Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THOMAS CROMWELL Two men have risen to larger power in England than has been wielded by any other Englishman not connected by birth or marriage with the royal line. They were of the same blood, for Oliver Cromwell was descended in the fifth generation from the sister of Thomas Cromwell, who under Henry VIII wielded the highest authority in Church and State.1 They were very unlike in character, but had common traits: unusual capacity for the affairs of government, tact in dealing with men, an iron will and the gift of foresight. Fame has been unfair to both of these great men. In giving judgment upon each in turn she has stood with eyes bound, not to weigh more evenly good against evil, but to take with blind confidence the opinion of his bitter enemies as a just estimate of his work and character. The opponents of Oliver Cromwell hung his coffined body on the gallows, and then flung his bones into a shallow grave at its foot. But they buried his memory under obliquy so deep that, more than two hundred years afterward, the city government of Leeds dared not accept the gift of a statue to him because they feared the people. A saner judgment has at last prevailed. It was 1 Milton in his "Second Defense of the People of England," refers to this descent of Oliver Cromwell "from illustrious ancestors distinguished for the part they took in restoring and establishing true religion in this country." voiced five years ago by the man who held at death the almost unquestioned primacy among the writers of history in the English tongue. "It is time for us to regard him as he really was, with all his physical and moral audacity, with all his tenderness and spiritual yearnings, in the world of action what Shakespeare was in the world of thought, the greatest, because the mos...