The presence in Cromwell’s papers of a speech criticizing government plans to invade France has given this text a significance which is unwarranted. If it was in fact delivered, it is an echo from thousands of such frank contributions to Parliamentary debate, a great many of which would have been far more bilious and less well expressed than his. It is almost impossible to find a Parliament in early Tudor England not resounding with gritty opposition; King Henry VIII would have rolled his eyes in weary longing at modern historians’ talk of ‘Tudor despotism’. Parliament was a ‘high court’ of
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