Lastly there was a very small contingent of extremists, Zwinglians and Anabaptists, all classed together as blasphemers and as social agitators.

Their chief notes were the variety of their opinions and the unanimity of their persecution by all other parties.

Some of them were men of intelligible social and religious tenets; others furnished the "lunatic fringe" of the reform movement.

The proclamation banishing them from England [Sidenote: 1538] on pain of death merely continued the previous practice of the government.
The fall of the Cromwell ministry, if it may be so termed by modern analogy, was followed by a government in which Henry acted as his own prime minister.

{309} He had made good his boast that if his shirt knew his counsel he would strip it off.[1] Two of his great ministers he had cast down for being too Catholic, one for being too Protestant.
Having procured laws enabling him to burn Romanists as traitors and Lutherans as heretics, he established a regime of pure Anglicanism, the only genuine Anglican Catholicism, however much it may have been imitated in after centuries, that ever existed.
[Sidenote: Anti-protestant measures] Measures were at once taken towards suppressing the Protestants and their Bible.