During the ‘progress time’ of the reformation, as he furthered the ‘cause of Christ’, Thomas Cromwell ventured into unknown political territory. The reformers hailed him as God's special ‘instrument’, and promised him that if, ‘for the zeale ye beare unto the trouth’ he ensured that ‘the pure worde of god may ones go forth’, then ‘the whole realme … shall haue … you after in more hye remembrance than the name of Austen that men saye brought the faith fyrst into englonde’. They prayed God ‘to preserve him long to such good purposes, that the living God may be duly known in his spirit and verity’, and besought ‘in our lorde Jesus, you maie liue Nestor in yeres’. Who would not, asked Richard Taverner, extol Cromwell's ‘most circumspect godliness and most godly circumspection in the cause and matter of our Christian religion?’ But most could not believe Cromwell to be circumspect at all, such were the risks he took. He himself knew well enough the mutability of political fortune, especially at the court of a king as restless and insecure as Henry VIII. Like Wolsey, and like his old friend Ralph Sadler, he understood that ‘the fair hests and promises of court are hely water’, sprinkled randomly. Cromwell had faced the wilderness in 1529, when his master Wolsey fell, and in the 1530s the stakes would be higher still.