1546 and Henry should march to Paris and take it, and dictate the terms of a peace to Francis from his own capital. In the following year (1545) Francis meditated a grand invasion of England, the Isle of Wight was seized, and several descents were made upon the coast of Sussex. But no important hostilities took place, and a treaty was at length concluded at Campes (June 7th, 1546), between Ardres and Guisnes, on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. VI. CONCLUSION OF THE REIGN. miserable towards the life. 69. The last days of Henry VIII. We now come to the last days of Henry VIII.'s life, the last six months of his reign, during which he became more violent and tyrannical than ever, and his court was divided by the secret intrigues of the two Henry's religious parties, which continued to cherish an implacable condition hatred against each other. Lutherans were still persecuted close of his as heretics, and the Papists as traitors; the court no longer presented any of the pageantries and gaieties of earlier days; a dreadful gloom hung over all: while in the midst of this terrible state of things, the King himself, distempered in mind and body, was the most wretched being in his court. By a life of unrestrained indulgence, he had become so enormously corpulent that he could neither support the weight of his own body, nor move about without the aid of machinery; and an oppression on his breathing almost prevented him from relieving himself.by a recumbent posture. He could not even bear to subscribe his name, and stamps with his initials were therefore affixed in his presence, and by his verbal command, to all the instruments which required the royal signature. An ulcer in one of his swollen limbs, which often subjected him to the most acute paroxysms of pain, rendered him offensive to his meanest attendants; his temper became frightful, and his mind was haunted by the most dismal apprehensions. How his last wife, Catherine Parr, escaped His mardestruction, appears almost miraculous. She was the riage with widow of Lord Latimer, and had married Henry on the Parr. 10th of July, 1543. Her elevation to the throne compensated the reformers, to whom she was attached, for the loss of the chancellor, Lord Audley, their secret but steady friend, who was succeeded by Lord Wriothesley, a patron of the old doctrine (1544). But she was more than once in imminent peril of her life. She had read the Lutheran books which had been prohibited by statute, and, encouraged either by the reformers or the King's helplessness, ventured to dispute with him upon faith and doctrine. The dis Catherine 66 66 CHAP. II. pleasure with which the King listened to her arguments, gave courage to Gardiner and Wriothesley, who had lately tried in vain to degrade Cranmer in the King's estimation, and they obtained orders from Henry to imprison Catherine, and prepare articles of impeachment against her. But she was warned in time; a succession of fits into which she fell when she heard of her danger brought the King to her apartment to console her, and she adroitly recovered the ground she had lost by her imprudent disputations. Kate, you are a doctor," said the King. "No, sir,” she replied, "I only wished to divert you from your pain by an argument in which you so much shine." Is it so, sweetheart?" said he, "then we are friends again." By this stratagem she saved herself, and when the chancellor came next morning with a guard to take her to the Tower, the King dismissed him with reproaches. The last political event of the reign has become memorable and interesting, from the fame of the illustrious man who was the chief figure in it. This was the execution of the Earl of Surrey, "so justly renowned," observes Mackintosh,* "by his poetical genius, which was father, the then surpassed in his own country by none but that of Chaucer; by his happy imitations of the Italian masters; by a version of the Eneid, of which the execution is wonderful, and the very undertaking betokens the consciousness of lofty superiority; by the place in which we are accustomed to behold him, at the head of the uninterrupted series of English poets; that we find it difficult to regard him in those inferior points of view, of a gallant knight, a skilful captain, and an active statesman, which in the eyes of his contemporaries eclipsed the lustre of his literary renown." Execution of the Earl of Surrey, and impri sonment and attain der of his Duke of Norfolk. Between the old house of Howard and the new house of Seymour there had been a bitter rivalry; and in the late war with France, Surrey had accused Hertford of having supplanted him in the command. The two families had become the acknowledged leaders of the rival sects; the Duke of Norfolk, the head of the Howards, was a zealous Papist; the Earl of Hertford, the uncle. of Prince Edward, was the secret leader of the reformers. The latter already aspired to the protectorship of the kingdom during the minority of his nephew, and he felt that the great obstacles to his promotion would be the Duke of Norfolk and his son. Personal pique, therefore, religious dissensions, and political jealousy all combined to instigate Hertford to destroy his enemies while Henry was still alive, and on the 12th of December, 1546, Norfolk * Hist., II., 235. 1549 and Surrey were imprisoned in the Tower, each being in ignorance of the other's arrest. The legal ground of proceeding was the sweeping clause of more than one recent statute, which made it high treason "to do anything by word, writing, or deed, to the scandal or peril of the established succession to the crown."* The Earl of Surrey had quartered the royal arms in his escutcheon, because he was descended, through his mother, the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, from the royal family of Edward III. He had used this escutcheon many years, and with the King's knowledge; but, whether his heraldry was true or false, it was now deemed treason. The parliament, commonly made accessory to these legal murders, passed an act of attainder; Surrey was executed on the 19th of January, 1547; and his father was ordered for execution on the 28th; but the King died in the night before that day, and Norfolk's execution was suspended, though he remained in the Tower till Queen Mary released him, and restored him in blood. 70. Settlement of the Succession. Henry's two divorces had created an uncertainty as to the line of succession, which parliament endeavoured to remove by two very extraordinary acts; the first enabling the King, on failure of issue by Jane Seymour or any other lawful wife, to bequeath the kingdom to any persons at his pleasure, without even reserving a preference to the descendants of former sovereigns (28 Hen. VIII., c. 7); the second, nominating the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth in the entail after the King's male issue, subject, however, to such conditions as he should name, and non-compliance with which should destroy their right (35 Hen, VIII., c. 1). This act still left the remainder at the King's discretion, and by his will, 30th December, 1546, he devised the crown, on failure of issue from his three children, to the heirs of the body of Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, his younger sister; thus setting aside the royal family of Scotland, descended from his elder sister Margaret. In the same document he appointed sixteen executors, most of them the adherents of the Seymours, to form the council of government, till his son should attain the age of eighteen, with full power to choose for him a wife, to govern the kingdom in his name, and appoint to all offices under the crown. This transaction marks most forcibly the great difference between the Tudor and Plantagenet governments, On the accession of Henry VI., when the Duke of Gloucester claimed the protectorship of the King and realm, because the deceased King * Mackintosh, II., 23. H CHAP. II. had bequeathed it to him by will, the parliament decisively repelled the notion that the King had any right to leave the government or the crown to any one. But now, parliament had surrendered the regular laws of the monarchy to one man's caprice; it had converted the nation into the private property of the sovereign; Henry's daughters were not to inherit by the fundamental laws of the constitution, but by the conditions and under the authority of his will; and the ill-assorted body of councillors whom he authorised to exercise the functions of a regency were called "executors," to keep up the language of the doctrine, that the people were the King's property, whom he could make over and bequeath to whomsoever he thought proper.* 71. Henry's Character. Contemporary writers do not speak of this reign with that just abhorrence and earnest longing for change which we should imagine. Some mention Henry after his death with eulogy; and if we except the Romanists, who naturally hated his memory, few appear to entertain the notion that "his name would descend to posterity among those of the many tyrants and oppressors of innocence whom the wrath of heaven has raised up, and the servility of man has endured." That Henry was loved by his people is impossible, because of the perfect fear which his acts inspired; but he had a few estimable qualities, and several which are popular in a sovereign. He had not one usual vice of tyrants, dissimulation; his manners were affable, and his temper generous; and though his schemes of foreign policy were not very sagacious, and his wars were productive of no material advantage, they were uniformly successful, and retrieved the honour of the English name. But our forefathers cherished his memory with reverence because of the share he took in the Reformation. "They saw in him, not, indeed, the proselyte of their faith, but the subverter of their enemies' power, the avenging minister of heaven, by whose giant arm the chain of superstition had been broken, and the prison gates burst asunder.”† the majestic lord, Who broke the bonds of Rome.‡ CHAPTER III. THE REFORMATION. SECTION I.-BRIEF SURVEY OF THE REFORMATION ON THE CONTINENT. tion of the 1. Early attempts at Reformation. The great change emphatically called the Reformation, which first emancipated the human mind from the bondage in which Rome had enslaved it for ages, began in the sixteenth century. The mind of Europe, however, had already risen up against the domination of Rome: first, during the pontificate of Innocent III., when the Insurrec Albigenses rose in insurrection, and were crushed by the Albigenses. furious crusade made against them by De Montfort, and the newlyestablished orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans; and secondly, in the fourteenth century, when the doctrines of Wycliffe Wycliffe and the Lollards spread through England, and Lollards. extended to Bohemia, which the Council of Constance succeeded in arresting by the reformation of the most scandalous abuses in the church, and the institution of a merciless persecution against the "heretics." and the of their The failure of these two attempts to shake off the yoke of Rome was, on the whole, beneficial to mankind; for, had the Causes church, corrupt as it was, been then overthrown, it is failure. very probable that a still more corrupt system would have taken its place, and that the power exercised by its clergy would have passed to a far worse class of teachers. The greater part of Europe then lay in ignorance, and the very little knowledge which was known, was confined to the clergy; books were few and costly; printing was unknown; and it was impossible for the laity to search the Scriptures for themselves. Even in the sixteenth century, which was comparatively a time of light, many of those who forsook the old religion, were soon led into errors far more serious than those which they had renounced, and false prophets such as John Matthias and John of Leyden, the Anabaptist leaders of Munster,* were able for a time to rule great cities, and in a darker age, might have founded empires, and established a superstition more cruel, licentious, and noxious, than Popery or even Islamism. But when the sixteenth century had dawned, the fulness of the time was come, and many causes had singularly combined to secure the success, and many circumstances had wonderfully prepared the minds of men to receive the doctrines of the Reformation; causes and circumstances which enabled the * Vide Robertson's Charles V., II., 273. |