CHAPTER XXXII.

HENRY VIII.-THE LAST EIGHTEEN YEARS OF HIS REIGN.

SIR THOMAS MORE OVERTHROW OF PAPAL POWER-ANNE BOLEYN

REFORMATION-SCOTLAND-FRANCE-THE HOWARDS.

WHEN the great seal of the chancellorship was taken from Cardinal Wolsey, it was given to Sir Thomas More. 1529. To receive this perilous honor, the new chancellor

Fain

was drawn from a beautiful retirement at Chelsea. would he have remained in the midst of his happy and accomplished family, his beautiful gardens, his well-stored library, and literary enjoyments, and not have tasted the favor of his capricious sovereign. One of the learned men of this age, the celebrated Greek scholar Erasmus, often visited Sir Thomas More, and writes thus in praise of the happy home at Chelsea :-"A house in which every one studies the liberal sciences, where the principal care is virtue and piety, where idleness never appears, where intemperate language is never heard, where regularity and order are preserved by dint of kindness and courtesy, where every one performs his duty, and yet all are so cheerful as if mirth were their only employment,-such a house ought rather to be termed a practical school of the Christian religion."

For four years Sir Thomas More retained the seals, and also the favor of his royal master. He proved an upright and incorruptible judge. The number of suits depending in the Court of Chancery when he came into office, was not only great, but many had been of twenty years' standing. So untiring was the new chancellor in the discharge of his duties, that ere he had held the office two years, he was answered, when after deciding one cause, he summoned another, that "there was not one suit more depending."

1531.

Sir Thomas More would not unite in the persecution to

which Queen Katherine was subjected whilst Henry was endeavoring to procure the divorce. Nor would he favor the separation from the Church of Rome, towards which the acts of the king now tended. He knew, therefore, that ruin would probably be the result of a longer continuance at court. Pleading advancing years, he gave up the chancellorship, and retired, a poorer but a happier man, to his beloved home at Chelsea. But, alas! there was not that spot in 1532. England, however graced by innocence, learning, or piety, which might prove a shelter from the despotic will of Henry VIII. At the close of the year 1532 the king was privately married to Anna Boleyn, and in June of the following year she was publicly crowned queen. Cranmer, now archbishop of Canterbury, convened an ecclesiastical court, in which Henry's marriage with Katherine of Arragon was declared null and void. This gentle, yet high-spirited woman, who never for a moment had yielded her claim as the lawful wife of Henry, was banished from court, and died at Kimbolton, in 1536, three years after the king's marriage with Anna Boleyn. On her death-bed Katherine earnestly desired to see her daughter, the Princess Mary, but her request was refused.

On the 30th of March, in the year 1534, the parliament of England gave the death-blow to papal power in their country, by acknowledging the king as the head of the English Church. It was now required of English subjects to take the oath of supremacy. This was refused by those Catholics who believed in the Pope alone as the supreme head of the Christian church in all lands. Their lives paid the penalty of their refusal. Many a zealous monk and priest suffered in this cause; but the fame of two illustrious victims obscures that of all the others. Sir Thomas More was a zealous Roman Catholic. He refused the oath of supremacy. The upright chancellor, the learned scholar, the steady friend, and the pious Christian, were alike forgotten by the absolute monarch, who only saw in him now the man who opposed his will.

Sir Thomas More, together with his aged friend, Bishop Fisher, was thrown into the Tower. The latter was, like More, an early friend and companion of the king. He was also one of the most learned men in Europe. While he lay a prisoner in the Tower, the Pope, out of his great respect to the virtue and wisdom of the aged prelate, suffering in the cause of the church, sent him a cardinal's hat. "Ha!" exclaimed the cruel king, "Paul may send him the hat; I will take care that he have never a head to wear it on." The bishop was beheaded on the 22d June, 1535.

A few days afterwards, Sir Thomas More was brought to trial. In Westminster Hall, where he once presided in honor, he now appeared clad in a coarse woollen robe, pale and emaciated from the rigors of his year's imprisonment, to be tried by judges, who to do the king a pleasure, were resolved on his conviction. More pleaded that he had never sought. "to deprive the king of his new title of supreme head of the church all that he had done was to be silent thereon, and that silence was not treason." But the corrupt judges pronounced that silence was treason, and under this wicked sentence the jury returned a verdict of guilty. His conduct, both at his trial and on the scaffold, was the perfection of Christian meekness and charity. He suffered on the 6th July, only fourteen days after the execution of his friend Fisher.

All Europe was roused to indignation, by the news that these two accomplished scholars had laid their heads upon the executioner's block. When told of the chancellor's death, the Emperor Charles V. exclaimed: "I should rather have lost the best city in my dominions than so worthy a counsellor When the tidings of the execution were brought to King Henry, he was playing at chess with Anne Boleyn Rising hastily, he looked with a stern countenance at the queen, saying: "Thou art the cause of the death of this man!" and left the room, for a moment conscience-smitten by this deed of guilt.

It would seem impossible that the king should show displeasure towards the wife for whom he had sacrificed the

happiness of his noble queen, Wolsey, the friend of twenty years, and some of the best blood in the kingdom. But what trust can be placed in the constancy of a heart swayed by passion?

The harsh words uttered on the occasion of Sir Thomas More's death, were but the prelude to a more fatal burst of the royal displeasure. The capricious monarch had bestowed his affections upon the Lady Jane Seymour, a maid of honor to his new queen, and Anna Boleyn was now to suffer by the same arts which she had used to supplant her own royal mistress. A few months after the unhappy Katherine of Arragon had breathed her last, amid the solitude and desertion of Kimbolton, Queen Anna Boleyn was arrested on the accusation of being unfaithful to the king. She was tried, and though the charges brought against her were not proved, she was declared guilty, and received sentence of death.

1536.

Under an oak-tree in Greenwich Park, the monarch impatiently awaited the execution. When the booming of the Tower gun told him that the axe of the executioner had fallen on the neck of his beautiful and unhappy queen, Henry exclaimed: "The business is done: uncouple the dogs and let us follow the sport!" And thus, attended by all the excitement of the chase, he went to Wolf Hall, in Wiltshire, and the next day brought thence, as his bride, the new queen, Jane Seymour. Anna Boleyn left one child, the Princess Elizabeth.

Henry, by declaring himself "Head of the Church," had put an end to the papal power in England, which was of itself a great step towards the Reformation. The motives of the

king in this work were too selfish and sordid, however, for the establishment of a pure and Protestant Church in his dominions. Romanist and Protestant suffered alike in his reign. At the same stake perished one who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, and another who denied the king's supremacy. To obtain the wealth contained therein,

hundreds of abbeys, monasteries, and religious houses were put down, and monks and nuns turned adrift upon the world.

These houses were not alone the "cages of unclean birds," as their destroyers called them. They had been also the refuge for the persecuted, and had served as hospitals for the poor. They had been, in many a wild district, "inns for the wayfaring man, who heard from afar the sound of the vesperbell, inviting at once to repose and devotion." They had given employment to hundreds, who had tilled the abbey or glebe lands, or tended the large flocks and herds belonging to the monasteries. They were also the repositories of learning and the fine arts, containing many a valued library, beautiful painting, statuary, and sculpture. When Henry, in one year, suppressed three hundred and seventy-six monasteries, an insurrection followed, which was especially violent in the north of England.

1536.

The Duke of Norfolk was sent against the insurgents, but "not until the pleasant banks of the Tweed, the Tyne, the Tees, the Don, and the Trent, were loathsome with the number of ghastly heads and reeking members, was a pardon proclaimed." The king then accused many of the richer priories and abbeys of having aided this rebellion, and they too fell a prey to his rapacity. The most magnificent shrines in the kingdom were despoiled. Even the tomb of Thomas à Becket, so long the favorite saint of England, and the famous shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, to which Henry, when a child, had once made a pilgrimage barefoot, and presented a costly necklace, were now robbed of their rich, time-honored treasures.

Cranmer, who had been made archbishop of Canterbury, did all that he could, under such an uncertain and despotic master, to further the real work of the Reformation. He caused an English translation of the Bible to be placed in every parish church, and the priests were commanded to expound the Scriptures to the people in plain English. Cranmer had married the niece of Osiander, a Protestant