French king, suggested some doubts as to the legality of the marriage from which the girl had sprung. Eighteen years had come and gone since Henry and Catherine had first lived in wedlock. No whisper of doubt seems ever to have stirred the air before. The king, certainly, had seen three dead sons, and had long despaired of a living one. And a cold dislike had taken the place of the kindly feeling which had once united the English husband to his Spanish wife. At this conjuncture the evil hint was dropped that resulted in so many woes. There was among the attendants of the queen a pretty maid of honour, who had spent many years in France, and who now, at the age of twenty, was not unknown in the coquetries and flirtations that went on beneath the palace roof. This was Anne Boleyn or Bullen, daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard, a lady of the ducal house of Norfolk. The king fell in love with her; and this passion hardened all his floating discontents into a firm resolve to obtain from the Pope a divorce from his cold, elderly Spanish wife.

Wolsey heard of this resolve-a seed of his own sowingshortly before he went to France in 1527, to conclude the new treaty. With an eye still fixed on the tiara, he promised the French king that his sister-in-law Renée should fill the place of the divorced queen. But he was reckoning without his host. When Henry heard, on the cardinal's return, of the new matrimonial alliance planned for him, he declared that no French princess was needed, since Anne Boleyn, and no other, should be his second wife. It brought Wolsey to his knees like a lightning-flash; but no entreaties and no arguments could move the stubborn king. All the splendid dreams in which Wolsey had been revelling, in the prospect of the coming change of queens, melted into air.

Everything then turned against the unhappy cardinal, who strove in vain to stem the tide. Pope Clement, placed "between the hammer and the forge," dreaded the rage of the

emperor, whose aunt Queen Catherine was, and dreaded also the loss of Henry's favour. Delay seemed his only safety. But the blame of this delay fell heavily on Wolsey, although he in fact was eager to have the matter settled. Henry stormed at him. Anne grew to hate him. Catherine knew that in his brain the fatal idea of the divorce had been first hatched. Thus, pierced with his own dart, Wolsey lingered through many torturing days. To add to his misery, news soon came from Italy of a great French army wasted away before Naples by hunger and disease, and the consequent ruin of all the ambitious hopes he had built on the French alliance.

June 21, 1529

After long delay, Cardinal Campeggio, appointed by the Pope to try the divorce case in conjunction with Wolsey, arrived in England. The popular mind was all in a ferment against Wolsey, for there loomed in the near future a danger that menaced the comfort, nay, the safety, of a thousand English homes-the danger of an interruption of the Flemish trade. Campeggio came to hear but not to decide the case. Within the great hall of the Black Friars' Monastery the two cardinals sat enthroned, supported on the right hand by the king, and on the left by the queen. Henry answered to the calling of his name; but Catherine, who had already appealed from the judgment of the Pope, instead of answering when her name was pronounced, knelt at the feet of her husband and drew a most touching picture of her meek submission to his will and her pure fidelity to their marriage-vows. Then rising, she bowed before the king and walked out of the room, resolved never, in person or by proxy, to face the court again. Nor was the resolve unkept. The prejudged trial went on without her; and all was ready for the legate's decision, when, in spite of Wolsey's urging and Henry's peremptory demands, Campeggio refused to pronounce a judgment, and adjourned the cause until the beginning of October. The secret of his intrepid speech lay in the fact that,

a month earlier, Clement had concluded a treaty with the emperor, which enabled him to act independently of Henry's

rage.

This sealed Wolsey's doom. A Parliament was summoned. At Grafton in Northamptonshire, where Henry and Anne Boleyn were staying, the cardinal saw for the last time the king whose splendour he had almost outshone. On his return to London, the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk, armed with a royal order, took the Great Seal from his keeping, turned him out of York Place, and gave him the strongest hint that his country seat of Esher (near Hampton Court) was the fittest covert for his fallen greatness. From Esher the tremulous letters of the old man, who signed himself truly "Most Miserable" (Miserrimus), pierced the hearts of friends, such as Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Cromwell, whose fortunes he had built up in his days of power. Henry did not at once sever the ties that bound him to his old companion and minister of so many years. When the King's Bench, founding on the Statute of Præmunire, convicted Wolsey on the ground that he had procured Bulls from Rome and assumed authority as a papal legate in England, and passed on him sentence of forfeiture and imprisonment, the king sent him a ring in token of his favour, and sent also some physicians of the court to treat him for a low fever that was wasting him away. Another effort of his enemies started an impeachment of forty-four articles against him in the newly assembled Parliament (Nov. 3). One charge related to the use of Ego et rex meus ("I and my king") in his despatches, as if assuming an equality with his master. The cloquence of Thomas Cromwell, formerly secretary to the fallen. cardinal, and one who stood by him to the last, secured the rejection of the Bill in the House of Commons. By-and-by Wolsey was pardoned, and was allowed to retain his see of York. There a hearty welcome flung a parting gleam of light on his broken life. He had never yet been installed in the

1530

cathedral of the northern capital. Now, a day was fixed for the ceremony, and preparations were made for the needful pageantry and revels. The final shock came before the appointed day. While he was sitting at dinner in the house of Cawood near York, the Earl of Northumberland came to arrest him for high treason. Northumberland, who had been a page in the cardinal's household, felt as if he had stabbed the fallen statesman to the heart when he touched him and spoke the terrible words of the arrest. The Yorkshire peasants could hardly restrain their tears as the sick old man, scarcely able to sit his mule, went slowly amid his guards toward the south. An attack of dysentery delayed him at Sheffield Park for eighteen days. Entering Leicester Abbey one evening late, he said to the abbot, "Father, I am come to lay my bones among you." It was true. A relapse of the same disease, acting on a frame broken with anxiety, wore his life away. He died at eight on Monday evening, the 28th of November 1530, being then in his sixtieth year. With his failing breath he lamented his neglect of God's service. Sir William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, he said, "Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs."

Το

Sir Thomas More had already received the chancellorship, and a new ministry had settled into place; the Duke of Norfolk being President of the Council, and the Duke of Suffolk Vice-President.

CHAPTER III.

THE BREACH WITH ROME.

The Christian Brethren-Cranmer, Cromwell, Latimer-Fisher and MoreTyndale's pen-Ruin of the monasteries-Pilgrimage of grace-Trial of Lambert--Iconoclasm-The Six Articles-Solway Moss-Henry's books -Anne Askew-Earl of Surrey.

B

ETWEEN the beginning of the divorce case, which ruined Wolsey, and the death of Mary Tudor, the first queen regnant of England, a period of one-and-thirty years elapsed. It was during that period that the Protestant Church of England struggled into life. Lollardie had never been quite forgotten in England, although its first enthusiasm had waned, and the mass of the people had settled down into a passive acceptance of the Roman dogmas. But there was always a handful that hungered after truth. Even before those political events which snapped the bonds linking England to Rome had begun to evolve, a little band of tradesmen and students, known as the Association of Christian Brethren, spoke words and read books of deadliest heresy (so called) in London and the university towns.

That severance of England from Rome which the divorce case may be said to have begun, was completed by the Acts of that memorable Parliament which lasted for seven years after its meeting in 1529. The most prominent enactments of this momentous period were the abolition of Annates or first-fruits in 1532, completed in 1534; the forbidding of appeals to Rome,