And so they both gained a home, each after his own heart, and the recent trials seemed only to enhance the sweet sense of security they now enjoyed.
“When the shore is gained, at last,
Who will count the billows past?”
But they had not been three months in their new homes, when tidings arrived from England of the death of their oppressor. Henry VIII. had passed to his last account on the early morn of the twenty-eighth of January, fifteen-hundred and forty-seven; passed from his earthly flatterers and parasites, who had treated him as if he were a demi-god, to the awful judgment bar whither he had sent before him by the hands of the executioner some seventy thousand of those subjects who had been committed by the King of kings to his care.
There, where prince and peasant, lord and slave, king and monk, are all equal, where there is no respect of persons, we leave him and close our tragical story.
FOOTNOTES
[57] The “Andredsweald,” a tale of the Norman Conquest, by the same author.