Men now found themselves in a strange and cruel delimma. If it was dangerous to believe too much, it was equally dangerous to believe too little. Traitor and heretic were dragged to execution on the same hurdle; for Henry burned as heretics those who declared their belief in Protestantism, and hanged or beheaded, as traitors, those who acknowledged the authority of the Pope and denied the supremacy of the King (S349).
Thus Anne Askew, a young and beautiful woman, was nearly wrenched asunder on the rack, in the hope of making her implicate the Queen in her heresy. She was afterward burned because she insisted that the bread and wine used in the communion service seemed to her to be simply bread and wine, and not in any sense the actual body and blood of Christ, as the King's statute of the Six Articles (S357) solemnly declared.
On the other hand, the aged Countess of Salisbury suffered for treason; but with a spirit matching the King's, she refused to kneel at the block, and told the executioner he must get her gray head off as best he could.
359. Henry's Death.
But the time was at hand when Henry was to cease his hangings, beheadings, and marriages. Worn out with debauchery, he died at the age of fifty-six, a loathsome, unwieldy, and helpless mass of corruption. In his will he left a large sum of money to pay for perpetual prayers for the repose of his soul. Sir Walter Raleigh said of him, "If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king."
It may be well to remember this, and along with it this other saying of one of the ablest writers on English constitutional history, that "the world owes some of tis greatest debts to men from whose memory it recoils."[1] The obligation it is under to Henry VIII is that through his influence—no matter what the motive—England was lifted up out of the old medieval ruts, and placed squarely and securely on the new highway of national progress.
[1] W. Stubbs's "Constitutional History of England."
360. Summary.
In this reign we find that though England lost much of her former political freedom, yet she gained that order and peace which came from the iron hand of absolute power. Next, from the destruction of the monasteries, and the sale or gift of their lands to favorites of the King, three results ensued:
1. A new nobility was in great measure created, dependent on the Crown. 2. The House of Lords was made less powerful by the removal of the abbots who had had seats in it. 3. Pauperism and distress were temporarily increased. 4. Finally, England completely severed her connection with the Pope, and established for the first time an independent National Church, having the King as its head.