* Strype—who certainly deserves a hundred stripes for
recording such an atrocity.
Cromwell's doom was now sealed, and the Duke of Norfolk, on the 10th of June, 1540, had the luxury of taking into custody his political antagonist. A charge of having one day pulled out a dagger, and declared he would stick to the cause of the Reformation, even against the king, was speedily got up, and, by the 28th of July, he was disposed of, at Tower Hill, in the customary manner. While in prison, he wrote a pitiful letter to Henry, with the word "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy!" reiterated thrice as a P.S.; the meanness and tautology of which evinced a poverty in the spirit as well as in the letter.
The king had now determined to marry Catherine Howard, but the old difficulty—another wife living—stood in the way of the desired arrangement. Having consulted his attorney, it was proposed to search for some previous marriage contract in which Anne of Cleves had been concerned; and as everybody is engaged, on an average, at least half-a-dozen times before being married once, there would have appeared little difficulty in accomplishing Henry's wishes.
The excessive ugliness of Anne of Cleves, however, placed great obstacles in the way, for she had clearly been a drug in the matrimonial market, and neither by hook nor by crook could an old offer for her be fished up until something of the kind from the young Prince of Lorraine—entered into before he was old enough to know better—was happily hit upon. A commission was at once issued, the matter tried, and of course decided in Henry's favour. By way of strengthening the king's case, it was urged by his learned counsel that he had married against his will, and therefore ought to be released from his contract. The Court, however, held that the establishment of such a principle would be almost equivalent to the passing of a general divorce act for half the couples in Christendom, and on that point at least the rule for a new trial of Henry's luck was refused accordingly. His suit for a nullification of his contract with Anne of Cleves succeeded on the other point, and both parties were equally gratified by the result which set them both at liberty. The lady felt she had much rather lose her husband's hand than her own head, and Henry began to think he might be wearing out the axe upon his wives before he had half done with it, and if he could find any other means for severing the marriage tie he much preferred doing so. He offered to make her his sister, with three thousand a year, an arrangement with which she expressed herself perfectly satisfied. Both parties were permitted to enter into wedlock again, if they pleased, and the king of course availed himself of the option with his accustomed celerity. The Bill was brought into Parliament on the 12th of July, and the 8th of August found Catherine Howard already publicly acknowledged as the fifth Mrs. Henry Tudor.
It had now become the boast of Henry that he held the balance with an even hand between the Catholics and the Reformers; but his impartiality was shown in a manner most inconvenient to both of them. He used to deal out what he called equal justice to both, by submitting a few on each side of the question to equal cruelty. He would forward three Catholics at a time to Smithfield, to be hanged as traitors, and by the same hurdle he would send three Lutherans to be burned as heretics.
As we are unwilling to turn our history into a Newgate Calendar, for the sake of recording the atrocities of a sanguinary king, we shall, in our account of the remainder of this odious reign, preserve the heads, and avoid the executions. The murder of the Countess of Salisbury, an old woman upwards of seventy, and the mother of Cardinal Pole, stands out perhaps from some other sanguinary deeds by its peculiar atrocity. The venerable lady, at the last moment, defied the executioner to come on, and a combat of the fiercest character took place upon the scaffold.
Henry, who had frequently tried to inoculate his nephew, James the Fifth of Scotland, with his own predatory propensities, became at length angry that the latter declined turning thief in the name of religion, and plundering the church under the pretext of simply reforming it. A conference had been agreed upon between the English and the Scotch kings; but the latter, at the instigation of Cardinal Beaton, whose olfactory nerves had detected a rat, broke his appointment with his imperious uncle. This ungentlemanly proceeding gave such offence to the English tyrant, that he threatened, with an awful oath, to let the weight of old Henry be felt in Scotland; and the expression that So-and-So purposes "playing old Harry," no doubt took its rise from the incident to whicn we have alluded.
The Duke of Norfolk was sent, as a low fellow of that period hath it, "to take the shine out of that Jem," who was completely defeated at Solway Moss, through his own troops turning their backs—not upon him, as it is said by some, but upon the enemy. James was so overwhelmed with shame and despair, that he drew his helmet over his eyes, assumed a stoop—a sure sign that he was stupefied—and never raised his head again, but fell a victim to that very vulgar malady, a low fever. He left his kingdom to his daughter, then only eight days old, who came to the throne on the ninth; but as she was not a nine days' wonder, she evinced no miraculous aptitude for the task of government.
Henry had in the meantime been made very uncomfortable by the rumours that his wife, familiarly known as Miss Kate Howard, had not been acting properly. When the king heard the news, he was deeply affected, for he was one of those persons who make up, in feeling for themselves, for their deficiency of feeling with regard to others. He sat down and had a good crocodilian cry, which irrigated his hands to such an extent that he was compelled to wring them to get them dry again. Cranmer and Norfolk were appointed to examine into the truth of the charges against the queen, who, when her guilt was proved beyond doubt, made a virtue of necessity—the only virtue of which she could boast—by boldly confessing it.
This unfortunate young woman had been promised a pardon on condition of her revealing the extent of her transgression; but when she had admitted not only a great deal she had done, but had thrown into the bargain a great deal she had never done at all, Henry, regardless of his pledge, thought that the best way to get rid of an annoyance was to break the neck of it. Catherine Howard was accordingly beheaded at the Tower, on the 15th of February, 1542, and finding her confession had done her no good, she retracted the greater part of it. "It was not to be supposed," says Mullins, "that a person who had shown himself so double as Henry, could long remain single," and he accordingly threw himself once more upon the matrimonial market. There he was of course no longer at a premium, and he was pretty soon at Parr; and it is a strange fact that he would have commanded a better price had it been certain that he could be had without the coupon, which had distinguished the settling days of two of the wives of this shocking bad sovereign. Catherine Parr was a corpulent old lady, fortified by at least forty summers, but she readily listened to the proposals of Henry. Henry entered her at once on his share or chère list, and in allusion to her bulk, placed opposite to her name the words "commands a very heavy figure." She was the widow of Neville, Lord Latimer; but, thought Henry, "What care I, if she has even killed her man?—it will not be the first time that I shall have killed my woman."