By way of celebrating his fifth nuptials, King Henry sent to the stake Dr. Barnes and other heretics, while certain Catholics were quartered for having refused to take the oath of supremacy. This persecution of both parties occasioned the indignation of both Catholics and Protestants. “How do folks manage to live here?” exclaimed a Frenchman, in surprise at such fickle punishments. “The Papists are hanged, and the anti-Papists are burned,” was the answer.
But Catharine Howard had not been queen of England one year before her terrible doom overshadowed her. The king discovered certain condemnatory circumstances regarding the conduct of the queen previous to her marriage with him, and in a few short months Catharine also expiated her ambition and her supposed guilt upon the scaffold.
King Henry again resorted to his literary pursuits for solace, being for the time disgusted with his experiments in the matrimonial line, as before his hapless wives had also been, and forsooth with graver cause and better reason. “The king had better marry a widow,” said the people; and that idea seeming to have occurred also to the mind of his august majesty, in the year 1543, this “royal Bluebeard of English history” took for his sixth wife, the Lady Catherine Parr, the three months’ widow of Lord Latimer. She was an ardent partisan of the Protestant party, as well as learned and beautiful, but her skill in argument had well-nigh cost her dear.
To amuse her gouty, quarrelsome, would-be-literary and spasmodically-religious royal spouse, Queen Catherine ventured to argue with him upon certain points in theology. Finding himself worsted in the mental contest, the irate king exclaimed: “A good hearing this, when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort to come in my old age to be taught by my wife.” And thereupon the new chancellor received the order to prepare the impeachment of the queen. But Catherine was warned in time of her coming doom and was possessed of self-control and tact sufficient for this emergency. When again the conversation turned upon religious subjects and the king questioned her upon some knotty point, she answered laughing: “I am not so foolish as not to know what I can understand when I possess the favor of having for a master and spouse a prince so learned in holy matters.”
“By St. Mary!” exclaimed the king; “it is not so, Kate; thou hast become a doctor.”
“And surely,” quoth the queen with mirthful looks, “I thought I noticed that such conversation diverted your Grace’s attention from your sufferings, and I ventured to discuss with you in the hope of making you forget your present infirmity.”
“Is it so, sweetheart?” replied the king; “then we are friends again, and it doth me more good than if I had received a hundred thousand pounds.”
The skilful and politic queen, well pleased to find her lovely head still resting on her own shoulders instead of on the executioner’s block, gave thanks to God for her deliverance, and henceforth left theology in peace. The orders given to the chancellor not having been revoked, the next day he arrived with forty men to arrest the queen, but King Henry, feigning surprise and anger, sent him away with much apparent displeasure.
Thus had Queen Catherine’s wit saved her neck, and the strong grip of the increasing gout now came to her rescue, and this Prince of Shams soon found himself held in the clutch of such a sturdy foe that neither qualms of conscience, nor tears, nor threats, could rid him at last of this dread consort of the tomb. Death claimed him, and the royal hypocrite was forced to yield to that relentless conqueror; and Henry VIII. faced the awful tribunal where no pretensions or shams could avail to hide the horrid deformity of his sin-polluted soul.
Upon the death of Henry VIII. in 1547, his son Edward was proclaimed king as Edward VI. But this young king died in 1553, at the age of sixteen years, and the mighty realm of England was left to the conflicting succession of two princesses, both of whom their royal father had stigmatized with the ban of illegitimacy. In this emergency the Protestants, headed by the Duke of Northumberland, determined to set up a new claimant.