It was in truth a "Reign of Terror" by an absolutism standing upon the ruin of every rival. The power of the Barons had gone; the Clergy were panic-stricken, and Parliament was a servant, which arose and bowed humbly to his vacant throne at mention of his name! A member for whom he had sent knelt trembling one day before him. "Get my bill passed to-morrow, my little man," said the King, "or to-morrow, this head of yours will be off." The next day the bill passed, and millions of Church property was confiscated, to be thrown away in gambling, or to enrich the adherents of the King.
Thomas Cromwell, who had succeeded to Wolsey's vacant place, was his efficient instrument. This student of Machiavelli's "Prince," without passion or hate, pity or regret, marked men for destruction, as a woodman does tall trees, the highest and proudest names in the Kingdom being set down in his little notebook under the head of either "Heresy" or "Treason." Sir Thomas More, one of the wisest and best of men, would not say he thought the marriage with Katharine had been unlawful, and paid his head as the price of his fearless honesty.
Jane Seymour, whom Henry married the day after Anne Boleyn's execution, died within a year at the birth of a son (Edward VI.). In 1540 Cromwell arranged another union with the plainest woman in Europe, Anne of Cleves; which proved so distasteful to Henry that he speedily divorced her, and in resentment at Cromwell's having entrapped him, by a flattering portrait drawn by Holbein, the Minister came under his displeasure, which at that time meant death. He was beheaded in 1540, and in that same year occurred the King's marriage with Katharine Howard, who one year later met the same fate as Anne Boleyn.
Katharine Parr, the sixth and last wife, and an ardent Protestant and reformer, also narrowly escaped, and would undoubtedly at last have gone to the block. But Henry, who at fifty-six was infirm and wrecked in health, died in the year 1547, the signing of death-warrants being his occupation to the very end.
Whatever his motive, Henry VIII. had in making her Protestant, placed England firmly in the line of the world's highest progress; and strange to say, that Kingdom is most indebted to two of her worst Kings.
The crown passed to the son of Jane Seymour, Edward VI., a feeble boy of ten. In view of the doubtful validity of his father's divorce, and the consequent doubt cast upon the legitimacy of Edward's two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, the young king was persuaded to name his cousin Lady Jane Grey as his heir and successor. This gentle girl of seventeen, sensitive and thoughtful, a devout reformer, who read Greek and Hebrew and wrote Latin poetry, is a pathetic figure in history, where we see her, the unwilling wearer of a crown for ten days, and then with her young husband hurried to that fatal Tower, and to death. Upon the death of Edward this unhappy child was proclaimed Queen of England. But the change in the succession produced an unexpected uprising, in which even Protestants joined. Lady Jane Grey was hurried to the block, and the Catholic Mary to the throne. Henry's divorce was declared void, and his first marriage valid. Elizabeth was thus set aside by Act of Parliament; and as she waited in the Tower, while her remorseless sister vainly sought for proofs of her complicity with the recent rebellion, she was seemingly nearer to a scaffold than to a throne.
Queen Elizabeth going on board the "Golden Hind."
From the painting by Frank Brangwyn.
When we remember that there coursed in the veins of Mary Tudor the blood of cruel Spanish kings, mingled with that of Henry VIII., can we wonder that she was cruel and remorseless? Her marriage with Philip II. of Spain quickly overthrew the work of her father. Unlike Henry VIII., Mary was impelled by deep convictions; and like her grandmother, Isabella I. of Spain, she persecuted to save from what she believed was death eternal; and her cruelty, although untempered by one humane impulse, was still prompted by a sincere fanaticism, with which was mingled an intense desire to please the Catholic Philip. But Philip remained obdurately in Spain; and while she was lighting up all England with a blaze of martyrs, Calais,—over which the English standard planted by Edward III. had waved for more than 200 years,—Calais, the last English possession in France, was lost. Amid these crushing disappointments, public and personal, Mary died (1558), after a reign of only five years.