“How dared you come here?” wrathfully inquired the usurper.
“To recover my father’s crown and my own inheritance,” boldly replied the prince.
Whereat, the history says, Edward struck at him with his iron gauntlet, and his attendants fell upon him and slew him with their swords.
Chapter Twenty Nine.
Edward the Sixth, the good King of England.
It was a strange moment in the history of England when the great King Henry the Eighth. (“Bluff King Hal,” as his subjects called him) breathed his last. However popular he may have been on account of his courage and energy, he possessed vices which must always withhold from him the name of a good king, and which, in fact, rendered his reign a continuous scene of cruelty and oppression. People were sick of hearing of the king and his wives—how he had beheaded one, and put away another, and ill-treated another, for no reason at all but his own selfish caprice. And men trembled for their lives when they remembered how Wolsey, and More, and Cromwell, and others had been sacrificed to the whimsical temper of this tyrannical sovereign. England, in fact, was tired out when Henry the Eighth died.
It was, at any rate, a change for them to find that their new king was in every respect the opposite of his father. Instead of the burly, hot-headed, self-willed, cruel Henry, they were now to be ruled by a frail, delicate, mild boy of nine, inheriting neither his father’s vices nor his faults, and resembling him as little in mind as in body. But the chief difference of all was this—that this boy-king was good.
A good King of England. It was indeed and, alas! a novelty. How many, counting back to the day when the country first knew a ruler, could be so described? Had not the sceptre of England passed, almost without exception, down a line of usurpers, murderers, robbers, and butchers, and was it not a fact that the few kings who had not been knaves had been merely fools?