HENRY VIII. AND HIS WIVES. A.D. 1528--1547.
When Henry VIII. had so ungratefully treated Cardinal Wolsey, there
was no one to keep him in order. He would have no more to do with the
pope, but said he was head of the Church of England himself, and could
settle matters his own way. He really was a very learned man, and had
written a book to uphold the doctrines of the Church, which had caused
the people to call him the Defender of the Faith. After the king's or
queen's name on an English coin you may see F.D.--_Fidei Defensor_.
This stands for that name in Latin. But Henry used his learning now
against the pope. He declared that his marriage with Katharine was
good for nothing, and sent her away to a house in Huntingdonshire,
where, in three years' time, she pined away and died. In the meantime,
he had married Anne Boleyn, taken Crumwell for his chief adviser, and
had made Thomas Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury. Then, calling
himself the head of the Church, he insisted that all his people should
own him as such; but the good ones knew that our Lord Jesus Christ is
the only real Head of the Church, and they had learnt to believe that
the pope is the father bishop of the west, though he had sometimes
taken more power than he ought, and no king could ever be the same
as a patriarch or father bishop. So they refused, and Henry cut off
the heads of two of the best--Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More--
though they had been his great friends. Sir Thomas More's good
daughter Margaret, came and kissed him on his way to be executed;
and afterwards, when his head was placed on a spike on London Bridge,
she came by night in a boat and took it home in her arms.
There were many people, however, who were glad to break with the pope,
because so much had gone amiss in the Church, and they wanted to set
it to rights. There was so much more reading, now that printing had
been invented, that many could read who had never learnt Latin, and
so a translation of the Bible was to be made for them, and there was
a great desire that the Church Services--many of which had also been
in Latin--should likewise be put into English, and the litany was first
translated, but no more at present. The king and Crumwell had taken
it upon them to go on with what had been begun in Wolsey's time--the
looking into the state of all the monasteries. Some were found going
on badly, and the messengers took care to make the worst of everything.
So all the worst houses were broken up, and the monks sent to their
homes, with a small payment to maintain them for the rest of their
lives.
As to the lands that good men of old had given to keep up the convents,
that God might be praised there, Henry made gifts of them to the lords
about Court. Whoever chose to ask for an abbey could get it, from the
king's good nature; and, as they wanted more and more, Henry went on
breaking up the monasteries, till the whole of them were gone. A good
deal of their riches he kept for himself, and two new bishoprics were
endowed from their spoils, but most of them were bestowed on the
courtiers. The king, however, did not at all intend to change the
teaching of the Church, and whenever a person was detected in teaching
any thing contrary to her doctrines, as they were at the time
understood, he was tried by a court of clergymen and lawyers before
the bishop, and, if convicted, was--according to the cruel custom of
those times--burnt to death at a stake in the market place of the
next town.
Meantime, the new queen, Anne Boleyn, whom the king had married
privately in May, 1533, had not prospered. She had one little
daughter, named Elizabeth, and a son, who died; and then the king
began to admire one of her ladies, named Jane Seymour. Seeing this
Anne's enemies either invented stories against her, or made the worst
of some foolish, unlady-like, and unqueen-like things she had said
and done, so that the king thought she wished for his death. She was
accused of high treason, sentenced to death, and beheaded: thus
paying a heavy price for the harm she had done good Queen Katharine.
The king, directly after, married Jane Seymour; but she lived only a
very short time, dying immediately after the christening of her first
son, who was named Edward.
Then the king was persuaded by Lord Crumwell to marry a foreign
princess called Anne of Cleves. A great painter was sent to bring her
picture, and made her very beautiful in it; but when she arrived, she
proved to be not only plain-featured but large and clumsy, and the
king could not bear the sight of her, and said they had sent him a
great Flanders mare by way of queen. So he made Cranmer find some
foolish excuse for breaking this marriage also, and was so angry with
Thomas Crumwell for having led him into it, that this favorite was in
turn thrown into prison and beheaded.
The king chose another English wife, named Katharine Howard; but,
after he had married her, it was found out that she had been very ill
brought up, and the bad people with whom she had been left came and
accused her of the evil into which they had led her. So the king cut
off her head, likewise, and then wanted to find another wife; but no
foreign princess would take a husband who had put away two wives and
beheaded two more, and one Italian lady actually answered that she
was much obliged to him, but she could not venture to marry him,
because she had only one neck.
At last he found an English widow, Lady Latimer, whose maiden name
was Katharine Parr, and married her. He was diseased now, lame with
gout, and very large and fat; and she nursed him kindly, and being a
good-natured woman, persuaded him to be kinder to his daughters, Mary
and Elizabeth, than he had ever been since the disgrace of their
mothers; and she did her best to keep him in good humor, but he went
on doing cruel things, even to the end of his life; and, at the very
last, had in prison the very same Duke of Norfolk who had won the
battle of Flodden, and would have put him to death in a few days'
time, only that his own death prevented it.
Yet, strange to say, Henry VIII. was not hated as might have been
expected. His cruelties were chiefly to the nobles, not to the common
people; and he would do good-natured things, and speak with a frank,
open manner, that was much liked. England was prosperous, too, and
shopkeepers, farmers, and all were well off; there was plenty of
bread and meat for all, and the foreign nations were afraid to go
to war with us. So the English people, on the whole, loved "Bluff
King Hal," as they called him, and did not think much about his many
wickednesses, or care how many heads he cut off. He died in the year
1547. The changes in his time are generally called the beginning of
the Reformation.