by many trials; wars in Provence and Calabria; burnings in Seville and Canterbury; persecutions in Rome and Paris. The cause had a thousand martyrs, a million devotees. Yet Father Martin, by his force, his humour, and his earnestness, was well prepared for the office of a torch-bearer in the march; and by the boldness of his step and the audacity of his voice, he called the world to witness that this army was no phantom host. Luther had burnt a papal bull, thrown off his frock, and taken to himself a wife; renouncing with his monkish habits the traditions of a sacerdotal class, and claiming as his natural right the freedom of a citizen and a man.

3. He had to fight for life, and liberty of speech as dear to him as life, with such antagonists as Silvestro da Prierio, general of the Dominicans, and Jakobi Hochstatten, chief of the Inquisition of Cologne. These great officials of the Church were angry that a peasant monk, of the inferior Order of Augustine, should presume to have opinions of his own. They wished to silence him with cord and fire. But Luther, by appealing to the sentiment already active in his class, had gained such power that no one liked to lay a hand on him. "Should he be touched, a hundred thousand of us will defend him with our lives," cried the German burgesses. Cæsar could not silence him. Nothing was left except to meet him, on his own ground, with book and tract. But Luther was no easy enemy to foil. A humour somewhat coarse, a power to hit and parry, an indifference to counter-strokes, made him an antagonist to fear. Erasmus tried a fall with

him; for while Erasmus liked some portion of his writing, a fastidious taste revolted from the rude and massive style in which the preacher carried on his work. Eck, Tetzel, and Cajetan, attacked him both with tongue and pen; but Luther so far got the better of these feeble folk that they combined in a request to have him burnt.

4. No prince appeared so ready to engage as champion of the papal cause against this heretic in the Saxon wilds as Henry. Friedrich of Saxony took him to his heart; and Friedrich of Saxony had placed the imperial crown on Charles's brow. Charles dared not vex a prince to whom he owed so much; yet all the feudal and conservative instincts of society were stirred against a priest who set authority at naught. Such men as Fox and More were moved to frenzy by his words. Even Warham was alarmed. The heretic's works were on the point of being burnt in public, as a scandal, when the primate heard that many persons in Oxford were infected with these heresies. With the help of Wolsey, Fisher, and other prelates, the King brought out his "Defence of the Seven Sacraments;" which he dedicated to the Pope, whose powers he had a "secret cause" for lifting above divine and human laws.

5. The Pope had praised his wit, his clerkly conveyance, and his style. "Well done, well done," said Clement, as he perused the pages; and on laying it aside, he added, "It was such a book as he should hardly have thought his grace, being much employed in other feats, could write, since men who

occupied their time in writing books had not been able to bring forth the like." The honorary title of the Defender of the Faith was formally bestowed on Henry for his book. "Whatever sanction has been given to the works of St. Augustine and St. Jerome by the Holy See shall be given to the King's book," cried the grateful Pope, who liked the book mainly because it was dull in style and common-sense in thought; a book putting the old theological facts in the old scholastic ways; and proving that the German heretic was disposed to set his interpretation of the Scriptures above that of cardinals and popes. Luther read the treatise in a different spirit, and fired his chain-shot in reply. "Indulgence may be felt for men who err in common with other men, but the King, a mere worm, a piece of rottenness, has set himself, in pride of will, and knowing what he is about, to lie against the majesty of God in heaven. A servant of God, I am called to cover him with his own filth and mud, and trample under foot that crowned head which has blasphemed our Lord."

6. Even More was startled by the lengths to which the King had gone. The Kings of Christendom were seeking to depress the papacy, Lautrec, commanding for the French in Milan, had abolished the papal jurisdiction in that duchy, and the Emperor was about to follow suit in Spain. Henry alone was true. "I moved the King's highness," says More, "either to leave out that point or else to touch it more tenderly, for doubt of such things as might hap to fall in question between his high

ness and some pope." More feared that Henry might not always feel inclined to act on his own principles of submission; but the King refused to change a word; "for which," says More, "his highness showed me a secret cause." By sword and pen, by money, counsel, and support, the King was giving too many proofs of his devotion to the Holy See for Clement to be seriously alarmed by Wolsey's threats.

CHAPTER III.

King and Queen.

1524.

I. PINING as man had seldom pined for heirs, the King was suffering more calamities on his hearth than prince before his time had ever borne. No son of his survived. He hardly knew how often Catharine had miscarried. From his earliest years of married life a curse had seemed to settle on his house. Few members of his family were aware how many children had been born to him. Reginald Pole, whose mother, Margaret of Salisbury, was governess to his daughter, only knew that several of his infants had been hidden out of sight. Such secrecy and silence drove him into fits of musing, till the man was almost mad.

2. In spite of every doubt, and after every death, the King still loved his wife. In their relations with each other, Catharine found no fault in him, and save in the aspersions of her own countrymen no breath of scandal rested on her matron fame. In earlier days, when Catharine brought to him the freshness of her love, the King had been a model youth, a man in virtues and accomplishments not unworthy of the good woman who had called him In Wolsey's company, and through Fernando's teaching, he had long been losing that fine grace of heart; having learnt from these bad teachers to

son.