was deprived of his crown. Queen Anne and her children were pronounced incapable of inheriting either name or property; and this papal malediction was to cling to them and their descendants after them. All prelates, priests, and friars, were enjoined to quit the blighted kingdom. Subjects were relieved from their oaths; tenants from their covenants. Peers and commoners were called to arm. All treaties and alliances were dissolved. The English flag was treated as a pirate flag, left to be hunted down in every sea. No ships from English harbours were to be received in Christian ports. All trade, all intercourse, must cease with the schismatic isles, and Christian princes were enjoined to march against the royal heretic and capture every one who took his part.

6. This bull was sealed to pacify the recluse Kimbolton, but the Pope, who was not hiding in a convent, dared not publish to the world what he had done. Who was to execute this sentence of the Church? Misled by monks and women, Catharine seemed to think a papal bull would strike a wilful sovereign and a powerful kingdom to the dust; but neither Paul nor Charles indulged in her fallacious dreams. The English king and people would reject the bull, and if a foreign army were to land, all parties would combine to drive them from the English soil. Paul had a hundred reasons for conciliating a defender of the faith and a recipient of the golden rose. Charles dared not press his uncle much; for France, in spite of Elinor's marriage to the King, was pushing him on every

side. "Yes; I am sorry for my aunt," he muttered in his frigid tones; "but I must think of my affairs; the French are stirring; I may lose an ally when I need him most; no, I must wait and see." Charles put his trust in Chapuys, and the cunning Savoyard was not unequal to his task.

7. Chapuys and the English conspirators, as Chapuys frankly calls his friends, were courting the new mistress, and trying to corrupt the two great men in church and state. Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, stood beyond their reach. A good man and a wise, the primate was attached no less by habit than conviction to that new learning, that progressive science, that national independence, of which Queen Anne was now the recognised flag, as her daughter was to be in after times the living soul. No man knew the Queen more intimately than he, and no man held her character in greater reverence than he. The wit, the learning, and the brightness which enchanted poets and scholars were to him less precious than the feeling heart and ready hand which carried help into unnumbered homes. To take one step against her peace and credit would have seemed to him an outrage on the best of women. Nothing could be done with Cranmer, save to bow him out of court, as Warham had been driven into seclusion at an earlier time. The King no longer sought him out. The clerk no longer summoned him to the board. Retiring to his country-seat in Kent, he spent his days in study and devotion; leaving his royal mistress in the palace to contend against his enemies and her own,

8. Cromwell, Secretary of State, was made of earthier mould than the Archbishop. A worthy pupil of the Cardinal whom he had served, Cromwell professed to be a man of the world: a man whose course was governed, less by theories and fantasies than by the actual state of things. He cared no more for the new Queen at Greenwich than for the old Queen at Kimbolton. All his thoughts were fixed on Henry. Henry was his lord and master. Henry had made him Secretary of state; Henry might make him knight and peer. Yet, if he crossed the humour of that master, he was but too well aware his head would fly. With an unsleeping eye, the secretary watched his master's face, and trimmed his sail according to his forecast of the coming gale. Chapuys believed that in a little time Cromwell might become the Emperor's

man.

CHAPTER II.

Stroke and Stroke.

1535.

1. STRANGE gusts of passion swept the court. Through Jane Seymour, Lady Exeter and Lady Kildare obtained a hearing for the Irish rebel Offaly. This murderer of Archbishop Allen, beaten from the field, had found a refuge with his sept and the connexions of his sept. Had Brereton caught him, short would have been his shrift; but in a wild and hilly country, with a tenantry of Celtic mutineers, Offaly had long defied pursuit. Ossory and his son received rewards; father and son being named governors of Kilkenny, Waterford, and Tipperary; on condition of resisting every effort made by Rome to sow dissension in the Irish camps. Lord Butler was already treasurer and admiral of Ireland, with a seat in the Council, a command in every Irish port. Red Piers expected, when the war was over, to obtain the deputy's chair. His name, his loyalty, his services, and his connexion with the Queen, entitled him to claim that dignity from the crown. Yet through a court intrigue, Lord Leonard Grey, Lady Kildare's brother, was appointed to that office. Grey had hardly been a week in Ireland, ere the murderer, Offaly, was in his tent, with something like a proImise of his life.

2. In spite of his brave looks, Henry was con

cerned about the interdict. Anne prayed him to seek support in Germany, and put himself at the head of a Gospel League. The Germans were prepared to act. Alesse, a Scottish priest, who had been driven from Edinburgh on account of his attachment to the new learning, and was now a confidential friend of Melancthon, arrived in London with a copy of the Loci Theologici, which was inscribed to Henry by the great reformer. Known to Cromwell as a learned minister, Alesse was carried by the secretary to the royal closet, where he urged the King, in Melancthon's name, to send an embassy to Germany.. Though it was hard for a Defender of the Faith to send ambassadors to heretics, yet the King was brought to yield, on which Fox and Heath, high priests of the new learning and the new order, crossed the seas, to learn by personal intercourse with the German princes what might be done towards the formation of a Gospel League.

3.. A liberal policy at home kept pace with this attempt abroad. Italian cardinals were deprived of their fat bishoprics, and English learned men were raised to power. Campeggio lost his sinecure of Salisbury, and Shaxton took that pluralist's seat. Ghinucchi lost his see of Worcester, which the bold reformer Latimer obtained. Cranmer was printing his edition of the English Bible, and the texts were almost ready for the public eyé.

4. The Queen appeared to have a great success; but this success, as the good Scottish priest said afterwards, laid the sword across her neck. When Gardiner, now in Paris, heard of the projected Gospel