spoils his own assertion, by adding that they showed a wonderful devotion to the king's will.* On the next day the abbot was conveyed to the romantic eminence of Tor Hill, and there, in sight of the stately abbey, the mansions, and the farspreading parks and pastures, of which he had been lord, he was hanged and quartered; and two of his monks, John Thorne, the treasurer, and Roger James, the under-treasurer, were hanged and quartered with him. According to a noble authority, the said abbot's body was divided into four parts, and the head was struck off; one quarter was sent to Wells, one to Bath, one to Ilchester, and one to Bridgewater; and the head was stuck upon the abbey-gate at Glastonbury.† In the same month Hugh Farringdon, abbot of Reading, and two of his monks, were hanged and quartered near their abbey; and John Beche, abbot of Colchester, was drawn and quartered near his abbey. All these butcheries of men whom they must have considered as faithful sons of the Roman church, could not but have been distasteful to Gardiner and the other leaders of the old learning; but we do not see that they ever ran the risk of incurring destruction by opposing the king's will, or by protesting against his measures. They, indeed, stood by, and saw men hanged and quartered for questioning the supremacy or resisting the seizure of their abbeys and houses, just as the converts of the new doctrine saw men burnt for entertaining the Protestant notions as to the sacrament and other points; and each party seems to have consoled itself for the sufferings of its own friends by the recollection and the prospect of the sufferings of the other party. Cromwell had identified himself with the Protestant party, and had gone to such lengths against the Papists, that it was impossible he could ever hope for a safe reconciliation with them. He saw also that the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner were gaining ground at court; and, to check their progress, he laboured hard to procure Henry a Protestant wife. "The king," says an old writer," considering his wooing disposition, had long continued a widower." He had, indeed, been a widower about two years; but this was not owing to a want of alacrity on his part in seeking for another wife. Shortly after the death of Jane Seymour he proposed to the Duchess-Dowager of Milan, who is said to have replied, facetiously, that if she had two heads she might think of the match; but that, as she had but one, she would rather decline the honour. He then addressed himself to the Princess Mary of Guise; but this princess was already affianced to his nephew, the King of Scots. A daughter of the House of Vendome was then recommended by the French court; Ellis's Letters. Russell's letter is addressed to Cromwell. He also says, " My lord, I ensure you there were many bills put up against the abbot by his tenants and others, for wrougs and injuries that he had done them. And I commit your good lordship to the keeping of the blessed Trinity." The letter is dated from Wells, the day after the execution of Whiting. Letter, last quoted, from Lord Russell to Cromwell. but he refused her because she had been previously rejected by his nephew, the said King of Scots. After this, he had the delicacy to propose that the French king should carry the two sisters of Mary of Guise to Calais, in order that he might go over and choose one of them; but the gallantry of Francis revolted at this idea; and Henry remained wifeless. In August, 1538, Madame de Montreuil, a lady who had accompanied Magdalen of France, the first wife of James V., to Scotland, passed through England on her way back to France, and the king seems to have thought she might suit him. Sadler wrote to Cromwell, telling him, 66 that, for as much as his highness is somewhat desirous to see the same lady, and to speak with her, his grace thinks that you may wondrous well take an occasion, honestly, to stay her, after such sort as she may speak to his majesty. . . . And his grace thinketh best that when he shall be at Dover, his highness may take occasion, as he goeth there abroad to see his haven, to enter into her lodging, and so see her, and speak with her there." The lady was detained accordingly, and honourably feasted, both at Canterbury and at Dover; but it appears that Henry changed his mind, and that the interview did not take place after all. In the month of March following, we find Cromwell extolling to the king the reported beauty of Anne of Cleves, the sister of the reigning Duke of Cleves, who was one of the princes of the Protestant confederacy; but he speaks as if the marriage had been already determined upon. "The said Christopher," says the minister, "instantly sueth every day the acceleration of the matter, lest some other shall prevent it; and that, in the mean time, the picture may be sent. Whereunto the duke answered that he should find some occasion to send it, but that his painter, Lucas, was left sick behind him at home. Every man praiseth the beauty of the same lady, as well for the face as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent. amongst other purposes, said unto them of late, that she excelleth as far the duchess as the golden sun excelleth the silvern moon, which appeareth in the gravity of her face. Thus say they that have seen them both."* One, Putting, we suppose, more faith in Hans Holbein, his own painter, than in Lucas, the court painter of Cleves, Henry dispatched Hans to take the young lady's likeness; and, in the month of August, one of his ambassadors in Germany wrote a fuller account of her person and accomplishments, assuring his majesty, moreover, that my Lady Anne ⚫ State Papers. The duchess here alluded to was the DuchessDowager of Milan. There is some ground for suspecting that this lady, upon seeing that Henry was settling for another wife, regretted that she had not consented to become queen of England. The Earl of Southampton reports to Cromwell the following conversation with the king: And as to the matter concerning the Duchess of Milan, when he had heard it he paused a good while, and, at the last, said, smiling, Have they remembered theirselves now? To the which I said, Sir, we that be your servants are much bound to God that it pleaseth him to send you so good fortune in Ireland, and now they to woo you whom ye have wooed so long.' He answered coldly, They that would not when they might, perchance shall not when they would.'" was not bound by any previous covenant or contract, but was at her free will to marry wherever she would. As for her education and morals, the diplomatist said that they were excellent, seeing that, like her sister the Lady Sibylla till she was married, and like her unmarried sister the Lady Amelia, "she had been brought up by the lady duchess her mother, and, in manner, never from her elbow; and the lady duchess was a wise lady, and one that very strictly looked after her children. Also, all the gentlemen of the court, and others whom he had questioned, had reported Anne to be of a very lowly and gentle disposition." "She occupieth her time," continues the letter, which is addressed to the king himself, "mostly with the needle, wherewithal she is expert. She can read and write her own language, but of French, Latin, or other languages, she knoweth not one; nor yet cannot sing nor play upon any instrument, for they take it here in Germany for a rebuke and an occasion of lightness that great ladies should be learned or have any knowledge of music. Her wit is so good that, no doubt, she will in a short space learn the English tongue whensoever she putteth her mind to it. I could never hear that she is inclined to the good cheer of this country, and marvel it were if she should, seeing that her brother, in whom it were somewhat more tolerable, doth so well abstain from it. Your grace's servant, Hans Holbein, hath taken the effigies of my Lady Anne and the Lady Amelia, and hath expressed their images very lively." The picture-a miniature in Holbein's best manner-was brought over in an ivory box, which represented a rose, so delicately carved as to be said to be worthy of the jewel it contained. The king fancied himself in love as he contemplated this nice performance of his favourite artist; and the match proceeded. Hoping, no doubt, that a Protestant wife would finish his conversion, many of the German princes gave it their support; and in the month of September the Count Palatine and ambassadors from Cleves arrived in London, where Cromwell, who was in ecstasies at the success of the scheme, was instructed by his royal master to bid them as hearty a welcome as he could devise, declaring unto them that their coming was marvellously agreeable unto his majesty.† The king joyfully finished this treaty: but the marriage, instead of making, marred Cromwell. All things being prepared as was fitting, and her lover brooking no delay, Anne set forward on her journey in the dreary month of December. She was honourably received at Calais by the lord-admiral, who conveyed her to Dover, where she landed at the end of the month. Though now unwieldy, Henry rode hastily to Rochester to meet her. He went in disguise, and his first view of her was a secret one, but it was enough: he shrunk back tottering • Ellis's Collection.-Letter of Nicholas Wotton to Henry VIII. The original (not perfect, but injured by fire) is in the, British Museum. State Papers.-Letter from the king to Cromwell. under the weight of disappointment and dismay; and it was some time before he composed himself sufficiently to wait upon her as her husband and king. It seems to have been with sensations like those with which one swallows a dose of noisome medicine that he embraced her, and gave her his conjugal kiss. The whole interview did not last above the speaking of twenty words: he then hurried from his bride without giving her the presents he had brought with him; and the next morning he sent Sir Anthony Brown, his master of the horse," with a partlet of sable skins to wear round the neck, and a muffler furred, with as cold a message as might be, and rode himself back to Greenwich marvellously heavy in heart." His fiercest wrath was kindled against all those who had promoted the match; and he considered that the deception practised upon him was a proof that all faith and loyalty had departed the world, and that no mortal man could be trusted. Cromwell was evidently less culpable than the ambassadors and the painters; but notwithstanding this circumstance, and his great boldness and ability, he must have trembled upon receiving the king's summons. A full council met at Greenwich, and there, after abusing him for marrying him to 66 a great Flanders mare," coarse, clumsy, and "unfit to nourish love," he commanded Cromwell to devise some pretext or plausible cause for preventing the conclusion of the hateful marriage.* In the very doubtful state of his relations with the Catholic powers, it was humbly but forcibly represented that it might prove very dangerous to give such an affront to the princes of the Protestant confederacy; and Cromwell seems to have made the most of the king's fears. "Is there, then, no remedy?—must I needs, against my will, put my neck into this noose?"-were the affectionate expressions of Henry as he agreed that the marriage should go on. The Lady Anne was met at Blackheath, and with great state brought to Greenwich on the 3rd of January, and she was married on the 5th day of the same month. But Henry's aversion did not abate on a closer acquaintance; and, without going into the disgusting details with which he, without hesitation, entertained his court, and the noble matrons thereof, we need merely state that he lamented his fate in the most pathetic terms, and declared that life would be a burden to him if he were forced to pass it with such a wife.t After all, it does not appear that Anne of Cleves was an ugly woman; and much of Henry's distaste may have proceeded from the mere caprice of the jaded voluptuary. He was certainly himself no very loveable object at the time. As he grew fat he wished for a fat wife, and his agents had been expressly commanded to look out for a fine, large woman. But Anne, it appears, was on too large a scale. According to Holbein's picture her complexion was wonderfully fair and beautiful, and her countenance very agreeable. Marillac, the French ambassador, no prejudiced observer, says that she was tolerably handsome,-de beauté moyenne. Like a true Frenchman, he criticises her German dress. In another dispatch he says"Aune has not been found quite so young and so beautiful as everybody supposed. She has brought with her twelve or fifteen ladies, all of whom, in respect to their external appearance, are even inferior to herself, and all, besides, dressed in such an awkward and unbecoming manner, that they would be thought ugly even if they were really handsome." + Depositions of the king and Cromwell, in Strype-Burnet.Hall,-Stow. The Catholic party were greatly rejoiced at this manifest failure of a great Protestant experiment; and other religious feelings came in to hasten the destruction of Cromwell. Bishop Gardiner, in a sermon at Paul's Cross, denounced as a damnable heresy the tenet of justification by faith alone without works, as taught by Luther and his followers. Dr. Barnes undertook to answer Gardiner, and to prove that it was the bishop who was heretical. Preaching from the same pulpit at Paul's Cross, the doctor became excited and somewhat scurrilous, as was much the fashion with preachers in those days; and he treated the bishop very roughly indeed. He said, among other things, that he (Dr. Barnes) was a fighting cock, and that Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was another fighting cock, but the garden cock lacked good spurs. For this offence, after being examined before the king, he was made to sign a recantation of his doctrine about faith, and commanded to ask pardon from the same pulpit. The pardon he asked of Gardiner; but, growing warm in his discourse, he forgot the rest, and, instead of repeating his recantation, he affirmed his previous tenet of justification by faith alone. The consequence was inevitable; he was thrown into the Tower, together with Garret and Jerome, two preachers who held the same opinions. Dr. Barnes was a most intimate friend of Cromwell, who had frequently employed him on missions into Germany; and the Papists thought that the king would not hold him blameless of his dependent's heterodoxy. We will not attempt to explain what perplexed those who were acting on the scene; but, while the Papists made sure that Cromwell's high offices of vicar-general and keeper of the privy seal would immediately fall to Tunstall and Clarke, Bishop of Bath, he was not only left in possession, but received from the king's hands the order of the garter, and was created Earl of Essex and lord-chamberlain, ostensibly as a reward for his exertions in obtaining an enormous grant from parliament.* It should appear, however, that Henry was making provision for the dispatch of the enormous quantity of business which had hitherto been transacted by Cromwell, who must have been a man of iron. He made two secretaries of state, Wriothesley and Ralph Sadler, and divided many important functions of government between them. We are not told how long the king had bemoaned his fate with Anne of Cleves when he saw the pretty little Lady Catherine Howard;† but it seems to have been some four or five months. The Lady Catherine was niece to the Duke of Norfolk, and as entire a Papist as Anne was a Protestant. Henry first met her at a dinner given by Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. It is supposed that that prelate and his party had calculated upon the impression her charms would make upon him; and it was natural enough for ⚫ During this session the Knights Hospitallers were dissolved, and their property was vested in the crown. †This unfortunate young creature was below the usual stature of English women. friend. On the 14th of June, Cromwell, deserted by all the world, asked for a trial before his peers, but the court preferred to proceed by bill of attainder, without trial,-a practice which he himself had helped the king to establish, with consent of the slavish parliament. The bill of attainder was hurried through the House of Lords; and on the 19th of June, nine days after his arrest, Cromwell received his doom as a manifold traitor and detestable heretic.* them to suppose that the next step a man like Henry would take, after espousing a Protestant, would be to choose a wife from the opposite sect. By a "notable appearance of honour, cleanness, and maidenly behaviour," Catherine quite captivated the king, who, it appears, frequently met her afterwards at the house of Bishop Gardiner, or of some other person equally anxious for the interests of the Romish church. In this society, composed of the mortal enemies of Cromwell, the king was not likely to hear much good of his minister. Gardiner, still feeling the prick of Dr. Barnes's spurs in his side, gave Henry to understand that the said Barnes had been an agent of Cromwell's in pressing the marriage with Anne of Cleves, that master and man had wittingly chosen his majesty an unpleasant wife for the sake of promoting their own religious notions,-and that both, instead of believing according to act of parliament and the king's will, were bent upon establishing the detestable heresies of Martin Luther. Every glance of the bright eyes of Catherine Howard was dangerous to the Protestant interest. At the same time Cromwell, strangely blind to what was passing, continued to deal his sharp blows at the scrupulous Papists who refused the oath of supremacy; and he was in the high exercise of despotic power, when, suddenly, on the 10th of June, he was arrested at the council-board on a charge of high treason, and forthwith carried to the Tower. his days of favour he had encouraged the prostration of all law, and the establishment of the most arbitrary modes of proceeding in judicial cases. He had held up the king as a being authorised to make and change statutes as he pleased; and he now felt the whole weight of the monstrous tyranny which he had helped to erect and inflate. His papers were seized,-his servants were questioned, and out of their evidence, which was never produced in court, or submitted to public examination anywhere else, his enemies fabricated a series of charges, the greatest of which amounted to treason. It was alleged that he had received bribes, and had encroached upon the royal authority by the issuing of commissions, pardons to criminals, and licenses for the exportation of prohibited goods; that, as vicargeneral and chief manager, under the king, of that Christian church, he had betrayed the good cause, protecting preachers of heresy and promoting the circulation of heretical books; and that, finally, he had, in a private conversation about the new opinions, drawn out his dagger, and declared that he would maintain the cause of the Reformation, even against the king himself. In his fall Crom-jesty, that, though it be determined that the pre In well scarcely showed more fortitude than Wolsey: he wrote imploring letters to his most gracious prince, crying "Mercy! Mercy!" Once Henry's heart seemed touched by these appeals, but it was only for a moment. Archbishop Cranmer summoned courage to write a letter in his behalf, but the epistle was not calculated to produce any great effect; and he afterwards gave his vote against his But before he was executed, Anne of Cleves was divorced, and the king was united in the holy bands of matrimony with Catherine Howard. On the 25th of June Anne was ordered to remove to Richmond, being told that that place would be more suitable to her health and pleasure than London. Then the king gave directions to his bishops and ministers to legalise his separation from Anne of Cleves; and the bishops and ministers acted accordingly. It was instantly discovered that there had been a formal contract of marriage between Anne and the son of the Duke of Lorraine ; and this, with Henry's assertion that the marriage had never been consummated, was deemed quite sufficient ground. Parliament met and humbly implored his majesty to investigate the subject. The case was submitted to a convocation of the clergy, and on the 9th of July it was unanimously decided by the churchmen of all colours that the marriage was null and void, inasmuch as the king had married the princess "without the inward consent of his own mind," and as there had been a pre-contract between her and another person. Poor Anne, who had the dread of the block before her eyes, and who was a person of more discretion than pride or passion, most quietly submitted to her fate, and two days after, being properly prompted and assisted (for she could write no English), she addressed a letter to his most excellent majesty, though the case, she observed, must needs be most hard and sorrowful into her, through the great love which she bore to his most noble person; yet, having more regard to God and his truth than to any worldly affection, "as it beseemed me," she continued, "at the beginning, to submit me to such examination and determination of the said clergy, whom I have and do accept for judges competent in that behalf, so here now, being ascertained how the said clergy hath therein given their judgment and sentence, I acknowledge myself hereby to accept and approve the same, wholly and entirely putting myself, for my state and condition, to your highness' goodness and pleasure, most humbly beseeching your ma Le Grand-Strype.-Burnet.-Herbert.-Journals. In his dispatches of the 31st of July, 11th of August, and 3rd of September, Marillac writes-" Anne makes no opposition whatever to the divorce, at which the king is the more pleased, because, as it is said, his new favourite (amourette) is already with child. The former is now called merely Madame Anne of Cleves. She is any thing but low spirited,-amuses herself in all possible ways, and dresses every day in new clothes, made in a strange fashion. All this is an indication of admirable prudence and dissimulation, or of extraordinary simplicity and stupidity." The reported pregnancy of Catherine seems to have been merely a bit of court or city scandal. tended matrimony between us is void and of none effect, whereby I neither can nor will repute myself for your grace's wife, considering this sentence whereunto I stand, and your majesty's clean and pure living with me, yet it will please you to take me for one of your most humble servants, and so to determine of me, as I may sometimes have the fruition of your most noble presence, which, as I shall esteem for a great benefit, so my lords, and others of your majesty's council, now being with me, have put me in comfort thereof, and that your highness will take me for your sister, for the which I most humbly thank you accordingly. Thus, most gracious prince, I beseech our Lord God to send your majesty long life and good health, to God's glory, your own honour, and the wealth of this noble realm."* On the very next day Henry commissioned the Duke of Suffolk to go to the Lady Anne at Richmond, and "considering she be now come to her strength, and in good temper of body," to press her further to write to her brother the Duke of Cleves, in order to express her perfect concurrence in all that had been done. Suffolk was also charged to make her write the same letter, in German, which had been sent to him the day before in English, lest people might say she had put her 66 signature to words which she did not understand, "adds the king, which," we doubt not but, by your good handling and dexterity, ye shall facilely bring to pass." The duke, moreover, was, by all ways and means, to make her write her letters to her brother before his departure, and to bring the said letters to court himself, and not "to leave anything uncertain upon a woman's promise that she would be no woman;" "the accomplishment whereof, on her part," adds this brutal pedant, " is as difficult in the refraining of a woman's will upon occasion, as in changing of her womanish nature, which is impossible." The duke was accompanied by the Earl of Southampton, now privy seal, and Sir Thomas Wriothesley, one of the principal secretaries of state; and he carried to Anne, from the king, a token, as to "his dearest sister by adoption," this same token being five hundred marks sterling in gold! Anne, too wise to resist, and, in all probability but too happy to escape out of the lion's jaws, did everything that was required of her. On the 16th of July she wrote the most submissive of letters to the most excellent and noble prince, her most benign and good brother Henry, subscribing herself, as had been agreed, his majesty's humble sister and servant. Still, however, Suffolk and the noble lords had not finished their commission, for the Which word sister" she was animated to write by the said duke, earl, and others before named, upon the king's majesty's former determination so to use and accept her."-State Papers. |