statute of the Six Articles, it was boldly declared that the king's proclamations had the authority of Acts of Parliament ! During the whole of the years 1538 and 1539, Henry was, nevertheless, not only grown suspicious of his subjects, but greatly alarmed at the rumours of a combination betwixt the Pope, the emperor, and the King of France against him. It was rumoured that Cardinal Pole was assisting in this scheme, and as Henry could not reach him, he determined to take vengeance on his But at this conference Cardinal Pole had been present, and Henry directly attributed the scheme of invasion to him. At once, therefore, he let loose his fury on his relatives and friends in England. Becket, the usher, and Wrothe, server of the Royal chamber, were dispatched into Cornwall, to collect some colour of accusation against Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, and his adherents and dependants. The marquis and marchioness were soon arrested, as well as Sir Geoffrey Pole and Lord Montagu, brothers of the cardinal, and Sir Anne of Cleves. From the original Portrait by Holbein. AUP relatives and friends in England. A truce for ten years was concluded, under the Papal mediation, betwixt Charles and Francis, at Nice, June, 1538. On the part of the two monarchs, they urged Paul to publish his bull of excommunication against Henry, which had been reserved so long, and Henry, whose spies soon conveyed to him these tidings, immediately ordered his fleet to bo put in a state of activity, his harbours of defence strengthened, and the whole population to be called under arms, in expectation of a combined attack from these enemies. Edward Neville, a brother of Lord Abergavenny. Two priests, Croft and Collins, and Holland, a mariner, were also arrested, and lodged in the Tower. On the last day of the year, the marquis and Lord Montagu were tried before some of the peers, but not before their peers in Parliament, for Parliament was not sitting. The commoners were brought to trial before juries; and all on a charge of having conspired to place Reginald Pole, late Dean of Exeter, the king's enemy, on the throne. The king's ministers declared that the charge was well proved, but no such proofs were ever published, which, we may be sure, A.D. 1539.] HENRY VIII. 247 Henry VIII. granting the Charter to the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons. From the Original Picture by Hans Holbein. would have been had they existed. It was said that they mine further to punish the hostile cardinal. Judgment had sent the cardinal money, which, from his own family, of treason was pronounced against him; the Contimight have been the case, and yet with no treason. It nental sovereigns were called upon to deliver him up; was also charged on the Marquis of Exeter that he had and he was constantly surrounded by spies, and, as he said, "I like well the proceedings of Cardinal Pole. believed, ruffians hired to assassinate him. Meantime it I like not the proceedings of this realm. I trust to see was said that a French vessel had been driven by stress a change in this world. I trust once to have a fair day of weather into South Shields, and in it had been taken on the knaves that rule about the king. I trust to give three emissaries-an English priest of the name of Moore, them a buffet one day." and two Irishmen, a monk and a friar, who were said to be carrying treasonable letters to the Pope and to Pole. The Irish monks were sent up to London, and tortured in the Tower-a very unnecessary measure, if they really possessed the treasonable letters alleged. Now, had these words been fully proved, of which there is no evidence, where was the treason? Any honest man of the old persuasion might, and did, no doubt, say that he did not like the changes going, and might hope to see the ministers who recommended them removed. But the fact was, those noblemen where descended directly from the old Royal line of England: Courtenay was grandson to Edward IV., by his daughter Catherine, and the Poles were grandsons to George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward. All had a better title to the throne than Heary, and that, combined with their connection with the cardinal, was the cause of the tyrant's deadly enmity. If these prisoners had been inclined to treason, they had had the fairest opportunity of showing it during the northern insurrection, but they had taken no part whatever. But Henry had determined to wreak his vengeance, which could not reach the cardinal, on them; and the servile peers and courts condemned them. It was said that Sir Geoffrey Pole, to save his own life, consented to give evidence against the rest-secretly it must have been, for it was never produced. His life, therefore, was spared, but the rest were executed. Lord Montagu, the Marquis of Exeter, and Sir Edward Neville were beheaded on Tower Hill on the 9th of January, 1539, and Sir Nicholas Carew, master of the king's horse, was also beheaded on the 3rd of March, on a charge of being privy to the conspiracy. The two priests and the mariner were hanged and quartered at Tyburn. A commission was then sent down into Cornwall, which arraigned, condemned, and put to death two gentlemen of the names of Kendall and Quintrell, for having said, some years before, that Exeter was the heir apparent, and should be king, if Henry married Anne Boleyn, or it should cost a thousand lives. The whole of these were just so many judicial murders, to glut the spite of this bloody despot. Lord Herbert, one of the best possibly informed writers of the age, declares that he could never discover any real proofs of the charges against these noblemen, and their destruction excited universal horror. Even at this advanced period of his tyranny and his crimes, Henry was not insensible to the odium occasioned, and ordered a book to be published containing the real proofs of their treason. The cardinal himself proclaimed to the world, that if his relations had entertained any treasonable designs, they would have shown them during the insurrection, and that he had carefully examined the king's book for these proofs, but in vain. But the sanguinary fury of Henry was not yet sated. The cardinal was sent by the Pope to the Spanish and French courts to concert the carrying out of the scheme of policy against England agreed upon. Henry defeated this by means of his agents, and neither Charles nor Francis would move: but not the less did Henry deter On the 28th of April Parliament was called upon to pass bills of attainder against Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the mother of Cardinal Pole; Gertrude, the widow of the Marquis of Exeter; the son of Lord Montagu, a boy of tender years; Sir Adam Fortescue, and Sir Thomas Dingley. If the evidence taken from the captive monks had anything to do with these attainders, it must have been very vague and meagre indeed, for it was found on trial that no sufficient charge could be established against any of the accused. The Countess of Salisbury, the mother of the cardinal, was a lady seventy years of age, but of a powerful and undaunted mind. She was first privately examined by the Earl of Southampton, and Goodrich, Bishop of Ely. But she conducted herself with so much spirit, that they wrote to Cromwell that she was more like a strong and determined man than a woman; that she denied everything laid to her charge; and it seemed to them that her sons could not have made her privy to their treasons. They, in fact, had no evidence. Cromwell next undertook her and the Marchioness of Exeter, but with no better success. He had got hold of some of the countess's servants, yet he could extract nothing from them; but as the king was resolved to put his victims to death, something must be done, and, therefore, Cromwell demanded of the judges whether persons accused of treason might not be attainted and condemned by Parliament without any trial! The judges, who, like every one else under this monster of a king, had lost all sense of honour and justice in the fears for their own safety, replied that it was a nice question, and one that no inferior tribunal could entertain, but that Parliament was supreme, and that an attainder by Parliament would be good in law! Such a bill was accordingly passed through the servile Parliament, condemning the whole to death without any form of trial whatever. To such a pass was England come-its whole constitution, its Magna Charta, its very right and privilege, thrown down before this cruel despot. The two knights were beheaded on the 10th of July; the Marchioness of Exeter was kept in prison for six mouths, and then dismissed; the son of Lord Montagu, the grandson of the countess, was probably, too, allowed to escape, for no record of his death appears; but the venerable old lady herself, the near relative of the king, and the last direct descendant of the Plantagenets, after having been kept in prison for nearly two years, was brought out, probably on some fresh act of the cardinal's, and on the 27th of May, 1541, was condemned to the scaffold. There she still showed the determination of her A.D. 1539.] NEGOTIATIONS FOR ANOTHER MARRIAGE. character. Unlike many who had fallen there before her, so far from making any ambiguous speech, or giving any hypocritical professions of reverence for the king, she refused to do anything which appeared consenting to her own death. When told to lay her head on the block, she replied, "No, my head never committed treason; if you will have it, you must take it as you The executioner tried to seize her, but she moved swiftly round the scaffold, tossing her head from side to side. At last, covered with blood, for the guards struck her with their weapons, she was seized, and forcibly held down, and whilst exclaiming, "Blessed are they who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake," the axe descended, and her head fell. can." A more revolting tragedy, in defiance of all law and justice, a more frightful murder committed in open day, by brutal force, on a venerable, meritorious, and innocent woman, never took place, whether the murderer were called king or assassin. It proclaimed to all the world that the King of England was now demoralised to the grade of the hardened despot, no longer sensible to any feeling of honour or humanity, and obedient only to his brutal passions. But the time of Cromwell himself was coming. The block was the pretty certain goal of Henry's ministers. The more he caressed and favoured them, the more certain was that result. As a cat plays with a mouse, so Henry played with his ministers and his wives. Cromwell had gone on long advocating the utmost stretches of despotism. He had done his best to level all the safeguards of the constitution, and, therefore, of every man's life and safety. He had sprung from the lowest rank, and, therefore, was naturally beheld with hatred by the old nobility; but this hatred he had infinitely augmented in a large party by attacking their then most deeply rooted objects of veneration. He had destroyed the property of the Church without being able to eradicate from the mind of the king its doctrines, and these had now recoiled upon him with a fatal force. He had failed to prevent the passing of the Six Articles, which made Roman Catholicism still the unquestioned religion of the land; and he saw the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner, the stanch champions of the old faith, steadily gaining the ascendancy at Court. Reflecting anxiously on the critical nature of his position, the deep and unprincipled minister came to the conclusion that the only mode of regaining his influence with the king was to promote a Protestant marriage. For a time at least Henry allowed himself to be governed by a new wife, and that time gained might prove everything to Cromwell. Circumstances seemed to favour him at this moment. The king was in constant alarm at the combination betwixt France and Spain; and a new alliance with the Protestant prince of Germany, if accomplished, would equally serve purposes of the king and of Cromwell. the Henry had now been a widower for more than two years, but by no means a willing one. Immediately after the death of Jane Seymour, he had made an offer of his hand to the Duchess Dowager of Milan, the niece of the emperor; but the duchess was not at all flattered by the proposal. It was too well known all over Europe that he had already disposed of three wives; Catherine of Arragon, it was said, by poison, Anne Boleyn by the axe, and 219 Jane Seymour by the want of proper care in childbed. His butcheries of numbers of other people, some of them of the highest rank and of near kindred to himself, made every one recoil from his alliance, especially as he was now become a huge and bloated mass of disease. The witty Dowager of Milan, therefore, sent him word that, as she had but one head, and could not very well do without it, she declined the honour. He then addressed himself to the Princess Marie of Guise, the Duchess-Dowager of Longueville, but she was already affianced to a younger and much more desirable husband, James V. of Scotland. The accounts which he received of the beauty and accomplishments of the Duchess de Longueville made him unwilling to take a refusal. Chatillon, the French ambassador at London, wrote to Francis that Henry would hear of nothing else but the duchess. The ambassador reiterated that she was betrothed to his nephew, James of Scotland; but Henry said he would not believe it, and that he would do much greater things for her, and for the French king, too, than James could. In fact, Henry hated James, and this was an additional stimulus: he would have been delighted to mortify the King of Scots by snatching her away from him. Chatillon asked him if he would marry another man's wife-a very pointed question, for both Catherine and Anne had been got rid of by the plea that they had been previously affianced to other men. This was lost, however, on the gross, callous mind of Henry, and Francis was obliged to tell him plainly it could not be, but offered him Mary of Bourbon, daughter of the Duke of Vendome. Henry refused Mademoiselle Vendome, because she had been formerly offered to James of Scotland, who preferred the Longueville, and Henry said he would not take the leavings of another king. In August, 1538, Madame de Montreuil, a lady who had accompanied Magdalen of France, the first wife of James V., to Scotland, was returning through England to France, and Henry thought that perhaps she might suit him; she was, therefore, detained at Dover some time, that the king might go and see her, but probably he soon learnt from others enough to withdraw him from the project, for he never went, but turned again to Francis I., who then offered him either of the sisters of the Queen of Scotland, the princesses of Guise. Henry listened to this, and proposed that Francis should come to Calais on pretence of a private conference, and bring these ladies with him, and others of the finest ladies of France, that he might look at them, and make a choice amongst them. Francis spurned this coarse proposal, saying he had too much regard for the fair sex to trot them out like horses at a fair, to be taken or refused at the humour of the purchaser. Now was the time for Cromwell, while Henry was chagrined by these difficulties. He informed him that Anne, daughter of John III., Duke of Cleves, Count of Mark, and Lord of Ravenstein, was greatly extolled for her beauty and good sense; that her sister Sybilla, the wife of Frederick, Duke of Saxony, the head of the Protestant confederation of Germany, called the Smalcaldic League, was famed for her beauty, talents, and virtues, and universally regarded as one of the most distinguished ladies of the time. He pointed out to Henry the advantages of thus, by this alliance, acquiring the firm friendship of the princes of Germany, in counterpoise to the designs of France and Spain; and he assured him that he heard that the sisters of the Electress of Saxony, educated under the same wise mother, were equally attractive in person and in mind, and waited only a higher position to give them greater lustre, especially the Princess Anne. Henry immediately caught at the idea, and desired to have the portraits of the two sisters sent over to him. Christopher Mount, who was employed to negotiate this matter, and who was probably a creature of Cromwell's, urged the Duke of Cleves to have the portraits done with all dispatch; but the duke, who, probably, had no faith in the result of the experiment, was in no hurry. He replied to Mount's importunities that Lucas, his painter, was sick; but he would see to it, and find some occasion to send it. This lukewarmness argued little hope or inclination in the Duke of Cleves; and, singularly enough, it appears that Anne, his daughter, was already engaged to the Duke of Lorraine. These pre-engagements, broken to oblige Henry, had always been used by him afterwards to get rid of the wife, and the duke might well pause upon it. Mount, however, who must have been no judge of beauty, or was destitute of judgment altogether, gave the business no rest. He reported that every man praised the beauty of the lady, as well for face as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent, and that she as far excelled the duchess (of Milan ?) as the golden sun excelleth the silver moon. The Duke of Cleves died on the 6th of February, 1539, and Henry dispatched Hans Holbein to take the lady's portrait. Nicholas Wotton, Henry's envoy at the Court of Cleves, in a letter dated August 11th of the same year, reported both of the progress of the portrait and of the lady's character as follows:-"As for the education of my said ladye, she hath from her childhood been like as the Ladye Sybille, till she was married, and the Ladye Amelye hath been, and now is, brought up with the ladye duchess, her mother, and in manner never from her elbow -the ladye duchess being a very wise ladye, and one that straitly looketh to her children. All the gentlemen of the Court, and others that I have asked, report her to be of very lowly and gentle condition, by which she hath so much won her mother's favour, that she is very loth to suffer her to depart from her. She employeth her time much with her needle; she can read and write her own, but French and Latin, or other language, she knoweth not; nor yet can sing, or play on 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 short space learn the English tongue, whenever 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 well abstain from it. Your grace's servant, Hans Holbein, hath taken the effigies of my Ladye Anne and the Ladye Amelye, and hath expressed their images very lively." Barrett, of Lee. I have myself seen it in the possession of my late friend Sir Samuel Meyrick, of Goodrich Court, where it yet remains, the property of his nephew. The box screws into three parts, and in each end is a miniature portrait, one of Anne of Cleves and the other of Henry VIII. The portrait of Anne certainly is that of a very comely lady. Unfortunately, it was more lively than the original; and this box became to Cromwell, who had thus succeeded in accomplishing the marriage, fatal as the box of Pandora herself. Henry, being delighted with the portrait-which agreed so well with the many praises written of the lady by his agents-acceded to the match; and in the month of September the count palatine and ambassadors from Cleves arrived in London, where Cromwell received them with real delight, and the king bade them right welcome. The treaty was soon concluded; and Henry, impatient for the arrival of his wife, dispatched the Lord Admiral Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, to receive her at Calais, and conduct her to England. Anne set out from her native city of Dusseldorf in the first week in October, 1539, attended by an escort of 400 horse, and the chief personages of the household of her brother, the Duke of Cleves. She arrived, on the 11th of December, on the English frontiers of Calais, and was received by the Lord Lisle, deputy of Calais, the lieutenant of the castle, the knight porter, and the marshal of Calais, and by the cavalry of the garrison, all freshly and gallantly appointed for the occasion, with the men-at-arms in velvet coats and chains of gold, and all the king's archers. About a mile from the town she was received by the lord admiral, the Lord William Howard, and many other lords and gentlemen. In the train which conducted Anne of Cleves into Calais there were kinsmen of five out of the six queens of Henry VIII. Henry beguiled the tedium of his waiting for his expected bride by the executions of the venerable abbot of Glastonbury, the abbot of Tending, and others. It was not enough that he suppressed the monasteries, and took possession of them he must quench his blood-thirst in the lives of the superiors. The abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, aged, and sinking under divers ailments, was executed on the charge of endeavouring to conceal the plate of the abbey, with John Thorne, his treasurer, and Roger James, his under-treasurer. Lord John Russell declares that the jury which condemned the abbot and his monks showed a wonderful devotion to the king's will; and that ferocious will was certainly carried out in a truly savage style. The venerable abbot and his two officers were conducted to the top of Tor Hill, and here, in full view of the grand old abbey, and the noble parks and farms over which he had so long presided, they were hanged and quartered. The abbot's head was stuck upon the gates of the abbey, and his four quarters were sent to be exposed on the gates of Wells, Bath, Ilchester, and Bridgewater. About the same time, the abbot of Reading and the abbot of Colchester were executed, and exposed in the same barbarous manner. This miniature of Anne of Cleves is still in existence, Whilst these horrible atrocities were every day spreadperfect as when it was executed, upwards of 300 years ing wider over Europe the terrible fame of Henry VIII., ago. Horace Walpole describes the box which enclosed he was impatiently awaiting his new wife. On the 27th it, as in the form of a white rose, delicately carved in of December, 1539, Anne landed at Deal, having been ivory, and says that he saw it in the cabinet of Mr. | escorted across the Channel by a fleet of fifty ships. She |