Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, Volumes I & II — 02 - Volume I, Chapter II. 1536-1542, part 1

Nothing could be more opposite to the strict principles of hereditary succession than the ideas entertained, even by the first lawyers of the time of Henry VIII.

, concerning the manner in which a title to the crown was to be established and recognised.

When Rich, the king's solicitor, was sent by his master to argue with sir Thomas More on the lawfulness of acknowledging the royal supremacy;

he inquired in the course of his argument, whether sir Thomas would not own for king any person whatever,--himself for example,--who should have been declared so by parliament?

He answered, that he would.

Rich then demanded, why he refused to acknowledge a head of the church so appointed?

"Because," replied More, "a parliament can make a king and depose him, and that every parliament-man may give his consent thereunto, but a subject cannot be bound so in case of supremacy[3]."

Bold as such doctrine respecting the power of parliaments would now be thought, it could not well be controverted at a time when examples were still recent of kings of the line of York or Lancaster alternately elevated or degraded by a vote of the two houses, and when the father of the reigning sovereign had occupied the throne in virtue of such a nomination more than by right of birth.

[Note 3: See Herbert's Henry VIII.

] But the obvious inconveniences and dangers attending the exercise of this power of choice, had induced the parliaments of Henry VIII.

to join with him in various acts for the regulation of the succession.

It was probably with the concurrence of this body, that in 1532 he had declared his cousin, the marquis of Exeter, heir to the crown; yet this very act, by which the king excluded not only his daughter Mary, but his two sisters and their children, every one of whom had a prior right according to the rules at present received, must have caused the sovereignty to be regarded rather as elective in the royal family than properly hereditary--a fatal idea, which converted every member of that family possessed of wealth, talents, or popularity, into a formidable rival, if not to the sovereign on the throne, at least to his next heir, if a woman or a minor, and which may be regarded as the immediate occasion of those cruel proscriptions which stained with kindred blood the closing years of the reign of Henry, and have stamped upon him to all posterity the odious character of a tyrant.

The first sufferer by the suspicions of the king was lord Thomas Howard, half-brother to the duke of Norfolk, who was attainted of high treason in the parliament of 1536, for having secretly entered into a contract of marriage with lady Margaret Douglas, the king's niece, through which alliance he was accused of aiming at the crown.

For this offence he was confined in the Tower till his death; but on what evidence of traitorous designs, or by what law, except the arbitrary mandate of the monarch confirmed by a subservient parliament, it would be difficult to say.

That his marriage was forbidden by no law, is evident from the passing of an act immediately afterwards, making it penal to marry any female standing in the first degree of relationship to the king, without his knowledge and consent.

The lady Margaret was daughter to Henry's eldest sister, the queen-dowager of Scotland, by her second husband the earl of Angus.

She was born in England, whither her mother had been compelled to fly for refuge by the turbulent state of her son's kingdom, and the ill success of her own and her husband's struggles for the acquisition of political power.

In the English court the lady Margaret had likewise been educated, and had formed connexions of friendship; whilst her brother James V. laboured under the antipathy with which the English then regarded those northern neighbours, with whom they were involved in almost perpetual hostilities.

It might easily therefore have happened, in case of the king's death without male heirs, that in spite of the power recently bestowed on him by parliament of disposing of the crown by will, which it is very uncertain how he would have employed, a connexion with the potent house of Howard might have given the title of lady Margaret a preference over that of any other competitor.

Henry was struck with this danger, however distant and contingent: he caused his niece, as well as her spouse, to be imprisoned; and though he restored her to liberty in a few months, and the death of Howard, not long afterwards, set her free from this ill-starred engagement, she ventured not to form another, till the king himself, at the end of several years, gave her in marriage to the earl of Lenox; by whom she became the mother of lord Darnley, and through him the progenitrix of a line of princes destined to unite another crown to the ancient inheritance of the Plantagenets and the Tudors.

The princess Mary, after the removal of Anne Boleyn, who had exercised towards her the utmost insolence and harshness, ventured upon some overtures towards a reconciliation with her father; but he would accept them on no other conditions than her adopting his religious creed, acknowledging his supremacy, denying the authority of the pope, and confessing the unlawfulness of her mother's marriage.

It was long before motives of expediency, and the persuasion of friends, could wring from Mary a reluctant assent to these cruel articles: her compliance was rewarded by the return of her father's affection, but not immediately by her reinstatement in the order of succession.

She saw the child of Anne Boleyn still a distinguished object of the king's paternal tenderness;

the new queen was likely to give another heir to the crown; and whatever hopes she, with the catholic party in general, had founded on the disgrace of his late spouse, became frustrated by succeeding events.

The death of Catherine of Arragon seemed to have removed the principal obstacles to an agreement between the king and the pope; and the holy father now deigned to make some advances towards a son whom he hoped to find disposed to penitence: but they were absolutely rejected by Henry, who had ceased to dread his spiritual thunders.

The parliament and the convocation showed themselves prepared to adopt, without hesitation, the numerous changes suggested by the king in the ancient ritual; and Cromwel, with influence not apparently diminished by the fall of the late patroness of the protestant party, presided in the latter assembly with the title of vicegerent, and with powers unlimited.

The suppression of monasteries was now carried on with increasing rigor, and thousands of their unfortunate inhabitants were mercilessly turned out to beg or starve.

These, dispersing themselves over the country, in which their former hospitalities had rendered them generally popular, worked strongly on the passions of the many, already discontented at the imposition of new taxes, which served to convince them that the king and his courtiers would be the only gainers by the plunder of the church;

and formidable insurrections were in some counties the result.

In Lincolnshire the commotions were speedily suppressed by the interposition of the earl of Shrewsbury and other loyal noblemen; but it was necessary to send into Yorkshire a considerable army under the duke of Norfolk.

Through the dexterous management of this leader, who was judged to favor the cause of the revolters as much as his duty to his sovereign and a regard to his own safety would permit, little blood was shed in the field; but much flowed afterwards on the scaffold, where the lords Darcy and Hussey, sir Thomas Percy, brother to the earl of Northumberland, and several private gentlemen, suffered as traitors.

The suppression of these risings strengthened, as usual, the hands of government, but at the expense of converting into an object of dread, a monarch who in the earlier and brighter period of his reign had been regarded with sentiments of admiration and love.

In lord Herbert's narrative of this insurrection, we meet with a passage too remarkable to be omitted.

"But the king, who was informed from divers parts, but chiefly from Yorkshire, that the people began there also to take arms, and knowing of what great consequence it might be if the great persons in those parts, though the rumour were false, should be said to join with him, had commanded George earl of Shrewsbury, Thomas Manners earl of Rutland, and George Hastings earl of Huntingdon, to make a proclamation to the Lincolnshire-men, summoning and commanding them on their allegiance and peril of their lives to return; which, as it much disheartened them, so many stole away," &c. In this potency of the hereditary aristocracy of the country, and comparative feebleness, on some occasions at least, of the authority of the most despotic sovereign whom England had yet seen on the throne, we discern at once the excuse which Henry would make to himself for his severities against the nobility, and the motive of that extreme popularity of manners by which Elizabeth aimed at attaching to herself the affections of the middling and lower orders of her subjects.

Soon after these events, Henry confirmed the new impressions which his subjects had received of his character, by an act of extraordinary, but not unprovoked, severity, which involved in destruction one of the most ancient and powerful houses among the peerage of Ireland, that of Fitzgerald earl of Kildare.

The nobleman who now bore this title had married for his second wife lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter of the first marquis of Dorset, and first-cousin to the king by his mother; he had been favored at court, and was at this time lord deputy of Ireland.

But the country being in a very disturbed state, and the deputy accused of many acts of violence, he had obeyed with great reluctance a summons to answer for his conduct before the king in council, leaving his eldest son to exercise his office during his absence.

On his arrival, he was committed to the Tower, and his son, alarmed by the false report of his having lost his head, broke out immediately into a furious rebellion.

After a temporary success, Thomas Fitzgerald was reduced to great difficulties: at the same time a promise of pardon was held out to him;

and confiding in it he surrendered himself to lord Leonard Grey, brother to the countess his step-mother.

His five uncles, also implicated in the guilt of rebellion, were seized by surprise, or deceived into submission.

The whole six were then conveyed to England in the same ship; and all, in spite of the entreaties and remonstrances of lord Leonard Grey, who considered his own honor as pledged for the safety of their lives, were hanged at Tyburn.

The aged earl had died in the Tower on receiving news of his son's rash enterprise; and a posthumous attainder being issued against him, his lands and goods were forfeited.

The king however, in pity to the widow, and as a slight atonement for so cruel an injustice, permitted one of her daughters to retain some poor remains of the family plate and valuables; and another of them, coming to England, appears to have received her education at Hunsdon palace with the princesses Mary and Elizabeth her relations.

Here she was seen by Henry earl of Surry, whose chaste and elegant muse has handed her down to posterity as the lovely Geraldine, the object of his fervent but fruitless devotion.

She was married first to sir Anthony Brown, and afterwards became the wife of the earl of Lincoln, surviving by many years her noble and unfortunate admirer.

The countess of Kildare, and the younger of her two sons, likewise remained in England obscure and unmolested; but the merciless rancour of Henry against the house of Fitzgerald still pursued its destitute and unoffending heir, who was struggling through a series of adventures the most perilous and the most romantic.

This boy, named Gerald, then about twelve years old, had been left by his father at a house in Kildare, under the care and tuition of Leverous a priest who was his foster-brother.

The child was lying ill of the small-pox, when the news arrived that his brother and uncles had been sent prisoners to England: but his affectionate guardian, justly apprehensive of greater danger to his young charge, wrapped him up as carefully as he could, and conveyed him away with all speed to the house of one of his sisters, where he remained till he was quite recovered.

Thence his tutor removed him successively into the territories of two or three different Irish chieftains, who sheltered him for about three quarters of a year, after which he carried him to his aunt the lady Elenor, at that time widow of a chief named Maccarty Reagh.

This lady had long been sought in marriage by O'Donnel lord of Tyrconnel, to whose suit she had been unpropitious: but wrought upon by the hope of being able to afford effectual protection to her unfortunate nephew, she now consented to an immediate union; and taking Gerald along with her to her new home in the county of Donegal, she there hospitably entertained him for about a year.

But the jealous spirit of the implacable king seemed to know no rest while this devoted youth still breathed the air of liberty, and he caused a great reward to be offered for his apprehension, which the base-minded O'Donnel immediately sought to appropriate by delivering him up.

Fortunately the lady Elenor discovered his intentions in time, and instantly causing her nephew to disguise his person, and storing him, like a bountiful aunt, with "sevenscore portugueses," she put him under the charge of Leverous and an old servant of his father's, and shipped him on board a vessel bound for St. Malo's. Having thus secured his escape, she loftily expostulated with her husband on his villainy in plotting to betray her kinsman, whom she had stipulated that he should protect to the utmost of his power; and she bid him know, that as the danger of the youth had alone induced her to form any connection with him, so the assurance of his safety should cause her to sequester herself for ever from the society of so base and mercenary a wretch: and hereupon, collecting all that belonged to her, she quitted O'Donnel and returned to her own country.

Gerald, in the mean time, arrived without accident in Bretagne, and was favorably received by the governor of that province, when the king of France, being informed of his situation, gave him a place about the dauphin.

Sir John Wallop however, the English embassador, soon demanded him, in virtue of a treaty between the two countries for the delivering up of offenders and proscribed persons; and while the king demurred to the requisition, Gerald consulted his safety by making a speedy retreat into Flanders.

Thither his steps were dogged by an Irish servant of the embassador's; but the governor of Valenciennes protected him by imprisoning this man, till the youth himself generously begged his release; and he reached the emperor's court at Brussels, without further molestation.

But here also the English embassador demanded him; the emperor however excused himself from giving up a fugitive whose youth sufficiently attested his innocence, and sent him privately to the bishop of Liege, with a pension of a hundred crowns a month.

The bishop entertained him very honorably, placing him in a monastery, and watching carefully over the safety of his person, till, at the end of half a year, his mother's kinsman, cardinal Pole, sent for him into Italy.

Before he would admit the young Irishman to his presence, the cardinal required him to learn Italian; and allowing him an annuity, placed him first with the bishop of Verona, then with a cardinal, and afterwards with the duke of Mantua.

At the end of a year and a half he invited him to Rome, and soon becoming attached to him, took him into his house, and for three years had him instructed under his own eye in all the accomplishments of a finished gentleman.

At the end of this time, when Gerald had nearly attained the age of nineteen, his generous patron gave him the choice either of pursuing his studies or of travelling to seek his adventures.

The youth preferred the latter; and repairing to Naples, he fell in with some knights of Rhodes, whom he accompanied to Malta, and thence to Tripoli, a place at that time possessed by the order, whence they carried on fierce war against the "Turks and miscreants," spoiling and sacking their villages and towns, and taking many prisoners whom they sold to the Christians for slaves.

In these proceedings, the young adventurer took a strenuous and valiant part, much to his profit;

for in less than a year he returned to Rome laden with a rich booty.

"Proud was the cardinal to hear of his prosperous exploits," and increased his pension to three hundred pounds a year.

Shortly after, he entered into the service of Cosmo duke of Florence, and remained three years his master of the horse.

The tidings of Henry's death at length put an end to his exile, and he hastened to London in the company of some foreign embassadors, and still attended by his faithful guardian Leverous.

Appearing at king Edward's court in a mask, or ball, he had the good fortune to make a deep impression on the heart of a young lady, daughter to sir Anthony Brown, whom he married; and through the intercession of her friends was restored to a part of his inheritance by the young monarch, who also knighted him.

In the next reign, the interest of cardinal Pole procured his reinstatement in all the titles and honors of his ancestors.

He was a faithful and affectionate subject to queen Elizabeth, in whose reign he turned protestant; was by her greatly favored, and finally died in peace in 1585. [4] That ill-directed restlessness which formed so striking a feature in the character of Henry VIII.

had already prompted him to interfere, as we have seen, on more than one occasion, with the order of succession; and the dangerous consequences of these capricious acts with respect to the several branches of the royal family have already been observed.

To the people at large also, his instability on so momentous a point was harassing and alarming, and they became as much at a loss to conjecture what successor, as what religion, he would at last bequeath them.

Under such circumstances, great indeed must have been the joy in the court and in the nation on the occurrence of an event calculated to end all doubts and remove all difficulties--the birth of a prince of Wales.

This auspicious infant seemed to strangle in his cradle the serpents of civil discord.

Every lip hastened to proffer him its homage; every heart united, or seemed at least to unite, in the general burst of thankfulness and congratulation.

[Note 4: See Chron.

of Ireland in Holinshed, _pass_.

Collins's Peerage, by sir E. Brydges, article _Viscount Leinster_.

] The zealous papists formed the party most to be suspected of insincerity in their professions of satisfaction; but the princess Mary set them an excellent example of graceful submission to what was inevitable, by soliciting the office of godmother.

Her sister was happily too young to be infected with court-jealousies, or to behold in a brother an unwelcome intruder, who came to snatch from her the inheritance of a crown: between Elizabeth and Edward an attachment truly fraternal sprung up with the first dawnings of reason; and notwithstanding the fatal blow given to her interests by the act of settlement extorted from his dying hand, this princess never ceased to cherish his memory, and to mention him in terms of affectionate regret.

The conjugal felicities of Henry were destined to be of short duration, and before he could receive the felicitations of his subjects on the birth of his son, the mother was snatched away by death.

The queen died deeply regretted, not only by her husband, but by the whole court, whom she had attached by the uncommon sweetness of her disposition.

To the princess Mary her behaviour had been the reverse of that by which her predecessor had disgraced herself; and the little Elizabeth had received from her marks of a maternal tenderness.

Jane Seymour was accounted a favourer of the protestant cause; but as she was apparently free from the ambition of interfering in state affairs, her death had no further political influence than what resulted from the king's marriage thus becoming once more an object of speculation and court intrigue.

It did not even give a check to the advancement of her two brothers, destined to act and to suffer so conspicuously in the fierce contentions of the ensuing minority; for the king seemed to regard it as a point of policy to elevate those maternal relations of his son, on whose care he relied to watch over the safety of his person in case of his own demise, to a dignity and importance which the proudest nobles of the land might view with respect or fear.

Sir Edward Seymour, who had been created lord Beauchamp the year before, was now made earl of Hertford; and high places at court and commands in the army attested the favor of his royal brother-in-law.

Thomas Seymour, afterwards lord high-admiral, attained during this reign no higher dignity than that of knighthood; but considerable pecuniary grants were bestowed upon him; and whilst he saw his wealth increase, he was secretly extending his influence, and feeding his aspiring spirit with fond anticipations of future greatness.

All now seemed tranquil: but a discerning eye might already have beheld fresh tempests gathering in the changeful atmosphere of the English court.

The jealousies of the king, become too habitual to be discarded, had in fact only received a new direction from the birth of his son: his mind was perpetually haunted with the dread of leaving him, a defenceless minor, in the hands of contending parties in religion, and of a formidable and factious nobility; and for the sake of obviating the distant and contingent evils which he apprehended from this source, he showed himself ready to pour forth whole rivers of the best blood of England.

The person beyond all comparison most dreaded and detested by Henry at this juncture was his cousin Reginald Pole, for whom when a youth he had conceived a warm affection, whose studies he had encouraged by the gift of a deanery and the hope of further church-preferment, and of whose ingratitude he always believed himself entitled to complain.

It was the long-contested point of the lawfulness of Henry's marriage with his brother's widow, which set the kinsmen at variance.

Pole had from the first refused to concur with the university of Paris, in which he was then residing, in its condemnation of this union: afterwards, alarmed probably at the king's importunities on the subject, he had obtained the permission then necessary for leaving England, to which he had returned, and travelled into Italy.

Here he formed friendships with the most eminent defenders of the papal authority, now incensed to the highest degree against Henry, on account of his having declared himself head of the English church; and both his convictions and his passions becoming still more strongly engaged on the side which he had already espoused, he published a work on the unity of the church, in which the conduct of his sovereign and benefactor became the topic of his vehement invective.

The offended king, probably with treacherous intentions, invited Pole to come to England, and explain to him in person certain difficult passages of his book: but his kinsman was too wary to trust himself in such hands; and his refusal to obey this summons, which implied a final renunciation of his country and all his early prospects, was immediately rewarded by the pope, through the emperor's concurrence, with a cardinal's hat and the appointment of legate to Flanders.

But alarmed, as well as enraged, at seeing the man whom he regarded as his bitterest personal enemy placed in a situation so convenient for carrying on intrigues with the disaffected papists in England, Henry addressed so strong a remonstrance to the governess of the Netherlands, as caused her to send the cardinal out of the country before he had begun to exercise the functions of his legantine office.

From this time, to maintain any intercourse or correspondence with Pole was treated by the king as either in itself an act of treason, or at least as conclusive evidence of traitorous intentions.

He believed that the darkest designs were in agitation against his own government and his son's succession; and the circumstance of the cardinal's still declining to take any but deacon's orders, notwithstanding his high dignity in the church, suggested to him the suspicion that his kinsman aimed at the crown itself, through a marriage with the princess Mary, of whose legitimacy he had shown himself so strenuous a champion.

What foundation there might be for such an idea it is difficult to determine.

There is an author who relates that the lady Mary was educated with the cardinal under his mother, and hints that an early attachment had thus been formed between them[5]: A statement manifestly inaccurate, since Pole was sixteen years older than the princess; though it is not improbable that Mary, during some period of her youth, might be placed under the care of the countess of Salisbury, and permitted to associate with her son on easy and affectionate terms.

It is well known that after Mary's accession, Charles V. impeded the journey of Pole into England till her marriage with his son Philip had been actually solemnized; but this was probably rather from a persuasion of the inexpediency of the cardinal's sooner opening his legantine commission in England, than from any fear of his supplanting in Mary's affections his younger rival, though some have ascribed to the emperor the latter motive.

[Note 5: See Lloyd's Worthies, article _Pole_.

] When however it is recollected, that in consequence of Henry's having caused a posthumous judgement of treason to be pronounced against the papal martyr Becket, his shrine to be destroyed, his bones burned, and his ashes scattered, the pope had at length, in 1538, fulminated against him the long-suspended sentence of excommunication, and made a donation of his kingdom to the king of Scots, and thus impressed the sanction of religion on any rebellious attempts of his Roman-catholic subjects,--it would be too much to pronounce the apprehensions of the monarch to have been altogether chimerical.

But his suspicion appears, as usual, to have gone beyond the truth, and his anger to have availed itself of slight pretexts to ruin where he feared and hated.

Such was the state of his mind when the treachery or weakness of Geffrey Pole furnished him with intelligence of a traitorous correspondence carried on with his brother the cardinal by several persons of distinction attached to the papal interest, and in which he had himself been a sharer.

On his information, the marquis of Exeter, viscount Montacute, sir Edward Nevil, and sir Nicholas Carew, were apprehended, tried and found guilty of high treason.

Public opinion was at this time nothing; and notwithstanding the rank, consequence and popularity of the men whose lives were sacrificed on this occasion; notwithstanding that secret consciousness of his own ill-will towards them, which ought to have rendered Henry more than usually cautious in his proceedings,--not even an attempt was made to render their guilt clear and notorious to the nation at large; and posterity scarcely even knows of what designs they were accused; to overt acts it is quite certain that they had not proceeded.

Henry lord Montacute was obnoxious on more than one account: he was the brother of cardinal Pole; and as eldest son of Margaret, sole surviving child of the duke of Clarence and heiress to her brother the earl of Warwick, he might be regarded as succeeding to those claims on the crown which under Henry VII.

had proved fatal to the last-mentioned unfortunate and ill-treated nobleman.

During the early part of this reign, however, he, in common with other members of the family of Pole, had received marks of the friendship of Henry.

In 1514, his mother was authorized to assume the title of countess of Salisbury, and he that of viscount Montacute, notwithstanding the attainder formerly passed against the great house of Nevil, from whom these honors were derived.

In 1521 lord Montacute had been indicted for concealing the treasons, real or pretended, of the duke of Buckingham; but immediately on his acquittal he was restored to the good graces of his sovereign, and, two years after, attended him on an expedition to France.

It is probable that lord Montacute was popular; he was at least a partisan of the old religion, and heir to the vast possessions which his mother derived from the king-making earl of Warwick her maternal grandfather; sufficient motives with Henry for now wishing his removal.

If the plot in which he was charged by his perfidious brother with participating, had in view the elevation of the cardinal to a matrimonial crown by his union with the princess Mary, which seems to have been insinuated, lord Montacute must at least stand acquitted of all design of asserting his own title; yet it may justly be suspected that his character of representative of the house of Clarence, was by Henry placed foremost in the catalogue of his offences.

A similar remark applies still more forcibly to the marquis of Exeter.

Son of Catherine, youngest daughter of Edward IV.

, and so lately declared his heir by Henry himself, it is scarcely credible that any inducement could have drawn this nobleman into a plot for disturbing the succession in favour of a claim worse founded than his own; and that the blood which he inherited was the true object of Henry's apprehensions from him, evidently appeared to all the world by his causing the son of the unhappy marquis, a child at this period, to be detained a state prisoner in the Tower during the remainder of his reign.

Sir Edward Nevil was brother to lord Abergavenny and to the wife of lord Montacute--a connection likely to bring him into suspicion, and perhaps to involve him in real guilt; but it must not be forgotten that he was a lineal descendant of the house of Lancaster by Joan daughter of John of Gaunt.

The only person not of royal extraction who suffered on this occasion was sir Nicholas Carew, master of the horse, and lately a distinguished favourite of the king; of whom it is traditionally related, that though accused as an accomplice in the designs of the other noble delinquents, the real offence for which he died, was the having retorted, with more spirit than prudence, some opprobrious language with which his royal master had insulted him as they were playing at bowls together[6].

The family of Carew was however allied in blood to that of Courtney, of which the marquis of Exeter was the head.

[Note 6: See Fuller's Worthies in Surry.

] But the attempt to extirpate all who under any future circumstances might be supposed capable of advancing claims formidable to the house of Tudor, must have appeared to Henry himself a task almost as hopeless as cruel.

Sons and daughters of the Plantagenet princes had in every generation freely intermarried with the ancient nobles of the land; and as fast as those were cut off whose connection with the royal blood was nearest and most recent, the pedigrees of families pointed out others, and others still, whose relationship grew into nearness by the removal of such as had stood before them, and presented to the affrighted eyes of their persecutor, a hydra with still renewed and multiplying heads.

Not content with these inflictions,--sufficiently severe it might be thought to intimidate the papal faction,--Henry gratified still further his stern disposition by the attainder of the marchioness of Exeter and the aged countess of Salisbury.

The marchioness he soon after released;

but the countess was still detained prisoner under a sentence of death, which a parliament, atrocious in its subserviency, had passed upon her without form of trial, but which the king did not think proper at present to carry into execution, either because he chose to keep her as a kind of hostage for the good behaviour of her son the cardinal, or because, tyrant as he had become, he had not yet been able to divest himself of all reverence or pity for the hoary head of a female, a kinswoman, and the last who was born to the name of Plantagenet.

It is melancholy, it is even disgusting, to dwell upon these acts of legalized atrocity, but let it be allowed that it is important and instructive.

They form unhappily a leading feature of the administration of Henry VIII.

during the latter years of his reign; they exhibit in the most striking point of view the sentiments and practices of the age; and may assist us to form a juster estimate of the character and conduct of Elizabeth, whose infant mind was formed to the contemplation of these domestic tragedies, and whose fame has often suffered by inconsiderate comparisons which have placed her in parallel with the enlightened and humanized sovereigns of more modern days, rather than with the stern and arbitrary Tudors, her barbarous predecessors.