Sir Nicholas Carew and others were accused of holding a traitorous correspondence with Cardinal Pole, and were imprisoned in the Tower ; as were also the Cardinal's brothers, Lord Montague and Sir Geoffrey Pole, their mother the Countess of Salisbury, the Marchioness of Exeter, Sir Adrian Fortescue and Sir Thomas Dingley. Reginald Pole, who had never hesitated in his conferences with the King to condemn the divorce, had been entrusted by Henry to go on a mission to the Pope to make peace if possible. Pope Paul IV had made him a Cardinal, to Henry's indignation, and he was still on the Continent. The Marquis of Exeter was a grandson of Edward IV, and Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, was the daughter of his brother, the Duke of Clarence. The King was roused to fresh anger against them because Charles V and Francis I had laid aside their enmity and become friends, and the Pope, looking to them for assistance, had issued a bull of excommunication against him. Geoffrey Pole saved his life by giving evidence against the plotters. Exeter and Montague were beheaded, December 9, 1538, Carew on March 3 following. Lady Exeter was pardoned, but the Countess of Salisbury was kept in confinement for two years longer, when she was brought to the scaffold on the fatal Green. Froude thinks it was because she was found to be still secretly corresponding with her son the Cardinal against the King, and there were fresh alarms of a rising in the North under Sir John Neville. Froude discredits the story told by Lingard, that the aged Countess refused to lay her head on the block on the ground that she was no traitor, and that the headsman hacked it off as he best could; and Mr. Gairdner evidently does not believe it.

Of the King's chief adviser in these terrible doings we have as yet said nothing, but it becomes necessary to do so now. Thomas Cromwell, who had risen from low estate, and whose early history is almost a blank to us, after a youth spent on the Continent, was appointed by Wolsey collector of his revenues of the see of York, entered Parliament in 1523 and became a member of Gray's Inn. Wolsey leaned much upon him, made him one of the commissioners appointed (1525) to inquire into the conditions of the smaller monasteries—and in this work he acted with great harshness—and he also managed the work of the foundation of the Cardinal's Colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He

seems to have remained faithful to Wolsey to the end, but it was he more than any one who persuaded Henry VIII to make himself supreme head of the Church by way of facilitating his divorce from Katharine, and he rose high in favour with the King and became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1535 he was made Vicar-General for a general visitation of churches, monasteries and clergy, was rewarded with large gifts of confiscated church lands, and was made Lord Chamberlain in 1539. This was the culmination of a career clever and wary, but tyrannical and oppressive to the English nation and utterly unprincipled towards foreign powers. His fall, which had long been desired by the Catholic party in England, was hastened by his negotiating the King's marriage with Anne of Cleves. Henry's disgust at his first sight of his affianced bride would not have sufficed to cause the agent's ruin, but the alliance with German Protestants, of which the marriage was to be the seal, was unpopular, and as it had served its purpose, nothing more was to be got out of it. For arranging the marriage he was created Earl of Essex April 1540, and on June 10 following the Duke of Norfolk denounced him as a traitor at the Council board, and he was at once sent to the Tower, charged with receiving bribes wholesale, selling commissions, secretly dispersing heretical books, and designing to marry the Princess Mary and make himself King. He was not tried but proceeded against by attainder. Archbishop Cranmer vainly tried to stem the tide. He was beheaded on Tower Green July 28, 1540. It was one sign of a Catholic reaction. The Tower and other metropolitan prisons were crowded with Protestant heretics, who were dragged away on hurdles and burnt in Smithfield, as were also some Catholics at the very same period for denying the King's supremacy.

Anne of Cleves was married to Henry on January 6, 1540, and divorced in July following. She lived the rest of her life in England with a pension, quite content, and rode in the procession along with the Princess Elizabeth at Queen Mary's coronation. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, August 1557

Immediately after this divorce Henry married Katharine Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and for a while all seemed bright. The royal pair next year went on a tour through the North. At Hampton Court they kept All Saints' Day, 1541, with much solemnity, and the

King gave directions to the celebrant, the Bishop of Lincoln, to return thanks to God" for the good life which he hoped to lead after sundry troubles." Next day after mass Archbishop Cranmer sorrowfully handed the King a paper which gave evidence of Katharine's unchastity both before and after marriage. She was confined for a while at Syon House, on February 10 was brought to the Tower, and beheaded on the Green three days later. It was a strange request which she made, and which was complied with—that the block might previously be brought to her cell that she might learn how to place her head upon it aright. With her died Lady Rochford, who had connived at her immoralities.

Anne Askew, our next prisoner, presents a strange contrast. She was the daughter of a Lincolnshire gentleman, who married in early life a Mr. Kyme, an ardent Roman Catholic. Anne's friends in London were equally ardent believers in the Reformed faith; among these friends was Queen Katharine Parr. Anne's husband, who for some time had neglected her, charged her with heresy, resting his charge on the recently passed" Six Articles " Act, which ordained that denial of Transubstantiation should be punished with death by burning. It was in 1545 that she was charged. Bishop Bonner appears to have been so moved by the sight of her simple beauty as to try to save her, but the Chancellor, Wriothesley, pressed her with questions, and she was firm in her answers, and was condemned. Her first place of confinement was Newgate, but she was sent to the Tower to be racked. The rack, says Lord de Ros, was regarded with such horror by the people as to be applied only in secrecy, and there might have been an outbreak in the city had all this become known. The application of the torture was in order to force her to incriminate the ladies who had supported her, but she resolutely closed her lips, first declaring that she was grateful to all her friends and would not betray them, and that it was her faithful maid who had kept her from starvation by going out and begging for her "of the prentices and others she met in the streets." Wriothesley himself worked the rack until she was nearly dead. She was taken off the machine, but was no longer able to walk, so she was carried in a cart to Smithfield and burned. Queen Katharine appears to have been in danger, but the King's sympathies were moved by the accounts which

reached him of the sufferer's noble constancy, and when Wriothesley came to him to excite him against the Queen, Henry called him a beast and a fool and drove him out of the room.

One more cheerful record remains of this terrible reign. In 1546, in honour of the peace which had been made between France and England, the former country sent its Lord High Admiral, the Bishop of Evreux, and some other nobles on an embassy to England. They landed at Greenwich and thence were conducted to the Tower, where a splendid banquet awaited them; thence to Lambeth Palace, and finally to Hampton Court, where the treaty was signed.

And still we have two more illustrious prisoners to name in this reign. The Duke of Norfolk was now seventy-four years old. He had commanded the victorious army at Flodden, had led another victorious campaign in Scotland, and had done good service in France. He was a son-in-law of King Edward IV, and two of his nieces had been Queens of England. The jealousy of Henry was aroused; he knew himself to be nearing his end, and feared that the Duke and his son, the Earl of Surrey, had designs upon the crown. He appointed Lord Hertford, his son's uncle, to be his guardian during his minority, and sent to Parliament a complaint that Norfolk and his son were plotting to seize the government. Surrey was accused of quartering the arms of King Edward the Confessor on his shield, after the manner of an heir-apparent, and also (it is shocking to have to record it) of having persuaded his sister, the widow of the King's natural son, the Duke of Richmond, to become Henry's mistress, of course with a view to ruling his movements. Surrey was tried by jury January 13, 1547, and perished six days later on Tower Hill. The Duke of Norfolk was condemned by bill of attainder, and would have died in like manner, had not the King himself died January 28, 1547, a few hours before the appointed time of execution. The Duke remained a prisoner until the accession of Mary, when he was released. He presided at the trial of the Duke of Northumberland, and died in his bed in 1554, aged eighty-one.

The young Edward, now ten years old, was at Hatfield when his father died. Next day his uncle, the Earl of Hertford, brought him up to the Tower with great pomp and ceremony. Here he received knighthood by the accolade of his uncle, and in return conferred on him

E

the title of Duke of Somerset. On February 24 the coronation took place at Westminster with the usual pageants.

Almost immediately disturbances began. Thomas, Lord Seymour, Somerset's younger brother, was sent to the Tower on the charge of aspiring to the kingdom by offering marriage to the Princess Elizabeth. He had secretly married Queen Katharine Parr on King Henry's death, and when she died (Sept. 5, 1548) he made this new move. Other acts

of ambition were charged against him, as well as of using his office of Lord High Admiral for privateering. He was beheaded on Tower Hill March 20, 1549, and though he was not worthy of much sympathy, public opinion was indignant against the heartlessness of his brother the Protector, and advantage was taken of it by the Catholic party to form a faction against him. He was accused, not unjustly, of accumulating vast riches by seizing property of the Church and Crown. A leader of the opposition to him was found in Dudley, Earl of Warwick. A meeting of his opponents was held in Ely Place in October 1549, with the result that the Tower was seized and Somerset was shut up in it. He was deposed from the Protectorate, and in February 1550 was pardoned and readmitted to the Privy Council. But in October 1551 he was again arrested on the charge of plotting to raise the country and murder Warwick. On this charge he was tried and beheaded on Tower Hill. He was the first Protestant ruler of England, " a rank Calvinist,” and was, in fact, in close communication with Calvin. It was certainly his influence which led to the changes between the two English prayerbooks of 1549 and 1552. His royal nephew, apparently, was, as Burnet puts it, "not greatly concerned" for him. This is his entry in his diary: "January 22, the Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Touer Hill between eight and nine a cloke in the morning." His fall involved the ruin of some of his principal supporters. Thus Sir Ralph Vane (or Fane; he belonged to the still existent Westmoreland family), though he had distinguished himself in the army, had offended the Duke of Northumberland. He was charged with complicity with Somerset and hid himself in a stable at Lambeth, but was arrested. Before the Privy Council he showed a bold front, and on his condemnation declared that his murder would make Northumberland's pillow uneasy. He was hanged, and the royal diary recording his "felony" and death