some Protestant prisoners for denying the
Pope's doctrines, and some Roman Catholic
prisoners for denying his own supremacy. Still
the people bore it, and not a gentleman in
England raised his hand.

But, by a just retribution, it soon came
out that Catherine Howard, before her
marriage, had been really guilty of such crimes
as the King had falsely attributed to his
second wife Anne Boleyn; so, again the dreadful
axe made the King a widower, and this
Queen passed away as so many in that reign
had passed away before her. As an appropriate
pursuit under the circumstances, Henry
then applied himself to superintending the
composition of a religious book called " A
necessary doctrine for any Christian Man."
He must have been a little confused in his
mind, I think, at about this period; for he
was so false to himself as to be true to some
one: that some one being Cranmer, whom
the Duke of Norfolk and others of his enemies
tried to ruin, but to whom the King was
stedfast, and to whom he one night gave his
ring, charging him when he should find
himself, next day, accused of treason, to show it
to the council board. This, Cranmer did to
the confusion of his enemies. I suppose the
King thought he might want him a little longer.

He married yet once more. Yes. Strange
to say, he found in England another woman
who would become his wife, and she was
CATHERINE PARR, widow of Lord Latimer. She
leaned towards the reformed religion; and, it
is some comfort to know, that she tormented
the King considerably by arguing a variety of
doctrinal points with him on all possible
occasions. She had very nearly done this to
her own destruction. After one of these
conversations, the King in a very black mood
actually instructed GARDINER, one of his
bishops who favored the Popish opinions, to
draw a bill of accusation against her, which
would have inevitably have brought her
to the scaffold where her predecessors had
died, but that one of her friends picked up
the paper of instructions, which had been
dropped in the palace, and gave her timely
notice. She fell ill with terror, but managed
the King so well when he came to entrap
her into further statements, by saying that
she had only spoken on such points to divert
his mind and to get some information from
his extraordinary wisdom, that he gave her
a kiss and called her his sweetheart. And.
when the Chancellor came next day, actually
to take her to the Tower, the King sent him
about his business, and honored him with the
epithets of a beast, a knave, and a fool. So
near was Catherine Parr to the block, and so
narrow was her escape!

There was war with Scotland in this reign,
and a short clumsy war with France for
favoring Scotland; but, the events at home
were so dreadful, and leave such an enduring
stain on the country, that I need say no more
of what happened abroad.

A few more horrors, and this reign is over.
There was a lady, ANNE ASKEW, in Lincolnshire,
who inclined to the Protestant opinions,
and whose husband, being a fierce Catholic,
turned her out of his house. She came to
London, and was considered as offending
against the six articles, and was taken to
the Tower, and put upon the rack—probably
because it was hoped that she might in her
agony criminate some obnoxious persons;
if falsely, so much the better. She was
tortured without uttering a cry, until the
Lieutenant of the Tower would suffer his men
to torture her no more; and then two priests
who were present actually pulled off their
robes and turned the wheels of the rack with
their own hands, so rending and twisting and
breaking her that she was afterwards carried
to the fire in a chair. She was burned
with three others, a gentleman, a clergyman,
and a tailor; and so the world went on.

Either the King became afraid of the power
of the Duke of Norfolk, and his son the Earl
of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, but
he resolved to pull them down, to follow all
the rest who were gone. The son was tried
first—of course for nothing—and defended
himself bravely; but of course he was found
guilty, and of course he was executed. Then
his father was laid hold of, and left for
death too.

But the King himself was left for death
too, by a Greater King, and the earth was to
be rid of him at last. He was now a swollen,
beastly, hideous spectacle, with a great hole
in his leg, and so odious to every sense that it
was dreadful to approach him. When he was
found to be dying, Cranmer was sent for from
his palace at Croydon, and came with all
speed, but found him speechless. Happily, in
that hour he perished. He was in the fifty-
sixth year of his age, and the thirty-eighth of
his reign.

Henry the Eighth has been favored by some
Protestant writers, because the Reformation
was achieved in his time. But the mighty
merit of it lies with other men and not
with him, and it can be rendered none the
worse by this monster's crimes, and none
the better by any defence of them. The
plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable
ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and
a blot of blood and grease upon the History
of England.

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