city. To describe the horrors that followed, would be to reiterate the catalogue of every crime, cruelty, and abomination that men perpetrate on such occasions. For five days the city was given up to the licence and plunder of this demoniac soldiery. The savage and maddened vagabonds ran through the streets, crying, "Blood! blood! Bourbon! Bourbon!" Every building, public and private, was burst open and plundered and desecrated. Churches, palaces, private houses were stripped of everything valuable, and the miserable people were treated with every imaginable horror, insult, and indignity. The Pope again escaped into the strong Castle of St. Angelo, but several of the cardinals and bishops fell into the merciless hands of the barbarian soldiers. All the writers of the time agree in the statement that the horror of this sacking of the capital of Christendom by a Christian army, transcends everything of the kind in history. For months the city was in the hands of this terrible concourse of savages.
The news of the sacking of Rome, and the imprisonment of the Pope, excited the most lively sensations of horror and indignation throughout the Christian, and especially the Catholic world. None appeared more affected than the emperor, by whose troops the sacrilegious deed had been perpetrated. He put himself and his Court into the deepest mourning, forbade all rejoicing for the birth of his son, and commanded prayers to be offered in all the churches throughout Spain for the liberation of His Holiness. No one could play off a piece of solemn hypocrisy more solemnly than Charles V.
Francis and Henry, who were making a fresh treaty of alliance, were at once affected with real or pretended horror. They agreed immediately to invade Italy with 30,000 foot, and 1,000 horse, to join the confederate army there, and drive out the troops of Spain, and liberate the Pope. Sir Francis Pointz was dispatched as ambassador to the emperor in Spain, and Cardinal Wolsey proceeded to France to concert with Francis the plans of the two kings. Wolsey travelled with his usual kingly pomp, attended by a retinue of nobles, and of 1,200 horse. He was met on the frontiers of France by the Cardinal of Lorraine, also with a splendid attendance of prelates, nobles, and gentlemen, and conducted through the different towns with processions, pageants, and all the homage that could be paid to a monarch. The King of France, as a mark of his especial favour, granted him the privilege of setting at liberty all the prisoners in the towns through which he passed. Wolsey remained at Abbeville a few days to rest, and then proceeded to Amiens, where he was received by the king and the whole Court on the 4th of August. There the cardinal remained for fourteen days, more for a show of amity betwixt France and England than for any real business, which had been already settled; one article of which was that Francis' son, the Duke of Orleans, should marry Mary, the Princess of England.
Meantime, Sir Francis Pointz had presented his demands to the emperor, which were of such a nature that Charles, aware that they were intended rather to justify a war with him than to be accepted, evaded them, by declaring that he would treat of them with his dear uncle by his ambassadors in England. Seeing, however, that the confederates in Italy were gathering strength, and that should they be reinforced by an army from France, kept on pay by Henry of England, the Pope would be taken out of his hands without having been of any profit to him, he sent orders to Moncada, his minister at Rome, to alarm the fears of His Holiness, and to extract as much money as he could out of him. Moncada managed so well, that the Pope, impatient for his liberty, agreed never to take any part against the emperor in Italy again; to pay 100,000 crowns down, another 100,000 in a fortnight, and 130,000 at the end of three months, besides granting to the emperor the tenth of all ecclesiastical revenues in Spain. The unfortunate Pope paid the first instalment, and then contrived to make his escape to Orvieto, whence he wrote to the King of England and to Wolsey, thanking them for their effectual interposition in his favour.
But the time was now approaching which was to interrupt the friendship of Henry with the head of the Church of Rome. Providence, through the headlong passions and unrestrainable will of Henry VIII., was preparing a marvellous revolution in the Church, and an opening to the liberty of religious faith in England, which he was the last of all men to occasion or to grant from the freedom of his opinions or the liberality of his inquiries. The Reformation in Germany had made an immense progress, and produced the most astonishing events. The whole mind and intellect of that country had been convulsed by the preaching of the doctrines of Luther. State had been set against state, prince against prince; and the bold monk of Wittemberg had only escaped the vengeance of the Church of Rome by the undaunted championship of the Elector of Saxony. In England, the reformed faith, derived from Wickliffe and the Lollards, had been making steady, wide, but silent progress; but little of this had risen into the region of the Court or the Government, for there Henry and his Spanish Queen were firmly attached to the Catholic Church, and any demonstration of any other religion would have brought down on the professor of it the sudden thunders of the arbitrary king and his pompous and all-powerful minister. Henry, fond of school divinity from his youth, and a great reader and admirer of Thomas Aquinas, had looked across to Germany with a grim and truculent glance, which seemed to rest on the blunt and unconventional reformer with an expression of one who longed to strike down the daring heretic, and rid the world of him. As this was out of his power, he determined to annihilate him by his pen; and for this purpose he had written a book against him, with the title of "A Treatise on the Seven Sacraments, against Martin Luther, the Heresiarch, by the Illustrious Prince Henry VIII." This he had caused to be presented to the Pope by the English ambassador, beautifully written and magnificently bound, and Leo X. received it with the most extravagant laudations, and conferred on Henry the title of "Defender of the Faith," in a bull signed by himself and twenty-seven cardinals.
Henry really believed, for some time, that he had crushed Luther and all his sect, but the free-mouthed reformer, who paid no flatteries to king or Pope, soon convinced the literary monarch that he was as much alive as ever. He wrote a reply to Henry, in which, giving him commendation for writing in elegant
