systems. His regard for literature was evinced by his liberality to learned men both at home and abroad. But under all this shining surface lay qualities of the most extraordinary and dangerous character. His vanity was of that kind that it made him believe himself the greatest man and wisest king that ever lived. No flattery could overtop the height of his egotism. He drank in adulation as a whale sucks in whole seas, and the intense love of power combined with this egregious self-estimation, and based on an unparalleled strength of fiery passions, made him soon impatient of contradiction, and, like a tornado, ready to crush everything around him that dared to stand in his way. It is remarkable that the same man who commenced by an admiration of learning and literature, put to death the three most celebrated men of letters of his Court—Sir Thomas More, the Viscount Rochford, and Surrey. As he advanced in years, he waded deeper and deeper in the noblest blood of the kingdom, sparing neither learning, genius, age, piety, man nor woman.
The circumstances of the times favoured his exercise of arbitrary power, and there is no record of this or any other country which exhibits a prince so thoroughly trampling down every liberty of the subject, every safeguard of life, and even of self-respect in his most exalted subjects.
But the Wars of the Roses had laid the aristocracy at his feet; the breach with Rome laid the Church there too. The Protestants and Romanists became pretty equally divided, courted with abject jealousy his smiles, to give them the ascendency, and, holding the balance, he made this the means of his most marvellous dominance. Other monarchs sought to reign without Parliaments, but Henry, by the terror of the axe and the gibbet, awed his Parliament into such slavish obedience, that he was enabled to commit his worst actions under a show of constitution and law. If it be difficult for us now to realise such monstrous deeds of political murder, such wholesale scenes of national rapine, as perpetrated on English ground, it is equally so to conceive the scene of base adulation which the Court and Parliament then presented. Rich assured him that he was a Solomon in wisdom, a Samson in strength and courage, an Absalom in beauty and grace of manners; and Audeley, his chancellor, declared that God had anointed him with the oil of gladness above his fellows, and that he exceeded all kings in wisdom, all generals in victory, that he had prostrated the Roman Goliath, and given thirty years of peace and blessings to his realm, such as no country at any time had ever enjoyed. "Whenever, during this harangue, the words "Most Sacred Majesty" occurred, or any similar term of homage, the whole of the lords arose, and they and the entire assembly bowed profoundly towards the throned demigod. The clergy in Convocation echoed this disgusting hypocrisy, declaring that he was the image of God upon earth; that to disobey him was as heinous as to disobey God himself; to limit his authority was not merely an offence to him, but to God as well. The fumigated idol drank all in, and believed it so true that he treated his worshippers as they well deserved; took their money at will, trod upon them at pleasure, put them to death without jury and without form of law, like miserable reptiles as they made themselves, and left them to reap in coming years a rich harvest of humiliations and sufferings.
CHAPTER XI.
REIGN OF EDWARD VI.
The country was doomed once more to experience the inconveniences of a regal minority, of that evil so forcibly enunciated by the sacred Scriptures: "Woe to the country whose king is a child." It was doomed once more to witness the struggles, incapacities, and manifold mischiefs of ambitious nobles, whilst the hand of the king was too feeble to keep them in restraint. The execution of Surrey, and the imprisonment and attainder of the great Duke of Norfolk, left the Seymours completely in the ascendant; and having recently risen into note and power, they very soon showed all the inflated ambition of such parvenus. The Earl of Hertford, as uncle of the king, was in reality the man now in the possession of the chief power. The king was but a few months more than nine years of age; and Henry, his father, acting on the discretion given him by an Act of Parliament of the twenty-eighth year of his reign, had by will settled the crown on his son, and had appointed sixteen individuals as his executors, who should constitute also the Privy Council, and exercise the authority of the Crown till the young monarch was eighteen years of age. To enable these executors, or rather, to enable Hertford to secure the person of the king, and take other measures for the establishment of their position, the death of Henry was kept secret for four days. He died on the morning of Friday, the 28th of January, and Parliament, which was virtually dissolved by his death, according to the then existing laws, met on the 29th, and proceeded to business as usual, so that any Acts passed under these circumstances would have clearly become null.
On the 31st of the month, the Chancellor Wriothesley announced to the assembled Parliament of both Houses, the decease of the king, and the appointment of the council to conduct the Government, in the name of the young Sovereign, Edward VI. The members of both Houses professed to be overwhelmed with grief at the news of their loss. It might have been supposed that Henry VIII., of blessed memory, had been one of the most mild and endearing men that ever lived. The Romanists and the Protestants, whom he chastised and tyrannised over with a pretty equal hand, were, according to their own account, sunk in sorrow, and the tender-hearted Wriothesley, who had never before shown any feeling except for himself, was so choked by his tears as scarcely to be able to announce the sad event. In fact, the servility of the Ministry and Parliament during the
