Henry would possibly have stopped. His immediate object had been to obtain his divorce from Katherine. That he could not obtain from the Pope, and therefore he abolished the Pope as far as his own domains extended, in order to get it. He was no Protestant, neither did he sympathise with Protestants; but Protestantism was at the moment on the rise, and it was difficult to break with the Pope without, in a greater or less degree, indirectly if not directly, encouraging Protestants. Again, he was sensible of the abuses of pilgrimages and shrines and magic images, thing;s which had excited the anger of men like Colet and Erasmus and More, who were no more Protestants than he; and his appreciation of these matters was doubtless quickened by the further consideration that the cult of Thomas à Becket was a standing memorial of the victory of papal over regal power. It was therefore advisable that Becket should be abolished, as in truth a traitor rather than a saint; and, having proceeded so far, he found the gold and jewels of Becket's shrine so agreeable a remedy for his impecuniosity, that other saints, whose claims to reverence were in themselves not so obnoxious to royalty, had to share the same fate notwithstanding. The same mixture of motives—desire to depreciate the Pope in the eyes of his subjects, and desire to fill his own chronically empty exchequer—contributed in no small degree to produce his crusade against the monks and friars, who formed, as they have been often called, a kind of militia of the Papacy and possessed—even on the lowest computation—a vast amount of wealth. But
matical' in describing the events of the sixteenth century in England, though his translators have kindly modified it in the English edition into 'separation.'
