autocratic power, that Henry VIII. should have become more arbitrary, more capricious, more unscrupulous, and altogether more unmanageable as age and irresponsible power increased—and both did increase together; and accordingly we find that each of his chief ministers in succession at last fell under his displeasure, and each in successively shorter periods. Wolsey maintained himself for nearly twenty years, Cromwell for ten only. After his fall no minister established the same ascendency over Henry which these had held. Norfolk held the highest position, and he too, after some six years of power, was overthrown, and was saved from the headsman only by the King's own death. It is a significant fact that the only one of Henry's really intimate advisers who continued to be such through the latter half of his reign, and maintained his position to the end of it, was Cranmer—a man who combined beyond a doubt great talents and much learning with many virtues, but also with one capital defect, that he had positively no character at all.
The sixteenth century, not in England alone but throughout Europe, was the golden age of personal government, and it would seem that it was beyond the capacity of human nature to endure the semi-deification which was accorded to all the threat sovereigns of that period, without undergoing a process of moral degeneration. In those days kings governed as well as reigned; their will to a very great extent was law, and it was impossible that youths of nineteen or twenty, as were all the three great European monarchs of the period when they ascended their respective thrones, should endure such a trial without damage to their moral nature; and accordingly we find that each one of them succumbed to it. The moral standard of all of them
