Thomas More was right and Henry VIII. was wrong in their attitude towards the claims of the papacy and the Catholic Church. He was therefore necessarily deprived of his archbishopric in 1559, but he remained loyal to Elizabeth; and after a temporary confinement he was suffered to pass the remaining nineteen years of his life in peace and quiet, never attending public worship and sometimes hearing mass in private. The queen visited him more than once at his house at Chobham, Surrey; he died and was buried there at the end of 1578.
Authorities.—Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.; Acts of the Privy Council; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, Spanish and Venetian; Kemp’s Loseley MSS.; Froude’s History; Burnet, Collier, Dixon and Frere’s Church Histories; Strype’s Works (General Index); Parker Soc. Publications (Gough’s Index); Birt’s Elizabethan Settlement. (A. F. P.)
HEATH, WILLIAM (1737–1814), American soldier, was born
in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on the 2nd of March 1737 (old
style). He was brought up as a farmer and had a passion for
military exercises. In 1765 he entered the Ancient and Honourable
Artillery Company of Boston, of which he became commander
in 1770. In the same year he wrote to the Boston Gazette letters
signed “A Military Countryman,” urging the necessity of
military training. He was a member of the Massachusetts
General Court from 1770 to 1774, of the provincial committee of
safety, and in 1774–1775 of the provincial congress. He was
commissioned a provincial brig.-general in December 1774,
directed the pursuit of the British from Concord (April 19, 1775),
was promoted to be provincial major-general on the 20th of June
1775, and two days later was commissioned fourth brig.-general
in the Continental Army. He became major-general on the 9th
of August 1776, and was in active service around New York
until early the next year. In January 1777 he attempted to
take Fort Independence, near Spuyten Duyvil, then garrisoned
by about 2000 Hessians, but at the first sally of the garrison his
troops became panic-stricken and a few days later he withdrew.
Washington reprimanded him and never again entrusted to him
any important operation in the field. Throughout the war,
however, Heath was very efficient in muster service and in the
barracks. From March 1777 to October 1778 he was in command
of the Eastern Department with headquarters at Boston, and
had charge (Nov. 1777–Oct. 1778) of the prisoners of war from
Burgoyne’s army held at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In May 1779
he was appointed a commissioner of the Board of War. He was
placed in command of the troops on the E. side of the Hudson
in June 1779, and of other troops and posts on the Hudson in
November of the same year. In July 1780 he met the French
allies under Rochambeau on their arrival in Rhode Island; in
October of the same year he succeeded Arnold in command of
West Point and its dependencies; and in August 1781, when
Washington went south to meet Cornwallis, Heath was left in
command of the Army of the Hudson to watch Clinton. After
the war he retired to his farm at Roxbury, was a member of the
state House of Representatives in 1788, of the Massachusetts
convention which ratified the Federal Constitution in the same
year, and of the governor’s council in 1789–1790, was a state
senator (1791–1793), and in 1806 was elected lieutenant-governor
of Massachusetts but declined to serve. He died at Roxbury on
the 24th of January 1814, the last of the major-generals of the
War of American Independence.
See Memoirs of Major-General Heath, containing Anecdotes, Details of Skirmishes, Battles and other Military Events during the American War, written by Himself (Boston, 1798; frequently reprinted, perhaps the best edition being that published in New York in 1901 by William Abbatt), particularly valuable for the descriptions of Lexington and Bunker Hill, of the fighting around New York, of the controversies with Burgoyne and his officers during their stay in Boston, and of relations with Rochambeau; and his correspondence, The Heath Papers, vols. iv.-v., seventh series, Massachusetts Historical Society Collections (Boston, 1904–1905).
HEATH, the English form of a name given in most Teutonic
dialects to the common ling or heather (Calluna vulgaris), but
now applied to all species of Erica, an extensive genus of monopetalous
plants, belonging to the order Ericaceae. The heaths
are evergreen shrubs, with small narrow leaves, in whorls usually
set rather thickly on the shoots; the persistent flowers have 4
sepals, and a 4-cleft campanulate or tubular corolla, in many
species more or less ventricose or inflated; the dry capsule is
4–celled, and opens, in the true Ericae, in 4 segments, to the
middle of which the partitions adhere, though in the ling the
valves separate at the dissepiments. The plants are mostly of
low growth, but several African kinds reach the size of large
bushes, and a common South European species, E. arborea,
occasionally attains almost the aspect and dimensions of a tree.
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| Fig. 1. Calluna vulgaris. |
One of the best known and most interesting of the family is the common heath, heather or ling, Calluna vulgaris (fig. 1), placed by most botanists in a separate genus on account of the peculiar dehiscence of the fruit, and from the coloured calyx, which extends beyond the corolla, having a whorl of sepal-like bracts beneath. This shrub derives some economic importance from its forming the chief vegetation on many of those extensive wastes that occupy so large a portion of the more sterile lands of northern and western Europe, the usually desolate appearance of which is enlivened in the latter part of summer by its abundant pink blossoms. When growing erect to the height of 3 ft. or more, as it often does in sheltered places, its purple stems, close-leaved green shoots and feathery spikes of bell-shaped flowers render it one of the handsomest of the heaths; but on the bleaker elevations and more arid slopes it frequently rises only a few inches above the ground. In all moorland countries the ling is applied to many rural purposes; the larger stems are made into brooms, the shorter tied up into bundles that serve as brushes, while the long trailing shoots are woven into baskets. Pared up with the peat about its roots it forms a good fuel, often the only one obtainable on the drier moors. The shielings of the Scottish Highlanders were formerly constructed of heath stems, cemented together with peat-mud, worked into a kind of mortar with dry grass or straw; hovels and sheds for temporary purposes are still sometimes built in a similar way, and roofed in with ling. Laid on the ground, with the flowers above, it forms a soft springy bed, the luxurious couch of the ancient Gael, still gladly resorted to at times by the hill shepherd or hardy deer-stalker. The young shoots were in former days employed as a substitute for hops in brewing, while their astringency rendered them valuable as a tanning material in Ireland and the Western Isles. They are said also to have been used by the Highlanders for dyeing woollen yarn yellow, and other colours are asserted to have been obtained from them, but some writers appear to confuse the dyer’s-weed, Genista tinctoria, with the heather. The young juicy shoots and the seeds, which remain long in the capsules, furnish the red grouse of Scotland with the larger portion of its sustenance; the ripe seeds are eaten by many birds. The tops of the ling afford a considerable part of the winter fodder of the hill flocks, and are popularly supposed to communicate the fine flavour to Welsh and Highland mutton, but sheep seldom crop heather while the mountain grasses and rushes are sweet and accessible. Ling has been suggested as a material for paper, but the stems are hardly sufficiently fibrous for that purpose. The purple or fine-leaved heath, E. cinerea (fig. 2), one of the most beautiful of the genus, abounds on the lower moors and commons of Great Britain and western Europe, in such situations being sometimes more prevalent than the ling. The flowers of both these species yield much honey, furnishing a plentiful supply to the bees in moorland districts; from this heath honey the Picts probably brewed the mead said by Boetius to have been made from the flowers themselves.
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| Fig. 2. Erica cinerea. |
The genus contains about 420 known species, by far the greater part being indigenous to the western districts of South Africa,
