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REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH
[ch. 2.
Wolsey's influence Henry made war with Louis of France in the Pope's quarrel, entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English Protestants. But Wolsey could not blind himself to the true condition of the Church. He was too wise to be deceived with outward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, in Europe and at home, the alternative of ruin or amendment; and therefore he familiarized Henry with the sense that a reformation was inevitable, and dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the Church itself inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell the first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay.
1527.May 7th.His intended measures were approaching maturity, when all Europe was startled by the news that Rome had been stormed by the Imperial army, that the Pope was imprisoned, the churches pillaged, the cardinals insulted, and all holiest things polluted and profaned. A spectator, judging only by outward symptoms, would have seen at that strange crisis in Charles V. the worst patron of heresy, and the most dangerous enemy of the Holy See; while the indignation with which the news of these outrages was received at the English Court, would have taught him to look on Henry as the one sovereign in Europe on whom that See might calculate most surely for support in its hour of danger. If he could have pierced below the surface, he would have found that the Pope's best friend was the prince who held him prisoner; that Henry was but doubtfully
