and invalid from the beginning. More ranks among the
original minds of this great century: he is the first who learnt how
to write English prose; but in the great currents of the literary
movement he shrank back from the foremost place: after he had aided
them by writings in the style of Erasmus, he set himself as Lord
Chancellor of England to oppose their onward sweep with much rigour:
he would not have the Church community itself touched. Of the last
statute he said, it killed either the body if one opposed it, or the
soul if one obeyed: he preferred to save his soul. He met his death
with so lively a realisation of the future life, in which the troubles
of this life would cease, that he looked on his departure out of it
with all the irony which was in general characteristic of him. The
fact that the Pope at this moment had named Bishop Fisher cardinal of
the Roman Church seems to have still more hastened his execution. They
both died as martyrs to the ideas by which England had been hitherto
linked to the Church community of the West and to the authority of the
Papacy.

If we turn our eyes abroad, the succession statute above all must have
made a most disagreeable impression on the Emperor Charles V. He saw
in it a political loss, an injury to his house, and indeed to all
sovereign families, and a danger to the Church. With a view to
opposing it, he formed the plan of drawing the King of France into an
enterprise against England. He proposed to him the marriage of his
third son, the Duke of Angouleme, with the Princess Mary, who was
recognised as the only lawful heiress of England by the Apostolic See,
and whose claims would then accrue to this prince.[123] And they would
not be difficult, so he said, to establish, as a great part of the
English abhorred the King's proceedings, his second marriage, and his
divergence from the Church. At the same time the Emperor proposed the
closest dynastic union of the two houses by a double marriage of his
two children with a son and a daughter of Francis I. What in the whole
world would he not have attained, if he had won over France to
himself! His combination embraced as usual West and East, Church and
State, Italian German and Northern affairs.

Perhaps the success of such a scheme was not probable; but
independently of this, Henry VIII had good cause to prepare himself to
meet the superior power of the Emperor, with whom he had so decidedly
broken. As we have already hinte