toric sense in which the
continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not
only cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he
cuts off England from England.

The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held
the scales between the Empire and the French Monarchy, and made the
modern balance of power in Europe. He is often described under the
dictum of _Ego et Rex Meus_; but he marks a stage in the English story
rather because he suffered for it than because he said it. _Ego et Rex
Meus_ might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we have
forgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant.
Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, simply
dismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the English were
amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like a
butler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman; it
struck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemed
sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saint
under Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death has
naturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; his
tenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for Humanism it must
have seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow as if Montaigne were a
martyr. And that is indeed the note; something truly to be called
unnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renascence; and the
soul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun,
saying "I shall be above that fellow" with Franciscan familiarity, which
can love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his king
the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only on
his wrath.

But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed (as
noted at the beginning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, and
less clouded with controversies, in the second of the two parts of
Henry's policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries; but
it is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true that
the Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a considerable
corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different both from
the contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant story.
It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and
such authorities denouncing the