I need say no more
of what happened abroad.

A few more horrors, and this reign is over. There was a lady, ANNE
ASKEW, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the Protestant opinions, and
whose husband being a fierce Catholic, turned her out of his house. She
came to London, and was considered as offending against the six articles,
and was taken to the Tower, and put upon the rack--probably because it
was hoped that she might, in her agony, criminate some obnoxious persons;
if falsely, so much the better. She was tortured without uttering a cry,
until the Lieutenant of the Tower would suffer his men to torture her no
more; and then two priests who were present actually pulled off their
robes, and turned the wheels of the rack with their own hands, so rending
and twisting and breaking her that she was afterwards carried to the fire
in a chair. She was burned with three others, a gentleman, a clergyman,
and a tailor; and so the world went on.

Either the King became afraid of the power of the Duke of Norfolk, and
his son the Earl of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, but he
resolved to pull _them_ down, to follow all the rest who were gone. The
son was tried first--of course for nothing--and defended himself bravely;
but of course he was found guilty, and of course he was executed. Then
his father was laid hold of, and left for death too.

But the King himself was left for death by a Greater King, and the earth
was to be rid of him at last. He was now a swollen, hideous spectacle,
with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every sense that it was
dreadful to approach him. When he was found to be dying, Cranmer was
sent for from his palace at Croydon, and came with all speed, but found
him speechless. Happily, in that hour he perished. He was in the fifty-
sixth year of his age, and the thirty-eighth of his reign.

Henry the Eighth has been favoured by some Protestant writers, because
the Reformation was achieved in his time. But the mighty merit of it
lies with other men and not with him; and it can be rendered none the
worse by this monster's crimes, and none the better by any defence of
them. The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a
disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History
of England.

CHAPTER XXIX--ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE SIXTH

Henry the Eighth had made a will, appointing a council of sixteen to
govern the kingdom for his son while he wa