ent for
the Queen and said to her, "'It is God's will that we should part, and I
order all these gentlemen to honour and treat you as if I were living
still; and, if it should be your pleasure to marry again, I order that you
shall have seven thousand pounds for your service as long as you live, and
all your jewels and ornaments.' The good Queen could not answer for
weeping, and he ordered her to leave him. The next day he confessed, took
the sacrament, and commended his soul to God."[263]

Henry died, in fact, as he had lived, a Catholic. The Reformation in
England, of which we have traced the beginnings in this book, did not
spring mature from the mind and will of the King, but was gradually thrust
upon him by the force of circumstances, arising out of the steps he took
to satisfy his passion and gratify his imperious vanity. Freedom of
thought in religion was the last thing to commend itself to such a mind as
his, and his treatment of those who disobeyed either the Act of Supremacy
or the Bloody Statute (the Six Articles) shows that neither on the one
side or the other would he tolerate dissent from his own views, which he
characteristically caused to be embodied in the law of the land, either in
politics or religion. The concession to subjects of the right of private
judgment in matters of conscience seemed to the potentates of the
sixteenth century to strike at the very base of all authority, and the
very last to concede such a revolutionary claim was Henry Tudor. His
separation from the Papal obedience, whilst retaining what, in his view,
were the essentials of the Papal creed, was directed rather to the
increase than to the diminution of his own authority over his subjects,
and it was this fact that doubtless made it more than ever attractive to
him. To ascribe to him a complete plan for the aggrandisement of England
and her emancipation from foreign control, by means of religious schism,
has always appeared to me to endow him with a political sagacity and
prescience which, in my opinion, he did not possess, and to estimate
imperfectly the forces by which he was impelled.

We have seen how, entirely in consequence of the unexpected difficulties
raised by the Papacy to the first divorce, he adopted the bold advice of
Cranmer and Cromwell to defy the Pope on that particular point. The
opposition of the Pope was a purely political one, forced upon him by the
Emperor for reasons of State, in order to prevent a coalit