ted France, nor to wholly break it off and so alienate Spain. A
balanced position between the two battling powers allowed him to remain at
peace, to maintain an independent policy, and to pursue his system of
home-government. He guarded his son's interests therefore by suggesting
that he should enter a secret protest against the validity of his
betrothal; and Catharine remained through the later years of his reign at
the English court betrothed but unmarried, sick with love-longing and
baffled pride.

[Sidenote: The Renascence]

But great as were the issues of Henry's policy, it shrinks into littleness
if we turn from it to the weighty movements which were now stirring the
minds of men. The world was passing through changes more momentous than
any it had witnessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall of the
Roman Empire. Its physical bounds were suddenly enlarged. The discoveries
of Copernicus revealed to man the secret of the universe. Portuguese
mariners doubled the Cape of Good Hope and anchored their merchant fleets
in the harbours of India. Columbus crossed the untraversed ocean to add a
New World to the Old. Sebastian Cabot, starting from the port of Bristol,
threaded his way among the icebergs of Labrador. This sudden contact with
new lands, new faiths, new races of men quickened the slumbering
intelligence of Europe into a strange curiosity. The first book of voyages
that told of the Western World, the travels of Amerigo Vespucci, was soon
"in everybody's hands." The "Utopia" of More, in its wide range of
speculation on every subject of human thought and action, tells us how
roughly and utterly the narrowness and limitation of human life had been
broken up. At the very hour when the intellectual energy of the Middle
Ages had sunk into exhaustion the capture of Constantinople by the Turks
and the flight of its Greek scholars to the shores of Italy opened anew
the science and literature of an older world. The exiled Greek scholars
were welcomed in Italy; and Florence, so long the home of freedom and of
art, became the home of an intellectual Revival. The poetry of Homer, the
drama of Sophocles, the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato woke again to
life beneath the shadow of the mighty dome with which Brunelleschi had
just crowned the City by the Arno. All the restless energy which Florence
had so long thrown into the cause of liberty she flung, now that her
liberty was reft from her, into the cause of