lar with the merchants and tradespeople, who as
the proud and prosperous inhabitants of an island which was separated
from the rest of Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a great dislike
for everything "foreign" and did not want an Italian bishop to rule
their honest British souls.

In 1517 Henry died. He left the throne to his small son, aged ten. The
guardians of the child, favoring the modern Lutheran doctrines, did
their best to help the cause of Protestantism. But the boy died before
he was sixteen, and was succeeded by his sister Mary, the wife of Philip
II of Spain, who burned the bishops of the new "national church" and in
other ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband

Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded by Elizabeth,
the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the second of his six wives,
whom he had decapitated when she no longer pleased him. Elizabeth, who
had spent some time in prison, and who had been released only at
the request of the Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial enemy of
everything Catholic and Spanish. She shared her father's indifference
in the matter of religion but she inherited his ability as a very shrewd
judge of character, and spent the forty-five years of her reign in
strengthening the power of the dynasty and in increasing the revenue and
possessions of her merry islands. In this she was most ably assisted by
a number of men who gathered around her throne and made the Elizabethan
age a period of such importance that you ought to study it in detail in
one of the special books of which I shall tell you in the bibliography
at the end of this volume.

Elizabeth, however, did not feel entirely safe upon her throne. She had
a rival and a very dangerous one. Mary, of the house of Stuart, daughter
of a French duchess and a Scottish father, widow of king Francis II of
France and daughter-in-law of Catherine of Medici (who had organised the
murders of Saint Bartholomew's night), was the mother of a little boy
who was afterwards to become the first Stuart king of England. She was
an ardent Catholic and a willing friend to those who were the enemies
of Elizabeth. Her own lack of political ability and the violent
methods which she employed to punish her Calvinistic subjects, caused
a revolution in Scotland and forced Mary to take refuge on English
territory. For eighteen years she remained in England, plotting forever
and a day against the woman who had gi