ead of the house, felt himself
also aggrieved by the alienation of family honors which he hoped to have
seen continued to himself and his posterity.

In honor, probably, of the recent marriage of the king, unusually
splendid justs were opened at Westminster on May-day; in which the
challengers were headed by sir John Dudley, and the defenders by the
earl of Surry. This entertainment was continued for several successive
days, during which the challengers, according to the costly fashion of
ancient hospitality, kept open house at their common charge, and feasted
the king and queen, the members of both houses, and the lord-mayor and
aldermen with their wives.

But scenes of pomp and festivity had no power to divert the thoughts of
the king from his domestic grievance,--a wife whom he regarded with
disgust: on the contrary, it is probable that this season of courtly
revelry encreased his disquiet, by giving him opportunities of beholding
under the most attractive circumstances the charms of a youthful beauty
whom he was soon seized with the most violent desire of placing beside
him on the throne which he judged her worthy to adorn.

No considerations of rectitude or of policy could longer restrain the
impetuous monarch from casting off the yoke of a detested marriage: and
as a first step towards emancipation, he determined to permit the ruin
of its original adviser, that unpopular minister, but vigorous and
serviceable instrument of arbitrary power, whom he had hitherto defended
with pertinacity against all attacks.

No sooner was the decline of his favor perceived, and what so quickly
perceived at courts? than the ill-fated Cromwel found himself assailed
on every side. His active agency in the suppression of monasteries had
brought upon him, with the imputation of sacrilege, the hatred of all
the papists;--a certain coldness, or timidity, which he had manifested
in the cause of religious reformation in other respects, and
particularly the enactment of the Six Articles during his
administration, had rendered him an object of suspicion or dislike to
the protestants;--in his new and undefined office of royal vicegerent
for the exercise of the supremacy, he had offended the whole body of the
clergy;--and he had just filled up the measure of his offences against
the nobility by procuring a grant of the place of lord high-steward,
long hereditary in the great house of the Veres earls of Oxford. The
only voice raised in his f