character. Unlike many who had fallen there before her, so far from making any ambiguous speech, or giving any hypocritical professions of reverence for the king, she refused to do anything which appeared consenting to her own death. When told to lay her head on the block, she replied, "No, my head never committed treason; if you will have it, you must take it as you can." The executioner tried to seize her, but she moved swiftly round the scaffold, tossing her head from side to side. At last, covered with blood, for the guards struck her with their weapons, she was seized, and forcibly held down, and whilst exclaiming, "Blessed are they who suffer persecution for righteousness sake," the axe descended, and her head fell.
A more revolting tragedy, in defiance of all law and justice, a more frightful murder committed in open day, by brutal force, on a venerable, meritorious, and innocent woman, never took place, whether the murderer were called king or assassin. It proclaimed to all the world that the King of England was now demoralised to the grade of the hardened despot, no longer sensible to any feeling of honour or humanity, and obedient only to his brutal passions.
But the time of Cromwell himself was coming. The block was the pretty certain goal of Henry's ministers. The more he caressed and favoured them, the more certain was that result. As a cat plays with a mouse, so Henry played with his ministers and his wives. Cromwell had gone on long advocating the utmost stretches of despotism. He had done his best to level all the safe-guards of the constitution, and, therefore, of every man's life and safety. He had sprung from the lowest rank, and, therefore, was naturally beheld with hatred by the old nobility; but this hatred he had infinitely augmented in a large party by attacking their then most deeply rooted objects of veneration. He had destroyed the property of the Church without being able to eradicate from the mind of the king its doctrines, and these had now recoiled upon him with a fatal force. He had failed to prevent the passing of the Six Articles, which made Roman Catholicism still the unquestioned religion of the land; and he saw the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner, the stanch champions of the old faith, steadily gaining the ascendancy at Court. Reflecting anxiously on the critical nature of his position, the deep and unprincipled minister came to the conclusion that the only mode of regaining his influence with the king was to promote a Protestant marriage. For a time at least Henry allowed himself to be governed by a new wife, and that time gained might prove everything to Cromwell. Circumstances seemed to favour him at this moment. The king was in constant alarm at the combination betwixt France and Spain; and a new alliance with the Protestant princes of Germany, if accomplished, would equally serve the purposes of the king and of Cromwell.
Henry had now been a widower for more than two years, but by no means a willing one. Immediately after the death of Jane Seymour, he had made an offer of his hand to the Duchess Dowager of Milan, the niece of the emperor; but the duchess was not at all flattered by the proposal. It was too well known all over Europe that he had already disposed of three wives; Catherine of Arragon, it was said, by poison, Anne Boleyn by the axe, and Jane Seymour by the want of proper care in childbed. His butcheries of numbers of other people, some of them of the highest rank and of near kindred to himself, made every one recoil from his alliance, especially as he was now become a huge and bloated mass of disease. The witty Dowager of Milan, therefore, sent him word that, as she had but one head, and could not very well do without it, she declined the honour. He then addressed himself to the Princess Mario of Guise, the Duchess-Dowager of Longueville, but she was already affianced to a young and much more desirable husband, James V. of Scotland. The accounts which he received of the beauty and accomplishments of the Duchess do Longueville made him unwilling to take a refusal. Chatillon, the French ambassador at London, wrote to Francis that Henry would hear of nothing else but the duchess. The ambassador reiterated that she was betrothed to his nephew, James of Scotland; but Henry said he would not believe it, and that he would do much greater things for her, and for the French king, too, than James could. In fact, Henry hated James, and this was an additional stimulus: he would have been delighted to mortify the King of Scots by snatching her away from him. Chatillon asked him if he would marry another man's wife—a very pointed question, for both Catherine and Anne had been got rid of by the plea that they had been previously affianced to other men. This was lost, however, on the gross, callous mind of Henry, and Francis was obliged to tell him plainly it could not be, but offered him Mary of Bourbon, daughter of the Duke of Vendome. Henry refused Mademoiselle Vendome, because she had been formerly offered to James of Scotland, who preferred the Longueville, and Henry said he would not take the leavings of another king. In August, 1538, Madame do Montreuil, a lady who had accompanied Magdalen of France, the first wife of James V., to Scotland, was returning through England to France, and Henry thought that perhaps she might suit him; she was, therefore, detained at Dover some time, that the king might go and see her, but probably he soon learnt from others enough to withdraw him from the project, for he never went, but turned again to Francis I., who then offered him either of the sisters of the Queen of Scotland, the princesses of Guise. Henry listened to this, and proposed that Francis should come to Calais on pretence of a private conference, and bring these ladies with him, and others of the finest ladies of France, that he might look at them, and make a choice amongst them. Francis spurned this coarse proposal, saying he had too much regard for the fair sex to trot them out like horses at a fair, to be taken or refused at the humour of the purchaser.
Now was the time for Cromwell, while Henry was chagrined by these difficulties. He informed him that Anne, daughter of John III., Duke of Cleves, Count of Mark, and Lord of Ravenstein, was greatly extolled for her beauty and good sense; that her sister Sybilla, the wife of Frederick, Duke of Saxony, the head of the Protestant confederation of Germany, called the Smalcaldic League, was famed for her beauty, talents, and virtues, and universally regarded as one of the most distinguished ladies of the time. He pointed out to Henry the advantages of thus, by this alliance, acquiring the firm friendship of the princes of Germany, in counterpoise to the
