othesly was then in as great a passion as he dared to utter, for he was writing in reply to Paget, the King's Secretary.

"With our answer to your strange letters I have thought meet to require you to consider that, travailing here, as we do, in things displeasant to all men whom we call before us, and devising how things may be answered, which must, of necessity, be dispatched, this kind of writing was no small discomfort to us all, whereby all our good will seemeth to be otherwise taken than we trust we have or shall deserve. What this matter of money importeth you know, and how slowly it cometh in, do we what we can. Even now we be advertised by Sir John Gresham that he shall not be able, from the allum and fustians, to pay Barth-Compain, but he must have £2000 by warrant. And in February we have £80,000 to pay, which must be provided for, or your credit will be in danger. It must be made of your half-year's rent, the tail of the Contribution, and some help of the Mint, for the subsidy is not payable till Easter, and the fifteenths' after. My Lord Great Master lacketh for victualling, and a great many poor men in England would be holpen that have delivered their victuals long since, and remain yet unpaid? I write this to you as to myself, that you may the rather weigh things thoroughly and remember that all things must in time be foreseen, or else it may chance you shall lack suddenly, even when you would fainest have. Would to God the King's Majesty had a sore present-to rid us in this mean time of some of our care." 11

Such expressions are far more significant of the real state of things than any general description in modern language; but still they convey no full idea of the extent of that expense and misery into which the Monarch had now plunged his kingdom. The storm he had raised besides was merely abated, not finished; and although the King of England be about to die, as well as the King of France, the burden which the former entailed on his son and successor, Edward VI., must be taken into account before we can judge of the merits or demerits of Henry VIII. when acting as his own Minister.

If we only glance at his Majesty's operations as a financier, we refer to a department entirely his own; and in the adulteration of the coin we see a series of measures which could only have been pursued in obedience to royal dictation. It was a course of proceeding by which, at every step, Henry at once defrauded the public, created commercial embarrassments innumerable, and involved his successors on the throne in serious difficulties long after he was gone. At his accession the ounce of gold and the pound of silver were worth forty shillings each. By his successive proclamations they were raised to forty-four, forty-five, and finally to forty-eight shillings. Contriving also, by a premium, to collect the old, he issued a new coinage, with no small proportion of alloy; and, once begun, he had gone on debasing it, till, at this moment, after such a ruinous war, the alloy exceeded the silver in the proportion of two to one! And what were the results to his successors? The nominal value

11 Gov. State Papers, i., 880, 881.

of his shillings had to be reduced, first to nine pence, then to six pence, and finally to be withdrawn. The corruptions which he had introduced into English coin were not rooted out till the reign of Elizabeth !

Base as these operations were, they still but very partially explain the extent of Henry's powers; who, after all this, had come down, and told Parliament, when taking leave of it for ever-" that no prince in the world more favoured his subjects than he did." Even since 1542, the indelible marks of his favour had cost his subjects, for naval and military expenses alone, a sum equal to more than thirty-two millions of our present coin. To this must be added, the amount in which he involved his son by this war with France, and this cannot be estimated at less than another million then, or fifteen millions more. But, to crown all, what shall we say, when only three years after, or in January 1550, Henry the Second of France not only disdained to fulfil the treaty his father had signed, and to pay the sums to which he had agreed; but even the pensions alluded to before, must no more be mentioned in his treaties? So far from any mutual umpires sitting to judge respecting debt due to England, the two millions of crowns formerly specified, have now sunk down to a fifth part of the sum, and Boulogne must be restored, on payment of the last item of 200,000 crowns! Thus, all the blood and treasure spent by his Majesty to secure a yearly tribute, in lieu of his foolish pretension to a foreign crown, were spent in vain; and Edward was left with the word France in his style, and stamped upon his father's debased coin, as an expressive and disgraceful memorial to himself and to posterity, of the closing years of Henry VIII.12

In days of old, when in trying circumstances, a despised state-prisoner once tendered his advice to a Roman centurion-" Nevertheless, the centurion believed the master and owner of the ship, more than those things which were spoken by Paul." And as Paul was reputed to be no judge in regard to the weather or the sea; so what, it must have been thought, could such a man as Tyndale know about the policy of govern

12 The late war with France, says Lord Herbert, cost Henry £586,718 sterling, and the keeping of Boulogne £755,833, or £1,342,551, which is equal to above 20 millions. Strype and Rapin affirm that the warlike expenses of Edward, by the year 1549, had cost him £1,356,687, which, added to those of Henry, would make £2,699,238, or above forty millions. But in strict justice both to Henry and his son, these statements admit of some correction. Among the Domestic State Papers, happily, we have one authentic document on this subject, detailing, from 1542, the entire Military and Naval expenses incurred by Henry VIII. and Edward VI. during their wars with France and Scotland, with the expenses of both Calais and Boulogne; and at the close we read," The sum total of the charges contained in this book, £3,491,471, 19s. 5d.: whereof in the time of the late King £2,134,784, 12d., in the time of the King's Majesty that now is £1,356,687, 188. 5d. and some fraction of a penny." It may have been from this document that Strype took his sum; but the MS. embraces the charges beyond 1549, or from September 1542 to September 1552. It is grounded on this manuscript that we have spoken of Henry's expenses from 1542, the sum of £2,134,784 being equal to £32,021,760, of the present day. On the same principle, the entire amount in this MS. of twenty-three large pages, will be £52,372,075, 11s. 3d. for Military and Naval expenses.

ment, or affairs of state? As in the former case, however, so in the latter, it would have been well for Henry VIII. had he condescended to listen to the advice given to him, in print, sixteen years ago. "We," said Tyndale, "having nothing to do at all, have meddled yet in all matters, and have spent even to the utter beggaring of ourselves. For the Frenchmen, as the saying is, of late days, made a play, or a disguising at Paris, in which the Emperor danced with the Pope and the French King, and wearied them; the King of England sitting on a high bench, and looking on. And when it was asked, why he danced not, it was answered, that he sat there, but to pay the minstrels their wages only! As one should say, we paid for all men's dancing." This war, it is true, had cost Francis also no small sum; but his son refusing to fulfil all previous obligations, there was no choice left to young Edward. He must sustain the expense of his father's "minstrels," and could only console himself with the reflection, that Calais was quite sufficient for a landing-place in France. By and bye this also was lost, which led Mary to say, that if they opened her body after death, they would find Calais written on her heart." 14

"13

By this, the evening of his life, it might seem that nothing was now wanting to complete the character of Henry the Eighth; a character which, notwithstanding all the past, it was customary to eulogise at the moment, and strange to say, by far too common, to soften down, or even eulogise, since. Some excuse may be pled for such writers as Becon, and Udal, and Foxe, who stood, as it were, too near the object, to be able to distinguish and define it but the confounding of vice and virtue in human character, which is not a venial offence against historical narrative, should certainly be corrected as the truth comes out, so that some fixed opinion may be at last obtained. Accordingly, the character of this Monarch is far more correctly estimated now, than it has been at any former period; for notwithstanding all the verbiage, not to say unconscious errors, which have been printed by some historians respecting him, the stubborn facts of his reign preserve a uniform and awful consistency to his dying hour. It is idle to listen to what men may have said, now that we have

13 Tyndale's Practice of Prelates.

14 One of the most ridiculous features of Henry's pretensions to the French crown was this, that it had become penal to give Francis his own title! And hence, in the end of next year, Edward's Parliament were obliged to enact, that "those who called the French King by the title of King of France, were not to be esteemed guilty of the pains of translating the King's authority or titles on any other!!"

gained access to the Monarch's own language, and almost all that he did or sanctioned, until he breathed his last in blood.

Before that Henry was gratified by the death of Beaton at a distance, there had been misery contemplated, of a darker hue; and after it, blood was shed of far greater value, in which the Crown and certain courtiers were immediately concerned. Wriothesly and Gardiner had sat at the Council table, advising as to the murder of the Scotish Cardinal; but they, with Bonner and Richard Rich, had since then been busy with several victims nearer hand, and under their own eye.

One of these suggests the idea that there must be a climax in human depravity. The first female martyr of rank or family, tormented and burnt to ashes, for no alleged crime, save stedfast adherence to the truth of Scripture, is here referred to; and if justice be done to the entire narrative, she occupies a place all her own. Among recorded martyrs in London, she had but one predecessor, and this was John Fryth. As in his case there was to be no abjuration, no recantation of the faith, nor any fear of the enemy; so it was with the devout and determined Anne Askew.

In noticing this unprecedented instance of female faith and fortitude, it must be remembered that for about twelve years past, the reputed heretic had been, by Parliament, taken out of the hands of the Bishops as such, or the Archbishop's Court, so that the case could not now resemble the course pursued with Fryth. The accused party, by this time, if any regard were to be paid to legal enactments, must be presented on the oaths of twelve men, before any imprisonment could ensue.15 There was indeed an Inquest in London, probably a standing one, for the examination of the accused; but the last year Henry's reign was to carry with it the highest possible degree of illegality, and of Satanic rage against the Truth. Witness the following narrative.

of

Sir William Askew of Kelsey in Lincolnshire, a gentleman of family, had two sons, Francis the eldest, and Edward, who was one of his Majesty's body-guard.16 These young men had three sisters. The eld

15 See 1534, or vol i., pp. 403, 404; and anno 1544, or p. 167 of this volume. 16"Whereas I am informed that this bearer, Edward Askew, my servant, son unto Sir William Askew, knight, is by some nobleman preferred unto the room of one of these new spears in the Court, which because it is done without my knowledge and his, I shall beseech you my Lord, inasmuch as I have no friend to sue unto for me and mine, but only unto your Lord

est having died, after her father had already advanced money in prospect of her union with a gentleman of opulence in the same county, Mr. Thomas Kyme; Anne the second, in obedience to her father's wishes, was married to him, and became the mother of two children.17 Her superior natural abilities had been greatly improved by education. The English Scriptures engaged her serious and frequent attention, and the result was, an earnest reception of the truths contained in them. Her husband, a devoted adherent of "the old learning," excited by such a decided change, in the excess of his passion absolutely drove her from his house; and, thus harshly treated, she had repaired to London to seek some redress, by suing for a divorce. Through her brother Edward, she could have no difficulty in being introduced to those of her own sex in the Court circle, who were in favour of the Scriptures; but, by whatever means it was, she became known to them all, including even the Queen herself. It was not long, however, before one so ardent in the faith was ensnared by the bloody Statute, or Act of six Articles; and Cranmer was now to witness a series of proceedings in gross violation of the bill which he had carried through Parliament two years ago.

It appears to have been on Friday the 12th of March, that this heroic young woman was first examined by one Christopher Dare, of the London Inquest, at Sadler's hall, Cheapside. The questions put, betrayed at once the ignorance of her examiner and Anne's thorough acquaintance with the sacred Volume; but she was immediately conveyed to the Lord Mayor, Sir Martin Bowes, a boisterous devotee.18 Bonner's Chancellor, Thomas Bage alias Williams, was there to record what passed. After a few words on transubstantiation, in which, by her replies, his Lordship was made to look very foolish, she was illegally committed to prison.19 She offered sureties, but he would take none, and sent her to the counter. There she remained eleven days, without one friend being allowed to see her. At last, on Tuesday the 23d, a cousin, Mr. Brit

ship, that you will, at this my request bear unto him your lawful favour and furtherance in the same; assuring your Lordship, that he, the young man, is of a very gentil nature, right forward, and of good activity, so that I think he shall be meet to furnish such a room, and to do to the King's Majesty diligent and faithful service."-Cranmer to Crumwell-at Forde 28th December 1539. MS. Chapter-house. This refers to Henry's personal guard, as before explained, p. 93. 17 The third sister, Jane, was married first to Sir George St. Paul, and then to Richard Disney, Esq., of Norton Disney, ancestor of the present John Disney, Esq. of the Hyde, Essex. 18 But a famous man in his day, among the Goldsmith's Company. He was sub-treasurer of the Mint under both Henry and Edward; and as the King can do no wrong, so in 1550 was granted to him a pardon of all treasons, trespasses, and contempts done by the said Martin concerning the money and coin of the King's Majesty and his father's before the date of these presents; and of all unjust and false making of money and payments of the same, contrary to common law, or any statute, act, provision or proclamation. See Strype's Eccl. Mem. 1550. Such was the commentary on Henry, the original offender, and cause of all the injustice done. Sir Martin left a sum for an Anniversary Sermon to be preached in St. Mary, Woolnoth, where the venerable John Newton so long proclaimed such doctrine as the poor Mayor never heard. Bowes lies there interred, under a close marble tomb.

19 Before this was done, by the Act of 1544, she ought to have been legally presented on the paths of twelve men.