degree to which the greatest ambition of a man seeking his fortune can acquire. I cannot comprehend, and the King still less, how your reverend lordship, after having allured us by so many fine promises about divorce, can have repented of your purpose, and how you could have done what you have in order to hinder the consummation of it. What then is your mode of proceeding? You quarrelled with the Queen to favour me at the time when I was less advanced in the King's good graces; and after having therein given me the strongest marks of your affection, your lordship abandons my interests to embrace those of the Queen. I acknowledge that I have put much confidence in your professions and promises, in which I find myself deceived. 'But for the future I shall rely on nothing but the protection of Heaven and the love of my dear King, which alone will be able to set right again those plans which you have broken and spoiled and to place me in that happy station which God wills, the King so much wishes, and which will be entirely to the advantage of the kingdom. The wrong you have done me has caused me much sorrow; but I feel infinitely more in seeing myself betrayed by a man who pretended to enter into my interests only to discover the secrets of my heart. I acknowledge that, believing you sincere, I have been too precipitate in my confidence; it is this which has induced and still induces me to keep more moderation in avenging myself, not being able to forget that I have been your servant, ANNE BOLEYN.' What words for the great prelate to read! To be spoken of by 'Nan Bullen,' a shallow, frivolous girl, as a man seeking his fortune! that he, the world-renowned statesman, should be informed by her that her plans were for the advancement of the kingdom! Above all to know that the King, his former friend, was now by her influence his relentless enemy! He must indeed have felt he had now touched the highest point of all his greatness, and that the killing frost had come! He had not the pitying foresight of Sir Thomas More, who when his daughter, Margaret Roper, visited him in the Tower and spoke of Anne and her Court as continually dancing and sporting, replied, 'Alas! Meg, alas! it pitieth me to think into what misery, poor soul! she will shortly come. These dances of hers will prove such dances that she will spurn our heads off like footballs, but it will not be long ere her head will dance the like dance.' Henry's regard for his old Minister occasionally revived by fits and starts, and had it not been for Anne's constant watchfulness to prevent interviews and to insinuate things against him, in which she was assisted by her father, the Duke of Norfolk, and others of their party, he might have regained some of his old ascendency over the King. Anne, however, extorted a solemn promise in addition from Henry that he would never see him. At Christmas time (1529) news was brought to the Court that Wolsey was in a state of such ill-health that he was likely to die. Henry went so far as to express great concern and sent his physician, Dr. Butts, to ascertain his condition. When Butts returned the King said, 'Have you seen yonder man?' 'Yes, sir.' 'How do you like him?' 'Sir,' said Dr. Butts, if you will have him dead, I warrant you he will be dead within four days if he receive not comfort from you.' On this Henry sent him a ruby ring and asked Anne to send some token of friendship; so she took a tablet of gold which hung at her side and sent it with some kindly worded message by Dr. Butts. The nearly broken-hearted man revived for a time with fresh hopes. But his enemies, thinking that Esher, where he had taken refuge, was too near, now that the King appeared a little softened towards him, induced Henry to order him to move to his house at Cawood, near York. During the few months he spent there it is said he accomplished more for the practice of religion than perhaps he had ever done from the period of his ordination to that of his fall as statesman. He gave himself up almost wholly to spiritual matters; every Sunday and holyday he celebrated Mass at some small village church. He lived simply and consorted on equal terms with many who had hardly dared to speak to him in the former times of his disdainful grandeur. He attended the death-beds of many who had fever and other infectious diseases. On the 4th of November this life of penitence was suddenly interrupted. The King had sent a party to arrest and to bring him south, the party being in charge, by Anne's special desire, of the Duke of Northumberland, who, like herself, bore an undying hatred to the Cardinal for hindering their marriage six years before, and who now proceeded to do his office with every species of insult, even ordering that the prisoner's legs were to be fastened to the stirrups of his mule, like those of a common criminal. Upwards of three thousand people assembled at Cawood to bid him farewell, and all along the country roads friends among both rich and poor came to kneel and beg his blessing. His health had been declining for a long time, and he was labouring under dropsy and general prostration. The enforced journey in wintry weather, added to other miseries, killed him. Arriving at the Abbey of Leicester one Saturday evening, he was met by the abbot and all the brotherhood, and had just strength to say, ‘Father Abbot, I am come to lay my bones among you.' An old man, broken with the storms of State, He died there on the Tuesday morning. The fates of Wolsey and Anne Boleyn have points of similarity in their general features: both raised to an unexpected eminence and from comparative obscurity by the same hand; both degraded and pursued with unforgiving dislike by the same mind; but there can be no other resemblance, except in fate, between the Cardinal, great in every way, and a woman like Anne, slight-natured, selfish, and vindictive. He was a man great in ambition, great in powers, great in worldliness, and, also, great in penitence; one who, though selfseeking to a large degree, was yet a faithful servant to his master, and a Minister who had his country's good at heart. The only way in which Anne seemed able to view anyone was the manner in which he or she had behaved to herself. Because Bishop Fisher had declared for Katherine of Aragon, Anne regarded him as one of her personal enemies to be got rid of, and after his execution on Tower Hill ordered his head to be brought to her to see 'before it was spiked,' and after looking at it for some time she said, 'And this is the head that has exclaimed against me? I think that it can never do me more harm now!' Anne could not in all cases, however, extinguish her conscience entirely; when the account of the execution of Sir Thomas More was brought to the King he looked at her and said, Thou art the cause of this man's death,' and then, leaving the game of cards they had been playing unfinished, he retired to his private room in great perturbation of spirit. Anne, feeling uneasy at his emotion, also rose, and wandered into the next room, where hung Holbein's lifelike presentment of the great Chancellor. She was suddenly seized with remorse and horror, and fancying his gaze was fixed on her reproachfully, she flung the picture out of the window, exclaiming, 'Oh mercy! the man seems to be still alive. He is looking at me, he is looking at me!' Some of the Court party who were Wolsey's enemies displayed their elation on hearing of his death in the most excruciatingly bad taste. Lord Wiltshire gave a large entertainment, during which a play was acted, the principal figure in which was the late Cardinal going down to hell. The Duke of Norfolk was so much pleased with the acting and the subject that he had the play printed to give to all his friends! Anne attained the summit of her ambition, but how little could she have felt happy or secure! Even within three months after their marriage, when venturing to remonstrate with Henry on some real, or fancied, flirtation, he roughly told her to hold her tongue, and to keep her eyes shut to his unfaithfulness, as her betters had done, ominously adding he could abase her yet more than he had raised her! She must have frequently seen what she did not like, and may have suspected more, bearing in mind how she and the King had arranged assignations and spoken love in the very presence of Katherine of Aragon, whose injured feelings 5 she could later fully realise. And yet with all the knowledge of the King's inconstancy, with the self-consciousness of deserved evil, with all portents and omens of tragic ends to unhallowed love, how little could Anne have dreamed that within ten years of writing passionate love-letters, and within three years of marriage, Henry should be listening impatiently for the sound of a gun, the signal that the fatal axe had fallen, to sweep her out of a rival's way. C. FORTESCUE YONGE. 5 1527-1536. ANGLICAN STARVATION AND A LIBERAL DIET After all, while we are disputing about these matters of relatively small importance, there are vast questions, lying at the root of all religion, which are being called in doubt from day to day by those very far removed from the plane of controversy on which we are so unfortunately forced to dwell. Those questions press heavily upon a large body of the earnest laity of this country, and I am convinced that no greater injury can be done to the cause of religion than to see so many ministers of religion apparently absorbed [in], and prepared to sacrifice everything to, matters which, compared with the subjects to which I have referred, are almost as nothing in the balance. I find it almost impossible to express adequately the strength of my feeling on this subject. There is not merely an injury, perhaps an irreparable injury, being done to the fabric of the Church of England, but there is an injury being done to the whole cause of religion. The RIGHT HON. ARTHUR JAMES BAlfour. I. IN the eighteenth century the Evangelicals prevailed. Mr. Lecky, whose History is an unruffled reflection of that age on the waters of memory, shows to us the Evangelicals, and them only among religious groups, in large lineament and sharp detail. He spends one out of his twenty-one chapters on 'The Religious Revival.' And at the end of his work, looking back, he writes of 'The Evangelical Party' thus: 'Nearly all the popular religious literature of the time, nearly every fresh departure, nearly every new organisation which grew up in the English religious world, was mainly due to it.' The Evangelicals deserved their prevalence. They had hold of the primary and living secret-personal religion-and they worked it out in exalted character and noble activities. It is their piety which tells. It may be seen, narrowing our vision within the lines of the English Church, as clearly, perhaps, as anywhere in the life of William Wilberforce. 'He rose soon after seven, spent the first hour and a half in his closet.' 'His own mind,' his sons in their biography go on to say, ' was quiet in the storm' of political encounter. 'The next day's diary affords a glimpse of those deep waters which no political tempests could disturb: "Walked from Hyde Park Corner, repeating the 119th Psalm, in great comfort. And so it is with them all. Lord |