The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 8

1849;
England's Forgotten Worthies (_Westminster Review_), 1852; Book of
Job (_Westminster Review)_, 1853; Poems of Matthew Arnold
(_Westminster Review_), 1854; Suggestions on the Best Means of
Teaching English History (Oxford Essays, etc.), 1855; History of
England, 12 vols., 1856-70; The Influence of the Reformation on the
Scottish Character, 1865; Inaugural Address delivered to the University
of St. Andrews, March 19, 1869, 1869; Short Studies on Great Subjects,
1867, 2 vols., series 2-4, 1871-83 (articles from _Fraser's Magazine,
Westminster Review_, etc.); The Cat's Pilgrimage, 1870; Calvinism:

Address at St. Andrews, 1871; The English in Ireland, 3 vols., 1872-74;
Bunyan (English Men of Letters), 1878; Cæsar: a Sketch, 1879; Two
Lectures on South Africa, 1880; Thomas Carlyle (a history of the first
forty years of his life, etc.), 2 vols., 1882; Luther: a Short Biography,
1883; Thomas Carlyle (a history of his life in London, 1834-81), 2
vols., 1884; Oceana, 1886; The English in the West Indies, 1888;
Liberty and Property: an Address [1888]; The Two Chiefs of Dunboy,
1889; Lord Beaconsfield (a Biography), 1890; The Divorce of
Catherine of Aragon, 1891; The Spanish Story of the Armada, 1892;
Life and Letters of Erasmus, 1894; English Seamen in the Sixteenth
Century, 1895; Lectures on the Council of Trent, 1896; My Relations
with Carlyle, 1903.
EDITED:--Carlyle's Reminiscences, 1881; Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, 1883.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
II. THE LAST YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WOLSEY.
III. THE PARLIAMENT OF 1529.
IV. CHURCH AND STATE.
V. MARRIAGE OF HENRY AND ANNE BOLEYN.
VI. THE PROTESTANTS.
VII. THE LAST EFFORTS OF DIPLOMACY.
NOTES.

HENRY VIII

CHAPTER I
SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
In periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending,
and the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under
the influence of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves
back into a time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a
single type, in which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms
of the son's, and the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths
the footprints of his distant ancestors. So absolutely has change become
the law of our present condition, that it is identified with energy and
moral health; to cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to
pass away from off the earth with the same convictions which we found
when we entered it, is to have missed the best object for which we now
seem to exist.
It has been, however, with the race of men as it has been with the planet
which they inhabit. As we look back over history, we see times of
change and progress alternating with other times when life and thought
have settled into permanent forms; when mankind, as if by common
consent, have ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented
with what they possess, have endeavoured to make use of it for
purposes of moral cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks
through many ages before the Persian war; such was that of the
Romans till the world revenged itself upon its conquerors by the
introduction among them of the habits of the conquered; and such again
became the condition of Europe when the Northern nations grafted the
religion and the laws of the Western empire on their own hardy natures,
and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political organisation which
remained unshaken for a thousand years.
The aspirant after sanctity in the fifteenth century of the Christian era
found a model which he could imitate in detail in the saint of the fifth.

The gentleman at the court of Edward IV. or Charles of Burgundy
could imagine no nobler type of heroism than he found in the stories of
King Arthur's knights. The forms of life had become more
elaborate--the surface of it more polished--but the life itself remained
essentially the same; it was the development of the same conception of
human excellence; just as the last orders of Gothic architecture were the
development of the first, from which the idea had worked its way till
the force of it was exhausted.
A condition of things differing alike both outwardly and inwardly from
that into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is
necessarily obscure to us. In the alteration of our own character, we
have lost the key which would interpret the characters of our fathers,
and the great men even of our own English history before the
Reformation seem to us almost like the fossil skeletons of another order
of beings. Some broad conclusions as to what they were are at least
possible to us, however; and we are able to determine, with tolerable
certainty, the social condition of the people