astern half, including most of the large
cities where Wycliffe's doctrines had formerly prevailed was favorable
to the Reformation.

On the one hand, Henry prohibited the Lutheran or Protestant doctrine
(S340); on the other, he caused the Bible to be translated (SS254,
339), and ordered a copy to be chained to a desk in every parish
church in England (1538); but though all persons might now freely read
the Scriptures, no one but the clergy was allowed to interpret them.
Later in his reign, the King became alarmed at the spread of
discussion about religious subjects, and prohibited the reading of the
Bible by the "lower sort of people."

358. Henry versus Treason.

Men now found themselves in a strange and cruel delimma. If it was
dangerous to believe too much, it was equally dangerous to believe too
little. Traitor and heretic were dragged to execution on the same
hurdle; for Henry burned as heretics those who declared their belief
in Protestantism, and hanged or beheaded, as traitors, those who
acknowledged the authority of the Pope and denied the supremacy of the
King (S349).

Thus Anne Askew, a young and beautiful woman, was nearly wrenched
asunder on the rack, in the hope of making her implicate the Queen in
her heresy. She was afterward burned because she insisted that the
bread and wine used in the communion service seemed to her to be
simply bread and wine, and not in any sense the actual body and blood
of Christ, as the King's statute of the Six Articles (S357) solemnly
declared.

On the other hand, the aged Countess of Salisbury suffered for
treason; but with a spirit matching the King's, she refused to kneel
at the block, and told the executioner he must get her gray head off
as best he could.

359. Henry's Death.

But the time was at hand when Henry was to cease his hangings,
beheadings, and marriages. Worn out with debauchery, he died at the
age of fifty-six, a loathsome, unwieldy, and helpless mass of
corruption. In his will he left a large sum of money to pay for
perpetual prayers for the repose of his soul. Sir Walter Raleigh said
of him, "If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were
lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of
the story of this king."

It may be well to remember this, and along with it this other saying
of one of the ablest writers on English constitutional history, that
"the world owes some of tis greatest debts to men from whose