tune hung doubtful between the parties, the
pagan monarch invoked the God of his fair Christian queen, and obtained
the victory! St. Remi found no difficulty in persuading Clovis, after
the fortunate event, to adopt the Christian creed. Political reasons for
some time suspended the king's open conversion. At length the Franks
followed their sovereign to the baptismal fonts. According to Pasquier,
Naude, and other political writers, these recorded miracles,[285] like
those of Constantine, were but inventions to authorise the change of
religion. Clovis used the new creed as a lever by whose machinery he
would be enabled to crush the petty princes his neighbours; and, like
Constantine, Clovis, sullied by crimes of as dark a dye, obtained the
title of "The Great." Had not the most capricious "Defender of the
Faith" been influenced by the most violent of passions, the Reformation,
so feebly and so imperfectly begun and continued, had possibly never
freed England from the papal thraldom;

For Gospel light first beamed from Bullen's eyes.

It is, however, a curious fact, that when the fall of Anne Bullen was
decided on, Rome eagerly prepared a reunion with the papacy, on terms
too flattering for Henry to have resisted. It was only prevented taking
place by an incident that no human foresight could have predicted. The
day succeeding the decapitation of Anne Bullen witnessed the nuptials of
Henry with the protestant Jane Seymour. This changed the whole policy.
The despatch from Rome came a day too late! From such a near disaster
the English Reformation escaped! The catholic Ward, in his singular
Hudibrastic poem of "England's Reformation," in some odd rhymes, has
characterised it by a _naivete_, which we are much too delicate to
repeat. The catholic writers censure Philip for recalling the Duke of
Alva from the Netherlands. According to these humane politicians, the
unsparing sword, and the penal fires of this resolute captain, had
certainly accomplished the fate of the heretics; for angry lions,
however numerous, would find their numerical force diminished by gibbets
and pit-holes. We have lately been informed by a curious writer, that
protestantism once existed in Spain, and was actually extirpated at the
moment by the crushing arm of the Inquisition.[286] According to these
catholic politicians, a great event in catholic history did not
occur--the spirit of catholicism, predominant in a land of
protestants--from the Span