sing; he is condoned
as a young man who promised to be a great king. There are, as Chesterton
points out, two great things that intruded into his reign: the one was
the difficulty of his marriages, the other was the question of the
monasteries. If Henry was a Bluebeard, he was such because his wives
were not a fortunate selection. 'He was almost as unlucky in his wives
as they were in their husband.' But the one thing that Chesterton feels
broke Henry's honour was the question of his divorce. In doing this he
mistook the friendship of the Pope for something that would make him go
against the position of the Church. 'Henry sought to lean upon the
cushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter.
The result was that Henry finished with the Papacy in the pious hope
that it had done with him; Henry became head of the Church that was
national, and soon Wolsey fell, to die in a monastery at Leicester.

But this terrible king 'struck down the noblest of the Humanists, Thomas
More, who died the death of a saint, gloriously jesting.' The question
of the monasteries is one that is solved by the simple statement that
the King wanted money and the monasteries supplied it. Is there any
justification for the crimes of Henry? For Chesterton 'it is unpractical
to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for Henry's crimes in
the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For whether or not it
was desired, it was not created.'

Chesterton in an original way has given a very clear account of the
difficulties of the reign of Henry VIII, a reign that had perhaps more
influence on English history than any other, a reign that showed what
the licence of an English monarchy could do and, what is of more
importance, what it could not, a reign that showed that the fall of a
great man could be so precipitate that the significance of it could not
be felt at the time, a reign that showed that the Pope was something
more than the friend of the English throne--he was in matters of Church
discipline its checkmate. This was the time that England trembled at the
devilry of a king and rejoiced at the sun of a new learning that was
slowly dispelling the fog of the Dark Ages.

* * * * *

It is usually assumed that Mary was a bad woman because she burned
people who were so unwise as not to be at least officially Catholics.
Historians have applied the word 'bloody' to her, whereas the bet