f thousands of yards of
bunting and cheap flags; the people mostly in sombre clothes; the
soldiers in ugly red, stiff coats, were the only colour of note
passing down Whitehall, past the hideous green stuck with frozen
Members of Parliament, to the grand, wonderful Abbey, which has seen
so many Queens crowned.

HENRY THE EIGHTH

Reigned thirty-eight years: 1509-1547.

Born, 1491. Married, 1509, Katherine of Aragon; 1532,
Anne Boleyn; 1536, Jane Seymour; 1540, Anne of Cleves;
1540, Katherine Howard; 1548, Katherine Parr.

THE MEN

VERSES BY HENRY THE EIGHTH IN PRAISE OF CONSTANCY

'As the holy grouth grene with ivie all alone
Whose flowerys cannot be seen and grene wode levys be gone,
Now unto my lady, promyse to her I make
From all other only to her I me betake.
Adew myne owne ladye, adew my specyall
Who hath my hart trewly, be sure, and ever shall.'

So, with songs and music of his own composition, comes the richest man
in Europe to the throne of England. Gay, brave, tall, full of conceit
in his own strength, Henry, a king, a Tudor, a handsome man, abounding
in excellence of craft and art, the inheritance from his father and
mother, figures in our pageant a veritable symbol of the Renaissance
in England.

He had, in common with the marvellous characters of that Springtime of
History, the quick intelligence and all the personal charm that the
age brought forth in abundance. In his reign the accumulated mass of
brain all over the world budded and flowered; the time gave to us a
succession of the most remarkable people in any historical period, and
it is one of the triumphs of false reasoning to prove this, in
England, to have been the result of the separation from the Catholic
Church. For centuries the Church had organized and prepared the ground
in which this tree of the world's knowledge was planted, had pruned,
cut back, nursed the tree, until gradually it flowered, its branches
spread over Christian Europe, and when the flowering branch hanging
over England gave forth its first-fruits, those men who ate of the
fruit and benefited by the shade were the first to quarrel with the
gardeners.

In these days there lived and died Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, Duerer, Erasmus, Holbein, Copernicus, Luther, Rabelais, and
Michael Angelo, to mention a few men of every shade of thought, and
in this goodly time came Henry to the English throne, to leave, at hi