Katharine had been unlawful,
and paid his head as the price of his fearless honesty.

Jane Seymour, whom Henry married the day after Anne Boleyn's execution,
died within a year at the birth of a son (Edward VI.). In 1540
Cromwell arranged another union with the plainest woman in Europe, Anne
of Cleves; which proved so distasteful to Henry that he speedily
divorced her, and in resentment at Cromwell's having entrapped him, by
a flattering portrait drawn by Holbein, the Minister came under his
displeasure, which at that time meant death. He was beheaded in 1540,
and in that same year occurred the King's marriage with Katharine
Howard, who one year later met the same fate as Anne Boleyn.

Katharine Parr, the sixth and last wife, {79} and an ardent Protestant
and reformer, also narrowly escaped, and would undoubtedly at last have
gone to the block. But Henry, who at fifty-six was infirm and wrecked
in health, died in the year 1547, the signing of death-warrants being
his occupation to the very end.

Whatever his motive, Henry VIII. had in making her Protestant, placed
England firmly in the line of the world's highest progress; and strange
to say, that Kingdom is most indebted to two of her worst Kings.

The crown passed to the son of Jane Seymour, Edward VI., a feeble boy
of ten. In view of the doubtful validity of his father's divorce, and
the consequent doubt cast upon the legitimacy of Edward's two sisters,
Mary and Elizabeth, the young king was persuaded to name his cousin
Lady Jane Grey as his heir and successor. This gentle girl of
seventeen, sensitive and thoughtful, a devout reformer, who read Greek
and Hebrew and wrote Latin poetry, is a pathetic figure in history,
where we see her, the unwilling wearer of a crown for ten days, and
{80} then with her young husband hurried to that fatal Tower, and to
death. Upon the death of Edward this unhappy child was proclaimed
Queen of England. But the change in the succession produced an
unexpected uprising, in which even Protestants joined. Lady Jane Grey
was hurried to the block, and the Catholic Mary to the throne. Henry's
divorce was declared void, and his first marriage valid. Elizabeth was
thus set aside by Act of Parliament; and as she waited in the Tower,
while her remorseless sister vainly sought for proofs of her complicity
with the recent rebellion, she was seemingly nearer to a scaffold than
to a throne.

[Illustration: Queen Elizabeth going on boar