ng thought the new monarch would be not only Octavus but
Octavius, fostering letters and cherishing the learned. There was a
general feeling that a new era was beginning and a new day dawning
after the long darkness of the Middle Age with its nightmares of Black
Deaths and Peasants' Revolts and, worst of all, the civil war that had
humbled England's power and racked her almost to pieces within.

It was commonly believed that the young prince was a paragon: handsome,
athletic, learned, generous, wise, and merciful. That he was fond of
sports, strong and in early life physically attractive, is well
attested. The principal evidences of his learning are the fulsome
testimony of Erasmus and his work against Luther. But it has been
lately shown that Erasmus was capable of passing off, as the work of a
powerful patron, compositions which he knew to be written by Latin
secretaries; and the royal author of the _Defence of the Seven
Sacraments_, which evinces but mediocre talent, received much
unacknowledged assistance.

If judged by his foreign relations Henry's statesmanship was
unsuccessful. His insincerity and perfidy often overreached
themselves, and he was often {278} deceived. Moreover, he was
inconstant, pursuing no worthy end whatever. England was by her
insular location and by the nearly equal division of power on the
Continent between France and the emperor, in a wonderfully safe and
advantageous place. But, so far was Henry from using this gift of
fortune, that he seems to have acted only on caprice.

[Sidenote: Domestic policy]

In domestic policy Henry achieved his greatest successes, in fact, very
remarkable ones indeed. Doubtless here also he was favored by fortune,
in that his own ends happened in the main to coincide with the deeper
current of his people's purpose, for he was supported by just that
wealthy and enterprising bourgeois class that was to call itself the
people and to make public opinion for the next three centuries. In
time this class would become sufficiently conscious of its own power to
make Parliament supreme and to demand a reckoning even from the crown,
but at first it needed the prestige of the royal name to conquer the
two privileged classes, the clergy and the nobility. The merchants and
the moneyed men only too willingly became the faithful followers of a
chief who lavishly tossed to them the wealth of the church and the
political privileges of the barons. And Henry had jus