than worthless. Even the bones of the Confessor were not
respected; but were moved and buried apart, until Queen Mary brought
them back and laid them once more in the shrine where they had reposed
so long, and where they rest to this day. Then robbers broke into the
Abbey and carried off, among other treasures, the silver head from Henry
the Fifth's monument. And in Edward the Sixth's reign, when the spirit
of iconoclasm was at its height, the Protector Somerset even talked of
demolishing the Abbey Church, and was only deterred from such an act of
vandalism by the rising, some say, of the inhabitants of Westminster,
or, by the sacrifice of seventeen manors belonging to the Chapter for
the needs of the protectorate.

A boy king was once more head of the English nation. When Henry the
Eighth died in January, 1547, Prince Edward was not quite ten years old,
his sister Elizabeth nearly fourteen, while Mary, the elder sister, was
thirty-one. In less than a month after his father's death, Edward was
crowned at Westminster, and very curious the accounts are of the
ceremony. As was usual, the prince spent the few days before his
coronation at the Tower; and the procession from thence to Westminster
was of extreme magnificence. The little boy was delighted by an
Arragonese sailor who "capered on a tight-rope down from the battlements
of St. Paul's to a window at the Dean's Gate."[44]

An old man in a chair, with crown and sceptre, represented
the state of King Edward the Confessor. St. George would
have spoken, but that His Grace made such speed for lack of
time he could not.[45]

The service at which Archbishop Cranmer, the king's godfather,
officiated, was still that of the Church of Rome: but it was greatly
shortened,

partly "for the tedious length of the same," and "the tender
age" of the King--partly for "that many points of the same
were such as, by the laws of the nation, were not
allowable."[46]

And there were various other differences in matters of detail, into
which we have no space to enter, which showed that a radical change had
taken place in England since Henry the Eighth's coronation. Even
shortened as it was, the service was so long and exhausting that the
poor little king was carried out fainting before it was over.

[Illustration: EDWARD THE SIXTH.--_From a Painting by Holbein._]

A "marvellous boy," "_monstrificus peullus_" as an Italian physician
described him, must