aper, before God, and that Tetzel and
his masters were a crew of impostors in selling them.

The King and the Cardinal were mightily indignant at this presumption;
and the King (with the help of SIR THOMAS MORE, a wise man, whom he
afterwards repaid by striking off his head) even wrote a book about it,
with which the Pope was so well pleased that he gave the King the title
of Defender of the Faith. The King and the Cardinal also issued flaming
warnings to the people not to read Luther's books, on pain of
excommunication. But they did read them for all that; and the rumour of
what was in them spread far and wide.

When this great change was thus going on, the King began to show himself
in his truest and worst colours. Anne Boleyn, the pretty little girl who
had gone abroad to France with his sister, was by this time grown up to
be very beautiful, and was one of the ladies in attendance on Queen
Catherine. Now, Queen Catherine was no longer young or handsome, and it
is likely that she was not particularly good-tempered; having been always
rather melancholy, and having been made more so by the deaths of four of
her children when they were very young. So, the King fell in love with
the fair Anne Boleyn, and said to himself, 'How can I be best rid of my
own troublesome wife whom I am tired of, and marry Anne?'

{Catherine was old, so he fell in love with Anne Boleyn: p0.jpg}

You recollect that Queen Catherine had been the wife of Henry's brother.
What does the King do, after thinking it over, but calls his favourite
priests about him, and says, O! his mind is in such a dreadful state, and
he is so frightfully uneasy, because he is afraid it was not lawful for
him to marry the Queen! Not one of those priests had the courage to hint
that it was rather curious he had never thought of that before, and that
his mind seemed to have been in a tolerably jolly condition during a
great many years, in which he certainly had not fretted himself thin;
but, they all said, Ah! that was very true, and it was a serious
business; and perhaps the best way to make it right, would be for his
Majesty to be divorced! The King replied, Yes, he thought that would be
the best way, certainly; so they all went to work.

If I were to relate to you the intrigues and plots that took place in the
endeavour to get this divorce, you would think the History of England the
most tiresome book in the world. So I shall say no more, than that after
a