ns left by his father
were exhausted, his subjects had been drained by repeated subsidies, and,
furious as he was at the treachery of his Spanish ally, Henry was driven
to conclude a peace.

[Sidenote: Protest of the New Learning]

To the hopes of the New Learning this sudden outbreak of the spirit of
war, this change of the monarch from whom they had looked for a "new
order" into a vulgar conqueror, proved a bitter disappointment. Colet
thundered from the pulpit of St. Paul's that "an unjust peace is better
than the justest war," and protested that "when men out of hatred and
ambition fight with and destroy one another, they fight under the banner,
not of Christ, but of the devil." Erasmus quitted Cambridge with a bitter
satire against the "madness" around him. "It is the people," he said, in
words which must have startled his age,--"it is the people who build
cities, while the madness of princes destroys them." The sovereigns of his
time appeared to him like ravenous birds pouncing with beak and claw on
the hard-won wealth and knowledge of mankind. "Kings who are scarcely
men," he exclaimed in bitter irony, "are called 'divine'; they are
'invincible' though they fly from every battle-field; 'serene' though they
turn the world upside down in a storm of war; 'illustrious' though they
grovel in ignorance of all that is noble; 'Catholic' though they follow
anything rather than Christ. Of all birds the Eagle alone has seemed to
wise men the type of royalty, a bird neither beautiful nor musical nor
good for food, but murderous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all,
and with its great powers of doing harm only surpassed by its desire to do
it." It was the first time in modern history that religion had formally
dissociated itself from the ambition of princes and the horrors of war, or
that the new spirit of criticism had ventured not only to question but to
deny what had till then seemed the primary truths of political order.

[Sidenote: The Jerome of Erasmus]

But the indignation of the New Learning was diverted to more practical
ends by the sudden peace. However he had disappointed its hopes, Henry
still remained its friend. Through all the changes of his terrible career
his home was a home of letters. His boy, Edward the Sixth, was a fair
scholar in both the classical languages. His daughter Mary wrote good
Latin letters. Elizabeth began every day with an hour's reading in the
Greek Testament, the tragedies of S