rked what was going on without seeming to mark it; kept its
own counsel until it was time to strike, and then struck as suddenly and
remorselessly as a beast of prey. It was strange to witness so much
subtlety combined with so much strength."

There was something baffling and terrifying in the mysterious bonhomie of
the King. In spite of Caesar's dictum, it is the fat enemy who is to be
feared; a thin villain is more easily seen through.

_His Ancestry_

Henry's antecedents were far from glorious. The Tudors were a Welsh family
of somewhat humble stock. Henry VII.'s great-grandfather was butler or
steward to the Bishop of Bangor, whose son, Owen Tudor, coming to London,
obtained a clerkship of the Wardrobe to Henry V.'s Queen, Catherine of
France. Within a few years of Henry's death, the widowed Queen and her
clerk of the wardrobe were secretly living together as man and wife. The
two sons of this morganatic match, Edmund and Jasper, were favoured by
their half brother, Henry VI. Edmund, the elder, was knighted, and then
made Earl of Richmond. In 1453 he was formally declared legitimate, and
enrolled a member of the King's Council. Two years later he married the
Lady Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of Edward III. It was this union
between Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort which gave Henry VII. his claim
by descent to the English throne.

The popularity of the Tudors was, no doubt, enhanced by the fact that with
their line, kings of decisively English blood, for the first time since
the Norman Conquest, sat on the English throne.

_His Early Days_

When Henry VIII. ascended the throne in 1509, England regarded him with
almost universal loyalty. The memory of the long years of the Wars of the
Roses and the wars of the Pretenders during the reign of his father, were
fresh in the people's mind. No other than he could have attained to the
throne without civil war.

Within two months he married Katharine of Aragon, his brother's widow, and
a few days afterwards the King and Queen were crowned with great splendour
in Westminster Abbey. He was still in his eighteenth year, of fine
physical development, but of no special mental precocity. For the first
five years of his reign, he was influenced by his Council, and especially
by his father-in-law, Ferdinand the Catholic, giving little indication of
the later mental vigour and power of initiation which made his reign so
memorable in English annals.

The political sit