day brought in fresh reports of their condition.
These communities, supposed to be special servants of God, had become
special servants of the Devil. The eagerness with which the Pope solicited
Henry's return, the assurance that he had always been his friend--had
always maintained that Henry was right in the divorce case, when he had a
Bull ready in his desk taking his crown from him--was in itself sufficient
evidence of the fitness of such a ruler to be the Supreme Judge in
Christendom. Just as little could the Emperor be trusted, whose
affectations of friendship were qualified by secret reservations. The King
had undertaken a great and beneficent work in his own realm and meant to
go through with it. The Pope might do as he pleased. The Continental
Princes might quarrel or make peace, hold their Councils, settle as they
liked their own affairs, in their own way; England was sufficient for
herself. He had called his people under arms; he had fortified the coasts;
he had regenerated the navy. The nation, or the nobler part of it, he
believed to be loyal to himself--to approve what he had done and to be
ready to stand by him. He was not afraid of attack from abroad. If there
was a rebellious spirit at home, if the clergy were mutinous because the
bit was in their mouths, if the Peers of the old blood were alarmed at the
growth of religious liberty and were discontented because they could no
longer deal with it in the old way, the King was convinced that he was
acting for the true interests of the country, that Parliament would uphold
him, and that he could control both the ecclesiastics and the nobles. The
world should see that the reforms which he had introduced into England
were not the paltry accidents of a domestic scandal, but the first steps
of a revolution deliberately resolved on and sternly carried out which was
to free the island for ever from the usurped authority of an Italian
Prelate, and from the poisonous influences within the realm of a corrupt
and demoralising superstition.

The call of Parliament after Anne's execution was the strongest evidence
of confidence in his people which Henry had yet given. He had much to
acknowledge and much to ask. He had to confess that, although he had been
right in demanding a separation from his brother's wife, he had fatally
mistaken the character of the woman whom he had chosen to take her place.
The succession which he had hoped to establish he had made more intricate
t