Being now quite resolved to get rid of Queen Catherine, and to marry
Anne Boleyn without more ado, the King made Cranmer Archbishop of
Canterbury, and directed Queen Catherine to leave the Court. She
obeyed; but replied that wherever she went, she was Queen of England
still, and would remain so, to the last. The King then married Anne
Boleyn privately; and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, within half a
year, declared his marriage with Queen Catherine void, and crowned Anne
Boleyn Queen.
She might have known that no good could ever come from such wrong, and
that the corpulent brute who had been so faithless and so cruel to his
first wife, could be more faithless and more cruel to his second. She
might have known that, even when he was in love with her, he had been a
mean and selfish coward, running away, like a frightened cur, from her
society and her house, when a dangerous sickness broke out in it, and
when she might easily have taken it and died, as several of the
household did. But, Anne Boleyn arrived at all this knowledge too late,
and bought it at a dear price. Her bad marriage with a worse man came
to its natural end. Its natural end was not, as we shall too soon see,
a natural death for her.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE EIGHTH
PART THE SECOND
The Pope was thrown into a very angry state of mind when he heard of
the King’s marriage, and fumed exceedingly. Many of the English monks
and friars, seeing that their order was in danger, did the same; some
even declaimed against the King in church before his face, and were not
to be stopped until he himself roared out ‘Silence!’ The King, not much
the worse for this, took it pretty quietly; and was very glad when his
Queen gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Elizabeth, and
declared Princess of Wales as her sister Mary had already been.
One of the most atrocious features of this reign was that Henry the
Eighth was always trimming between the reformed religion and the
unreformed one; so that the more he quarrelled with the Pope, the more
of his own subjects he roasted alive for not holding the Pope’s
opinions. Thus, an unfortunate student named John Frith, and a poor
simple tailor named Andrew Hewet who loved him very much, and said that
whatever John Frith believed _he_ believed, were burnt in Smithfield—to
show what a capital Christian the King was.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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