Before considering the actual work of suppression, it may be interesting to glance at the royal destroyer and his times. The character of Henry VIII. is utterly inexplicable to many persons, chiefly because they do not reflect that even the inconsistencies of a great man may be understood when seen in the light of his times. A masterly and comprehensive summary of the virtues and vices of the Tudor monarch, who has been described as "the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king," may be found in "A History of Crime in England," by Luke Owen Pike. The distinguished author shows that in his brutality, his love of letters, his opposition to Luther, his vacillation in religious opinions, King Henry reflects with remarkable fidelity the age in which he lived, both in its contrasts and its inconsistencies. "It is only the previous history of England which can explain all the contradictions exhibited in his conduct,--which can explain how he could be rapacious yet sometimes generous, the Defender of the Faith yet under sentence of excommunication, a burner of heretics yet a heretic himself, the pope's advocate yet the pope's greatest enemy, a bloodthirsty tyrant yet the best friend to liberty of thought in religion, an enthusiast yet a turncoat, a libertine and yet all but a Puritan. He was sensual because his forefathers had been sensual from time immemorial, rough in speech and action because there had been but few men in Britain who had been otherwise since the Romans abandoned the island. He was superstitious and credulous because few were philosophical or gifted with intellectual courage. Yet he had, what was possessed by his contemporaries, a faint and intermittent thirst for knowledge, of which he himself hardly knew the meaning." Henry was shrewd, tenacious of purpose, capricious and versatile. In spite of his unrestrained indulgences and his monstrous claims of power, which, be it remembered, he was able to enforce, and notwithstanding any other vices or faults that may be truthfully charged against him, he was, on the whole, a popular king. Few monarchs have ever had to bear such a strain as was placed upon his abilities and character. Rare have been the periods that have witnessed such confusion of principles, social, political and religious. Those were the days when liberty was at work, "but in a hundred fantastical and repulsive shapes, confused and convulsive, multiform, deformed." Blind violence and half-way reforms characterized the age because the principles that were to govern modern times were not yet formulated.