In the days of the queen's father all "public interests" were concentrated in the court-circle and its dependencies. The Parliament was but the formal echo of the voice which came from the cabinet. The learned Spelman has recorded that when the Lower House hesitated to pass the bill for the dissolution of the monasteries, they were summoned into the king's presence; and the Commons being first kept in waiting some hours in his gallery, the king entered, looking angrily on one side and then on the other: the dark scowl of the magnificent despot announced his thoughts; and they listened to the thunder of his voice. "I hear," said he, "that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads."[1] I do not recollect whether it was on this occasion that his majesty saluted his faithful Commons as "brutes!" but the burly tyrant treated them as such. The penalty of their debates was to be their heads; therefore this important bill passed _nemine contradicente_! However contemptuously this monarch regarded those who were within his circle, he was sufficiently enlightened in the great national revolution he meditated to desire to gain over the multitude on his side. The very circumstance of the king allowing, as the letters patent run, "the free and liberal use of the Bible in _our own natural English tongue_," was a _coup-d'état_, and an evidence that Henry at one time designed to create a people of readers on whom he counted to side with him. The people were already possessed of the Reformation, before Henry the Eighth had renounced the papacy. The reformers abroad had diligently supplied them with versions of the Scriptures, and no small numbers of pamphlets printed abroad in English were dispersed among the early "gospellers," the expressive distinction of the new heretics; a humble but fervent rabble of tailors, joiners, weavers, and other handicraftsmen, who left "the new for the old God," ready martyrs against the gross papistical impostures, and many females theological, who turned away from the corporal presence, and whom no bishop could seduce to curtsey to a saint.