How did the English Reformation come about? During nearly forty years in the first half of the sixteenth century (1509 to 1547) England was ruled by the last of her really despotic kings, Henry VIII. As everybody knows, Henry had a peculiar domestic experience,—he married in succession six wives. As fresh fancies took him, he rid himself of four of these—two by divorce, and two by the headsman’s axe. One wife, Jane Seymour, died in childbirth of his only son, who succeeded him as Edward VI. Wife No. 6, by her extraordinary prudence contrived to escape destruction, and survived the kingly monster. _This_ is a harsh term for the historical father of the English church, and some modern historians of ability and repute have done their best—as has been done in the cases of Macbeth and Richard III., as these kings are portrayed by Shakespeare—to partially whitewash Henry. That he was, in common parlance, a great king, and a man of ability, of energy and decision, and that under him England prospered, and held an advanced position amongst the nations, few will dispute; but that he was a cruel, lustful, selfish tyrant seems equally undeniable. He made use of men and women as subservient to his will or his pleasure, and when his ends were so served, he ruthlessly destroyed them. His great minister, Wolsey, would not bend to his wishes in the matter of divorcing his first wife, so Wolsey was degraded, and in his old age sent into seclusion, to die of a broken heart. And in succession Thomas Cromwell, Sir Thomas More, and the Earl of Surrey, suffered the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Henry, when a young man, opposed the Reformation. He wrote a book against Luther and his heresies, which so pleased the Pope that he granted Henry the title of _Defender of the Faith_. This papal title has passed down by inheritance through all succeeding English sovereigns; every coin from the mintage of Queen Victoria bears its initial letters. Henry first married, under the Pope’s dispensation, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, Catherine of Arragon, by whom he had a daughter, afterwards Queen Mary. But the King fell in love—if, in the passions of such a man, the noble word _love_ can be rightly used—with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s lady attendants. To gain Anne, Henry, after a number of years of wedded life with Catherine, all at once became conscience- stricken that his marriage with her was an unlawful one; and he asked the Pope to recall his dispensation and annul the marriage. Now, Catherine was sister to the Emperor of Germany, Charles the Fifth, one of the Pope’s best supporters in these sad Reformation times. And, moreover, to have rescinded the dispensation would have been an admission of papal fallibility; so the Pope gave Henry a refusal.