wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the succession question. Question of the king's divorce. In the later years of Wolsey's ascendancy, nevertheless, that same question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry's own mind it was never long absent; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing tired of his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid. Somewhere about the end of 1526 those who were in the king's intimate confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce--a thing not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But Henry's doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had become enamoured of another lady--the beautiful, ambitious and cunning Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of becoming merely the king's mistress, but aspired to be his consort. England and the Reformation. The question of the king's divorce soon became inextricably confused with another problem, whose first beginnings go back to a slightly earlier date. What was to be the attitude of England towards the Reformation? It was now nearly ten years since Martin Luther had posted up his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and since he had testified to his faith before the diet of Worms. All Germany was now convulsed with the first throes of the revolt against the papacy, and the echoes of the new theological disputes were being heard in England. King Henry himself in 1521 had deigned to write an abusive pamphlet against Luther, for which he had been awarded the magnificent title of _Fidei Defensor_ by that cultured sceptic Pope Leo X. About the same time we begin to read of orders issued by the bishops for the discovery and burning of all Lutheran books--a clear sign that they were reaching England in appreciable quantities. Hitherto it had been only the works of Wycliffe that had merited this attention on the part of inquisitors. In the Wycliffite remnant, often persecuted but never exterminated, there already existed in England the nucleus of a Protestant party. All through the reign of Henry VII. and the early years of Henry VIII. the intermittent burning of "heretics," and their far more frequent recantations, had borne witness to the fact that the sect still lingered on. The Wycliffites were a feeble folk, compelled to subterraneous ways, and destitute of learned leaders or powerful supporters. But they survived to see Luther's day, and to merge themselves in one body with the first English travelling scholars and merchants who brought back from the continent the doctrines of the German Reformation. The origins of a Protestant party, who were not mere Wycliffites, but had been first interested in dogmatic controversy by