Yet all this is forgotten or discoloured by reason of the ugly picture of those later days when Morton and Prince Arthur and Elizabeth were gone. It seems, indeed, as though a certain moral deterioration had set in from the time when Henry made up his mind to do violence to his conscience by making away with Warwick in 1499. Morton, his wisest counsellor, of whom More gives a most attractive portrait in the _Utopia_, died the next year; Arthur, whom he loved, in the spring of 1502; Elizabeth, always a refining and softening influence, within a twelvemonth of Arthur. To these latter years belong almost entirely the extortions of Empson and Dudley; the harsh treatment of Katharine of Aragon, a helpless hostage in his hands; the revolting proposal for a union with the crazy Joanna of Castile. This view is further borne out when we observe that in these years also his political foresight degenerates into craftiness, personal animosities playing a larger part. The intellectual falling off is hardly less marked than the moral. For the personal repute of a King who was almost, if not quite, one of the great, it is to be regretted that his last years have cast a permanent cloud over a reign which emphatically made for the good of the nation over which he ruled. CHAPTER V HENRY VIII (i), 1509-27--EGO ET REX MEUS [Sidenote: Europe in 1509] Roughly speaking, the forty years preceding the accession of Henry VIII. had witnessed the birth of modern Europe. The old feudal conception of Christendom had passed away: the modern conception of organic States had taken its place. The English Kings had for some time ceased to hold sway in France, whether as claimants to the throne or as great feudatories. France herself had become a united and aggressive nation; the fusion of the Spanish monarchies was almost completed: the Emperor was no longer regarded as the titular secular head of Christendom, but was virtually the chief of a loose Germanic confederation. The Turk, finally established in Eastern Europe, was shortly to find himself regarded as a possible ally of Christian Powers; Christendom still reckoned the Pope as its spiritual head, but the cataclysm was already preparing; and the enterprise of daring seamen had but just rent the veils that had hidden from the nations of Europe the boundless possibilities of a new world in the West and an ancient world in the East, converting the pathless ocean into the great Highway. [Sidenote: England's position in Europe]