There was one point on which Henry did incline rather to Cranmer's side; this was auricular confession. Perhaps he dreaded it on political grounds. Now the bishops were urgent for its universal adoption, and Tonstall wrote to the king on the subject. Henry rejected his demand and called him a self-willed man. He seemed thus to draw towards reconciliation with his primate. Nor was this all. A bill had passed withdrawing heretics from the jurisdiction of the bishops, and subjecting them to the secular courts. The chancellor, supported by Cranmer, Cromwell, and Suffolk, and with the sanction of the king, set at liberty the five hundred persons who had been committed to prison. The thunderbolt had indeed trenched the seas, but nobody was hurt--at least for the moment.[302] [Sidenote: THE MOCK SEA-FIGHT.] Henry resorted to other means for the purpose of reassuring those who imagined that the pope was already re-established in England. He exhibited to the citizens of London the spectacle of one of those sea-fights, on which the ancient Romans used to lavish such enormous sums. Two galleys, one of them decorated with the royal ensigns, the other with the papal arms, appeared on the Thames, and a naval combat began. The two crews attacked each other; the struggle was sharp and obstinate; at length the soldiers of the king boarded the enemy and threw into the water amidst the shouts of the people an effigy of the pope and images of several cardinals. The pontifical phantom, seized by bold hands, was dragged through the streets; it was hung, drowned, and burnt.[303] It would have been better for the king to let alone such puerile and vulgar sports, which pleased none but the mob, and to give more serious proofs of his attachment to the Gospel. CHAPTER IV. HENRY VIII. AND ANNE OF CLEVES. (1539-1540.) At the period which we have now reached, Henry VIII. displayed in a more and more marked manner that autocratic disposition which submits to no control. He lifted up or cast down; he crowned men with honors or sent them to the scaffold. He pronounced things white or black as suited him, and there was no other rule but his own absolute and arbitrary power. A simple and modest princess was one of the first to learn by experience that he was a despot in his family as well as in church and state. [Sidenote: ANNE OF CLEVES.]