As one of the consequences of an unwarrantable act of piracy near the English coast in the autumn of 1533, Henry had been able to get hold of a prominent young man of the violently Protestant town of Lübeck, by name Mark Meyer. At London he was treated with the greatest courtesy by the King and Cromwell, and returned to his native city invested with the honour of knighthood[555]. Such bounty was seldom showered on anybody by Henry VIII. without some ulterior purpose, and Meyer’s case was no exception to the general rule. It soon transpired that proposals had been made for a close alliance between England and Lübeck[556]. Ever since the peace of Stralsund in 1370, the cities of the Hanseatic League had claimed a decisive voice in the affairs of the neighbouring realm of Denmark[557]: the death of the king of that country in April, 1533, had left the throne vacant, and Lübeck was at this moment bent on obtaining the disposal of it. Henry signified his willingness to aid the Lübeckers in this enterprise, on condition that they would promise that if they were successful they would be guided by him in the final bestowal of the Danish crown. In May, 1534, the Lübeckers sent an embassy to England[558], and the proposals of the previous year were accepted. The new alliance had a very important bearing on the larger issues of Henry’s foreign policy. The social and political revolution which had been in progress in Lübeck since 1530 had placed the power in the hands of a party whose anti-papal tendencies were fully as violent as those of the Wittenberg theologians, and whose conscientious scruples were of less weight, when thrown into the scales of political expediency[559]. The treaty concluded with England contained certain doctrinal statements which lay suspiciously close to the needs of Henry’s immediate position[560], and the King must have been at least temporarily convinced that he had obtained a valuable ally against the See of Rome. The treaty with Lübeck was also a very distinct move against the Emperor, for an Imperial candidate had been proposed for the vacant throne of Denmark, and by supporting the Lübeckers Henry necessarily opposed Charles. But the new alliance failed to accomplish what was expected of it: in fact it actually worked to England’s disadvantage. Before its conclusion, George Wullenwever, the demagogue whom the recent upheaval had rendered temporarily supreme in Lübeck, had offered to support the claims of the Lutheran Duke of Holstein to the Danish throne; but when Holstein, unwilling to gain his ends by force, prudently refused the proffered aid, the friendship of the Lübeckers was converted into bitter enmity. They soon invaded his lands, but were repulsed and besieged in turn in their own city: a peace of a most extraordinary nature finally resulted, by which an agreement was reached in regard to the affairs of Holstein, though both parties reserved the