possessors of all heretical writings, but they were set at nought.[214] Spies were encouraged; the husband tempted to betray the wife, the parent the child, and a man’s foes became literally those of his own household.[215] Nay, more, by a refinement in cruelty, the strongest instincts of nature were outraged, and a daughter was compelled to fire the fagots with her own hands, by which her father was to be burned.[216] But measures like these were only calculated to defeat the object which they were intended to promote. Strong public feeling, when matured in its growth and righteous in its principle, cannot be effectually suppressed--check it, and it rages impatiently; whilst, if its fair course be not hindered, it may only make sweet music. CHAPTER VII. CRANMER.--THE DIVORCE.--THE SUPREMACY. We have now touched upon a few of the many elements which were secretly at work preparing England for a reformation of religion, and without some regard to which it would be impossible to account for the rapid pace at which it was consummated: let us but shut our eyes to this undercurrent of events--take our stand at the accession of Henry the Eighth--and endeavour to guess at the future; and what could seem to us more improbable, than that a reign so begun was destined to effect the extinction of the papal power in England? Henry mounted the throne with a treasury full to overflowing, the fruits of a revenue improved by the wisdom of his father’s laws, by the care with which that sagacious monarch husbanded the nation’s purse, and, it must be added, by the rapacity of Dudley and Empson, his fiscal officers; who then would conjecture that an exhausted exchequer was to drive him to the plunder of the church, in order to continue the profusion which its affluence had taught him?--He had mounted the throne a zealous papist and a learned, having been himself intended, it was said, for the see of Canterbury, had not the death of his elder brother put the crown upon his head instead of the mitre; ambitious, moreover, of papal distinctions, and eventually able to procure them by entering the lists with Luther as a volunteer champion of the ancient creed; who would then conjecture that the title of “Defender of the Faith,” in the sense in which it was conferred upon him, was the very last to which he was to have a just claim?--He mounted the throne, having Katherine, his brother’s widow, for his wife by a dispensation from the Pope, who counted it the ratification of his own authority in England, that her very princes were thenceforth to derive their title to the crown from the validity of this his bull; who then would conjecture that this stroke of policy, as it was thought, for which a point had been strained at Rome, was to be precisely the ruin of the politician, and that the subversion of papal usurpation in England would be actually effected by the very measure which was to have confirmed it? Amongst