The history of Henry VIII has less in it to make historians disagree. His uxoriousness represents the explanation of the revolutionary changes that took place in the government and the religion of England. He fell in love with a younger, handsomer woman than the elderly wife, who for more than twenty years had been, as he confessed himself, his faithful, loving spouse, and then his first marriage got on his conscience. The succeeding marriages are the best commentary on this explanation. His father, Henry VII, had left him a full treasury, and the son had spent liberally during the early years of his reign, and finally the famous Field of the Cloth of Gold had almost exhausted the crown's resources. Many a nobleman had literally carried his estates on his back and returned from France so heavily mortgaged that the power of the nobles was broken. This made most of them thoroughly {256} dependent on the King. When the trouble with the Church came then, the King himself and most of the nobles were rather glad of the opportunity to obtain possession of the Church properties, the estates of the great monasteries, and the many foundations for charitable and social purposes that existed in connection with Church societies. All of these might well be brought under the law of the confiscation so as to fatten the Royal treasury, or at least fall to an expectant sycophantic nobility. The question that many have been unable to answer satisfactorily for themselves is how could the religion of a whole people be taken from them under such sordid circumstances if they really held it. It has been supposed that the change was made possible only by the fact that for centuries there had been a growing feeling in England of opposition to a foreign spiritual ruler, the Pope, and that this culminated in Henry VIII's time and enabled him to assume the headship of the English Church. James Gairdner has, however, dispelled this idea completely, though himself an Anglican, and like Augustus Jessop continuing in his adherence to the English Church. He shows in his book on Lollardism that there was no widespread growing feeling of opposition to Rome, and that while of course occasionally, when there were difficulties between the crown and the Pope, mutterings of spiritual insubordination were heard, which took the form expressed by Shakespeare through the mouth of King John in his play, these were but temporary and individual and not at all a growing sentiment of wide diffusion. England up to Henry's time had been one of the most faithful countries of Europe in the support of the Papacy, and continued to be so until the change actually came.