She sat and watched complacently as her children drove back the infidel Saracens, conscious of her own growing strength, and that she was becoming still stronger as those three tidal waves of religious frenzy swept over Europe into the Holy Land. There was no question of supremacy now between temporal and spiritual heads. All the lines of power--all the threads of human destiny--led to Rome, and were found at last in the papal hand. But these were halcyon days. There was a cloud already on the horizon, the size of a man's hand, and that hand was--Wickliffe's--the hand which had torn the veil of mystery from the Bible by translating it into the speech of the common people, the hand which had written words inciting rebellion against church authority. The clouds grew larger and darker when printing came, disseminating the new heresies. The Bible was broadcast in the hands of the people, who began to manifest a dangerous tendency to think! The whole enginery of thumbscrew, rack, and stake was set to work. Tender human flesh shrinks from burning, lacerating, and torture, so the griefs, longings, and aspirations of thousands of hearts flowed in streams deep down below the surface, coming to light here and there for brief moments among the followers of Huss, the Albigenses, the Waldenses, only to be driven back again into silence and despair. CHAPTER VII. In the early part of the sixteenth century the fate of Europe was in the hands of three men--Charles V., Emperor of Germany; Francis I., King of France, and Henry VIII., King of England. Charles was half Fleming and half Spaniard, with the grasping acquisitiveness of the one nation, and the proud, fanatical cruelty of the other. Small of stature, plain in feature, sedate, quiet, crafty, he was playing a desperate game with Francis I. for supremacy in Europe. Francis, handsome as an Apollo, accomplished, fascinating, profligate, was fully his match in ambition. Covering his worst qualities with a gorgeous mantle of generosity and chivalrous sense of honor, he was the insidious corrupter of morals in France; creating a sentiment which laughed at virtue and innocence as qualities belonging to a lower class of society. Each of these men was striving to enlist Henry VIII. upon his side, by appealing to the cruel caprices of that vain, ostentatious, arrogant king, who in turn tried to use them for the furthering of his own desires and purposes.