In 1540 Henry VIII. married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. She had been represented as a great beauty by Cromwell, whom the king had raised to power. This Cromwell was a former servant of Cardinal Wolsey. But so great was Henry’s disgust upon beholding the awkward, ill-dressed, ill-featured, German princess, whom he had been inveigled into making his fourth bride, that though the marriage was perforce celebrated according to agreement, the unfortunate Cromwell was soon after disgraced and executed, and the sensitive conscience of the royal hypocrite was once again called into requisition to annul this ill-starred union. The beautiful face of Lady Catharine Howard no doubt quickened the stings of the conveniently tender conscience of this dissembling King of Knaves, who declared with pious cant that, having ascertained that Anne of Cleves had previously been betrothed to the Duke of Lorraine, his punctilious scruples would not allow him to retain her as his wife; whereupon King Henry, who waited not now for pope or bishop to annul his marriage vows and break his conjugal fetters, bestowed upon his divorced wife the title of “Adopted Sister,” which honor poor Anne of Cleves consented to receive, doubtless thanking heaven for having preserved her from the more terrible fate of some of the wives of this fickle consort. By way of celebrating his fifth nuptials, King Henry sent to the stake Dr. Barnes and other heretics, while certain Catholics were quartered for having refused to take the oath of supremacy. This persecution of both parties occasioned the indignation of both Catholics and Protestants. “How do folks manage to live here?” exclaimed a Frenchman, in surprise at such fickle punishments. “The Papists are hanged, and the anti-Papists are burned,” was the answer. But Catharine Howard had not been queen of England one year before her terrible doom overshadowed her. The king discovered certain condemnatory circumstances regarding the conduct of the queen previous to her marriage with him, and in a few short months Catharine also expiated her ambition and her supposed guilt upon the scaffold. King Henry again resorted to his literary pursuits for solace, being for the time disgusted with his experiments in the matrimonial line, as before his hapless wives had also been, and forsooth with graver cause and better reason. “The king had better marry a widow,” said the people; and that idea seeming to have occurred also to the mind of his august majesty, in the year 1543, this “royal Bluebeard of English history” took for his sixth wife, the Lady Catherine Parr, the three months’ widow of Lord Latimer. She was an ardent partisan of the Protestant party, as well as learned and beautiful, but her skill in argument had well-nigh cost her dear.