Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/225

] Catherine contumacious, and on the 23rd, that her marriage was null and invalid from the beginning. On the 28th, in a court held at Lambeth, the archbishop pronounced the king's marriage with Anne Boleyn to be good and valid. On the 1st of June, being Whit Sunday, Anne was crowned with every possible degree of pomp and display. She was first brought by the Lord Mayor from the palace at Greenwich in a gay procession of barges to the Tower. Then, after some days, a brilliant procession of noblemen, great prelates, and ambassadors, conducted her through the streets of London in an open litter covered with cloth of gold shot with white, and the two palfreys which supported the litter clad, heads and all, in a garb of white damask. The queen was dressed in a surcoat of silver tissue, and a mantle of the same lined with ermine. Her dark tresses were worn flowing down her shoulders; but on her head she wore a coif with a circlet of precious rubies. Over her head was borne a canopy carried by four knights on foot.

The streets were hung with crimson and scarlet, and that part of Cheapside with cloth of gold and velvet. There were all sorts of pageants, in which pagan deities mingled freely with Christian emblems. No coronation had ever been witnessed at Westminster more costly or brilliant. Anne, being now far advanced in pregnancy, must have found it a most fatiguing ceremony. Cranmer, of course, placed the crown upon her head.



Henry, notwithstanding his separation from Rome, was anxious to obtain the sanction of his marriage by the Pope; but instead of that, Clement fulminated his denunciations against him over Europe. He annulled Cranmer's sentence on Henry's first marriage, and published a bull excommunicating Henry and Anne, unless they separated before the next September, when the new queen expected her confinement. Henry dispatched ambassadors to the different foreign courts to announce his marriage, and the reasons which had led him to it; but from no quarter did he receive much gratulation. One person in particular wrote to him in the most cutting and unsparing strain. This was Cardinal Pole, a near kinsman of his, whom he had used great endeavours to win to his side.

When the bishoprics of Winchester and York became vacant by the death of Wolsey, the king would fain have conferred one of them on Pole, whom he had educated and destined for the highest offices of the Church. The young clergyman could not conscientiously approve of Henry's divorce scheme, and accordingly fell under his displeasure. Henry, however, permitted him to retire to the Continent, and, having been educated in Italy, he there soon received the cardinal's hat from the Pope.

The people, from one end of the country to the other, were on the side of Catherine. They justly looked upon her as a virtuous, amiable, and religious queen, who was thrust aside to make way for a younger rival; and they did not hesitate to express their opinion of that rival's conduct. They cried out against "Nan Bullen" lustily on all occasions, and declared that they would have none of her. The monastic orders, who were writhing under the privation of their ancient houses and estates, and who foresaw further and more extensive spoliations in the Reformation tendencies of Cranmer and the new queen, preached everywhere hatred to the "Bullen" usurper of the throne, and bold denunciations of the licentious conduct of the king himself. One Friar Peyto, a very devout and zealous member of the order of Observants, preached before the king and queen at