Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/162

142 But this uncertain attitude could not be maintained for ever. A crisis came which compelled him to choose his course.

Edward with varying health had arrived at the age fatal to the male Tudors, the age at which Prince Arthur had died, at which his brother the Duke of Richmond had died. The cough to which he was always subject had increased in the late winter. He dissolved Parliament in person, but immediately after he was removed to Greenwich in a state of marked debility, and by the end of April the gravest alarms were entertained for his life. Philosophers, who believe that great events are enveloped in great causes, that the future is evolved out of the present by laws unerring as those which regulate the processes of nature, can see in the grandest of individual men but instruments which might easily have been dispensed with; and in the cracking of the thread of a human soul but a melting raindrop, or a leaf fluttering from a bough. Centuries, it may be, take their complexion from these large influences; and broad laws of progress may shape the moulds for the casting of eras; but the living Englishman of the sixteenth century would have seen in these closet speculations but the shadow of a dream compared with the interests which depended on the result of the illness of a boy who was not yet sixteen. The eyes of England, of the Emperor, of the Pope, of the King of France, of all the civilized world, were turned with almost equal agitation to the sick-bed at Greenwich.

The reverses of France in the autumn of 1552 had