Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/273

 with Gardiner and not with Cranmer. The extinction of the Norfolk interest might have led him to further negotiations with protestantism abroad, but with domestic Puritanism, such as that by which Somerset palliated his greed for confiscation, there is no trace in Henry. For spoil however the old lion went on yearning to the last; the dissolution of chantries and colleges, to follow that of the monasteries, was one of the measures of his last parliament.

It may strike some of us that the process of change had now gone far enough; the English Church was freed from the yoke of Rome, but she retained all her proper framework and at least half of her old endowments; I say at least half, I should not like to commit myself to a statement that there was much more. She had obtained the Bible in English and the use of the chief forms of prayer in the vernacular, and was preparing for a revision in form of the Sacramental Services; she had rid herself of a mass of superstitious usages. It is true that the king remained a believer in Roman Catholic forms of doctrine; but it must always be remembered that those forms had not yet, by the Tridentine decrees, been hardened into their later inflexibility; and, when we consider the terrible risks which, in the next reign, the Church of England ran, of losing all sense or desire of continuity, identity, or communion with the historic Catholic Christendom, we may feel thankful that such risk was run under a weak king and feeble ministers, not under the influence of a strong win and strong hand like Henry's.

You will see thus that I believe him to have been a man of purpose; not the mere capricious tyrant who found it a pleasant exercise of despotic power to burn Catholics and Protestants on the same day, or found a malicious gratification in making Cranmer support the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist and Gardiner the doctrine of unlimited obedience: further than this I do not go. I believe him to have been a man of unbounded selfishness; a man to whom the acquisition of power was precious mainly as a step towards the acquisition of greater power; a man of whom we may say, as I said at first, that he was the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king;