Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/301

 ecclesiastical bills pass without a protest, but the Lords are not reduced so low as they were in 1540. The remaining sessions, those of 1544, 1545, and 1546, furnish nothing' that illustrates our subject: the journals record no opposition or protest; the king has his own way in everything. Time would fail me if I were to attempt to go into the minor parliamentary cases of privilege, or to clothe or colour the dry facts that I have been retailing to you; or I might describe how, when the Duke of Suffolk opened parliament, all the members, every time the king's name occurred, bowed until their heads all but touched the ground; or how Henry himself closed the session of 1545 with a sermon on charity; how in 1515 parliament and convocation were so comfortably at one that Taylor, the clerk of the parliament, was prolocutor of the Lower House of Canterbury: or how ecstatically Hare and Moyle praised the beauty of their royal master; or how, when he brought the news of the king's death, the rough old Wriothesley could not speak for tears: or how weary the clerk of the parliament was of Audley's speeches, which took such a long time to deliver, and so much more to write out and read.

All our authorities, even the dry journals themselves, furnish matters of amusement to inquiring minds. But time has failed me already, and I must wind up with a few words of sentiment.

I think, that after what I have said, you will allow me to say that I have grounds for believing that Henry VIII was the master, and in no sense the minister, of his people: that, where he carried their good will with him, it was y forcing not by anticipating or even educating it. I am obliged altogether to reject the notion that he was the interpreter in any sense of the wishes of his people: the utmost that he did in this direction was to manipulate and utilise their prejudices to his own purposes. I allow fully the truth of the theory that one great principle of his policy was to obtain for his measures, for all his measures, the acquiescence of his people, and thus to invest them with a safe, irrefragable authority; but I must add that he knew how to