Geographically, the country was about equally divided between Catholicism and Protestantism.  The northwestern half clung to the ancient faith; the southeastern half, including most of the large cities where Wycliffe’s doctrines had formerly prevailed was favorable to the Reformation.

On the one hand, Henry prohibited the Lutheran or Protestant doctrine (S340); on the other, he caused the Bible to be translated (SS254, 339), and ordered a copy to be chained to a desk in every parish church in England (1538); but though all persons might now freely read the Scriptures, no one but the clergy was allowed to interpret them.  Later in his reign, the King became alarmed at the spread of discussion about religious subjects, and prohibited the reading of the Bible by the “lower sort of people.”

358.  Henry versus Treason.

Men now found themselves in a strange and cruel delimma.  If it was dangerous to believe too much, it was equally dangerous to believe too little.  Traitor and heretic were dragged to execution on the same hurdle; for Henry burned as heretics those who declared their belief in Protestantism, and hanged or beheaded, as traitors, those who acknowledged the authority of the Pope and denied the supremacy of the King (S349).

Thus Anne Askew, a young and beautiful woman, was nearly wrenched asunder on the rack, in the hope of making her implicate the Queen in her heresy.  She was afterward burned because she insisted that the bread and wine used in the communion service seemed to her to be simply bread and wine, and not in any sense the actual body and blood of Christ, as the King’s statute of the Six Articles (S357) solemnly declared.

On the other hand, the aged Countess of Salisbury suffered for treason; but with a spirit matching the King’s, she refused to kneel at the block, and told the executioner he must get her gray head off as best he could.

359.  Henry’s Death.

But the time was at hand when Henry was to cease his hangings, beheadings, and marriages.  Worn out with debauchery, he died at the age of fifty-six, a loathsome, unwieldy, and helpless mass of corruption.  In his will he left a large sum of money to pay for perpetual prayers for the repose of his soul.  Sir Walter Raleigh said of him, “If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.”

It may be well to remember this, and along with it this other saying of one of the ablest writers on English constitutional history, that “the world owes some of tis greatest debts to men from whose memory it recoils."[1] The obligation it is under to Henry VIII is that through his influence—­no matter what the motive—­England was lifted up out of the old medieval ruts, and placed squarely and securely on the new highway of national progress.

[1] W. Stubbs’s “Constitutional History of England.”