but he, knowing better than to come, and wisely staying where he
was, the King’s rage fell upon his brother Lord Montague, the
Marquis of Exeter, and some other gentlemen: who were tried for
high treason in corresponding with him and aiding him – which they
probably did – and were all executed. The Pope made Reginald Pole
a cardinal; but, so much against his will, that it is thought he
even aspired in his own mind to the vacant throne of England, and
had hopes of marrying the Princess Mary. His being made a high
priest, however, put an end to all that. His mother, the venerable
Countess of Salisbury – who was, unfortunately for herself, within
the tyrant’s reach – was the last of his relatives on whom his
wrath fell. When she was told to lay her grey head upon the block,
she answered the executioner, ‘No! My head never committed
treason, and if you want it, you shall seize it.’ So, she ran
round and round the scaffold with the executioner striking at her,
and her grey hair bedabbled with blood; and even when they held her
down upon the block she moved her head about to the last, resolved
to be no party to her own barbarous murder. All this the people
bore, as they had borne everything else.
Indeed they bore much more; for the slow fires of Smithfield were
continually burning, and people were constantly being roasted to
death – still to show what a good Christian the King was. He
defied the Pope and his Bull, which was now issued, and had come
into England; but he burned innumerable people whose only offence
was that they differed from the Pope’s religious opinions. There
was a wretched man named LAMBERT, among others, who was tried for
this before the King, and with whom six bishops argued one after
another. When he was quite exhausted (as well he might be, after
six bishops), he threw himself on the King’s mercy; but the King
blustered out that he had no mercy for heretics. So, HE too fed
the fire.
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Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
All this the people bore, and more than all this yet. The national
spirit seems to have been banished from the kingdom at this time.
The very people who were executed for treason, the very wives and
friends of the ‘bluff’ King, spoke of him on the scaffold as a good
prince, and a gentle prince – just as serfs in similar
circumstances have been known to do, under the Sultan and Bashaws
of the East, or under the fierce old tyrants of Russia, who poured
boiling and freezing water on them alternately, until they died.
The Parliament were as bad as the rest, and gave the King whatever
he wanted; among other vile accommodations, they gave him new
powers of murdering, at his will and pleasure, any one whom he
might choose to call a traitor. But the worst measure they passed
was an Act of Six Articles, commonly called at the time ‘the whip
with six strings;’ which punished offences against the Pope’s
opinions, without mercy, and enforced the very worst parts of the
monkish religion. Cranmer would have modified it, if he could;
but, being overborne by the Romish party, had not the power. As
one of the articles declared that priests should not marry, and as
he was married himself, he sent his wife and children into Germany,
and began to tremble at his danger; none the less because he was,
and had long been, the King’s friend. This whip of six strings was
made under the King’s own eye. It should never be forgotten of him
how cruelly he supported the worst of the Popish doctrines when
there was nothing to be got by opposing them.
This amiable monarch now thought of taking another wife. He
proposed to the French King to have some of the ladies of the
French Court exhibited before him, that he might make his Royal
choice; but the French King answered that he would rather not have
his ladies trotted out to be shown like horses at a fair. He