By all these acts of violence, the pope was at length incited to publish the bull which had been passed against the king of England ; and having hopes, from the recon ciliation which had now taken place between Charles and Francis, that they would unite in the execution of the sentence, he publicly delivered Henry's soul to the devil, and his dominions to the first invader. Libels were dispersed anew, denouncing him as worse than all preceding persecutors, and particularly reproaching him with his resemblance to the Emperor Julian, whom he was said to have imitated in his learning and apostacy, while he was much inferior to him in point of morals. In some of these publications, Henry discovered the pen of his kinsman Cardinal Pole, whom he had origi,, nally distinguished with his favour, but who had taken a violent part against the king in support of the papal claims. Several of the nobility were brought to trial, and condemned to death for having joined in a conspi racy with the cardinal, in the design, as was suspected, of raising him to the throne by a marriage with the Prin cess Mary.
Though Henry had greatly changed the theological sentiments in which he had been educated, he was ex tremely bigotted and dogmatical in the support of those which he retained; and so much had his native arro gance been inflamed by the flattery of his courtiers, that lie thought himself entitled to regulate, by his own pri vate standard, the religious faith of the whole nation. He particularly rested his orthodoxy upon the most ab surd of all the popish tenets, namely, the doctrine of transubstantiation; and determined to maintain, in this essential article, the purity of the Catholic faith, he de nounced all departure from the belief of this point as he retical and detestable. In his vanity and zeal, lie even held a public disputation on the subject with one Lam bert, a schoolmaster, who had appealed to the king's judgment ; and who was cruelly burned at the stake, for his opposition to this favourite test. In the parliament a bill was passed, called by the Protestants the 44 bloody statute," which reduced the essential articles of religion to the number of six, namely, the real presence, commu nion in one kind, the perpetual obligation of vows of chas tity, the celibacy of the clergy, the utility of private masses, and the necessity of auricular confession. A de nial of any of these points was punishable with death ; and, even though recanted, subjected the offender to the forfeiture of his goods, and imprisonment during the king's pleasure : but, in the case of the first, the privi lege of recantation was not admitted ; which was a degree of severity hitherto unexampled, and even unknown tc the inquisition uself. With the most abject servility, the parliament enacted 1vIlatcver the king and his minis ters thought proper to dictate ; confirmed the surrender of the monasteries, and secured the property of the ab bey lands to the king- tinl his successors ever ; attaint ed of high treason, without any legal evidence or inquiry, but 'won a mere suspicion of having aided the insurgents, the Nlarchioness of Exeter, the Countess of Salisbury, Sir Adrian Fortescue, and Sir Thomas Dingley,—the two last of whom were executed ; and at last, in one sweep ing act, made an entire surrender of all their civil liber ties, by giving to the king's proclamations the same force as a parliamentary statute.
As soon as the act of the six articles had passed, not less than 500 persons, in consequence of the zeal with which the Catholics informed against offenders, were committed to prison ; but though Cranmer, Cromwell, and others favourable to the Protestant cause, had not been able to prevent the passing of the act, they found means to ellide its execution; and, in consequence of their remonstrating against the cruelty of punishing so many delinquents, they were all set at liberty. The king, at the same time, as if desirous to give each party an op portunity of triumphing in turn, permitted every indi vidual to have in his family a copy of the new transla tion of the Bible.
In the course of the year which followed the death of Queen Jane, Henry had been engaged in several matri monial treaties, particularly with the duchess dowager of Milan, and with Mary of Guise, who married James V. of Scotland ; but at length, by the advice of Cromwell, he contracted a match with a Protestant princess, Anne of Cleves, of whom a flattering portrait had been shcwn to him, and whose relations had great weight among the Lutheran leaders. Finding, however, that her beauty did not correspond with the descriptions which he had received, he conceived a strong dislike to her person ; and was induced, from mere political motives, to com plete the marriage.
A parliament was this year assembled, in which none of the abbots or priors were allowed a place ; and the king, after informing them by the mouth of the chancel lor, that, in consequence of the great diversity of reli gions which still prevailed, he had appointed some emi nent divines to draw up a list of tenets to which his sub jects were to assent, proceeded to make the very unex pected demand of a subsidy, on account of the great ex pence which he had incurred in putting the kingdom in a proper state of defence. Already had he dissipated the immense sums which he had acquired by the plun der of the church, and he had this very year suppressed the only remaining religious order in England, the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, or " the Knights of Malta," as they are commonly called, whose large re venues formed no contemptible addition to the spoil which he had collected from the monasteries. The commons, though lavish of the liberty and blood of their fellow subjects, were sufficiently frugal of their money; and, had it not been owing to the earnest desire of both the Protestant and the Popish parties to gain the king to their views, he would have found it no easy matter to procure their consent to a demand, which was so con trary to all the expectations which had recently been held out to the public, of a long exemption from sup plies to the crown.