DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

England to an unprecedented position in the councils of the nations; but he stained his reign by the exercise of despotic power, and left at his death, in 1547, a gloomy record of tyrannical abuse. Parliamentary institutions were still in their infancy ; Parliament was only convoked to ratify his arbitrary decrees ; ministers and bishops who attempted to interfere with his whims he sent to the Tower and the scaffold. Profligate as he was cruel, he married no less than six times, and divorced or beheaded his wives when he grew tired of them. His second wife, Anna Boleyn, whose head fell under the executioner’s axe, bore to him, in 1533, the Princess Elizabeth. We, who live under free and liberal institutions, can hardly realise the condition of the people of England towards the middle of the sixteenth cen- tury. The laws, which now afford to all alike ample safeguard and protection, were then ill-de- fined and irregularly applied. The dominant law of the land was brute force, which was in the hands of the great feudatories of the Crown, and was exercised by them without restraint against any kind of civil, political, and religious offender. There was a prison in every parish; not only every town but every castle had its dungeon, places of the foulest description, without ventilation, damp and pestilential, stifling in summer, icy in winter. —————