his people should own him as such; but the good ones knew that our Lord Jesus Christ is the only real Head of the Church, and they had learnt to believe that the pope is the father bishop of the west, though he had sometimes taken more power than he ought, and no king could ever be the same as a patriarch or father bishop.  So they refused, and Henry cut off the heads of two of the best—­Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More—­ though they had been his great friends.  Sir Thomas More’s good daughter Margaret, came and kissed him on his way to be executed; and afterwards, when his head was placed on a spike on London Bridge, she came by night in a boat and took it home in her arms.

There were many people, however, who were glad to break with the pope, because so much had gone amiss in the Church, and they wanted to set it to rights.  There was so much more reading, now that printing had been invented, that many could read who had never learnt Latin, and so a translation of the Bible was to be made for them, and there was a great desire that the Church Services—­many of which had also been in Latin—­should likewise be put into English, and the litany was first translated, but no more at present.  The king and Crumwell had taken it upon them to go on with what had been begun in Wolsey’s time—­the looking into the state of all the monasteries.  Some were found going on badly, and the messengers took care to make the worst of everything.  So all the worst houses were broken up, and the monks sent to their homes, with a small payment to maintain them for the rest of their lives.

As to the lands that good men of old had given to keep up the convents, that God might be praised there, Henry made gifts of them to the lords about Court.  Whoever chose to ask for an abbey could get it, from the king’s good nature; and, as they wanted more and more, Henry went on breaking up the monasteries, till the whole of them were gone.  A good deal of their riches he kept for himself, and two new bishoprics were endowed from their spoils, but most of them were bestowed on the courtiers.  The king, however, did not at all intend to change the teaching of the Church, and whenever a person was detected in teaching any thing contrary to her doctrines, as they were at the time understood, he was tried by a court of clergymen and lawyers before the bishop, and, if convicted, was—­according to the cruel custom of those times—­burnt to death at a stake in the market place of the next town.

Meantime, the new queen, Anne Boleyn, whom the king had married privately in May, 1533, had not prospered.  She had one little daughter, named Elizabeth, and a son, who died; and then the king began to admire one of her ladies, named Jane Seymour.  Seeing this Anne’s enemies either invented stories against her, or made the worst of some foolish, unlady-like, and unqueen-like things she had said and done, so that the king thought she wished for his death.  She was accused of high treason, sentenced to death, and beheaded:  thus paying a heavy price for the harm she had done good Queen Katharine.