CHAPTER II.

WRITHINGS OF THE DOWN-TRODDEN.

Of headstrong will!

"O terrible excess

Can this be piety?"-WORDSWORTH.

OTHING is proverbially more inconstant than the taste of monarchs. Of this the history of all palaces, especially the history of English palaces, affords incontestable proof. "Varium et mutabile semper," might be written upon each portico and pediment! Winchester, Westminster, Blackfriars, Crosby Hall, the Tower, Greenwich, Theobald's, Richmond, Hampton Court, Kensington, and others, down to Buckingham Palace, Brighton and Osborne, what "thick-coming fancies"! St. James' and Windsor alone seem permanent; yet the latter has undergone nearly as many changes as all the rest combined. If these variations afford no proof of the stability of

our monarchs' tastes, they at least demonstrate that the attachment of the people to the monarchy is no fitful and uncertain thing. To appropriate structures of which the sovereign has grown weary, though thousands, perhaps millions, of the nation's money have been profusely lavished on the magnificent decoration of them, into hospitals for useless sinecurists, maintained at the public expense, might seem to be adding insult

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to injury. Yet this has been the uniform course of palace transformations! The British people are used to it. grumble, exclaim, resist, threaten, grow furious, and submit. What inhabitant of the metropolis is ignorant of the pleasures of an excursion to Hampton Court? Choose a sunny day,— a small and well-assorted party,- take a return ticket by the railway, and you have within your reach as many materials for enjoyment as can be derived from fresh air, rich scenery, horticultural rarities, the wonders of ancient and modern art, the Cartoons of Raphael included, and abundant historical associations. You can people the scene, if you please, with the successive courts of British monarchs, from Henry VIII. down to George II.; and, should you be well versed in the history of female costume, you can vary the dress into the fashion of each age as it passes: the cap-like head attire of the court of Henry VIII.; the ruff and farthingale of Elizabeth; the thin curls of the date of Charles I.; the hood and close kerchief of the time of Cromwell; the negligent nakedness of the court of Charles II.; the ring-fence, called a hoop, of the period of Queen Anne. If your tastes be architectural, it is probable, indeed, that you will receive a smart shock as you see Wolsey's noble Tudor Gothic side by side with Grecian pillars and porticos, and you may think, somewhat emphatically, of Horace's emblem, which represents the horse's head conjoined with the fish's tail. It may possibly surprise you to learn that Sir Christopher Wren himself, no inferior man, is responsible for these incongruities. But he, too, could plead precedents; and Inigo Jones had marshalled the way to false taste before him. Besides, when royalty commanded, Wren had been more than once made to sacrifice as in the re-building of St. Paul's - his own tastes and convictions. Yet, notwithstanding every apology, it must be acknowledged that Wren did not excel in alterations. With him, indeed, they were never restorations. Lincoln and Westminster Abbey cry shame; and the visitant to Hampton Court deplores the incestuous union which he there witnesses ! "Most lame and impotent conclusion!" But when even "the good Homer is

allowed his occasional nod, we must be patient if Sir Christopher should sometimes betray a similar infirmity.

A noble place is Hampton Court in which to study modern English history! We suggest this hint to parents, and advise them now and then to abandon the labored volumes over which their children are poring, and to give their lessons in some place like this vivâ voce. The course of the projector of this pile is in itself a high moral. How industry and learning can lift a man from littleness; how sensuality, luxury and pride, can thrust him down from greatness; how insecure is the tenure of the mightiest possessions; how the pomp of the world is like the fata morgana

dazzling, indeed, but airy and unsubstantial; how the man who rises suddenly by ambition may fall like lightning down; how adversity often brings out of the humble all the good that was ever in them; how the possessions of the mind transcend and outlast the acquisitions of the powerful; and how a conscience-stricken death-bed is the saddest scene on this side of the infinite; - all these lessons, and many more, are suggested by the name and by the

ancient palace of Cardinal Wolsey. Every court and ornament recalls some passage of his history. Imposingly went forth from under these arches the train of the last of English cardinals,— the last, at least, before Pio Nono imparted new life to a defunct title,

with its array of pursuivants, esquires, retainers, and even nobles; of cross and basin and chalice; whilst in the midst of all rode forth, the reverend priest, his sumptuous array of blazing scarlet relieved only by golden stirrup and ermined fur; himself the personification of grandeur, as his mule was meant to be of humility; uniting thus the opposite emblems of godliness with worldly pride. Sad scene! sadder even in its triumphs than in its catastrophe! We turn from the bloated rich man with disgust; but when we hear the humbled poor man ejaculating, "Vain pomp and glory of the world, I hate ye!" we feel that the moralities of the tragedy are satisfied. About this spot moved, as long as he could move, after Wolsey had resigned Hampton Court to his imperious master, Henry VIII.; passing here through his successive phases of gayety, gallantry, extravagance, selfish hardheartedness, imperious self-will, cruelty, wholesale oppression, bloated animalism, ulcerated death by inches! Here, by the strong will which beat down More, Wolsey, the pope, his successive wives, the great monastic establishments, and which only failed before Luther, he formed, to the extensive injury of his neighbors, and in imitation of the Anglo-Norman sovereigns, an enormous park, which was mercifully de-chased by his successor. Whatever our sympathy with Wolsey may be, who can have any with the brutal tyrant who called himself his lord?

The title of "Head of the Church" was in his case a monstrous anomaly; the Church of England was not wont to set a layman at its head. "The limits of the authority which he possessed as such were not traced, and indeed have never been traced, with precision. The laws which declared him supreme in ecclesiastical matters were drawn rudely, and in general terms. If, for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of those laws, we examine the books and lives of those who founded the English

church, our perplexity will be increased. For the founders of the English church wrote and acted in an age of violent intellectual fermentation, and of constant action and reäction. They, therefore, often contradicted each other, and sometimes contradicted themselves. That the king was, under Christ, sole head of the church, was a doctrine which they all with one voice affirmed; but those words had very different signification in different mouths, and in the same mouth at different conjunctures. Sometimes an authority which would have satisfied Hildebrand was ascribed to the sovereign; then it dwindled down to an authority little more than that which had been claimed by many ancient English princes, who had been in constant communication with the Church of Rome. What Henry and his favorite counsellors meant at one time by the supremacy, was certainly nothing less than the whole power of the keys. The king was to be the pope of his kingdom, the vicar of God, the expositor of catholic verity, the channel of sacramental grace. He arrogated to himself the right of deciding dogmatically what was orthodox doctrine and what was heresy, of drawing up and imposing confessions of faith, and of giving religious instruction to his people. He proclaimed that all jurisdiction, spiritual as well as temporal, was derived from him alone, and that it was in his power to confer episcopal authority and to take it away. He actually ordered his seal to be put to commissions by which bishops were appointed, who were to exercise their functions as his deputies and during his pleasure. According to this system, as expounded by Cranmer, the king was the spiritual as well as the temporal chief of the nation. In both capacities his highness must have lieutenants. As he appointed civil officers to keep his seal, to collect his revenues, and to dispense justice in his name, so he appointed divines, of various ranks, to preach the gospel and to administer the sacraIt was unnecessary that there should be any imposition of hands. The king—such was the opinion of Cranmer, given in the plainest words might, in virtue of authority derived from God, make a priest; and the priest so made needed no ordination

ments.