CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.
EDWARD THE SIXTH, THE GOOD KING OF ENGLAND.
It was a strange moment in the history of England when the great King Henry the Eighth.

("Bluff King Hal," as his subjects called him) breathed his last.

However popular he may have been on account of his courage and energy, he possessed vices which must always withhold from him the name of a _good_ king, and which, in fact, rendered his reign a continuous scene of cruelty and oppression.

People were sick of hearing of the king and his wives--how he had beheaded one, and put away another, and ill-treated another, for no reason at all but his own selfish caprice.

And men trembled for their lives when they remembered how Wolsey, and More, and Cromwell, and others had been sacrificed to the whimsical temper of this tyrannical sovereign.