At the same time it made Henry popular with the
merchants and tradespeople, who as the proud and prosperous
inhabitants of an island which was separated from the rest of
Europe by a wide and deep channel, had a great dislike for
everything ``foreign'' and did not want an Italian bishop to rule
their honest British souls.
In 1517 Henry died. He left the throne to his small son,
aged ten. The guardians of the child, favoring the modern
Lutheran doctrines, did their best to help the cause of Protestantism.
But the boy died before he was sixteen, and was succeeded
by his sister Mary, the wife of Philip II of Spain, who
burned the bishops of the new ``national church'' and in other
ways followed the example of her royal Spanish husband
Fortunately she died, in the year 1558, and was succeeded
by Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,
the second of his six wives, whom he had decapitated when she
no longer pleased him. Elizabeth, who had spent some time in
prison, and who had been released only at the request of the
Holy Roman Emperor, was a most cordial enemy of everything
Catholic and Spanish. She shared her father's indifference
in the matter of religion but she inherited his ability as a
very shrewd judge of character, and spent the forty-five years
of her reign in strengthening the power of the dynasty and in
increasing the revenue and possessions of her merry islands.
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