on London Bridge, but we know very little about him beyond the fact that he was with us for some four or five years, during which, through the penurious policy of Henry VII., we lost the honour of sharing with his brother in the discovery of America.1

Perceiving the error he had made in not listening to Bartolomeo Colombo, the King endeavoured to retrieve his mistake by granting Letters Patent, dated March 5, 1496, to the Venetian, Sebastian Cabot, and his three sons, five ships "to navigate all parts of the east, west, and northern seas, for the discovery of countries which had never been visited by Christians." They set out on March 1499, one from Bristol and four from London, laden with light wares, and went as far as the north side of the Terra de Labradore, latitude 67. According to Hakluyt, Cabot on his first voyage discovered Newfoundland and the isle of St. John. When he returned to London, he brought back with him three natives of Florida; he had even sailed as far south as that semi-tropical land. Marvellous tales had he to tell the listening King, who in an ecstasy of delight presented the Discoverer to the Queen and Royal Family, and, moreover, entertained him at a banquet. Londoners, doubtless, went wild over the Indians, their feather head-dresses and their dusky skins. The Royal Household Books disclose the following generous entry : "A present to him that found the New Isle, £10."

No doubt the success of this venture inspired the King and his people with a keen interest in the possibilities of the newfound lands, and eventually led to the issue of a charter conferring fresh privileges on the Association, or Fellowship, of the Merchant Adventurers of England, who for the next two hundred years were to be so pre-eminently successful in planting the British flag on lands then unheard of. Cabot, when an old man, received a pension from Edward vi., to whom one day at Greenwich Palace he demonstrated the wonders of the mariner's compass. According to Richard Biddle, he died in London in his eighty-fourth year-but no particulars or names of authorities are given for his statement.2

1 Vita di Bartolomeo Colombo. Michaeli, Geneva, 1792.

2 Richard Biddle's Life of Sebastian Cabot. Philadelphia and London, 1830. See also a curious and informing article on Cabot in the Cartologia. Florence, 1843.

The spirit of adventure is ever easily enkindled in young English hearts, and it is therefore not surprising that in April 1536, M. Hore, a wealthy merchant of the Chepe, should have found no great difficulty in persuading thirty young gentlemen to sail with him from Gravesend, on a voyage of discovery, in his two ships, the Trinity and the Minion. Their journey was not very prosperous, and the crews had many hardships to endure, but when, in the following October, they all returned safe and sound, they gave information concerning the coast-line of Newfoundland and the island of Cape Breton. After this, endless similar voyages were undertaken, and nearly all resulted in some additions to our geographical knowledge and literature.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE SIXTEENTH

THE

CENTURY

HE first year of the sixteenth century opened with the proclamation of a Papal Jubilee, destined to be the last ever celebrated by a Catholic England. Henry VII. responded in a most orthodox and liberal fashion to Pope Alexander the Sixth's invitation to grant his subjects every facility to visit Rome and share in the spiritual treasures so liberally showered upon those who worshipped at the shrines of the Princes of the Apostles (Peter and Paul). The Pontiff wished to avail himself of this universal pilgrimage to promote a European crusade against the Turks, then threatening Western Europe. Louis XI., and most of the other Christian sovereigns, received the Papal proposal very coolly. Not so Henry VII., who, thinking Pope Alexander's scheme practical, ordered a proclamation to that effect to be made throughout the kingdom, and sent £400 himself to the Holy See in aid of the crusade. For the same purpose, moreover, he taxed his subjects pretty heavily, on an increasing scale according to their incomes. The number of English pilgrims to Rome during the year 1501 is reported to have reached the high figure of 1800 persons-a large gathering for those days, when we consider the difficulties of travel and the length of a journey which, as late as 1818, took Cardinal Wiseman six weeks to accomplish by sea. The pilgrims were lodged in the English Hospital and in the Hospital of Santa Marta,1 behind

1 The Chapel of St. Martha was included in the old Basilica that preceded the present wonderful church. The Hospital was beyond, on the site of the actual one. See Father Thurston's interesting work on The Holy Year.

are

the old Basilica of St. Peter's, where their successors frequently entertained in our own time whenever it pleases them to go to Rome on a pilgrimage that takes less than forty hours by rail. But, unlike the worthy folk who flocked thither five hundred years ago, our pious contemporaries have only good report to give of the Pontiffs who now so worthily fill Peter's Chair. Far otherwise was it in Henry the Seventh's day, when the notorious Borgias were exciting and entertaining the world with accounts of their scandals and crimes. It was a weird place, this Rome of the Borgias, full of danger for unsophisticated pilgrims, who, home returning, had many a strange tale to tell of Pope Alexander, of Lucrezia and Cæsar Borgia, and of the incredible luxury in which lived the Cardinals Sforza, della Rovere, d'Entrague's and Medici. The effect of this pilgrimage was to increase the growing distaste of the English to contribute to the heavy tax of "Peter's Pence" for the support of the "evil Court of a foreign potentate." The pilgrims had started full of pious intention, and they returned with their heads crammed with sinister stories of murder, luxury, and even worse.1

The Jubilee was celebrated in London by the King, Queen, and Court going in State to St. Paul's to hear High Mass and Te Deum; and the whole population visited, either severally or processionally, seven churches, to receive the special indulgences and spiritual privileges of the Holy Year.

The Court of England under Henry VII. was not conspicuously brilliant. The Treasury was nearly empty, and the King, by nature and force of circumstances, parsimonious. The Queen and her mother-in-law, the old Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, were extremely austere and pious, and only on State occasions relaxed their conventual mode of life. Henry, when left to his own devices, was, on the other hand, inclined to be good-natured and even jocular, qualities that do not appear in his portraits, which give him a sour expression, though his contemporaries tell us he could on occasion enjoy a joke. His ideas of domestic morality were on a par with those of his unpleasant son and successor. He behaved shamefully to his daughter-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, by diverting her dower to

1 See for an account of this Jubilee, Burchard's Diarium, and La Storia dei Giubilei Pontifici per Alfonso Sachetti. Firenze, 1610.

his own use. After the loss of his queen, and the death of his son, Prince Arthur, he conceived the nauseous idea of marrying his juvenile daughter-in-law. She was, however, for her sorrow, promptly betrothed to Prince Henry. Meanwhile the King turned his matrimonial attentions in the direction of the mad Queen Juana of Aragon, and, failing her, in that of the bad young Queen of Naples. Finally he died a widower.

Henry VII. was a thorough man of his times, and those times, so far as domestic morality was concerned, were extremely loose. A Venetian who visited London early in the sixteenth century was amazed at the lack of harmony that existed in English families of rank. "The men, who never married for love," said he, "entertained but slight affection for their wives, and both parents apparently cared little or nothing for their children." The King's own mother bore him before she was fourteen, and two of the reigning Queen's sisters were brides before they were fifteen. The reason for this strange state of affairs is not far to find the civil war had decimated the older aristocracy, with the result that most families of position had a host of orphan "wards," boys and girls, on their hands, whom it was to their interest to "contract" in marriage as speedily as possible, so as to secure their fortunes either for themselves or their children. The upper classes of English Society at this period indulged in a sort of game of matrimonial speculation, for, as a ward was, by law, the absolute property of his or her guardians, the voice of natural affection was rarely, if ever, listened to. These matrimonial contracts between mere children were legally as binding as the subsequent religious service, which generally took place after the infants had reached the age of puberty. The sidelights of history are often more important than the dazzling flashes struck by the crash of great political events. The ever-increasing series of scandals in high life which marked the first half of the sixteenth century, and which mainly arose out of the contracting of mere infants in marriage for purely mercenary or worldly motives, no doubt prepared the public mind to accept the matrimonial vagaries of Henry VIII. The same Venetian authority was greatly surprised at the amount of promiscuous kissing that went on in England at this time. "Everybody kisses everybody else. Men when they meet kiss each other even