These things were not done without causing great discontent among the people. The monks had been good landlords and hospitable entertainers of all travellers, and had been accustomed to give away a great deal of corn, and fruit, and meat, and other things. In those days it was difficult to change goods into money, in consequence of the roads being very few and very bad, and the carts, and waggons of the worst description; and they must either have given away some of the good things they possessed in enormous quantities, or have suffered them to spoil and moulder [腐烂]. So, many of the people missed what it was more agreeable to get idly than to work for; and the monks who were driven out of their homes and wandered about encouraged their discontent; and there were, consequently, great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. These were put down by terrific executions, from which the monks themselves did not escape, and the King went on grunting and growling in his own fat way, like a Royal pig.

I have told all this story of the religious houses at one time, to make it plainer, and to get back to the King's domestic affairs.

The unfortunate Queen Catherine was by this time dead; and the King was by this time as tired of his second Queen as he had been of his first. As he had fallen in love with Anne when she was in the service of Catherine, so he now fell in love with another lady in the service of Anne. See how wicked deeds are punished, and how bitterly and self-reproachfully the Queen must now have thought of her own rise to the throne! The new fancy was a Lady Jane Seymour; and the King no sooner set his mind on her, than he resolved to have Anne Boleyn's head. So, he brought a number of charges against Anne, accusing her of dreadful crimes which she had never committed, and implicating [牵涉] in them her own brother and certain gentlemen in her service: among whom one Norris, and Mark Smeaton a musician, are best remembered. As the lords and councillors were as afraid of the King and as subservient [恭顺的] to him as the meanest peasant in England was, they brought in [宣布裁决] Anne Boleyn guilty, and the other unfortunate persons accused with her, guilty too. Those gentlemen died like men, with the exception of Smeaton, who had been tempted by the King into telling lies, which he called confessions, and who had expected to be pardoned; but who, I am very glad to say, was not. There was then only the Queen to dispose of. She had been surrounded in the Tower with women spies; had been monstrously persecuted and foully slandered [诋毁]; and had received no justice. But her spirit rose with her afflictions; and, after having in vain tried to soften the King by writing an affecting letter to him which still exists, 'from her doleful [悲伤的] prison in the Tower,' she resigned [听任] herself to death. She said to those about her [她周围的人], very cheerfully, that she had heard say [sth said] the executioner was a good one, and that she had a little neck (she laughed and clasped it with her hands as she said that), and would soon be out of her pain. And she was soon out of her pain, poor creature, on the Green inside the Tower, and her body was flung [扔] into an old box and put away in the ground under the chapel.

There is a story that the King sat in his palace listening very anxiously for the sound of the cannon which was to announce this new murder; and that, when he heard it come booming on the air, he rose up in great spirits and ordered out his dogs to go a-hunting. He was bad enough to do it; but whether he did it or not, it is certain that he married Jane Seymour the very next day.

现在hunting是uncountable noun. 也许a-hunting算combining form, 如job-hunting/house-hunting/flat-hunting.

I have not much pleasure in recording that she lived just long enough to give birth to a son who was christened [在洗礼上命名] Edward, and then to die of a fever: for, I cannot but think that any woman who married such a ruffian [恶棍], and knew what innocent blood was on his hands, deserved the axe that would assuredly [definitely/certainly] have fallen on the neck of Jane Seymour, if she had lived much longer.

After Henry VIII's wife, Anne Boleyn, was executed, Jane Seymour and Henry married on May 30, 1536. On October 12, 1537, she gave birth to Henry VIII's first male heir, King Edward VI, the future king of England. She died of childbirth complications less than two weeks later, on October 24, 1537, after having been queen for only a year and a half.

六级/考研单词: landlord, hospitable, entertain, accustom, cart, wagon, immense, spoil, idle, terrific, secular, tire, wicked, deed, punish, throne, resolve, dread, commit, peasant, guilt, tempt, confess, disposition, spy, persecute, foul, vain, affection, jail, clasp, fling, chapel, cannon, hunt, noun, fever, innocent, ax, execute, heir