"Shakespeare is steadily preparing a synthesis of religious mysticism with national purpose; and this synthesis is not actually accomplished in the King himself, but rather in the royal child, Elizabeth... [T]he massive play [Henry VIII] ends with the christening ceremony of the baby Elizabeth, over whom Cranmer speaks the final prophecy, Shakespeare's last word to the England he loved... Every tragic insight, every penetrating sting of satire, every deepest religious intuition, orthodox or otherwise, of the greater plays, every lyric love of England's natural sweetness, is subdued within this last, almost ritualistic, offering by Shakespeare of himself and his deepest poetic wisdom to Elizabeth and her successor James I... [S]urely here, if never elsewhere, we can feel that this prophecy is offered...to the essential sovereignty, the golden thread in England's story, that line of kings in Macbeth stretching out "to the crack of doom", handed down from his day to ours. Macbeth was recalled, and Cranmer's lines forecast, by the "emblems" used at Anne Bullen's coronation: holy oil, Edward the Confessor's crown, the rod and the "bird of peace"... The conclusion to Henry VIII is no mere record of an historic past, but rather the one comprehensive statement in our literature of that peace towards which the world labours and for which Great Britain fights."