What, then, it will be asked, was the real gist of the charges made against Froude by The Edinburgh Review?  The question at issue was nothing less than the whole policy of Henry’s reign, and the motives of the King.  The character of Henry is one of the most puzzling in historical literature, and Froude had to deal with the most difficult part of it.  To the virtues of his earlier days Erasmus is an unimpeachable witness.  The power of his mind and the excellence of his education are beyond dispute.  He held the Catholic faith, he was not naturally cruel, and, compared with Francis I., or with Henry of Navarre, he was not licentious.  But he was brought up to believe that the ordinary rules of morality do not govern kings.  That the king can do no wrong is now a maxim of the Constitution, and merely means that Ministers are responsible for the acts of the Crown.  Henry could scarcely have been made to understand, even if there had been any one to tell him, what a constitutional monarch was.  Though forced to admit, and taught by experience, that he could not safely tax his subjects without the formal sanction of Parliament, he was in theory absolute, and he held it his duty to rule as well as to reign.  When Charles I. argued, a century later, that a king was not bound to keep faith with his subjects, it may be doubted whether he deceived himself.  The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.  His duty to God Henry would always have acknowledged.  A historian so widely different from Froude as Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that, if mere self-indulgence had been the king’s object, the infinite pains he took to obtain a Papal divorce from Katharine of Aragon would have been thrown away.  That he had a duty to his neighbour, male or female, never entered his head.  His subjects were his own, to deal with as he pleased.  Revolting as this theory may seem now, it was held by most people then, and there was not a man in England, not Sir Thomas More himself, who would have told the King that it was untrue.

It is with the divorce of Katharine that the difficulty of estimating Henry begins.  Froude’s narrative sets out with the marriage of Anne Boleyn.  Here the reviewer plants his first arrow.  The divorce was a nullity, having no authority higher than Cranmer’s.  Anne Boleyn, as is likely enough from other causes, was never the King’s wife, and Elizabeth was illegitimate, though she had of course a Parliamentary title to the throne.  It seems clear, however, that inasmuch as Katharine had been his brother Prince Arthur’s wife, the King could not lawfully marry her, according to the canons of the Catholic Church.  Why did he marry Anne Boleyn?  The reviewer says because he was in love with her, and triumphantly refers to the King’s letters, printed in the Appendix of Hearne’s Ayesbury.* They are undoubtedly love-letters, and they contain one indelicate expression.  Compared with Mirabeau’s letters to Sophie de Monnier, they are cold and chaste.  Froude says