that the King wanted a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after Anne’s execution.  The character of Henry viii. is only important now as it bears upon the policy of his reign.  That Froude washed him too white is almost as certain as that Lingard painted him too black.  The notion that lust supplies the key to his marriages and their consequences is utterly ridiculous.  The most dissolute of English kings was content, and more than content, with one wife.  On the other hand, Froude does at least give a clue when he suggests that these frequent marriages were political moves.  A female sovereign reigning in her own right had never been known in England, and up to the birth of Jane Seymour’s son Edward the whole kingdom passionately desired that there should be a Prince of Wales.  Edward himself was but a sickly child, and was not expected to live even for the short span of his actual career.  Credulous indeed must they be who maintain the innocence either of Anne Boleyn or of Katharine Howard, and there seems small use in holding with the learned Father Gasquet that Anne was not guilty of the offences imputed to her, but had done something too bad to be mentioned on a trial for incest.  It is a question of evidence, and the evidence is lost.  But the Grand Jury which presented Anne was respectable, the Court which convicted her was distinguished, and neither she nor any of her paramours denied their guilt on the scaffold.  Simple adultery in a queen was capital then, if indeed it be not capital now.  In an ordinary husband Henry’s conduct would have been revolting.  It is not attractive in him.  Stubbs pleads that we cannot judge him, and abandons the attempt in despair.

—­ * Oxford, 1720. —­

As he rejects with equal decision both the Roman Catholic picture and Froude’s, he only puts us all to ignorance again.  Froude is at least intelligible.

It is a fact, and not a fancy, that Henry provided from the spoils of the monasteries for the defence of the realm, that he founded new bishoprics from the same source, that he disarmed the ecclesiastical tribunals, and broke the bonds of Rome.  The corruption of at least the smaller monasteries, some of which were suppressed by Wolsey before the rise of Cromwell, is established by the balance of evidence, and the disappearance of the Black Book which set forth their condition was only to be expected in the reign of Mary.  The crime which weighs most upon the memory of the King is the execution of Fisher and More.

More, though he persecuted heretics, is the saint and philosopher of the age.  Of Fisher Macaulay says that he was worthy to have lived in a better age, and died in a better cause.  But what if these good men, from purely conscientious motives, would have brought over a Spanish army to coerce their Protestant fellow-subjects and their lawful sovereign?  That, and not speculative error, is the real charge against