They are not of course on that account to be neglected.  Although the House of Commons was no result of popular election, it consisted of representative Englishmen, who would hardly have acquiesced in statements notoriously untrue.  Henry neither obtained nor asked the opinion of the people, as we understand the phrase.  The “dim common populations” had no more to do with the Government of England then than they have to do with the Government of India now.  At the same time it must be remembered that the King could not rely upon mere force.  He had no standing army, and a popular rising would have swept him almost without resistance from his throne.  It is almost as hard for us to imagine his position as to understand his character.  Parliament, judges, magistrates, were subordinate to his sovereign will and pleasure.  From the authority of the Pope he cut himself free, and neither Clement VII. nor Paul iii. was strong enough to stand up against him.  He could hold his own with France, with the Empire, with Spain.  The one Power he never ventured to defy was the English people.  It was the essence of the Tudor monarchy to rely upon the masses rather than the classes, to keep the aristocracy down by expressing the popular will.  So far as Henry took part in it, the Reformation was not religious at all.  As Macaulay drily remarks, he was a good Catholic who preferred to be his own Pope.  He knew very well that Englishmen would like him none the worse for resisting the pretensions of Rome, for insisting on the royal supremacy, for taking every possible step to secure the succession in the male Tudor line.  If in his callous indifference to the fate of the men or women who stood in his way he appears scarcely human, we must consider, with Bishop Stubbs, his awful isolation.  The whole burden of the State was upon him, and he could not share it.  Not till the reign of his elder daughter did his subjects realise the horrors from which he had delivered them.

Hostile criticism, though it affected the opinion of scholars, did Froude no harm with the public.  Macaulay’s popularity was at its height in 1858.  But Macaulay passes lightly in his Introduction over the sixteenth century, and the reign of Henry viii., or at least the latter part of it, had never been so copiously illustrated before.  The Oxford Movement, which treated the Reformation as a discreditable incident worthy of oblivion, had not much influence with the laity.  Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary Church.  The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the execution of More and Fisher, reminded them that the Bishop of Rome neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of England.  That “gospel light first dawned from Boleyn’s eyes” might be a paradox.  It was, however, a paradox which contained a truth, and it was by no means disagreeable