he published his first book, The Nemesis of Faith, now happily forgotten. It raised an immediate commotion. It was denounced as heretical, and the senior tutor of Exeter burnt it during a lecture in the College Hall. Froude resigned his Fellowship, and his connection with the university was severed for thirty-three years. He was one of the first to take advantage of the alteration of the law which enabled a clergyman to resign his orders. In 1892 he went back to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History. "The temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he said, "was too much for me." He died on October 20, 1894, and on his tombstone he is simply described, by his own wish, as Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford.

The writer is indebted for information with regard to Froude's life to Mr. Pollard's article in the Dictionary of National Biography, and to Mr. Herbert Paul's admirable Life of Froude (Pitman).

W. LLEWELYN WILLIAMS.

November 16, 1908.

The following is a list of the published works of J.A. Froude:

Life of St. Neot (Lives of the English Saints, edited by J.H. Newman), 1844; Shadows of the Clouds (Tales), by Zeta (pseud.), 1847; A Sermon (on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached at St. Mary's Church on the Death of the Rev. George May Coleridge, 1847; Article on Spinoza (Oxford and Cambridge Review), 1847; The Nemesis of Faith (Tale), 1849; England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review), 1852; Book of Job (Westminster Review), 1853; Poems of Matthew Arnold (Westminster Review), 1854; Suggestions on the Best Means of Teaching English History (Oxford Essays, etc.), 1855; History of England, 12 vols., 1856-70; The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character, 1865; Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St. Andrews, March 19, 1869, 1869; Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867, 2 vols., series 2-4, 1871-83 (articles from Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, etc.); The Cat's Pilgrimage, 1870; Calvinism: Address at St. Andrews, 1871; The English in Ireland, 3 vols., 1872-74; Bunyan (English Men of Letters), 1878; Cæsar: a Sketch, 1879; Two Lectures on South Africa, 1880; Thomas Carlyle (a history of the first forty years of his life, etc.), 2 vols., 1882; Luther: a Short Biography, 1883; Thomas Carlyle (a history of his life in London, 1834-81), 2 vols., 1884; Oceana, 1886; The English in the West Indies, 1888; Liberty and Property: an Address [1888]; The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, 1889; Lord Beaconsfield (a Biography), 1890; The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, 1891; The Spanish Story of the Armada, 1892; Life and Letters of Erasmus, 1894; English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, 1895; Lectures on the Council of Trent, 1896; My Relations with Carlyle, 1903.

EDITED:—Carlyle's Reminiscences, 1881; Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, 1883.

CONTENTS

HENRY VIII

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the influence of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves back into a time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a single type, in which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms of the son's, and the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of his distant ancestors. So absolutely has change become the law of our present condition, that it is identified with energy and moral health; to cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass away from off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it, is to have missed the best object for which we now seem to exist.

It has been, however, with the race of men as it has been with the planet which they inhabit. As we look back over history, we see times of change and progress alternating with other times when life and thought have settled into permanent forms; when mankind, as if by common consent, have ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented with what they possess, have endeavoured to make use of it for purposes of moral cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks through many ages before the Persian war; such was that of the Romans till the world revenged itself upon its conquerors by the introduction among them of the habits of the conquered; and such again became the condition of Europe when the Northern nations grafted the religion and the laws of the Western empire on their own hardy natures, and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political organisation which remained unshaken for a thousand years.

The aspirant after sanctity in the fifteenth century of the

Christian era found a model which he could imitate in detail in the saint of the fifth. The gentleman at the court of Edward IV. or Charles of Burgundy could imagine no nobler type of heroism than he found in the stories of King Arthur's knights. The forms of life had become more elaborate—the surface of it more polished—but the life itself remained essentially the same; it was the development of the same conception of human excellence; just as the last orders of Gothic architecture were the development of the first, from which the idea had worked its way till the force of it was exhausted.

A condition of things differing alike both outwardly and inwardly from that into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is necessarily obscure to us. In the alteration of our