Ann Boleyn had been other than a scheming and faithless woman; or if, later, Jane Seymour had safely brought forth her son (and perhaps other sons), Henry would assuredly never have married six wives. You say he should have seen beforehand the disparity of years, the illegality, the incest—should have seen even the yet unfallen curse: in our time boys of eighteen did not see so clearly all these things.” “Alas,” the juror might have added, “marriage and death are the two supreme incidents in man’s life: but marriage comes before experience and judgment—these are absent when they are most needed; experience and judgment attend on death when they are needless.” “Bear in mind, moreover,” resumes the older voice, “that in our time the marriage laws were obscure, perplexing, and unsettled. High ideals of marriage did not exist. The first nobleman in our Court was the Earl of Suffolk who twice committed bigamy and was divorced three times; his first wife was his aunt, and his last his daughter-in-law. Papal relaxations and papal permissions were cheap and common—they permitted every sort of sexual union and every sort of separation. Canon law and the curious sexual relationships of ecclesiastics, high and low, shed no light but rather darkness on the matter. The Pope, it is true, hesitated to grant Henry’s divorce, but not, as the whole world knew, on moral or religious grounds: at heart he approved the divorce and rebuked Wolsey for not settling the matter offhand in England. All the papal envoys urged the unhappy Catharine to retire into a religious house; but Catharine insisted that God had called her to her position”—forgetting, we may interpose, that if He called her to it He also in effect deposed her from it. God called her daughter Mary, so Mary believed, to burn Protestants; God called Elizabeth, so Elizabeth exclaimed (‘it was marvellous in her eyes’), to harass Romanists.

“But the one paramount circumstance which weighed with us, and we remember a thousand circumstances while you remember the ‘six wives’ only, was the question of succession. If succession was the one question which more than all others agitated your fathers in Anne’s time, try to imagine what it was to us. You, after generations of order, peace and security—you utterly fail to understand our position. We had barely come out of a lawless cruel time—a time born of the ferocity and hate of conflicting dynasties. Fathers still lived to tell us how they ate blood, and drank blood, and breathed blood. They and we were weary of blood, and our two Henrys (priceless Henrys to us,) had just taken its taste out of our mouths. No queen, be it well noted, had ruled over us either in peaceful or in stormy times; we believed with our whole souls, rightly or wrongly, that no queen could possibly preserve us from destruction and ruin. It was our importunity mainly—make no mistake on this point,—which drove our king, whenever he was wifeless, to take another wife. His three years of widowhood after Jane Seymour’s death was our gravest anxiety.”

The newer voice replies: “You were a foolish and purblind generation. The simplicity of your Henry’s subjects, and the servility of his parliament have become a bye-word. It is true your king, although less capable than you suppose, was not without certain gifts—their misuse only adds to his infamy. It is true also that he had been carefully educated,—his father was to be thanked for that. It would seem, moreover, that quite early in life he was not without some attractiveness in person and manners, but you forget that bodily grossness and mental irritability soon made him a repulsive object. An eminent Englishman of our century says he was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned and swinish-looking fellow, and that indeed so bad a character could never have been veiled under a prepossessing appearance. Your King was vain, ostentatious, and extravagant. With measured words we declare that his hypocrisy, cruelty, sacrilege, selfishness and lust, were all unbounded. He was above all an unrivalled master of mean excuses: did he wish to humble and oppress the clergy—they had violated the statute of premunire. Did his voluptuous eye fall on a dashing young maid of honour—he suddenly discovered that he was living in incest, and that his marriage was under God’s curse. Did the Pope hesitate to grant him a divorce—he began to see that the proper head of the English Church was the English king. Was his exchequer empty—he was convinced that the inmates of the wealthy religious houses led the lives and deserved the fate of certain cities once destroyed by fire and brimstone. Did a defiant Pole carry his head out of Harry’s reach—it was found that Pole’s mother, Lady Salisbury, was the centre of Yorkist intrigue, and that the mother’s head could be lopped off in place of the son’s.”

The two voices it is clear have much to say for themselves. It is equally clear that the two groups of jurymen will not agree on their verdict.

It is commonly held and as a rule on good grounds, that the judgment of immediate friends and neighbours is less just than the opinion of foreigners and of posterity. This is so when foreigners and posterity are agreed, and are free from the tumult, and passion, and personal bias of time and place. It is not so in Henry’s case. Curiously enough, foreign observers, scholars, envoys, travellers, agree with—nay, outrun Henry’s subjects in their praise of Henry. Curiously too the tumult and passion touching Henry’s matrimonial affairs—touching all his affairs indeed,—have grown rather than diminished with the progress of time. Epochs, like men, have not the gift of seeing themselves as others see them. Unnumbered Frenchmen ate and drank, and made merry, and bought and sold; married their children and buried their parents, not knowing that France was giving a shock to all mankind for all time to come. The assassins of St. Bartholomew believed that in future a united Christendom would bless them for performing a pious and uniting deed. We see all at once the bare and startling fact of six wives. Henry’s subjects saw and became familiar with a slow succession of marriages, each of which had its special cloud of vital yet confusing circumstance. So too the Reformation has its different phases. In the sixteenth century it was looked on as a serious quarrel, no doubt, but no one dreamed it was anything more. Then each side thought the other side would shortly come to its senses and all would be well; no one dreamt of two permanently hostile camps and lasting combat. If personal hate and actual bloodshed have passed away, and at the present moment the combat shews signs of still diminishing bitterness, it is because a new and mysterious atmosphere is slowly creeping over both—slowly benumbing both the armies.

An attempt must be made here to sketch Henry’s character with as much impartiality as is possible. But no impartial sketch will please either his older friends or his newer enemies. Although Henry came to the throne a mere boy, he was a precocious boy. In the precocious the several stages of life succeed each other more quickly than in others, and probably they themselves do not wear so well. When Henry was twenty-five he was little less wise and capable than he was at thirty-five or forty-five. At forty he was probably wiser than he was at fifty. The young king’s presence was striking; he had a fresh rosy complexion, and an auburn though scanty beard. His very limbs, exclaims one foreign admirer, “glowed with warm pink” through his delicately woven tennis costume. He was handsome in feature; large and imposing in figure; open and frank in manners; strong, active, and skilled in all bodily exercises. He was an admirer of all the arts, and himself