to be in his favor.
But are the facts, when fairly stated, in his favor? They are not. His advocates must find themselves terribly puzzled to reconcile his practice with their theory. They prove beyond all dispute that the succession question was the grand thought of England in Henry's time; but they do not prove, because they cannot prove, that the King's action was such as to show that he was ready, we will not say to make important sacrifices to lessen the probabilities of the occurrence of a succession war, but to do anything in that way that required him to control any one of the gross passions or grosser appetites of which he was throughout his loathsome life the slave and the victim. He seems to have passed the last twenty years of his reign in doing deeds that give flat contradiction to the theory set up by his good-natured admirers of after-times, that he was the victim of circumstances, and that, though one of the mildest and most merciful of men in fact, those villanous circumstances did compel him to become a tyrant, a murderer, a repudiator of sacramental and pecuniary and diplomatic obligations, a savage on a throne, and a Nebuchadnezzar for pride and arrogance, only that, unfortunately for his subjects in general, and for his wives in particular, he was not turned out to grass. A beast in fact, he did not become a beast in form. Scarcely one of his acts, after the divorce of Catharine of Aragon, was of a character to favor the continuance of peace in England, while many of them were admirably calculated to bring about a war for the regal succession. Grant that he was justified in putting away his Spanish wife,—a most excellent and eminently disagreeable woman, a combination of qualities by no means uncommon,—where was the necessity of his taking Anne Boleyn to wife? Why could he not have given his hand to some foreign princess, and so have atoned to his subjects for breaking up the Spanish alliance, in the continuance of which the English people had no common political interest, and an extraordinary commercial interest? Why could he not have sent to Germany for some fair-haired princess, as he did years later, and got Anne of Cleves for his pains, whose ugly face cost poor Cromwell his head, which was giving the wisest head in England for the worst one out of it? Henry, Mr. Froude would have us believe, divorced Catharine of Aragon because he desired to have sons, as one way to avoid the breaking out of a civil war; and yet it was a sure way to bring Charles V. into an English dispute for the regal succession, as the supporter of any pretender, to repudiate the aunt of that powerful imperial and royal personage. The English nation, Mr. Froude truly tells us, was at that time "sincerely attached to Spain. The alliance with the House of Burgundy" (of which Charles V. was the head) "was of old date; the commercial intercourse with Flanders was enormous,—Flanders, in fact, absorbing all the English exports; and as many as fifteen thousand Flemings were settled in London. Charles himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in the late French war; and when, in his supposed character of leader of the anti-Papal party in Europe, he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate Rome, he had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was fomenting in the population." Was it not a strange way to proceed for the preservation of peace in England to offend a foreign sovereign who stood in so strong and influential a position to the English people? Charles was not merely displeased because of the divorce of his relative, his mother's sister, a daughter of the renowned Isabella, who had wrought such great things for Christendom,—promoting the discovery of America, and conquering Granada,—but he was incensed at the mere thought of preferring to her place a private gentlewoman, who would never have been heard of, if Henry had not seen fit to raise her from common life, first to the throne, and then to the scaffold. That was an insult to the whole Austro-Burgundian family, whose dominions rivalled those of the Roman Caesars, and whose chief had just held a King of France captive and a Pope of Rome besieged. The Emperor might, perhaps, have been sooted, had his relative's place been bestowed upon some lady of corresponding blueness of blood; but it offended his pride, when he reflected on her being supplanted by Mrs. Boleyn. The aristocratical morgue was too strong in him to bear such an insult with fortitude. Yet none other than Mrs. Boleyn would Henry have, notwithstanding the certainty of enraging Charles, and with the equal certainty of disgusting a majority of his own subjects. If it had been simply a wife that he desired, and if he was thinking merely of the succession, and so sought only for an opportunity to beget legitimate children, why did he so pertinaciously insist upon having no one but "Mistress Anne" for the partner of his throne and bed?
When he married Jane Seymour on the 20th of May, 1536, having had Anne's head cut off on the 19th, Mr. Froude sees in that infamous proceeding—a proceeding without parallel in the annals of villany, and which would have disgraced the worst members of Sawney Bean's unpromising family—nothing but a simple business-transaction. The Privy Council and the peers, troubled about the succession, asked Henry to marry again without any delay, when Anne had been prepared for condemnation. The King was graciously pleased to comply with this request, which was probably made in compliance with suggestions from himself,—the marriage with Jane Seymour having been resolved upon long before it took place, and the desire to effect it being the cause of the legal assassination of Anne Boleyn, which could be brought about only through the "cooking" of a series of charges that could have originated nowhere out of her husband's vile mind, and which led to the deaths of six innocent persons. "The indecent haste" of the King's marriage with the Seymour, Mr. Froude says, "is usually considered a proof entirely conclusive of the cause of Anne Boleyn's ruin. To myself the haste is an evidence of something very different. Henry, who waited seven years for Anne Boleyn, was not without some control over his passions; and if appetite had been the moving influence with him, he would scarcely, with the eyes of all the world fixed upon his conduct, have passed so extravagant an insult upon the nation of which he was the sovereign. The precipitancy with which he acted is to me a proof that he looked on matrimony as an indifferent official act which his duty required at the moment. This was the interpretation which was given to his conduct by the Lords and Commons of England. In the absence of any evidence, or shadow of evidence, that among contemporaries who had means of knowing the truth another judgment was passed upon it, the deliberate assertion of an Act of Parliament must be considered a safer guide than modern unsupported conjecture."18
We submit that the approving action of men who were partakers of Henry's guilt is no proof of his innocence. Their conduct throughout the Boleyn business simply proves that they were slaves, and that the slaves were as brutal as their master. If Henry was so indifferent in the matter of matrimony as to look upon all women with the same feelings, if he married officially as the King, and not lovingly as a man, how came it to pass that he was thrown into such an agony of rage, when, being nearly fifty years old, ugly Anne of Cleves was provided for him? His disappointment and mortification were then so great that they hastened that political change which led to Cromwell's fall and execution. When Henry first saw the German lady, he was as much affected as George, Prince of Wales, was when he first saw Caroline of Brunswick, but he behaved better than George in the lady's presence. Much as he desired children, he never consummated his marriage with Anne of Cleves, though he must have known that the world would be but ill-peopled, if none but beautiful women were to be married. Had he fulfilled the contract made with her, he might have had many sons and daughters, and the House of Tudor might have been reigning over England at this day. Both his fifth and sixth wives, Catharine Howard and Catharine Parr, were fine women; and if he had lived long enough to get rid of the latter, he would, beyond all question, have given her place to the most beautiful woman whom he could have prevailed upon to risk his perilous embraces preliminarily to those of the hangman.
If Henry had married solely for the purpose of begetting children, he never would have divorced and slaughtered Anne Boleyn. During her brief connection with him, she gave birth to two children, one a still-born son, and the other the future Queen Elizabeth, who lived to her seventieth year, and whose enormous vitality and intellectual energy speak well for the physical excellence of her mother. The miscarriage that Anne experienced in February, 1536, was probably the occasion of her repudiation and murder in the following May, as Henry was always inclined to attribute disappointments of this kind to his wives, who ever dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death.19 The most charitable view that can be taken of Henry's abominable treatment of his second wife is, that he was led by his superstitious feelings, which he called religion, to sacrifice her to the manes of his first wife, whom Anne had badly treated, and who died on the 7th of January, 1536. Henry, after
Mr. Froude mentions that a request that the King would marry, similar to that which he received after the fall of Anne Boleyn, was urged by the Council on the death of Jane Seymour; but, as he allowed more than two years to elapse between the date of Jane's death and the date of his marriage with Anne of Cleves, which marriage he refused to consummate, is not the inference unavoidable that he wedded Jane Seymour so hurriedly merely to gratify his desire to possess her person, and that in 1537-39 he was singularly indifferent to the claims of a question upon his attention?
Henry thought of divorcing Catharine of Aragon some years before she had become too old to bear children. She was born in the last month of 1485, and the "King's secret matter," as the divorce question was called, was in agitation as early as the first half of 1527, and probably at an earlier period. Catharine was the mother of five children, but one of whom lived, namely, the Princess Mary, afterward Mary I.
