It is never more difficult to judge equitably C. 2. the actions of public men than when private as well as general motives have been allowed to influence them, or when their actions may admit of being represented as resulting from personal inclination, as well as from national policy. In life, as we actually experience it, motives slide one into the other, and the most careful analysis will fail adequately to sift them. In history, from the effort to make our conceptions distinct, we pronounce upon these intricate matters with unhesitating certainty, and we lose sight of truth in the desire to make it truer than itself. The difficulty is further complicated by the different points of view which are chosen by contemporaries and by posterity. Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell most on those which approach nearest to themselves: contemporaries whose interests are at stake overlook what is personal in consideration of what is to them of broader moment; posterity, unable to realize political embarrassments which have ceased to concern them, concentrate their attention on such features of the story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to the private and personal passions of the men and women whose character they are considering. These natural, and to some extent inevitable tendencies, explain the difference with which the divorce between Henry VIII. and Catherine of Arragon has been regarded by the English nation. in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. In the former, not only did the parliament pro CH. 2. fess to desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary* that 'all indifferent and discreet persons' judged that it was right and necessary. In the latter, perhaps, there is not one of ourselves who has not been taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth, she is an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle appetite. The story is a long and painful one, and on its personal side need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself into the question, and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been at stake beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his queen, the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of England would have coloured the entire complexion of the Reformation. Uncertainty of the cession. The succession to the throne, although deterlaw of suc- mined in theory by the ordinary law of primogeniture, was nevertheless subject to repeated arbitrary changes. The uncertainty of the rule was acknowledged and deplored by the parliament, and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity of sentiment, compelled the observance. An opinion prevailed—not, I * HALL, p. 784. † 25 Hen. VIII. c. 22. The law of believe, traceable to statute, but admitted by CH. 2. custom, and having the force of statute in the prejudices of the nation-that no stranger born primogeni out of the realm could inherit.* descent in the female line was not turerepeatedly viola or evaded. Although the formally de- ted nied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the throne.† Even Henry VII. refused to strengthen his title by advancing the claims of his wife: and the uncertainty of the laws of marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Romish canon law, which affected the legitimacy of children, furnished, in connexion with the further ambiguities of clerical dispensations, per Nor was the theory distinctly admitted, or the claim of the house of York would have been unquestionable. * 28 Hen. VIII. c. 24. Speech | heredes regno atque vitâ privâsset of Sir Ralph Sadler in parlia- illatum est.'-WILKINS'S Conment, Sadler Papers, vol. iii. cilia, vol. iii. p. 714. Richard P. 323. claimed the crown on the ground that a precontract rendered his brother's marriage invalid, and Henry VII. tacitly allowed the same doubt to continue. The language of the 22nd of the 25th of Hen. VIII. is so clear as to require no additional elucidation; but another distinct evidence of the belief of the time upon the subject is in one of the papers laid before Pope Clement. ‡ 25 Hen. VIII. c. 22. Draft of the Dispensation to be granted to Henry VIII. Rolls House MS. It has been asserted by a writer in the Tablet that there is no instance in the whole of English history where the ambiguity of the marriage law led 'Constat, in ipso regno quam to a dispute of title. This was plurima gravissima bella sæpe not the opinion of those who exorta, confingentes ex justis et remembered the wars of the legitimis nuptiis quorundam fifteenth century. Recens in Angliæ regum procreatos illegiquorundam vestrorum animistimos fore propter aliquod conadhuc est illius cruenti temporis memoria,' said Henry VIII. in a speech in council, quod a Ricardo tertio cum avi nostri materni Edwardi quarti statum in | MS.; WILKINS's Concilia, vol. controversiam vocâsset ejusque iii. p. 707. sanguinitatis vel affinitatis con- Сн. 2. petual pretexts, whenever pretexts were needed, for a breach of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the character of the nation remained essentially military, it could as little tolerate an incapable king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with an inefficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the title, when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward II., a Richard II., or a Henry VI., the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too Consent of feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation parliament was avowed, even in the authoritative language necessary to make of a statute,* as essential to the legitimacy of a good the Sovereign's sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.† So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful epiThe wars of sodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its character in blood in the private records of every English family, having been the long struggle of the preceding century, from which the nation was still suffering, and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it had endured. It had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be searched in vain for any title. the Roses. *28 Hen. VIII. c. 24. Appendix 2 to the Third Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records, p. 241. parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so CH. 2. unmeaning. gle sus not extin guished. This very unmeaning character of the dispute The strugincreased the difficulty of ending it. In wars of pended, but conquest or of principle, when something definite is at stake, the victory is either won, or it is lost; the conduct of individual men, at all events, is overruled by considerations external to themselves which admit of being weighed and calculated. In a war of succession, where the great families were divided in their allegiance, and supported the rival claimants in evenly balanced. numbers, the inveteracy of the conflict increased with its duration, and propagated itself from generation to generation. Every family was in blood feud with its neighbour; and children, as they grew to manhood, inherited the duty of revenging their fathers' deaths. No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of York and the battle of Bosworth; and experience too truly convinced Henry VII. that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because there was no will to continue it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon his mind of the constant dread of an explosion, can we excuse or understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the Earl of Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present an act of arbitrary or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty. |