Most noble, spirited, and like a queen.  Yet she would never have been brought to this extremity, and she would have shown a truer nobleness, if four years before she could have yielded at the pope’s entreaty on the first terms which were proposed to her.  Those terms would have required no humiliating confessions; they would have involved no sentence on her marriage nor touched her daughter’s legitimacy.  She would have broken no law of God, nor seemed to break it.  She was required only to forget her own interests; and she would not forget them, though all the world should be wrecked by her refusal.  She denied that she was concerned in “motions prejudicial to the king or to the Realm,” but she must have placed her own interpretation on the words, and would have considered excommunication and interdict a salutary discipline to the king and parliament.  She knew that this sentence was imminent, that in its minor form it had already fallen; and she knew that her nephew and her friends in England were plotting to give effect to the decree.  But we may pass over this.  It is not for an English writer to dwell upon those faults of Catherine of Arragon, which English remorse has honourably insisted on forgetting.  Her injuries, inevitable as they were, and forced upon her in great measure by her own wilfulness, remain among the saddest spots in the pages of our history.

One other brief incident remains to be noticed here, to bring up before the imagination the features of this momentous summer.  It is contained in the postscript of a letter of Cranmer to Hawkins the ambassador in Germany; and the manner in which the story is told is no less suggestive than the story itself.

The immediate present, however awful its import, will ever seem common and familiar to those who live and breathe in the midst of it.  In the days of the September massacre at Paris, the theatres were open as usual; men ate, and drank, and laughed, and cried, and went about their common work, unconscious that those days which were passing by them, so much like other days, would remain the dies nefasti, accursed in the memory of mankind for ever.  Nothing is terrible, nothing is sublime in human things, so long as they are before our eyes.  The great man has so much in common with men in general, the routine of daily life, in periods the most remarkable in history, contains so much that is unvarying, that it is only when time has done its work; and all which was unimportant has ceased to be remembered, that such men and such times stand out in their true significance.  It might have been thought that to a person like Cranmer, the court at Dunstable, the coronation of the new queen, the past out of which these things had risen, and the future which they threatened to involve, would have seemed at least serious; and that engaged as he had been as a chief actor, in a matter which, if it had done nothing else, had broken the heart of a high-born lady whom once he had honoured as his queen,