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 profess to desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary[104] 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.

The succession to the throne, although determined 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,[105] and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity of sentiment, compelled the observance.  An opinion prevailed—­not, I believe, traceable to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force of statute in the prejudices of the nation—­that no stranger born out of the realm could inherit.[106] Although the descent in the female line was not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the throne.[107] 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,[108] furnished, in connection with the further ambiguities of clerical dispensations, perpetual 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 feeble to retain it.  The consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a statute,[109] as