It is certain that if, as I said, he had died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like that Roman Emperor said by Tacitus to have been consensu omnium dignus imperii nisi imperasset, would have been considered by posterity as formed by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would have been deplored as a perpetual calamity.  We must allow him, therefore, the benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it, when interpreting his later actions.  Not many men would have borne themselves through the same trials with the same integrity; but the circumstances of those trials had not tested the true defects in his moral constitution.  Like all princes of the Plantagenet blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will.  His impulses, in general nobly directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life, when his character was formed, he was forced into collision with difficulties with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to contend.  Education had done much for him, but his nature required more correction than his position had permitted, whilst unbroken prosperity and early independence of control had been his most serious misfortune.  He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greatest of men.  With all his faults about him, he was still perhaps the greatest of his contemporaries; and the man best able of all living Englishmen to govern England, had been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.

The other person whose previous history we have to ascertain is one, the tragedy of whose fate has blotted the remembrance of her sins—­if her sins were, indeed, and in reality, more than imaginary.  Forgetting all else in shame and sorrow, posterity has made piteous reparation for her death in the tenderness with which it has touched her reputation; and with the general instincts of justice, we have refused to qualify our indignation at the wrong which she experienced, by admitting either stain or shadow on her fame.  It has been with Anne Boleyn as it has been with Catherine of Arragon—­both are regarded as the victims of a tyranny which catholics and protestants unite to remember with horror; and each has taken the place of a martyred saint in the hagiology of the respective creeds.  Catholic writers have, indeed, ill repaid, in their treatment of Anne, the admiration with which the mother of Queen Mary has been remembered in the Church of England; but the invectives which they have heaped upon her have defeated their object by their extravagance.  It has been believed that matter failed them to sustain a just accusation, when they condescended to outrageous slander.  Inasmuch, however, as some natural explanation can usually be given of the actions of human beings in this world without supposing them to have been possessed by extraordinary wickedness, and if we are to hold Anne Boleyn entirely free from fault, we place not the king only, but the privy council, the judges,