and besides describing he justified it. He had to depict the
absolute government of Henry; and he argued that it was a necessity
of the times. We must not transfer the passions of one age to the
controversies of another. In the seventeenth century the issue was
between the Stuart kings and their Parliaments, or, in other words,
between the Crown and the people. In the sixteenth century king and
Parliament were united against an alien power, the Catholic Church,
and a foreign prince, the Pope. Before England was free she had to
become Protestant, and Henry, whatever his motives, was on the
Protestant side. That he was himself an unscrupulous tyrant is
beside the point. He was an ephemeral phaemomenon, and, as a matter
of fact, his tyranny, which the people never felt, died with him.
The Church of Rome was a permanent fact, immortal, if not
unchangeable, which would have reduced England, if it had prevailed,
to the condition of France, Italy, and Spain. Whether Henry VIII.
was a good man, or a bad one, is not the question. Bishop Stubbs,
who cannot be accused of anti-ecclesiastical, or anti-theological
prejudice, calls him a "grand, gross figure," not to be tried and
condemned by ordinary standards of private morals. The only interest
of his character now is its bearing upon the fate of England. If the
Pope, and not the king, had become head of the English Church, would
it have been for the advantage of the English people? By frankly
taking the king's side Froude made two different and influential
sets of enemies, especially at Oxford. High Churchmen, then and for
the rest of his life, assailed him for hostility to "the Church,"
forgetting or ignoring the fact that the Church of England is not
the Church of Rome. Liberals, on the other hand, mistook him for a
friend of lawless despotism, as if Henry's opponents had been
constitutional statesmen, and not arrogant Churchmen, hating liberty
even more than he did.