abominations which were as well known, it seems, to him as they were
afterwards to the whole people of England; his vast schemes for
education; his still vaster schemes for breaking the alliance with
Spain, and uniting France and England as fellow-servants of the Pope,
and twin-pillars of the sacred fabric of the Church, which helped so
much toward his interest in Catherine's divorce, as a 'means' (these
are his own words) 'to bind my most excellent sovereign and this
glorious realm to the holy Roman See in faith and obedience for
ever'; his hopes of deposing the Emperor, putting down the German
heresies, and driving back the Turks beyond the pale of Christendom;
his pathetic confession to the Bishop of Bayonne that 'if he could
only see the divorce arranged, the King re-married, the succession
settled, and the laws and the Church reformed, he would retire from
the world, and would serve God the remainder of his days.'

Peace be with him! He was surely a noble soul; misled, it may be--as
who is not when his turn comes?--by the pride of conscious power; and
'though he loved England well, yet loving Rome better': but still it
is a comfort to see, either in past or in present, one more brother
whom we need not despise, even though he may have wasted his energies
on a dream.

And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning. As
Mr. Froude, in a noble passage, says:-


'Extravagant as his hopes seem, the prospect of realising them was,
humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable. He had but
made the common mistake of men of the world, who are the
representatives of an old order of things, when that order is doomed