he was unable to recover it from Francis; could only refund it by
raising some fresh tax or benevolence: and why may not the
Parliament have considered the release of old taxes likely to offend
fewer people than the imposition of new ones? It is certainly an
ugly thing to break public faith; but to prove that public faith was
broken, we must prove that Henry compelled the Parliament to release
him; if the act was of their own free will, no public faith was
broken, for they were the representatives of the nation, and through
them the nation forgave its own debt. And what evidence have we that
they did not represent the nation, and that, on the whole, we must
suppose, as we should in the case of any other men, that they best
knew their own business? May we not apply to this case, and to
others, mutatis mutandis, the argument which Mr. Froude uses so
boldly and well in the case of Anne Boleyn's trial--'The English
nation also, as well as . . . deserves justice at our hands?'

Certainly it does: but it is a disagreeable token of the method on
which we have been accustomed to write the history of our own
forefathers, that Mr. Froude should find it necessary to state
formally so very simple a truth.

What proof, we ask again, is there that this old Parliament was
'servile'? Had that been so, Wolsey would not have been afraid to
summon it. The specific reason for not summoning a Parliament for
six years after that of 1524 was that they were not servile; that
when (here we are quoting Mr. Hallam, and not Mr. Froude) Wolsey
entered the House of Commons with a great train, seemingly for the
purpose of intimidation, they 'made no other answer to his harangues
than that it was their usage to debate only among themselves.' The
debates on this occasion lasted fifteen or sixteen days, during