execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint,
with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do
no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it
may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history,
unless we are desirous of seeing that become a mere party-record. The
practice of publishing books in an incomplete state is one that by no
means tends to render them impartial, when they relate to matters that
are in dispute. Mr. Froude's first and second volumes, which bring the
work down to the murder of Anne Boleyn, afforded the most desirable
material for the critics, many of whom most pointedly dissented from
his views, and some of whom severely attacked his positions, and not
always unsuccessfully. They were, naturally, not disposed to think that
an act bad in itself changed its character when it became the act of
Henry VIII. It was contrary to all human experience to suppose that
Henry was in all cases in the right, while his opponents and his
victims were as invariably in the wrong. If there ever had lived and
reigned a man who could not do wrong, it was preposterous to look for
him in one who had been a wife-killer, a persecutor, the slayer of the
nobility of his kingdom, the exterminator of the last remnants of an
old royal race, the patron of fagots and ropes and axes, and a
hard-hearted and selfish voluptuary, who seems never to have been open
to one kind or generous feeling. Most of those tyrants that have been
hung up on high, by way of warning to despots, have had their
"uncorrupted hours," in which they vindicated their claim to humanity
by the performance of some good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is
supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with
garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same
moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish
father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the
feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the