were cruel as the grave against Frenchmen only that they might
preserve France from destruction, so might the admirers of Henry plead
that he was vindictively cruel only that the English masses might live
in peace, and be protected in quietly tilling their fields, manuring
them after their own fashion, and not having them turned up and
fertilized after the fashion of Bosworth and Towton and Barnet. Surely
Henry Tudor, second of that name, is entitled to the same grace that is
extended to Maximilien Robespierre, supposing the facts to be in his
favor.

But are the facts, when fairly stated, in his favor? They are not. His
advocates must find themselves terribly puzzled to reconcile his
practice with their theory. They prove beyond all dispute that the
succession question was the grand thought of England in Henry's time;
but they do not prove, because they cannot prove, that the King's
action was such as to show that he was ready, we will not say to make
important sacrifices to lessen the probabilities of the occurrence of a
succession war, but to do anything in that way that required him to
control any one of the gross passions or grosser appetites of which he
was throughout his loathsome life the slave and the victim. He seems to
have passed the last twenty years of his reign in doing deeds that give
flat contradiction to the theory set up by his good-natured admirers of
after-times, that he was the victim of circumstances, and that, though
one of the mildest and most merciful of men in fact, those villanous
circumstances did compel him to become a tyrant, a murderer, a
repudiator of sacramental and pecuniary and diplomatic obligations, a
savage on a throne, and a Nebuchadnezzar for pride and arrogance, only
that, unfortunately for his subjects in general, and for his wives in
particular, he was not turned out to grass. A beast in fact, he did not
become a beast in form. Scarcely one of his acts, after the divorce of