son, and the other the future Queen Elizabeth, who lived to her
seventieth year, and whose enormous vitality and intellectual energy
speak well for the physical excellence of her mother. The miscarriage
that Anne experienced in February, 1536, was probably the occasion of
her repudiation and murder in the following May, as Henry was always
inclined to attribute disappointments of this kind to his wives, who
ever dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death.[Footnote: Henry
thought of divorcing Catharine of Aragon some years before she had
become too old to bear children. She was born in the last month of
1485, and the "King's secret matter," as the divorce question was
called, was in agitation as early as the first half of 1527, and
probably at an earlier period. Catharine was the mother of five
children, but one of whom lived, namely, the Princess Mary, afterward
Mary I.] The most charitable view that can be taken of Henry's
abominable treatment of his second wife is, that he was led by his
superstitious feelings, which _he_ called religion, to sacrifice
her to the manes of his first wife, whom Anne had badly treated, and
who died on the 7th of January, 1536. Henry, after his fashion, was
much moved by Catharine's death, and by perusal of the letter which she
wrote him from her dying bed; and so he resolved to make the only
atonement of which his savage nature was capable, and one, too, which
the bigoted Spanish woman would have been satisfied with, could she
have foreseen it. As the alliance between the royal houses of England
and Spain was sealed with the blood of the innocent Warwick, who was
sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father,
Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged
by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it
were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by
ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a
woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the