life, and not even in this age, when we have organized divorce, could
such slips be brought forward against a wife of whom a husband had
become weary,--that we should be careful how we attach credit to what
is called the evidence against Catharine Howard; and her
contemporaries, who had means of weighing and criticizing that
evidence, did not agree in believing her guilty. Mr. Froude, who would,
to use a saying of Henry's time, find Abel guilty of murder of Cain,
were that necessary to support his royal favorite's hideous cause, not
only declares that the unhappy girl was guilty throughout, but lugs God
into the tragedy, and makes Him responsible for what was, perhaps, the
cruellest and most devilish of all the many murders perpetrated by
Henry VIII. The luckless lady was but a child at the time she was
devoured by "the jaws of darkness." At most she was but in her
twentieth year, and probably she was a year or two younger than that
age. Any other king than Henry would have pardoned her, if for no other
reason, then for this, that he had coupled her youth with his age, and
so placed her in an unnatural position, in which the temptation to
error was all the greater, and the less likely to be resisted, because
of the girl's evil training,--a training that could not have been
unknown to the King, and on the incidents of which the Protestant plot
for her ruin, and that of the political party of which she was the
instrument, had been founded. But of Henry VIII., far more truly than
of James II., could it have been said by any one of his innumerable
victims, that, though it was in his power to forgive an offender, it
was not in his nature to do so.

No tyrant ever was preceded to the tomb by such an array of victims as
Henry VIII. If Shakspeare had chosen to bring the highest of those
victims around the last bed that Henry was to press on earth, after the
fashion in which he sent the real or supposed victims of Richard III.