to haunt the last earthly sleep of the last royal Plantagenet, he would
have had to bring them up by sections, and not individually, in
battalions, and not as single spies. Buckingham, Wolsey, More, Fisher,
Catharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine
Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury,
Surrey,--these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the
patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led
the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to
despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower
rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the
King's "jealous rage." Undoubtedly some of these persons had justly
incurred death, but it is beyond belief that they were all guilty of
the crimes laid to their charge; yet Mr. Froude can find as little
good in any of them as of evil in Henry's treatment of them. He would
have us believe that Henry was scrupulously observant of the law! and
that he allowed Cromwell to perish because he had violated the laws of
England, and sought to carry out that "higher law" which politicians
out of power are so fond of appealing to, but which politicians in
power seldom heed. And such stuff we are expected to receive as
historical criticism, and the philosophy of history! And pray, of what
breach of the law had the Countess of Salisbury been guilty, that she
should be sent to execution when she had arrived at so advanced an age
that she must soon have passed away in the course of Nature? She was
one of Cromwell's victims, and as he had been deemed unfit to live
because of his violations of the laws of the realm, it would follow
that one whose attainder had been procured through his devices could
not be fairly put to death. She suffered ten months after Cromwell, and
could have committed no fresh offence in the interval, as she was a
prisoner in the Tower at the time of her persecutor's fall, and so
remained until the day of her murder. The causes of her death,