If it could be established that the conduct of Henry VIII. toward his people, his church, his nobles, and his wives was regulated solely with reference to the succession question, and by his desire to preserve the peace of his kingdom, we believe that few men would be disposed to condemn most of those of his acts that have been long admitted to blacken his memory, and which have placed him almost at the very head of the long roll of heartless tyrants. That the end justifies the means is a doctrine which everybody condemns by word of mouth, but the practice founded upon which almost all men approve in their hearts, whenever it applies to their own schemes, or to schemes the success of which promises to benefit them, either individually or in the mass. As the apologists of the French Jacobins have argued that their favorites 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 Catharine of Aragon, was of a character to favor the continuance of peace in England, while many of them were admirably calculated to bring about a war for the regal succession. Grant that he was justified in putting away his Spanish wife,a most excellent and eminently disagreeable woman, a combination of qualities by no means uncommon,where was the necessity of his taking Anne Boleyn to wife? Why could he not have given his hand to some foreign princess, and so have atoned to his subjects for breaking up the Spanish alliance, in the continuance of which the English people had no common political interest, and an extraordinary commercial interest? Why could he not have sent to Germany for some fair-haired princess, as he did years later, and got Anne of Cleves for his pains, whose ugly face cost poor Cromwell his head, which was giving the wisest head in England for the worst one out of it? Henry, Mr. Froude would have us believe, divorced Catharine of Aragon because he desired to have sons, as one way to avoid the breaking out of a civil war; and yet it was a sure way to bring Charles V. into an English dispute for the regal succession, as the supporter of any pretender, to repudiate the aunt of that powerful imperial and royal personage. The English nation, Mr. Froude truly tells us, was at that time "sincerely attached to Spain. The alliance with the House of Burgundy" (of which Charles V. was the head) "was of old date; the commercial intercourse with Flanders was enormous,Flanders, in fact, absorbing all the English exports; and as many as fifteen thousand Flemings were settled in London. Charles himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in the late French war; and when, in his supposed character of leader of the anti-Papal party in Europe, he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate Rome, he had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was fomenting in the population." Was it not a strange way to proceed for the preservation of peace in England to offend a foreign sovereign who stood in so strong and influential a position to the English people? Charles was not merely displeased because of the divorce of his relative, his mother's sister, a daughter of the renowned Isabella, who had wrought such great things for Christendom,promoting the discovery of America, and conquering Granada,but he was incensed at the mere thought of preferring to her place a private gentlewoman, who would never have been heard of, if Henry had not seen fit to raise her from common life, first to the throne, and then to the scaffold. That was an insult to the whole Austro-Burgundian family, whose dominions rivalled those of the Roman Caesars, and whose chief had just held a King of France captive and a Pope of Rome besieged. The Emperor might, perhaps, have been sooted, had his relative's place been bestowed upon some lady of corresponding blueness of blood; but it offended his pride, when he reflected on her being supplanted by Mrs. Boleyn. The aristocratical morgue was too strong in him to bear such an insult with fortitude. Yet none other than Mrs. Boleyn would Henry have, notwithstanding the certainty of enraging Charles, and with the equal certainty of disgusting a majority of his own subjects. If it had been simply a wife that he desired, and if he was thinking merely of the succession, and so sought only for an opportunity to beget legitimate children, why did he so pertinaciously insist upon having no one but "Mistress Anne" for the partner of his throne and bed?
When he married Jane Seymour on the 20th of May, 1536, having had Anne's head cut off on the 19th, Mr. Froude sees in that infamous proceedinga proceeding without parallel in the annals of villany, and which would have disgraced the worst members of Sawney Bean's unpromising familynothing but a simple business-transaction. The Privy Council and the peers, troubled about the succession, asked Henry to marry again without any delay, when Anne had been prepared for condemnation. The King was graciously pleased to comply with this request, which was probably made in compliance with suggestions from himself,the marriage with Jane Seymour having been resolved upon long before it took place, and the desire to effect it being the cause of the legal assassination of Anne Boleyn, which could be brought about only through the "cooking" of a series of charges that could have originated nowhere out of her husband's vile mind, and which led to the deaths of six innocent persons. "The indecent haste" of the King's marriage with the Seymour, Mr. Froude says, "is usually considered a proof entirely conclusive of the cause of Anne Boleyn's ruin. To myself the haste is an evidence of something very different. Henry, who waited seven years for Anne Boleyn, was not without some control over his passions; and if appetite had been the moving influence with him, he would scarcely, with the eyes of all the world fixed upon his conduct, have passed so extravagant an insult upon the nation of which he was the sovereign. The precipitancy with which he acted is to me a proof that he looked on matrimony as an indifferent official act which his duty required at the moment. This was the interpretation which was given to his conduct by the Lords and Commons of England. In the absence of any evidence, or shadow of evidence, that among contemporaries who had means of knowing the truth another judgment was passed upon it, the deliberate assertion of an Act of Parliament must be considered a safer guide than modern unsupported conjecture."18