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38 <p align="center">&nbsp;</p>
39 <p align="center"><b><font size="7">The Divorce of<br>Catherine of Aragon</font></b><br>
40 <font size="5">by
41 JA Froude, 1891</font></p>
42 <p align="center">
43 <img border="0" src="aragon-new1.jpg" alt="miniature portrait of Katharine of Aragon by Lucas Horenbout" width="325" height="321"></td>
44 <td width="25%" height="610"></td>
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47<blockquote>
48 <blockquote>
49 <font style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font>
50 <font face="Times New Roman">
51 <div align="left">
52 <b>INTRODUCTION</b></div>
53 <p align="left">THE mythic element cannot be eliminated out of history. Men
54 who play leading parts on the world's stage gather about them the admiration
55 of friends and the animosity of disappointed rivals or political enemies.
56 The atmosphere becomes charged with legends of what they have said or done
57 -- some inventions, some distortions of facts, but rarely or never accurate.
58 Their outward acts, being public, cannot be absolutely misstated; their
59 motives, being known only to themselves, are an open field for imagination;
60 and as the disposition is to believe evil rather than good, the portraits
61 drawn may vary indefinitely, according to the sympathies of the describer,
62 but are seldom too favourable. The more distinguished a man is the more he
63 is talked about. Stories are current about him in his own lifetime,
64 guaranteed apparently by the highest authorities; related, insisted upon;
65 time, place, and circumstance accurately given -- most of them mere
66 malicious lies; yet, if written down, to reappear in memoirs a hundred years
67 hence, they are likely to pass for authentic, or at least probable. Even
68 where there is no malice, imagination will still be active. People believe
69 or disbelieve, repeat or suppress, according to their own inclinations; and
70 death, which ends the feuds of unimportant persons, lets loose the tongues
71 over the characters of the great. Kings are especially sufferers; when alive
72 they hear only flattery; when they are gone men revenge, themselves by
73 drawing hideous portraits of them, and the more distinguished they may have
74 been the more minutely their weaknesses are dwelt upon. <i>&quot;C'est un plaisir
75 indicible,&quot;</i> says Voltaire, <i>&quot;de donner des décrets contre des
76 souverains morts quand on ne peut en lancer contre eux de leur vivant de
77 peur de perdre ses oreilles.&quot;</i> The dead sovereigns go their way. Their
78 real work for good or evil lives after them; but they themselves are where
79 the opinions expressed about their character affect them no more. To Cæsar
80 or Napoleon it matters nothing what judgment the world passes upon their
81 conduct. It is of more importance for the ethical value of history that acts
82 which as they are related appear wicked should be duly condemned, that acts
83 which are represented as having advanced the welfare of mankind should be
84 duly honoured, than that the real character of individuals should be
85 correctly appreciated. To appreciate any single man with complete accuracy
86 is impossible. To appreciate him even proximately is extremely difficult.
87 Rulers of kingdoms may have public reasons for what they do, which at the
88 time may be understood or allowed for. Times change, and new interests rise.
89 The circumstances no longer exist which would explain their conduct. The
90 student looks therefore for an explanation in elements which he thinks he
91 understands -- in pride, ambition, fear, avarice, jealousy, or sensuality;
92 and, settling the question thus to his own satisfaction, resents or
93 ridicules attempts to look for other motives.</p>
94 </font><font style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
95 <font style="font-family: Times New Roman">
96 <p align="left">So long as his moral judgment is generally correct, he
97 inflicts no injury, and he suffers none. Cruelty and lust are proper objects
98 of abhorrence; he learns to detest them in studying the Tiberius of Tacitus,
99 though the character described by the great Roman historian may have been a
100 mere creation of the hatred of the old Roman aristocracy. The manifesto of
101 the Prince of Orange was a libel against Philip the Second; but the Philip
102 of Protestant tradition is an embodiment of the persecuting spirit of
103 Catholic Europe which it would be now useless to disturb. The tendency of
104 history is to fall into wholesome moral lines whether they be accurate or
105 not, and to interfere with harmless illusions may cause greater errors than
106 it aspires to cure. Crowned offenders are arraigned at the tribunal of
107 history for the crimes which they are alleged to have committed. It may be
108 sometimes shown that the crimes were not crimes at all, that the sufferers
109 had deserved their fate, that the severities were useful and essential for
110 some great and valuable purpose. But the reader sees in the apology for acts
111 which he had regarded as tyrannical a defence of tyranny itself. Preoccupied
112 with the received interpretation, he finds deeds excused which he had learnt
113 to execrate; and in learning something which, even if true, is of no real
114 moment to him, he suffers in the maiming of his perceptions of the
115 difference between right and wrong. The whitewashing of the villains of
116 tradition is, therefore, justly regarded as waste of labour. If successful,
117 it is of imperfect value; if unsuccessful, it is a misuse of industry which
118 deserves to be censured. Time is too precious to be squandered over
119 paradoxes. The dead are gone; the censure of mankind has written their
120 epitaphs, and so they may be left. Their true award will be decided
121 elsewhere. </p>
122 </font><font face="Times New Roman">
123 <p align="left">This is the commonsense verdict. When the work of a man is
124 done and ended; when, except indirectly and invisibly, he affects the living
125 world no more, the book is closed, the sentence is passed, and there he may
126 be allowed to rest. The case is altered, however, when the dead still live
127 in their actions, when their principles and the effects of their conduct are
128 still vigorous and operative, and the movements which they initiated
129 continue to be fought over. It sometimes happens that mighty revolutions can
130 be traced to the will and resolution of a single man, and that the conflict
131 continues when he is gone. The personal character of such a man becomes then
132 of intrinsic importance as an argument for attack or defence. The changes
133 introduced by Henry VIII. are still denounced or defended with renewed
134 violence; the ashes of a conflict which seemed to have been decided are
135 again blown into a flame; and what manner of man Henry was, and what the
136 statesmen and churchmen were who stood by him and assisted him in reshaping
137 the English constitution, becomes a practical question of our own time. By
138 their fruits ye shall know them. A good tree cannot bear evil fruit, neither
139 can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Roman Catholics argue from the
140 act to the man, and from the man back to the act. The Reformation, they say,
141 was a rebellion against an authority appointed by God for the rule of the
142 world; it was a wicked act in itself; the author or the authors of it were
143 presumably, therefore, themselves wicked; and the worst interpretation of
144 their conduct is antecedently probable, because a revolt against the Church
145 of Christ could only have originated in depraved hearts. Or again, inverting
146 the argument, they say with sufficient plausibility that the sins and crimes
147 of the King are acknowledged facts of history; that from so bad a man no
148 good thing could ever rise; that Henry was a visible servant of the devil,
149 and therefore the Reformation, of which he was the instrument, was the
150 devil's work. If the picture drawn of him by his Catholic contemporaries is
151 correct, the inference is irresistible. That picture, however, was drawn by
152 those whose faith he wounded and whose interests he touched, and therefore
153 might be regarded with suspicion. Religious animosity is fertile in calumny,
154 because it assumes beforehand that every charge is likely to be true in
155 proportion to its enormity, and Catholic writers were credulous of evil when
156 laid to the charge of so dangerous an adversary. But the Catholics have not
157 been Henry's only accusers; all sorts and sects have combined in the general
158 condemnation. The Anglican High Churchman is as bitter against him as
159 Reginald Pole himself. He admits and maintains the separation from Rome
160 which Henry accomplished for him; but he abhors as heartily as Pole or
161 Lingard the internal principles of the Reformation. He resents the control
162 of the clergy by the civil power. He demands the restoration of the
163 spiritual privileges which Henry and his parliaments took away from them. He
164 aspires to the recovery of ecclesiastical independence. He therefore with
165 equal triumph points to the blots in Henry's character, and deepens their
166 shade with every accusation, proved or unproved, which he can find in
167 contemporary records. With him, too, that a charge was alleged at the time
168 is evidence sufficient to entitle him to accept it as a fact. </p>
169 <p align="left">Again, Protestant writers have been no less unsparing, from
170 an imprudent eagerness to detach their cause from a disreputable ally. In
171 Elizabeth's time it was a point of honour and loyalty to believe in the
172 innocence of her mother. If Anne Boleyn was condemned on forged or false
173 evidence to make way for Jane Seymour, what appears so clearly to us must
174 have been far clearer to Henry and his Council; of all abominable crimes
175 committed by tyrannical princes there was never one more base or cowardly
176 than Anne's execution; and in insisting on Anne's guiltlessness they have
177 condemned the King, his ministers, and his parliaments. Having discovered
178 him to have murdered his wife, they have found him also to have been a
179 persecutor of the truth. The Reformation in England was at its outset
180 political rather than doctrinal. The avarice and tyranny of the Church
181 officials had galled the limbs of the laity. Their first steps were to break
182 the chains which fretted them, and to put a final end to the temporal power
183 of the clergy. Spiritual liberty came later, and came slowly from the
184 constitution of the English mind. Superstition had been familiarised by
185 custom, protected by natural reverence, and shielded from inquiry by the
186 peculiar horror attaching to unbelief. The nation had been taught from
187 immemorial time that to doubt on the mysteries of faith was the worst crime
188 which man could commit; and while they were willing to discover that on
189 their human side the clergy were but brother mortals of questionable
190 character, they drew a distinction between the Church as a national
191 institution and the doctrines which it taught. An old creed could not yield
192 at once. The King did much; he protected individual Lutherans to the edge of
193 rashness. He gave the nation the English Bible. He made Latimer a bishop. He
194 took away completely and for ever the power of the prelates to punish what
195 they called heresy <i>ex officio</i> and on their own authority; but the
196 zeal of the ultra-Protestants broke loose when the restraint was taken off;
197 the sense of the country was offended by the irreverence with which objects
198 and opinions were treated which they regarded as holy, and Parliament, which
199 had put a bit in the mouth of the ecclesiastical courts, was driven to a
200 substitute in the Bill of the Six Articles. The advanced section in popular
201 movements is usually unwise. The characteristic excellence of the English
202 Reformation is, that throughout its course it was restrained by the law, and
203 the Six Articles Bill, tempered as it was in the execution, was a
204 permissible, and perhaps useful, measure in restraint of intemperance. It
205 was the same in Germany. Anabaptists continued to be burnt in Saxony and
206 Hesse long after Luther's revolt; Calvin thought the stake a fitting penalty
207 for doubts upon the Trinity. John Knox, in Scotland, approved of
208 witch-burning and sending mass-priests to the gallows. Henry could not
209 disregard the pronounced feeling of the majority of the English people. He
210 was himself but one of them, and changed slowly as they changed. Yet
211 Protestant tradition has assumed that the bloody whip with six strings was
212 an act of arbitrary ferocity. It considers that the King could, and ought
213 to, have advanced at once into an understanding of the principle of
214 toleration -- toleration of the new opinions, and a more severe repression
215 of the old. The Puritans and Evangelicals forgot that he had given them the
216 English Testament. They forgot that by setting his foot upon the bishops he
217 had opened the pulpits to themselves, and they classed him among the
218 persecutors, or else joined in the shallow laughs of the ultramontane
219 Catholics at what they pleased to call his inconsistency. </p>
220 <p align="left">Thus from all sides a catena of invective has been wrapped
221 about Henry's character. The sensible part of the country held its tongue.
222 The speakers and writers were the passionate and fanatical of both
223 persuasions, and by them the materials were supplied for the Henry VIII. who
224 has been brought down to us by history, while the candid and philosophic
225 thinkers of the last and present centuries have accepted the traditional
226 figure. In their desire to be impartial they have held the balance equal
227 between Catholics and Protestants, inclining slightly to the Catholic side,
228 from a wish to conciliate a respectable body who had been unjustly maligned
229 and oppressed; while they have lavished invectives upon the early Reformers
230 violent enough to have satisfied even Pole himself, whose rhetoric has
231 formed the base of their declamation. </p>
232 <p align="left">Liberal philosophy would have had a bad time of it in
233 England, perhaps in all Europe, if there had been no Henry VIII. to take the
234 Pope by the throat. But one service writers like Macaulay have undoubtedly
235 accomplished. They have shown that it is entirely impossible to separate the
236 King from his ministers -- to condemn Henry and to spare Cranmer. Protestant
237 writers, from Burnet to Southey, have tried to save the reforming bishops
238 and statesmen at Henry's expense. Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley have been
239 described as saints, though their master was a villain. But the cold
240 impartiality of Macaulay has pointed out unanswerably that in all Henry's
241 most questionable acts his own ministers and his prelates were active
242 participants -- that his Privy Council, his parliaments, his judges on the
243 bench, the juries empanelled to try the victims of his tyranny, were equally
244 his accomplices; some actively assisting; the rest, if these acts were
245 really criminal, permitting themselves to be bribed or terrified into
246 acquiescence. The leading men of all descriptions, the nation itself,
247 through the guilt of its representatives, were all stained in the same
248 detestable colours. It may be said, indeed, that they were worse than the
249 King himself. For the King at least may be pleaded the coarse temptations of
250 a brutal nature; but what palliation can be urged for the peers and judges
251 who sacrificed Anne Boleyn, or More, or Fisher, according to the received
252 hypothesis? Not even the excuse of personal fear of an all-powerful despot.
253 For Henry had no Janissaries or Prætorians to defend his person or execute
254 his orders. He had but his hundred yeomen of the guard, not more numerous
255 than the ordinary followers of a second-rate noble. The Catholic leaders,
256 who were infuriated at his attacks upon the Church, and would if they could
257 have introduced foreign armies to dethrone him, insisted on his weakness as
258 an encouragement to an easy enterprise. Beyond those few yeomen they urged
259 that he had no protection save in the attachment of the subjects whom he was
260 alienating. What strange influence was such a king able to exercise that he
261 could overawe the lords and gentry of England, the learned professions, the
262 municipal authorities? How was it that he was able to compel them to be the
263 voluntary instruments of his cruelty? Strangest of all, he seems to have
264 needed no protection, but rather to have been personally popular, even among
265 those who disapproved his public policy. The air was charged with threats of
266 insurrection, but no conspiracy was ever formed to kill him, like those
267 which so often menaced the life of his daughter. When the North was in arms
268 in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and a question rose among the leaders whether in
269 the event of victory the King was to be deposed, it was found that anyone
270 who proposed to remove him would be torn in pieces by the people.</p>
271 <p align="left">Granting that Henry VIII. was, as Dickens said of him, &quot;a
272 spot of blood and grease&quot; on the page of English history, the contemporary
273 generation of Englishmen must have been fit subjects of such a sovereign.
274 Every country, says Carlyle, gets as good a government as it deserves. The
275 England of the Cromwells and the Cranmers, the Howards and the Fitzwilliams,
276 the Wriothesleys and the Pagets, seems to have been made of baser materials
277 than any land of which mankind has preserved a record. Roman Catholics may
278 fairly plead that out of such a race no spiritual reform is likely to have
279 arisen which could benefit any human soul. Of all the arguments which can be
280 alleged for the return of England to the ancient fold, this is surely the
281 most powerful. </p>
282 <p align="left">Yet England shows no intention of returning. History may say
283 what it pleases, yet England remains tenacious of the liberties which were
284 then won for us, and unconscious of the disgrace attaching to them;
285 unconscious, also, that the version of the story which it accepts contains
286 anything which requires explanation. The legislation of Henry VIII., his
287 Privy Council, and his parliaments is the Magna Charta of the modern world.
288 The Act of Appeals and the Act of Supremacy asserted the national
289 independence, and repudiated the interference of foreign bishop, prince, or
290 potentate within the limits of the English empire. The clergy had held for
291 many centuries an <i>imperium in imperio.</i> Subject themselves to no law
292 but their own, they had asserted an irresponsible jurisdiction over the
293 souls and bodies of the people. The Act for the submission of these persons
294 reduced them to the common condition of subjects under the control of the
295 law. Popes were no longer allowed to dispense with ordinary obligations.
296 Clerical privileges were abolished. The spiritual courts, with their
297 intolerable varieties of iniquity, were swept away, or coerced within
298 rational limits. The religious houses were suppressed, their enormous wealth
299 was applied for the defence of the realm, and the worse than Augean dunghill
300 of abuses was cleared out with resolute hand. These great results were
301 accomplished in the face of papal curses, in defiance of superstitious
302 terrors, so despicable when bravely confronted, so terrible while the
303 spectre of supernatural power was still unexorcised; in the face, too, of
304 earthly perils which might make stout hearts shake, of an infuriated
305 priesthood stirring the people into rebellion, of an exasperated Catholic
306 Europe threatening fire and sword in the name of the Pope. These were
307 distinguished achievements, not likely to have been done at all by an
308 infamous prince and infamous ministers; yet done so well that their work is
309 incorporated in the constitution almost in the form in which they left it;
310 and this mighty revolution, the greatest and most far-reaching in modern
311 times, was accomplished without a civil war, by firmness of hand, by the
312 action of Parliament, and a resolute enforcement of the law. Nor has the
313 effect of Henry's legislation been confined to England. Every great country,
314 Catholic or Protestant, has practically adopted its chief provisions. Popes
315 no longer pretend a power of deposing princes, absolving subjects from their
316 allegiance, or selling dispensations for offences against the law of the
317 land. Appeals are no longer carried from the national courts to the court of
318 the Rota. The papal treasury is no longer supplied by the plunder of the
319 national clergy, collected by resident papal officials. Bishops and
320 convocations have ceased to legislate above and independent of the secular
321 authority, and clerks who commit crimes bear the same penalties as the
322 profane. The high quality of the Reformation statutes is guaranteed by their
323 endurance; and it is hard to suppose that the politicians who conceived and
324 carried them out were men of base conditions. The question is not of the
325 character of the King. If nothing was at issue but the merits or demerits of
326 a single sovereign, he might be left where he lies. The question is of the
327 characters of the reforming leaders, who, jointly with the King, were the
328 authors of this tremendous and beneficent revolution. Henry in all that he
329 did acted with these men and through them. Is it possible to believe that
330 qualities so opposite as the popular theory requires existed in the same
331 persons? Is it possible, for instance, that Cranmer, who composed or
332 translated the prayers in the English Liturgy, was the miserable wretch
333 which Macaulay or Lingard describes? The era of Elizabeth was the outspring
334 of the movement which Henry VIII. commenced, and it was the grandest period
335 in English history. Is it credible that so invigorating a stream flowed from
336 a polluted fountain? </p>
337 <p align="left">Before accepting a conclusion so disgraceful -- before
338 consigning the men who achieved so great a victory, and risked and lost
339 their lives in the battle, to final execration -- it is at least permissible
340 to pause. The difficulty can only be made light of by impatience, by
341 prejudice, or by want of thought. To me at any rate, who wished to discover
342 what the real history of the Reformation had been, it seemed so
343 considerable, that, dismissing the polemical invectives of later writers, I
344 turned to the accounts of their conduct, which had been left behind by the
345 authors of it themselves. Among the fortunate anomalies of the situation,
346 Henry departed from previous custom in holding annual parliaments. At every
347 step which he took, either in the rearrangement of the realm or in his own
348 domestic confusions, he took the Lords and Commons into his council, and
349 ventured nothing without their consent. The preambles of the principal
350 statutes contain a narrative clear and precise of the motives of everything
351 that he did -- a narrative which at least may have been a true one, which
352 was not put forward as a defence, but was a mere explanation of acts which
353 on the surface seemed violent and arbitrary. If the explanation is correct,
354 it shows us a time of complications and difficulties, which, on the whole,
355 were successfully encountered. It shows us severe measures severely
356 executed, but directed to public and necessary purpose, involving no
357 sycophancy or baseness, no mean subservience to capricious tyranny, but such
358 as were the natural safeguards during a dangerous convulsion, or remedies of
359 accidents incidental to hereditary monarchy. The story told is clear and
360 distinct; pitiless, but not dishonourable. Between the lines can be read the
361 storm of popular passions, the beating of the national heart when it was
362 stirred to its inmost depths. We see established institutions rooted out,
363 idols overthrown, and injured worshippers exasperated to fury; the air, as
364 was inevitable at such a crisis, full of flying rumours, some lies, some
365 half lies with fragments of truth attaching to them, bred of malice or dizzy
366 brains, the materials out of which the popular tradition has been built. It
367 was no insular revolution. The stake played for was the liberty of mankind.
368 All Europe was watching England, for England was the hinge on which the fate
369 of the Reformation turned. Could it be crushed in England, the Catholics
370 were assured of universal victory, and therefore tongues and pens were busy
371 everywhere throughout Christendom, Catholic imagination representing Henry
372 as an incarnate Satan, for which, it must be admitted, his domestic
373 misadventures gave them tempting opportunities. So thick fell the showers of
374 calumny, that, bold as he was, he at times himself winced under it. He
375 complained to Charles V. of the libels circulated about him in France and
376 Flanders. Charles, too, had suffered in the same way. He answered,
377 humorously, that &quot;if kings gave occasion to be spoken about they would be
378 spoken about; kings were not kings of tongues.&quot; Henry VIII. was an easy mark
379 for slander; but if all slanders are to pass as true which are flung at
380 public men whose policy provides them with an army of calumniators, the
381 reputation of the best of them is but a spotted rag. The clergy were the
382 vocal part of Europe. They had the pulpits; they had the writing of the
383 books and pamphlets. They had cause to hate Henry, and they hated him with
384 an intensity of passion which could not have been more savage had he been
385 the devil himself. But there are men whose enmity is a compliment. They
386 libelled Luther almost as freely as they libelled the English king. I
387 myself, after reading and weighing all that I could find forty years ago in
388 prints or manuscripts, concluded that the real facts of Henry's conduct were
389 to be found in the Statute Book and nowhere else; that the preambles of the
390 Acts of Parliament did actually represent the sincere opinion about him of
391 the educated laymen of England, who had better opportunities of knowing the
392 truth than we can have, and that a modern Englishman may be allowed to
393 follow their authority without the imputation of paradox or folly. </p>
394 <p align="left">With this impression, and with the Statute Book for a guide,
395 I wrote the opening portion of my &quot;History of England, from the Fall of
396 Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada.&quot; The Published criticisms upon my work
397 were generally unfavourable. Catholic writers inherited the traditions and
398 the temper of their forefathers, and believed the eatena of their own
399 historians. Protestants could not believe in a defence of the author of the
400 Six Articles Bill. Secular reviewers were easily witty at the &quot;model
401 husband&quot; whom they supposed me to be imposing upon them, and resented the
402 interference with a version of the story authenticated by great names among
403 my predecessors. The public, however, took an interest in what I had to say.
404 The book was read, and continues to be read; at the close of my life,
405 therefore, I have to go once more over the ground; and as I am still
406 substantially alone in maintaining an opinion considered heretical by
407 orthodox historians, I have to decide in what condition I am to leave my
408 work behind me. In the thirty-five years which have elapsed since those
409 early volumes appeared large additions have been made to the materials for
410 the history of the period. The vast collection of manuscripts in the English
411 Record Office, which then were only partially accessible, have been sorted,
412 catalogued, and calendared by the industry of my friends Mr. Brewer and Mr.
413 Gairdner. Private collections in great English houses have been examined and
414 reported on by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Foreign archives at
415 Paris, Simancas, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Brussels have been searched to
416 some extent by myself, but in a far larger degree by able scholars specially
417 appointed for the purpose. In the despatches, thus made accessible, of the
418 foreign ambassadors resident at Henry's court we have the invaluable, if not
419 impartial, comments of trained and responsible politicians who related from
420 day to day the events which were passing under their eyes. Being Catholics,
421 and representatives of Catholic powers, they were bitterly hostile to the
422 Reformation -- hostile alike on political grounds and religious -- and
423 therefore inclined to believe and report the worst that could be said both
424 of it and of its authors. But they wrote before the traditions had become
425 stereotyped; their accounts are fresh and original; and, being men of the
426 world, and writing in confidence to their own masters, they were as
427 veracious as their prejudices would allow them to be. Unconsciously, too,
428 they render another service of infinite importance. Being in close
429 communication with the disaffected English peers and clergy, and engaged
430 with them secretly in promoting rebellion, the ministers of Charles V.
431 reveal with extraordinary clearness the dangers with which the Government
432 had to deal. They make it perfectly plain that the Act of Supremacy, with
433 its stern and peremptory demands, was no more than a legitimate and
434 necessary defence against organised treason. </p>
435 <p align="left">It was thus inevitable that much would have to be added to
436 what I had already published. When a microscope is applied to the petal of a
437 flower or the wing of an insect, simple outlines and simple surfaces are
438 resolved into complex organisms with curious and beautiful details. The
439 effect of these despatches is precisely the same -- we see with the eyes, we
440 hear with the ears, of men who were living parts of the scenes which they
441 describe. Stories afterwards elaborated into established facts we trace to
442 their origin in rumours of the hour; we read innumerable anecdotes, some
443 with the clear stamp of truth on them, many mere creations of passing wit or
444 malice, no more authentic than the thousands like them which circulate in
445 modern society, guaranteed by the positive assertions of personal witnesses,
446 yet visibly recognisable as lies. Through all this the reader must pick his
447 way and use his own judgment. He knows that many things are false which are
448 reported about his own eminent contemporaries. He may be equally certain
449 that lies were told as freely then as now. He will probably allow his
450 sympathies to guide him. He will accept as fact what fits in with his creed
451 or his theory. He will share the general disposition to believe evil,
452 especially about kings and great men. The exaggerated homage paid to
453 princes, when they are alive, has to be compensated by suspecting the worst
454 of them as soon as they are gone. But the perusal of all these documents
455 leaves the broad aspect of the story, in my opinion, precisely where it was.
456 It is made more interesting by the greater fulness of particulars; it is
457 made more vivid by the clear view which they afford of individual persons
458 who before were no more than names. But I think now, as I thought forty
459 years ago, that through the confusions and contradictions of a stormy and
460 angry time, the statutebook remains the safest guide to follow. If there be
461 any difference, it is that actions which till explained appeared
462 gratuitously cruel, like the execution of Bishop Fisher, are seen beyond
463 dispute to have been reasonable and just. Bishop Fisher is proved by the
464 words of the Spanish Ambassador himself to have invited and pressed the
465 introduction of a foreign Catholic army into England in the Pope's interest.
466 </p>
467 <p align="left">Thus I find nothing to withdraw in what I then wrote, and
468 little to alter save in correcting some small errors of trivial moment; but,
469 on the other hand, I find much to add; and the question rises in what way I
470 had better do it, with fair consideration for those who have bought the book
471 as it stands. To take the work to pieces and introduce the new material into
472 the text or the notes will impose a necessity of buying a new copy, or of
473 being left with an inferior one, on the many friends who least deserve to be
474 so treated. I have concluded, therefore, on writing an additional volume,
475 where such parts of the story as have had important light thrown upon them
476 can be told over again in ampler form. The body of the history I leave as it
477 stands. It contains what I believe to be a true account of the time, of the
478 immediate causes which brought about the changes of the sixteenth century,
479 and of the characters and principles of the actors in them. I have only to
480 fill up certain deficiencies and throw light into places hitherto left dark.
481 For the rest, I do not pretend to impartiality. I believe the Reformation to
482 have been the greatest incident in English history; the root and source of
483 the expansive force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe,
484 and imprinted the English genius and character on the constitution of
485 mankind. I am unwilling to believe more evil than I can help of my
486 countrymen who accomplished so beneficent a work, and in a book written with
487 such convictions the mythical element cannot be wholly wanting. Even things
488 which immediately surround us, things which we see and touch, we do not
489 perceive as they are; we perceive only our own sensations, and our
490 sensations are a combined result of certain objects and of the faculties
491 which apprehend them. Something of ourselves must always be intermixed
492 before knowledge can reach us; in every conclusion which we form, in every
493 conviction which is forced upon us, there is still a subjective element. It
494 is so in physical science. It is so in art. It is so in our speculations on
495 our own nature. It is so in religion. It is so even in pure mathematics. </p>
496 <p align="left">The curved and rectilineal figures on which we reason are
497 our own creation, and have no existence exterior to the reasoning mind. Most
498 of all is it so in history, where we have no direct perceptions to help us,
499 but are dependent on the narratives of others whose beliefs were necessarily
500 influenced by their personal dispositions. The first duty of an historian is
501 to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape
502 their influence. In judging of the truth of particular statements, the
503 conclusion which he will form must be based partly upon evidence and partly
504 upon what he conceives to be likely or unlikely. In a court of justice,
505 where witnesses can be cross-examined, uncertain elements can in some degree
506 be eliminated; yet, after all care is taken, judges and juries have been
507 often blinded by passion and prejudice. When we have nothing before us but
508 rumours set in circulation, we know not by whom or on what authority, and we
509 are driven to consider probabilities, the Protestant, who believes the
510 Reformation to have been a victory of truth over falsehood, cannot come to
511 the same conclusion as the Catholic, who believes it to have been a curse,
512 or perhaps to the same conclusion as the indifferent philosopher, who
513 regards Protestant and Catholic alike with benevolent contempt. For myself,
514 I can but say that I have discriminated with such faculty as I possess. I
515 have kept back nothing. I have consciously distorted nothing which conflicts
516 with my own views. I have accepted what seems sufficiently proved. I have
517 rejected what I can find no support for save in hearsay or prejudice. But
518 whether accepting or rejecting, I have endeavoured to follow the rule that
519 incidents must not be lightly accepted as authentic which are inconsistent
520 with the universal laws of human nature, and that to disprove a calumny it
521 is sufficient to show that there is no valid witness for it. </p>
522 <p align="left">Finally, I do not allow myself to be tempted into
523 controversy with particular writers whose views disagree with my own. To
524 contradict in detail every hostile version of Henry VIII.'s or his
525 ministers' conduct would be as tedious as it would be irritating and
526 unprofitable. My censors have been so many that a reply to them all is
527 impossible, and so distinguished that a selection would be invidious. Those
528 who wish for invectives against the King, or Cranmer, or Cromwell, can find
529 them everywhere, from school manuals to the grave works of elaborate
530 historians. For me, it is enough to tell the story as it presents itself to
531 my own mind, and to leave what appears to me to be the truth to speak for
532 itself. </p>
533 <p align="left">The English nation throughout their long history have borne
534 an honourable reputation. Luther quotes a saying of Maximilian that there
535 were three real sovereigns in Europe -- the Emperor, the King of France, and
536 the King of England. The Emperor was a king of kings. If he gave an order to
537 the princes of the Reich, they obeyed or disobeyed as they pleased. The King
538 of France was a king of asses. He ordered about his people at his will, and
539 they obeyed like asses. The King of England was king of a loyal nation who
540 obeyed him with heart and mind as loyal and faithful subjects. This was the
541 character borne in the world by the fathers of the generation whom popular
542 historians represent as having dishonoured themselves by subserviency to a
543 bloodthirsty tyrant. It is at least possible that popular historians have
544 been mistaken, and that the subjects of Henry VIII. were neither much better
545 nor much worse than those who preceded or came after them. </p>
546 <hr>
547 <p align="left"><font size="2">From <i>The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon:
548 The Story as Told by the Imperial Ambassadors Resident at the Court of Henry
549 VIII</i> by J.A. Froude.&nbsp; Published in New York by C. Scribner's Sons,
550 1891.</font></p>
551 </blockquote>
552</blockquote>
553
554<p align="center"><a href="froudeone.html">
555<font size="2">to Chapter One</font></a></p>
556<p align="center"><a href="secondary.html">
557<font size="2">to Secondary Sources</font></a></p>
558<p align="center">
559<a href="monarchs/aragon.html"><font size="2">to
560Katharine of Aragon website</font></a></p>
561 </font>
562 </font>
563<blockquote>
564 <blockquote>
565 <font style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
566 <font face="Times New Roman">
567 </font><font style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">
568 </font>
569 <p class="3text" align="left">&nbsp;</p>
570 </font>
571 </blockquote>
572</blockquote>
573
574</body>
575
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