party spirit. When the great powers of Europe
were united against Elizabeth, and when Elizabeth's own character was
vilely and wantonly assailed, the Catholic writers dipped their pens in
the stains which blotted her mother's name; and, more careless of truth
than even theological passion can excuse, they poured out over both
alike a stream of indiscriminate calumny. On the other hand, as
Elizabeth's lordly nature was the pride of all true-hearted Englishmen,
so the Reformers laboured to reflect her virtues backwards. Like the
Catholics, they linked the daughter with the parent; and became no less
extravagant in their panegyrics than their antagonists in their
gratuitous invective. But the Anne Boleyn, as she appears in
contemporary letters, is not the Anne Boleyn of Foxe, or Wyatt, or the
other champions of Protestantism, who saw in her the counterpart of her
child. These writers, though living so near to the events which they
described, yet were divided from the preceding generation by an
impassable gulf. They were surrounded with the heat and flame of a
controversy, in which public and private questions were wrapped
inseparably together; and the more closely we scrutinize their
narratives, the graver occasion there appears for doing so.

[Sidenote: Rules to be observed in judging this question.]

While, therefore, in following out this miserable subject, I decline so
much as to entertain the stories of Sanders, who has represented Queen
Anne as steeped in profligacy from her childhood, so I may not any more
accept those late memorials of her saintliness, which are alike
unsupported by the evidence of those who knew her. If Protestant legends
are admitted as of authority, the Catholic legends must enter with them,
and we shall only deepen the confusion. I cannot follow Burnet, in
reporting out of Meteren a version of Anne Boleyn's trial, unknown in
England. The subject is one on which rhetoric and rumour are alike
unprofitable. We must confine ourselves to accounts written at the time
by persons to whom not the outline of the facts only was known, but the
circumstances which surrounded them; by persons who had seen the
evidence upon the alleged offences, which, though now lost
irrecoverably, can be proved to have once existed.

[Sidenote: Difficulty of ascertaining Anne Boleyn's early character.]

We are unable, as I early observed, to form any trustworthy judgment of
Anne Boleyn before her marriage. Her education