lly
acquainted with the grounds of the prosecution, did deliberately, after
hearing the queen's defence, pronounce against her a unanimous verdict.
If there was foul play, they had advantages infinitely greater than any
to which we can pretend for detecting it. The Boleyns were unpopular,
and Anne herself was obnoxious to the imperialists and Catholics; but
all parties, Catholic and Protestant alike, united in the sentence.

[Sidenote: The popular interpretation is not credible.]

Looking at the case, then, as it now stands, we have the report for some
time current, that the queen was out of favour, and that the king's
affection was turned in another direction,--a report, be it observed,
which had arisen before the catastrophe, and was not, therefore, an
afterthought, or legend; we have also the antecedent improbability,
which is very great, that a lady in the queen's position could have been
guilty of the offences with which the indictment charges her. We have
also the improbability, which is great, that the king, now forty-four
years old, who in his earlier years had been distinguished for the
absence of those vices in which contemporary princes indulged
themselves, in wanton weariness of a woman for whom he had
revolutionized the kingdom, and quarrelled with half Christendom,
suddenly resolved to murder her; that, instead of resorting to poison,
or to the less obtrusive methods of criminality, he invented, and
persuaded his council to assist him in inventing, a series of
accusations which reflected dishonour on himself, and which involved the
gratuitous death of five persons with whom he had no quarrel, who were
attached to his court and person. To maintain these accusations, he
would have to overawe into an active participation in his crime, judges,
juries, peers, the dearest relations of those whom he was destroying,
and this with no standing army, no praetorians or janissaries at his
back, with no force but the yeomen of the guard, who could be scattered
by a rising of the apprentices. He had gone out of his way, moreover, to
call a parliament; and the summons had been so hasty that no time was
left to control the elections; while again to fail was ruin; and the
generation of Englishmen to whom we owe the Reformation were not so
wholly lost to all principles of honour, that Henry could have counted
beforehand upon success in so desperate a scheme with that absolute
certainty without which he would scarcely have r