o understand, even if
there had been any one to tell him, what a constitutional monarch
was. Though forced to admit, and taught by experience, that he could
not safely tax his subjects without the formal sanction of
Parliament, he was in theory absolute, and he held it his duty to
rule as well as to reign. When Charles I. argued, a century later,
that a king was not bound to keep faith with his subjects, it may be
doubted whether he deceived himself. The thoughts of men are widened
with the process of the suns. His duty to God Henry would always
have acknowledged. A historian so widely different from Froude as
Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that, if mere self-indulgence had been
the king's object, the infinite pains he took to obtain a Papal
divorce from Katharine of Aragon would have been thrown away. That
he had a duty to his neighbour, male or female, never entered his
head. His subjects were his own, to deal with as he pleased.
Revolting as this theory may seem now, it was held by most people
then, and there was not a man in England, not Sir Thomas More
himself, who would have told the King that it was untrue.

It is with the divorce of Katharine that the difficulty of
estimating Henry begins. Froude's narrative sets out with the
marriage of Anne Boleyn. Here the reviewer plants his first arrow.
The divorce was a nullity, having no authority higher than
Cranmer's. Anne Boleyn, as is likely enough from other causes, was
never the King's wife, and Elizabeth was illegitimate, though she
had of course a Parliamentary title to the throne. It seems clear,
however, that inasmuch as Katharine had been his brother Prince
Arthur's wife, the King could not lawfully marry her, according to
the canons of the Catholic Church. Why did he marry Anne Boleyn? The
reviewer says because he was in love with her, and triumphantly
refers to the King's letters, printed in the Appendix of Hearne's
Ayesbury.* They are undoubtedly love-letters, and they contain one
indelicate expression. Compared with Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de
Monnier, they are cold and chaste. Froude says that the King wanted
a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously
indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after
Anne's execution. The character of Henry VIII. is only important now
as it bears upon the policy of his reign. That Froude washed him too
white is almost as certain as that Lingard painted him too black.
The notion that