evitable, and
arrangement essential. The historian has no option if he wishes to be
intelligible. He will naturally arrange his facts so that they spell
what he believes to be the truth; and he must of necessity suppress
those facts which he judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the
scale on which he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts
compels both selection and suppression, it counsels no less a
restraint of judgment. A case in a court of law is not simplified by a
cloud of witnesses; and the new wealth of contemporary evidence (p. ix)
does not solve the problems of Henry's reign. It elucidates some
points hitherto obscure, but it raises a host of others never before
suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements written
hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no better;
in modern history we frequently have half a dozen witnesses giving
inconsistent accounts of what they have seen with their own eyes.
Dogmatism is merely the result of ignorance; and no honest historian
will pretend to have mastered all the facts, accurately weighed all
the evidence, or pronounced a final judgment.

The present volume does not profess to do more than roughly sketch
Henry VIII.'s more prominent characteristics, outline the chief
features of his policy, and suggest some reasons for the measure of
success he attained. Episodes such as the divorce of Catherine of
Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the determination of
the relations between Church and State, would severally demand for
adequate treatment works of much greater bulk than the present. On the
divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan Ehses
in his _Roemische Dokumente_.[11] The dissolution of the monasteries
has been exhaustively treated from one point of view by Dr. Gasquet;[12]
but an adequate and impartial history of what is called the Reformation
still remains to be written. Here it is possible to deal with (p. x)
these questions only in the briefest outline, and in so far as they
were affected by Henry's personal action. For my facts I have relied
entirely on contemporary records, and my deductions from these facts
are my own. I have depended as little as possible even on contemporary
historians,[13] and scarcely at all on later writers.[14] I have,
however, made frequent use of Dr. Gairdner's articles in the _Dictionary
of National Biography_, particularly of that on Henry VIII., the b