which does not
necessarily involve any breach whatever of the code of morals.
Traitors are not executed because they are immoral, but because they
are dangerous. Never did a more innocent head fall on the scaffold
than that of Lady Jane Grey; never was an execution more fully
justified by the law. The contrast was almost as flagrant in many a
State trial in the reign of Henry VIII.; no king was so careful of
law,[1175] but he was not so careful of justice. Therein lay his
safety, for the law takes no cognisance of injustice, unless the
injustice is also a breach of the law, and Henry rarely, if ever, (p. 436)
broke the law. Not only did he keep the law, but he contrived that the
nation should always proclaim the legality of his conduct. Acts of
attainder, his favourite weapon, are erroneously supposed to have been
the method to which he resorted for removing opponents whose conviction
he could not obtain by a legal trial. But acts of attainder were, as a
rule, supplements to, not substitutes for, trials by jury;[1176] many
were passed against the dead, whose goods had already been forfeited
to the King as the result of judicial verdicts. Moreover, convictions
were always easier to obtain from juries than acts of attainder from
Parliament. It was simplicity itself to pack a jury of twelve, and
even a jury of peers; but it was a much more serious matter to pack
both Houses of Parliament. What then was the meaning and use of acts
of attainder? They were acts of indemnity for the King. People might
cavil at the verdict of juries; for they were only the decisions of a
handful of men; but who should impugn the voice of the whole body
politic expressed in its most solemn, complete and legal form? There
is no way, said Francis to Henry in 1532, so safe as by Parliament,[1177]
and one of Henry's invariable methods was to make the whole (p. 437)
nation, so far as he could, his accomplice. For pardons and acts of
grace the King was ready to assume the responsibility; but the nation
itself must answer for rigorous deeds. And acts of attainder were
neither more nor less than deliberate pronouncements, on the part of
the people, that it was expedient that one man should die rather than
that the whole nation should perish or run any risk of danger.

[Footnote 1175: "I never knew," writes Bishop
Gardiner a few months after Henry's death, "man
committed to prison for disa