with a minuteness for
which there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane had
returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of the
King's personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the
conspiracy with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction
as there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful
favour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly for
being simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the King. It
culminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story told
on an earlier page. For the despot revenged himself on a rebel whose
defiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste the
most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had once
ridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King Henry had
knelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people had
called Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor.
This might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet it
was not really so.

For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that still
stranger something of which we have, perhaps fancifully, found hints
before in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurably
weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; and whether or no his
failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in the
dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almost be said to
have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for the
drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own
character. We may put the matter most practically by saying that it is
unpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for
Henry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For
whether or no it was desired, it was not created. Least of all our
princes did the Tudors leave behind them a secure central government,
and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or two
generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years
afterwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its new
servants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world;
and the axe which had been sanctified with the blood of More and soiled
with the blood of Cromwell was, at the signal of one of that slave's own
descendants, to fall and to kill an English king.

T