feelings of a gentleman,
ended a repulsive, bloodstained monster, the more dangerous because his
evil was always held to be good by himself and those around him.

In his own eyes he was a deeply wronged and ill-used man when Katharine of
Aragon refused to surrender her position as his wife after twenty years of
wedlock, and appealed to forces outside England to aid her in supporting
her claim. It was a rebellious, a cruel, and a wicked thing for her and
her friends to stand in the way of his tender conscience, and of his
laudable and natural desire to be succeeded on the throne by a son of his
own. Similarly, it seemed very hard upon him that all Europe, and most of
his own country, should be threateningly against him for the sake of Anne
Boleyn, for whom he had already sacrificed and suffered so much, and
particularly as she was shrewish and had brought him no son. He really was
a most ill-used man, and it was a providential instance of divine justice
that Cromwell, in the nick of time, when the situation had become
unendurable and Jane Seymour's prudish charms were most elusive, should
fortunately discover that Anne was unworthy to be Henry's wife, and
Cranmer should decide that she never _had_ been his wife. It was not his
fault, moreover, that Anne of Cleves' physical qualities had repelled him.
A wicked and ungenerous trick had been played upon him. His trustful
ingenuousness had been betrayed by flatterers at the instance of a knavish
minister, who, not content with bringing him a large unsympathetic Dutch
vrow for a wife, had pledged him to an alliance with a lot of
insignificant vassal princes in rebellion against the greater sovereigns
who were his own peers. It was a just decree of heaven that the righteous
wisdom of Gardiner and Norfolk should enable it to be demonstrated clearly
that the good King had once more been deceived, and that Anne, and the
policy she stood for, could be repudiated at the same time without
opprobrium or wrongdoing. Again, how relentless was the persecution of the
powers of evil against the obese invalid of fifty who married in ignorance
of her immoral past a light-lived beauty of seventeen, and was undeceived
when her frivolity began to pall upon him by those whose political and
religious views might benefit by the disgrace of the party that had placed
Katharine Howard by the King's side as his wife. That the girl Queen
should lose her head for lack of virtue before her marriage and l