subtle
means, has been determined here within the king's Realm, before a man of
his own making, the Bishop of Canterbury, no person indifferent I think in
that behalf; and for the indifference of the place, I think the place had
been more indifferent to have been judged in hell; for no truth can be
suffered here, whereas the devils themselves I suppose do tremble to see
the truth in this cause so sore oppressed."[445]

Most noble, spirited, and like a queen. Yet she would never have been
brought to this extremity, and she would have shown a truer nobleness, if
four years before she could have yielded at the pope's entreaty on the
first terms which were proposed to her. Those terms would have required no
humiliating confessions; they would have involved no sentence on her
marriage nor touched her daughter's legitimacy. She would have broken no
law of God, nor seemed to break it. She was required only to forget her own
interests; and she would not forget them, though all the world should be
wrecked by her refusal. She denied that she was concerned in "motions
prejudicial to the king or to the Realm," but she must have placed her own
interpretation on the words, and would have considered excommunication and
interdict a salutary discipline to the king and parliament. She knew that
this sentence was imminent, that in its minor form it had already fallen;
and she knew that her nephew and her friends in England were plotting to
give effect to the decree. But we may pass over this. It is not for an
English writer to dwell upon those faults of Catherine of Arragon, which
English remorse has honourably insisted on forgetting. Her injuries,
inevitable as they were, and forced upon her in great measure by her own
wilfulness, remain among the saddest spots in the pages of our history.

One other brief incident remains to be noticed here, to bring up before the
imagination the features of this momentous summer. It is contained in the
postscript of a letter of Cranmer to Hawkins the ambassador in Germany; and
the manner in which the story is told is no less suggestive than the story
itself.

The immediate present, however awful its import, will ever seem common and
familiar to those who live and breathe in the midst of it. In the days of
the September massacre at Paris, the theatres were open as usual; men ate,
and drank, and laughed, and cried, and went about their common work,
unconscious that those days which were passing by them