d
the Council. He says that there are but two ways of assisting the Queen
and Princess and of setting right the affairs of the realm: one would be
if it pleased God to visit the King with some little malady."[319] "The
second method was force, of which, he said, the King and his Ministers
were in marvellous fear. If it came to a war, he thought the King would be
specially careful of the Queen and Princess, meaning to use them, should
things turn to the worst, as mediators for peace. But if neither of these
means were made use of, he really believed they were in danger of their
lives. He considered it was lucky for the King that the Emperor did not
know how easy the enterprise of England would be; and the present, he
said, was the right time for it."

His private physician, it is to be remembered, was necessarily, of all
Henry's servants, the most trusted by him; and the doctor was not
contented with indirect suggestions, for he himself sent a secret message
to Chapuys that twenty great peers and a hundred knights were ready, they
and their vassals, to venture fortune and life, with the smallest
assistance from the Emperor, to rise and make a revolution.[320]

Dr. Butts with his _petite maladie_ was a "giant traitor," though, happily
for himself, he was left undiscovered. Human sympathies run so inevitably
on the side of the sufferers in history, that we forget that something
also is due to those whom they forced into dealing hardly with them.
Catherine and the faithful Catholics who conspired and lost their lives
for her cause and the Pope's, are in no danger of losing the favourable
judgment of the world; the tyranny and cruelty of Henry VIII. will
probably remain for ever a subject of eloquent denunciation; but there is
an _altera pars_--another view of the story, which we may be permitted
without offence to recognise. Henry was, on the whole, right; the general
cause for which he was contending was a good cause. His victory opened the
fountains of English national life, won for England spiritual freedom, and
behind spiritual freedom her political liberties. His defeat would have
kindled the martyr-fires in every English town, and would have burnt out
of the country thousands of poor men and women as noble as Catherine
herself. He had stained the purity of his action by intermingling with it
a weak passion for a foolish and bad woman, and bitterly he had to suffer
for his mistake; but the revolt against, and the overt