But more: to question Mary’s legitimacy was to throw open the question of succession to half a dozen ambitious competitors. It was, too probably, to involve England at Henry’s death in another civil war of the Roses, and in all the internecine horrors which were still rankling in the memories of men; and probably, also, to bring down a French or Scotch invasion. There was then too good reason, as Mr. Froude shows at length, for Wolsey’s assertion to John Cassalis—‘If his Holiness, which God forbid, shall show himself unwilling to listen to the King’s demands, to me assuredly it will be but grief to live longer, for the innumerable evils which I foresee will follow . . . Nothing before us but universal and inevitable ruin.’ Too good reason there was for the confession of the Pope himself to Gardner, ‘What danger it was to the realm to have this thing hang in suspense . . . That without an heir-male, etc., the realm was like to come to dissolution.’ Too good reason for the bold assertion of the Cardinal-Governor of Bologna, that ‘he knew the guise of England as few men did, and that if the King should die without heirs-male, he was sure that it would cost two hundred thousand men’s lives; and that to avoid this mischief by a second marriage, he thought, would deserve heaven.’ Too good reason for the assertion of Hall, that ‘all indifferent and discreet persons judged it necessary for the Pope to grant Henry a divorce, and, by enabling him to marry again, give him the hope of an undisputed heir-male.’ The Pope had full power to do this; in fact, such cases had been for centuries integral parts of his jurisdiction as head of Christendom. But he was at once too timid and too time-serving to exercise his acknowledged authority; and thus, just at the very moment when his spiritual power was being tried in the balance, he chose himself to expose his political power to the same test. Both were equally found wanting. He had, it appeared, as little heart to do justice among kings and princes as he had to seek and to save the souls of men; and the Reformation followed as a matter of course.
Through the tangled brakes of this divorce question Mr. Froude leads us with ease and grace, throwing light, and even beauty, into dark nooks where before all was mist, not merely by his intimate acquaintance with the facts, but still more by his deep knowledge of human character, and of woman’s even more than of man’s. For the first time the actors in this long tragedy appear to us as no mere bodiless and soulless names, but as beings of like passions with ourselves, comprehensible, coherent, organic, even in their inconsistencies. Catherine of Arragon is still the Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given us the key to many parts of her story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately enough has made us understand how Henry’s affections, if he ever had any for her—faithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless _mariage de convenance_—may have been gradually replaced by indifference and even dislike, long before the divorce was forced on him as a question not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to Heaven. And that he did see it in this latter light, Mr. Froude brings proof from his own words, from which we can escape only by believing that the confessedly honest ‘Bluff King Hal’ had suddenly become a consummate liar and a canting hypocrite.