A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct
of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been
logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was
with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had
taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon
his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the
neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and
quilting-parties.
Mr. Froude is too able a man to seek to pass crude eulogy of Henry
VIII. upon the world. He knows that the reason why this or that or the
other thing was done is what his readers will demand, and he does his
best to meet their requirements. Very plausible, and very well
sustained by numerous facts, as well as by philosophical theory, is the
position which he assumes in reference to Henry's conduct. Henry,
according to the Froudean theory, was troubled about the succession to
the throne. His great purpose was to prevent the renewal of civil war
in England, a war for the succession. When he divorced Catharine of
Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn, when he libelled and murdered Anne
Boleyn, when he wedded Jane Seymour, when he became disgusted with and
divorced Anne of Cleves, when he married and when he beheaded Catharine
Howard, when he patronized, used, and rewarded Cromwell, and when he
sent Cromwell to the scaffold and refused to listen to his plaintive
plea for mercy, when he caused Plantagenet and Neville blood to flow
like water from the veins of old women as well as from those of young
men, when he hanged Catholics and burned Protestants, when he caused
Surrey to lose the finest head in England,--in short, no matter what he
did, he always had his eye steadily fixed across that boiling sea of
blood that he had created upon one grand point, namely, the
preservation of the internal peace of England, not only while he
himself should live, but after his death.
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