Henry, after his fashion, was
much moved by Catharine's death, and by perusal of the letter which she
wrote him from her dying bed; and so he resolved to make the only
atonement of which his savage nature was capable, and one, too, which
the bigoted Spanish woman would have been satisfied with, could she
have foreseen it. As the alliance between the royal houses of England
and Spain was sealed with the blood of the innocent Warwick, who was
sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father,
Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged
by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it
were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by
ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a
woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the
Tower Green. Heaven's judgement would seem to have been openly
pronounced against that blood-cemented alliance, formed by two of the
greatest of those royal ruffians who figured in the fifteenth century,
and destined to lead to nothing but misery to all who were brought
together in consequence of it's having been made. If one were seeking
for proofs of the direct and immediate interposition of a Higher Power
in the ordering of human affairs, it would be no difficult matter to
discover them in the history of the royal houses of England during
the existence of the Lancastrian, the York, and the Tudor families.
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