Crime leads to crime therein in regular sequence, the guiltless
suffering with the guilty, and because of their connection with the
guilty, until the palaces of the Henries and the Edwards become as
haunted with horrors as were the halls of the Atridae. The "pale
nurslings that had perished by kindred hands," seen by Cassandra when
she passed the threshold of Agamemnon's abode, might have been
paralleled by similar "phantom dreams," had another Cassandra
accompanied Henry VII. when he came from Bosworth Field to take
possession of the royal abodes at London. She, too, might have spoken,
taking the Tower for her place of denunciation, of "that human
shamble-house, that bloody floor, that dwelling abhorred by Heaven,
privy to so many horrors against the most sacred ties." And she might
have seen in advance the yet greater horrors that were to come, and
that hung "over the inexpiable threshold; the curse passing from
generation to generation."
Mr. Froude thinks that Catharine Howard, the fifth of Henry's wives,
was not only guilty of antenuptial slips, but of unfaithfulness to the
royal bed. It is so necessary to establish the fact of her infidelity,
in order to save the King's reputation,--for he could not with any
justice have punished her for the irregularities of her unmarried
life, and not even in this age, when we have organized divorce, could
such slips be brought forward against a wife of whom a husband had
become weary,--that we should be careful how we attach credit to what
is called the evidence against Catharine Howard; and her
contemporaries, who had means of weighing and criticizing that
evidence, did not agree in believing her guilty.
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