No tyrant ever was preceded to the tomb by such an array of victims as
Henry VIII. If Shakspeare had chosen to bring the highest of those
victims around the last bed that Henry was to press on earth, after the
fashion in which he sent the real or supposed victims of Richard III.
to haunt the last earthly sleep of the last royal Plantagenet, he would
have had to bring them up by sections, and not individually, in
battalions, and not as single spies. Buckingham, Wolsey, More, Fisher,
Catharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine
Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury,
Surrey,--these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the
patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led
the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to
despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower
rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the
King's "jealous rage." Undoubtedly some of these persons had justly
incurred death, but it is beyond belief that they were all guilty of
the crimes laid to their charge; yet Mr. Froude can find as little
good in any of them as of evil in Henry's treatment of them.
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