The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
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. Mr. Froude, who would, to use a saying of Henry's time, find Abel guilty of murder of Cain, were that necessary to support his royal favorite's hideous cause, not only declares that the unhappy girl was guilty throughout, but lugs God into the tragedy, and makes Him responsible for what was, perhaps, the cruellest and most devilish of all the many murders perpetrated by Henry VIII. The luckless lady was but a child at the time she was devoured by "the jaws of darkness." At most she was but in her twentieth year, and probably she was a year or two younger than that age. Any other king than Henry would have pardoned her, if for no other reason, then for this, that he had coupled her youth with his age, and so placed her in an unnatural position, in which the temptation to error was all the greater, and the less likely to be resisted, because of the girl's evil training,—a training that could not have been unknown to the King, and on the incidents of which the Protestant plot for her ruin, and that of the political party of which she was the instrument, had been founded. But of Henry VIII., far more truly than of James II., could it have been said by any one of his innumerable victims, that, though it was in his power to forgive an offender, it was not in his nature to do so.
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. He would have us believe that Henry was scrupulously observant of the law! and that he allowed Cromwell to perish because he had violated the laws of England, and sought to carry out that "higher law" which politicians out of power are so fond of appealing to, but which politicians in power seldom heed. And such stuff we are expected to receive as historical criticism, and the philosophy of history! And pray, of what breach of the law had the Countess of Salisbury been guilty, that she should be sent to execution when she had arrived at so advanced an age that she must soon have passed away in the course of Nature? She was one of Cromwell's victims, and as he had been deemed unfit to live because of his violations of the laws of the realm, it would follow that one whose attainder had been procured through his devices could not be fairly put to death. She suffered ten months after Cromwell, and could have committed no fresh offence in the interval, as she was a prisoner in the Tower at the time of her persecutor's fall, and so remained until the day of her murder. The causes of her death, however, are not far to seek: she was the daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV., and Henry hated every member of that royal race which the Tudors had supplanted; and she was the mother of Reginald Pole, whom the King detested both for his Plantagenet blood and for the expositions which he made of the despot's crimes.
One of the victims sacrificed by Mr. Froude on the altar of his Moloch even he must have reluctantly brought to the temple, and have offered up with a pang, but whose character he has blackened beyond all redemption, as if he had used upon it all the dirt he has so assiduously taken from the character of his royal favorite. There are few names or titles of higher consideration than that of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. It is sufficient to name Surrey to be reminded of the high-born scholar, the gallant soldier, one of the founders of English literature, and a poet of equal vigor of thought and melodiousness of expression. His early and violent death, at the behest of a tyrant, who himself had not ten days to live when he stamped—for he could no longer write—the death-warrant of his noblest subject, has helped to endear his memory for three centuries; and many a man whose sympathies are entirely with the Reformation and the "new men" of 1546, regrets the untimely death of the Byron of those days, though the noble poet was at the head of the reactionary party, and desired nothing so much as to have it in his power to dispose of the "new men," in which case he would have had the heads of Hertford and his friends chopped off as summarily as his own head fell before the mandate of the King. Everything else is forgotten in the recollection of the Earl's youth, his lofty origin, his brilliant talents, his rank as a man of letters, and his prompt consignment to a bloody grave, the last of the legion of patricians sent by Henry to the block or the gallows. Yet it is Surrey upon whom Mr. Froude makes his last attack, and whom he puts down as a dirty dog, in order that Henry VIII may not be seen devoting what were all but his very latest hours to the task of completing the judicial murder of one whom he hated because he was so wonderfully elevated above all the rest of his subjects as to be believed capable of snatching at the crown, though three of the King's children were then alive, and there were several descendants of two of his sisters in both Scotland and England. Because, of all men who were then living, Surrey most deserved to reign over England, the jealous tyrant supposed there could be no safety for his youthful son until the House of Howard had been humiliated, and both its present head and its prospective head ceased to exist. Not satisfied with attributing to him political offences that do not necessarily imply baseness in the offender, Mr. Froude indorses the most odious charges that have been brought against Surrey, and which, if well founded, utterly destroy all his claims to be considered, we will not say a man of honor, but a man of common decency. Without having stated much that is absolutely new, Mr. Froude has so used his materials as to create the impression that Surrey, the man honored for three centuries as one of the most chivalrous of Englishmen, and as imbued with the elevating spirit of poetry, was a foul fellow, who sought to engage his sister in one of the vilest intrigues ever concocted by courtier, in order that she might be made a useful instrument in the work of changing the political condition of England. Henry's illegitimate son, Henry Fitz-Roy, Duke of Richmond, whom he had at one time thought of declaring his successor, died, leaving a widow, who was Surrey's sister. This lady told Sir Gawin Carew that her brother had advised her so to bear herself toward the King that possibly "his Majesty might cast some love unto her, whereby in process she should bear as great a stroke about him as Madame d'Estampes did about the French king." Madame d'Estampes was the most notorious and influential of Francis I.'s many mistresses; and if Carew's evidence is to be depended upon, we see what was the part assigned by Surrey to his sister in the political game the old aristocracy and the Catholics were playing. She, the widow of the King's son, was to seduce the King, and to become his mistress! Carew's story was confirmed by another witness, and Lady Richmond had complained of Surrey's "language to her with abhorrence and disgust, and had added, 'that she defied her brother, and said that they should all perish, and she would cut her own throat, rather than she would consent to such villany.'" On Surrey's trial, Lady Richmond also confirmed the story, and "revealed his deep hate of the 'new men,' who, 'when the King was dead,'