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Mr. Froude has, of course, not written these words without having facts whereby to prove them. One he gives in an important note containing an extract from a letter of the Venetian Ambassador in 1515. At least, if his conclusions be correct, we must think twice ere we deny his assertion that ‘the man best able of all living Englishmen to govern England had been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.’

‘We are bound,’ as Mr. Froude says, ‘to allow him the benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it in interpreting his later actions.’ ‘The true defect in his moral constitution, that “intense and imperious will” common to all princes of the Plantagenet blood, had not yet been tested.’ That he did, in his later years, act in many ways neither wisely nor well, no one denies; that his conduct did not alienate the hearts of his subjects is what needs explanation; and Mr. Froude’s opinions on this matter, novel as they are, and utterly opposed to that of the standard modern historians, require careful examination. Now I am not inclined to debate Henry the Eighth’s character, or any other subject, as between Mr. Froude and an author of the obscurantist or pseudo-conservative school. Mr. Froude is Liberal; and so am I. I wish to look at the question as between Mr. Froude and other Liberals; and therefore, of course, first, as between Mr. Froude and Mr. Hallam.

Mr. Hallam’s name is so venerable and his work so Important, that to set ourselves up as judges in this or in any matter between him and Mr. Froude would be mere impertinence: but speaking merely as learners, we have surely a right to inquire why Mr. Hallam has entered on the whole question of Henry’s relations to his Parliament with a praejudicium against them; for which Mr. Froude finds no ground whatsoever in fact. Why are all acts both of Henry and his Parliament to be taken in malam partem? They were not Whigs, certainly: neither were Socrates and Plato, nor even St. Paul and St. John. They may have been honest men as men go, or they may not: but why is there to be a feeling against them rather than for them? Why is Henry always called a tyrant, and his Parliament servile? The epithets have become so common and unquestioned that our interrogation may seem startling. Still we make it. Why was Henry a tyrant? That may be true, but must be proved by facts. Where are they? Is the mere fact of a monarch’s asking for money a crime in him and his ministers? The question would rather seem to be, Were the moneys for which Henry asked needed or no; and, when granted, were they rightly or wrongly applied? And on these subjects we want much more information than we obtain from any epithets. The author of a constitutional history should rise above epithets: or, if he uses them, should corroborate them by facts. Why should not historians be as fair and as cautious in accusing Henry and Wolsey as they would be in accusing Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston? What right, allow us to ask, has a grave constitutional historian to say that ‘We cannot, indeed, doubt that the unshackled and despotic condition of his friend, Francis I., afforded a mortifying contrast to Henry? What document exists in which Henry is represented as regretting that he is the king of a free people?–for such Mr. Hallam confesses, just above, England was held to be, and was actually in comparison with France. If the document does not exist, Mr. Hallam has surely stepped out of the field of the historian into that of the novelist, a la Scott or Dumas. The Parliament sometimes grants Henry’s demands: sometimes it refuses them, and he has to help himself by other means. Why are both cases to be interpreted in malam partem? Why is the Parliament’s granting to be always a proof of its servility?–its refusing always a proof of Henry’s tyranny and rapacity? Both views are mere praejudicia, reasonable perhaps, and possible: but why is not a praejudicium of the opposite kind as rational and as possible? Why has not a historian a right to start, as Mr. Froude does, by taking for granted that both parties may have been on the whole right; that the Parliament granted certain sums because Henry was right in asking for them; refused others because Henry was wrong; even that, in some cases, Henry may have been right in asking, the Parliament wrong in refusing; and that in such a case, under the pressure of critical times, Henry was forced to get as he could the money which he saw that the national cause required? Let it be as folks will. Let Henry be sometimes right, and the Parliament sometimes likewise; or the Parliament always right, or Henry always right; or anything else, save this strange diseased theory that both must have been always wrong, and that, evidence to that effect failing, motives must be insinuated, or openly asserted, from the writer’s mere imagination. This may be a dream: but it is as easy to imagine as the other, and more pleasant also. It will probably be answered (though not by Mr. Hallam himself) by a sneer: ‘You do not seem to know much of the world, sir.’ But so would Figaro and Gil Blas have said, and on exactly the same grounds.