WHITEHALL

dinal's downfall, Henry seized his house and goods, and converted York Place into a royal residence, under the title of Westminster Place, then, for the first time, called also Whitehall.

"It is not impossible," says Mr Brayley (Londiniana, vol. ii., p. 27) "that the Whitehall, properly so called, was erected by Wolsey, and obtained its name from the newness and freshness of its appearance, when compared with the ancient buildings of York Place. Shakspeare, in his play of 'King Henry VIII.,' makes one of the interlocutors say, in describing the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn :-

'So she parted,

And with the same full state paced back again
To York Place, where the feast is held.'

To this is replied

'Sir, you

Must no more call it York Place that is past.
For since the Cardinal fell, that title's lost :

'Tis now the King's, and called Whitehall."

It is curious to observe the links between ancient names and their modern representatives, and the extraordinary contrast sometimes exhibited between the two. The "Judge," who by Henry's orders went to turn Wolsey out of his house, without any other form of law-a proceeding which excited even the fallen slave to a remonstrance-was named Shelly, and was one of the ancestors of the poet! the most independent-minded and generous of CHAPTER XI

We have said more about Wolsey than we intend to say of Henry the Eighth; for the son of the butcher was a great man, and his master was only a king. Henry, born a prince, became a butcher; Wolsey, a butcher, became a prince. And we are not playing upon the word as applied to the king; for Henry was not only a butcher of his wives, he resembled a brother of the trade in its better and more ordinary course. His pleasures were of the same order; his language was coarse and jovial; he had the very straddle of a fat butcher, as he stands in his doorway. Take any picture or statue of Henry the Eighth-fancy its cap off, and a knife in its girdle, and it seems in the very act of saying, "What d'ye buy? What d'ye buy?" There is even the petty complacency in the mouth, after the phrase is uttered.

And how formidable is that petty unfeeling mouth, in the midst of those wide and wilful cheeks! Disturb the self-satisfaction of that man, derange his bile for an instant, make him suppose that you do not quite think him

"Wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best,"

and what hope have you from the sentence of that mass of pampered egotism?

Let us not do injustice, however, even to the doers of it. What better was to be looked for, in those times, from the circumstances under which Henry was born and bred-from the son of a wilful father, and an unfeeling state marriage-from the educated combiner of church and state, instinctively led to entertain the worldliest notions of both, and of heaven itself-from the inheriter of the greatest wealth, and power, and irresponsibility,

CHARACTER OF

ever yet concentrated in an English sovereign? It has been attempted of late by various writers (and the attempt is a good symptom, being on the charitable side), to make out a case for Henry the Eighth as if he were a sort of rough but honest fellow, a kind of John Bull of that age, who meant well upon the whole, and thought himself bound to keep up the conventionalities of his country. We know not what compliment is intended to be implied by this, either to Henry or his countrymen; but really when a man sends his wives, one after the other, to the scaffold, evidently as much to enable him to marry another as to vindicate any propriety-when he "cuts" and sacrifices his best friends and servants, and pounces upon their goods-when he takes every license himself, though he will not allow others even to be suspected of it-when he grows a brute beast in size as well as in habits, and dies shedding superfluous blood to the last we cannot, for our parts, as Englishmen, but be glad of some better excuses for him of the kind above stated, than such as are to be found in the roots of the national character, however jovial. Imagine only the endearments that must have passed between this man and Anne Bullen, and then fancy the heart that could have sent the poor little, hysterical, half-laughing, halfcrying thing to the scaffold! The man was mad with power and vanity. That is his real excuse.

It has been said, that all which he did was done by law, or at least under the forms of it, and by the consent, sometimes by the recommendation, of his statesmen. The assertion is not true in all instances; and where it is, what does it prove but that his tyrannical spirit had helped to make his statesmen slaves? They knew what he wished, and notoriously played the game into his hands. When they did not, their heads went off. That circumstances had spoilt them altogether, and that society, with all its gaudiness, was but in a halfbarbarous state, is granted; but it is no less true, that

HENRY THE EIGHTH

his office, his breeding, and his natural temper, conspired to make Henry the worst and most insolent of a violent set of men; and he stands straddling out accordingly in history, as he does in his pictures, an image of sovereign brutality.

Excessive vanity, aggravated by all the habits of despotism and luxury, and accompanied, nevertheless, by that unconscious misgiving which is natural to inequalities between a man's own powers and those which he derives from his position, is the clue to the character of Henry the Eighth. Accordingly, no man gave greater ear to tale-bearers and sowers of suspicion, nor resented more cruelly or meanly the wounds inflicted on his selflove, even by those who least intended them, or to whom he had shown the greatest fondness. The latter, indeed, he treated the worst, out of a frenzy of egotistical disappointment; for his love arose, not from any real regard for their merits, but from what he had taken for a flattery to his own. Sir Thomas More knew him well, when, in observation to some one who had congratulated him on the King's having walked up and down with his arm around his neck, he said that he would have that neck cut in two next day, if the head belonging to it opposed his will. He not only took back without scruple all that he had given to Wolsey, but he went to live in the houses of his fallen friend and servant-places which a man with any feeling and kindly remembrance would have avoided. He was very near picking a murderous quarrel with his last wife, Catherine Parr, on one of his theological questions. And how did he conduct himself to the memory of poor Anne Bullen, even on the day of her execution? Hear Lingard, who, though no partisan of his, thinks he must have had some heinous cause of provocation, to induce him to behave so roughly :

"Thus fell," says the historian, "this unfortunate Queen within four months after the death of Catherine.

CHARACTER OF

To have expressed a doubt of her guilt during the reign of Henry, or of her innocence during that of Elizabeth, would have been deemed a proof of disaffection. The question soon became one of religious feeling, rather than of historical disquisition. Though she had departed no farther than her husband from the ancient doctrine, yet, as her marriage with Henry led to the separation from the communion of Rome, the Catholic writers were eager to condemn, the Protestant to exculpate her memory. In the absence of those documents which alone could enable us to decide with truth, I will only observe that the King must have been impelled by some powerful motive to exercise against her such extraordinary, and, in one supposition, such superfluous vigour. Had his object been (we are sometimes told that it was) to place Jane Seymour by his side on the throne, the divorce of Anne without execution, or the execution without the divorce, would have effected his purpose. But he seemed to have pursued her with insatiable hatred. Not content with taking her life, he made her feel in every way in which a wife and a mother could feel. He stamped on her character the infamy of adultery and incest; he deprived her of the name and right of wife and Queen; and he even bastardized her daughter, though he acknowledged that daughter to be his own. If then he were not assured of her guilt, he must have discovered in her conduct some most heinous cause of provocation, which he never disclosed. He had wept at the death of Catherine (of Arragon); but, as if he sought to display his contempt for the character of Anne, he dressed himself in white on the day of her execution, and was married to Jane Seymour the next morning." 1

Now, nothing could be more indecent and unmanly than such conduct as this, let Anne have been guilty as she might; and nothing, in such a man, but mortified self-love could account for it. Probably he had dis