with the precision and accuracy of one of Marivaux's novels. He appears as familiar with the scandalous chronicle of Henry's court as if he had a Grammont or an Angleterre galante for his guide. His authorities for all this are a few dateless letters and a furious invective by Henry's enemy, Cardinal Pole. But neither is the story, as told by him, quite consistent. The finished coquette, who coldly and with ambitious calculation for two years refused a less price than a crown for her affections; who, by consummate artifice, wrought the amorous monarch to divorce his wife, and wed herself; is stated, nevertheless, to have lived as Henry's concubine during three years; for Dr. Lingard is particular in his dates. Now, in the absence of all authentic evidence, would it not have been more natural, undoubtedly more charitable, to attribute her long resistance to her virtuous principles, perhaps to her previous attachment to Lord Percy? her weakness, to the seductions of Henry's ardent attachment, and to her confidence in the fulfilment of his promises when the supposed impediment to marriage should be removed? For Henry was then in the zenith of his glory and his power, with every thing to captivate; nor had the cruelty of his character been developed, she herself being reserved for its first victim. All that is proved against her in this part of her history is, that she was married on the 25th of January, (in a garret, as Dr. Lingard, with due regard to probability, asserts,) and that Elizabeth was born about the 13th of September.

There remains, however, one circumstance in the history of her elevation, to which, having rejected the other calumnies relating to her family, Dr. Lingard and Mr. Butler adhere with firmness, namely, the previous connection between Henry and Mary, the sister of Anne Boleyn. The evidence on which this rests, is the direct assertion of Pole, and an inference drawn from one passage of a most remarkable document. Now, the testimony of Pole is entirely unsupported, unless by this inference, and we confess that we have not sufficient confidence in his integrity to receive it without great suspicion. The work in which it is contained is admitted by his friends to be a most ' acrimonious invective; in which,' according to his own biographer, Phillips, every aggravation which regards this article is set forth in all its iniquity, and heightened with all the colouring which indignation and eloquence can give.** It is far, there

* Those of our readers, who know Cardinal Pole only from the picture drawn of him by Dr. Lingard, will have but an incorrect notion of his character. In his address ad Cæsarem he urges the Emperor, as his most imperious duty, to neglect his wars against the Turks, for the purpose of invading England; and says, that if his fleet were actually in the Hellespont, he should still urge him to abandon that enterprize, in order to chastise the King of England.

fore,

fore, from improbable, that Pole may have heightened and aggravated' some idle and scandalous report into a positive assertion; more especially, as he is known to have watched with a vigilance, not entirely disinterested, the claim of Mary, daughter of Catherine, to the succession. Any tale, therefore, which would bring the legitimacy of Anne's children into the same predicament, and make them liable to the same doubt, would serve his purpose, and be received without too close an examination into its truth and certainty. But Sir Thomas Boleyn's character stood high, as an honourable and religious man. He is highly praised by Erasmus, and we cannot but consider his unimpeached integrity as a strong guarantee against the truth of such an enormity in the bosom of his family. Dr. Lingard's second proof is ingenious, but, if conclusive, involves not merely Henry and Anne Boleyn, but the Pope himself, in this monstrous iniquity. In a note relating to a dispensation granted by the Pope at Orvieto is this

statement:

'Mary Boleyn had been Henry's mistress. Now, the relationship between sister and sister is as near as the relationship between brother and brother; whence it was argued, that if Henry, as he contended, could not marry Catherine, on the supposition that she had been carnally known by his brother Arthur, so, neither could Anne marry Henry, because he had carnally known her sister Mary. On this account the following clause was introduced : Etiamsi illa tibi alias secundo aut remotiore consanguinitatis aut primo affinitatis gradu, etiam ex quocunque licito seu illicito coitu proveniente, invicem conjuncta sit, dummodo relicta fratris tui non fuerit.' Thus the king was placed in a most singular situation, compelled to acknowledge in the Pontiff, a power which he at the same time denied, and solicit a dispensation of the same nature as that which he maintained to be invalid.'

But this dispensation, says Dr. Lingard himself, the Pope signed without any alteration: therefore, if his own construction be correct, the Pope, the infallible guardian of Christian morals, unhesitatingly sanctions the grossest incest. Pole, alluding probably to this very clause, (and, indeed, on examination of the passage it seems a safe inference that he had no other ground for his scandalous assertion,) is equally conclusive against his Holiness; idque impetrasti' is his phrase. Il as we think of the Pope, we cannot quite credit this extravagant charge; while the folly as well as inconsistency attributed by it to Henry is in itself absolutely incredible. If the incestuous connection were a secret from the world, would he not have thrown the proof of it on others, rather than thus have proclaimed it? If it had been so public and notorious as to make concealment impossible, must not some other evidence besides Pole's have remained? Lord

Herbert,

Herbert, the earliest historian of the transaction, and who published the document, clearly adopted a different construction, for he translates the illicito coitu, forbidden wedlock.' But the whole history of the dispensation itself is obscure. Lord Herbert appears far from confident of its authenticity, and at all events, no impartial historian would have so peremptorily and positively stated, what rests on such partial, questionable, and suspicious evidence.*

But the attractions of this remarkable woman, her accomplishments, her patronage of learned men, her delight in letters and in the society of the rising poets of the day, Wyatt, Bryan, and her amiable and ill-fated brother, Rochford; her boundless charities and her religious devotion; the total want of proof, that she was guilty of infidelity; the cruelty of her tragical end; all these facts rest on evidence clear and unexceptionable. But the tender mercies of some are cruel, and the charity of others is not much better. Her most innocent expressions are still distorted into proofs of her guilt; her interest for her attendants accused with her; even her pathetic exclamation, Oh! my sweet brother, art thou, too, in trouble!' have been perverted into indications of conscious criminality. Even the feeling, not unbefitting a martyr, that induced her to send and implore the forgiveness of the Princess Mary, before her death, is perverted into a proof of her having been guilty of some secret and more cruel injury, than their own calumnies can afford any ground for believing. The few indiscreet speeches which she confessed, considering the manners of the time, and her education in the French court, where freedom with inferiors has always been habitual, are really trivial and unimportant. Why, then, would Dr. Lingard mislead the common reader, by saying, that she had descended from her high rank to make companions of her servants'? Of the attendants who shared her fate, not one, excepting Smeaton, but was a man of birth, rank, or distinction. Norreys and Weston had been employed in high stations; Smeaton she denied having seen more than once. To the argument in proof of her guilt, which is drawn from her language at the place of execution, we shall first suggest, that her daughter was at the mercy aud dependant upon the caprice of Henry; and

'Can it be thought credible,' says Burnet, that at the same time when the king pretended such scruples and troubles of conscience, he could be guilty of such folly and impudence as to put himself thus in the Pope's mercy by two such demands? This was a forgery of Cardinal Pole's, which Sanders greedily catched to dress up the same.'— Burnet, App. i. p. 281. Dr. Lingard remarks, that the reluctance of Burnet to acknowledge Mary as one of the king's mistresses, must yield to the repeated assertions of Pole, in his private letter to Henry, written in 1535—as if the repetition of the assertion by the same person at all increased its authority.

† Andrews, No. 35.

then

then subjoin a beautiful passage and apposite quotation from Mr. Glocester Ridley's Triumphant Answer to Phillips.

'If her gentleness and meekness forgave the King so great an injury, and was desirous to turn the spectators' thoughts from the particular cruelty of her death, to what she believed was his general disposition; such more than ordinary charity did not deserve so perverse an interpretation. The reach of Shakspeare's powerful genius, when he would represent the amiable virtues of the injured Desdemona, to excite pity in the spectators for her, and indignation at the revilers of suffering innocence, could not imagine any thing more affecting, than to represent her in similar circumstances to those of Anne Boleyn.

Des. A guiltless death I die.

Emil. Oh! who has done this deed?
Des. Nobody, I myself-farewell,

Commend me to my kind Lord-Oh! farewell.'

Before we quit this subject, we would observe, that Mr. Ellis has adduced some convincing arguments to prove the celebrated letter of Anne Boleyn to be genuine, a composition unquestionably of the most exquisite and pathetic beauty.

But, after all, the character of Anne Boleyn is a subordinate and unimportant question in the history of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic writers have felt that if they could not strike a nobler quarry, they would advance their cause but little, by blackening the character of this unhappy woman. It is obviously impossible for us, in our narrow limits, to enter into a detailed defence of our Protestant army of Martyrs.' We shall, therefore, select Archbishop Cranmer, as the principal object of their obloquy. Their motto appears to have been,

To exemplify the fairness, the liberality, and the consistency with which this great man's memory has been treated, not by the most rank and virulent of the Popish writers, such men as Persons, Sanders, or Andrews, but the more moderate and dispassionate, we first recommend to the notice of our readers two passages from Dodd's Church History, which occur in two successive pages. He (Cranmer) had already taken a wife in Germany, and showed his inclinations by opposing the Six Article Act, and daily entertaining in his house such as affected novelties in religion.' Turn the leaf, and we read, ' He never was known to oppose the tyrannical proceedings of King Henry the Eighth, but went along with him in persecuting to death both Protestants and Catholics-he went all the lengths of the court in the Six Article Act.'-Dodd, Article Cranmer. Dr. Milner, under the

name

name of Merlin, asserts, that in Germany he (Cranmer) became a bigamist by marrying Osiander's sister-using this term, as it should seem, for the double purpose of misleading common and ignorant readers such as Cobbett* into receiving it, in its popular acceptation; and at the same time of sheltering himself from the charge of deliberate falsehood under its ambiguity? If he means that Cranmer had two wives at once, it is difficult not to make that charge directly and explicitly: he must, or he ought to have known that Cranmer was readmitted to his fellowship at Cambridge on the death of his first wife, a year after his marriage. From writers such as these, it is almost cheering to turn to the pages of Mr. Butler, who thus sums up the character of Cranmer, in his Historical Memoirs of Catholics, and repeats the same estimate, with some alterations, in his Book of the Roman Catholic Church, unjustly, as we conceive, but with a liberality unprecedented in his party.

'His (Cranmer's) protection of the Princess Mary from the fury of her father; his endeavours to save Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher and Cromwell; his resistance to the passing of the sanguinary enactment of the six articles; and his encouragement of letters and learned men, are entitled to praise. But when we find that, though he adopted the Lutheran principles so early as his residence in Germany on the business of the divorce, he yet continued, during the fifteen subsequent years of Henry's reign, in the most public profession of the Catholic religion, the article of the supremacy of the Pope alone excepted; that though, when he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, he took the customary oath of obedience to the see of Rome, he yet, just before he took it, retired into a private room and protested against it; and that though he subscribed, and caused his clergy to subscribe, to the six articles, the third and fourth of which enjoined celibacy to the clergy, and the observance of the vow of chastity, he yet, though a priest, continued to cohabit with his wife; we must pronounce him guilty of dissimulation. When we find that, though he knew Anne Boleyn was under no precontract of marriage, he yet, to use Bishop Burnet's expression, extorted from her, standing as she did on the very verge of eternity, a confession of the existence of such contract, we must pronounce him guilty of subserviency to his master's cruelties: when we see how instrumental he was in bringing Lambert, Anne Askew, Jane Bocken, Von Paris, and others, both Catholics and Anabaptists, to the stake; and particularly when we read his successful exertions to induce the young prince to sign the sentence for Jane Bocken's condemnation, we must pronounce him guilty, both of the theory and practice of religious persecution: when we find that, previously to Henry's marriage with Anne of Cleves, he declared that the negociations for her marriage with a prince of the house of Lorraine were not a lawful impediment to her marriage with Henry,-he yet, within six months after it, declared that they created such an impediment, and *See History, No. 8.

solemnized