t had no nobler foundation than the facts that Anne's
position drove her into hostility to the Roman jurisdiction, and that
her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the nobility and
the gentry of the time.[547] Her place in English history is due (p. 192)
solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined part
of Henry's nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in
intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve
the respect of her own or subsequent ages.

[Footnote 544: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 365.]

[Footnote 545: Cranmer, _Works_ (Parker Soc.), ii.,
245; _cf. Ven. Cal._, iv., 351, 418.]

[Footnote 546: _L. and P._, iv., Introd., p.
ccxxxvii.]

[Footnote 547: There is not much historical truth
in Gray's phrase about "the Gospel light which
dawned from Bullen's eyes"; but Brewer goes too far
in minimising the "Lutheran" proclivities of the
Boleyns. In 1531 Chapuys described Anne and her
father as being "more Lutheran than Luther himself"
(_L. and P._, v., 148), in 1532 as "true apostles
of the new sect" (_ibid._, v., 850), and in 1533 as
"perfect Lutherans" (_ibid._, vi., 142).]

It is otherwise with her rival, Queen Catherine, the third of the
principal characters involved in the divorce. If Henry's motives were
not so entirely bad as they have often been represented, neither they
nor Anne Boleyn's can stand a moment's comparison with the unsullied
purity of Catherine's life or the lofty courage with which she defended
the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic figure
in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No breath of
scandal touched her fair name, or impugned her devotion to Henry. If
she had the misfortune to be identified with a particular policy, the
alliance with the House of Burgundy, the fault was not hers; she had
been married to Henry in consideration of the advantages which that
alliance was supposed to confer; and, if she used her influence to
further Spanish interest, it was a natural feeling as near akin to
virtue as to vice, and Carroz at least complained, in 1514, that she
had completely identified herself with her husband and her husband's
subjec