by contemporaries and by
posterity. Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell most on those
which approach nearest to themselves: contemporaries whose interests are at
stake overlook what is personal in consideration of what is to them of
broader moment; posterity, unable to realise political embarrassments which
have ceased to concern them, concentrate their attention on such features
of the story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to the
private and personal passions of the men and women whose character they are
considering.

These natural, and to some extent inevitable tendencies, explain the
difference with which the divorce between Henry VIII. and Catherine of
Arragon has been regarded by the English nation in the sixteenth and in the
nineteenth centuries. In the former, not only did the parliament profess to
desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary[104]
that "all indifferent and discreet persons" judged that it was right and
necessary. In the latter, perhaps, there is not one of ourselves who has
not been taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the
sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of
the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth, she is
an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle
appetite. The story is a long and painful one, and on its personal side
need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private
character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some
length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself
into the question, and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been
at stake beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his
queen, the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of
England would have coloured the entire complexion of the Reformation.

The succession to the throne, although determined in theory by the ordinary
law of primogeniture, was nevertheless, subject to repeated arbitrary
changes. The uncertainty of the rule was acknowledged and deplored by the
parliament,[105] and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity
of sentiment, compelled the observance. An opinion prevailed--not, I
believe, traceable to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force
of statute in the prejudices of the nation--that no stranger born out of
the realm c