writers were the passionate and fanatical of both persuasions, and by them the materials were supplied for the Henry VIII. who has been brought down to us by history, while the candid and philosophic thinkers of the last and present centuries have accepted the traditional figure. In their desire to be impartial they have held the balance equal between Catholics and Protestants, inclining slightly to the Catholic side, from a wish to conciliate a respectable body who had been unjustly maligned and oppressed; while they have lavished invectives upon the early Reformers violent enough to have satisfied even Pole himself, whose rhetoric has formed the base of their declamation.
Liberal philosophy would have had a bad time of it in England, perhaps in all Europe, if there had been no Henry VIII. to take the Pope by the throat. But one service writers like Macaulay have undoubtedly accomplished. They have shown that it is entirely impossible to separate the King from his ministers—to condemn Henry and to spare Cranmer. Protestant writers, from Burnet to Southey, have tried to save the reforming bishops and statesmen at Henry's expense. Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley have been described as saints, though their master was a villain. But the cold impartiality of Macaulay has pointed out unanswerably that in all Henry's most questionable acts his own ministers and his prelates were active participants—that his Privy Council, his parliaments, his judges on the bench, the juries empanelled to try the victims of his tyranny, were equally his accomplices; some actively assisting; the rest, if these acts were really criminal, permitting themselves to be bribed or terrified into acquiescence. The leading men of all descriptions, the nation itself, through the
