Certainly the new king was most liberal in his spending, and as certainly was abundantly provided for. And money counted in those days--as it does most whiles: no man in England could come to the dignity of Justice of the Peace--such office as our evergreen friend Justice Shallow holds in Shakespeare--except he had a rental of £20 per annum, equivalent to a thousand dollars of present money--measured by its purchasing power of wheat.[69] By the same standard the average Earl had a revenue of £20,000, and the richest of the peers is put down at a probable income of three times this amount. What a special favorite of the crown could do in the way of expenditure is still made clear to us by those famous walks, gardens, and gorgeous saloons of Hampton Court, where the great Cardinal Wolsey set his armorial bearings upon the wall--still to be seen over the entrance of the Clock Court. If you go there--and every American visitor in London should be sure to find a way thither--you will see, may be, in the lower range of windows, that look upon the garden court--the pots of geranium and the tabby cats belonging to gentlewomen of rank, but of decayed fortune--humble pensioners of Victoria--who occupy the sunny rooms from which, in the times we are talking of, the pampered servants of the great Cardinal looked out. And when the great man drove to court, or into the city, his retinue of outriders and lackeys, and his golden trappings, made a spectacle for all the street mongers. Into that panorama, too, of the early days of Henry VIII., enters with slow step, and with sad speech, poor Katharine of Aragon--the first in order of this stalwart king’s wives. Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler used to read that queen’s speech with a pathos that brought all the sadnesses of that sad court to life again: Miss Cushman, too, you may possibly have heard giving utterance to the same moving story; but, I think, with a masculinity about her manner she could never wholly shake off, and which gave the impression that she could--if need were--give the stout king such a buffet on the ears as would put an end to all chaffer about divorce. Shakespeare, writing that play of Henry VIII., probably during the lifetime of Elizabeth (though its precise date and full authenticity are matters of doubt), could not speak with very much freedom of the great queen’s father: She had too much of that father’s spirit in her to permit that; otherwise, I think the great dramatist would have given a blazing score to the cruelty and _Bluebeardism_ of Henry VIII.