But Mr. Froude’s chief text-book seems to have been State Papers and Acts of Parliament. He has begun his work in the only temper in which a man can write accurately and well; in a temper of trust toward the generation whom he describes. The only temper; for if a man has no affection for the characters of whom he reads, he will never understand them; if he has no respect for his subject, he will never take the trouble to exhaust it. To such an author the Statutes at large, as the deliberate expression of the nation’s will and conscience, will appear the most important of all sources of information; the first to be consulted, the last to be contradicted; the Canon which is not to be checked and corrected by private letters and flying pamphlets, but which is to check and correct them. This seems Mr. Froude’s theory; and we are at no pains to confess that if he be wrong we see no hope of arriving at truth. If these public documents are not to be admitted in evidence before all others, we see no hope for the faithful and earnest historian; he must give himself up to swim as he may on the frothy stream of private letters, anecdotes, and pamphlets, the puppet of the ignorance, credulity, peevishness, spite, of any and every gossip and scribbler. Beginning his history with the fall of Wolsey, Mr. Froude enters, of course, at his first step into the vexed question of Henry’s divorce: an introductory chapter, on the general state of England, we shall notice hereafter. A very short inspection of the method in which he handles the divorce question gives us at once confidence in his temper and judgment, and hope that we may at last come to some clearer understanding of it than the old law gives us, which we have already quoted, concerning the dog who went mad to serve his private ends. In a few masterly pages he sketches for us the rotting and dying Church, which had recovered her power after the Wars of the Roses over an exhausted nation; but in form only, not in life. Wolsey, with whom he has fair and understanding sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister, ‘loving England well, but loving Rome better,’ who intends a reform of the Church, but who, as the Pope’s commissioner for that very purpose, is liable to a _præmunire_, and therefore dare not appeal to Parliament to carry out his designs, even if he could have counted on the Parliament’s assistance in any measures designed to invigorate the Church. At last arises in the divorce question the accident which brings to an issue on its most vital point the question of Papal power in England, and which finally draws down ruin upon Wolsey himself. This appears to have begun in the winter of 1526–27. It was proposed to marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king. The Bishop of Tarbés, who conducted the negotiations, advised himself, apparently by special instigation of the evil spirit, to raise a question as to her legitimacy.