But of all these figures, not excepting Henry’s own, Wolsey stands out as the most grand and tragical; and Mr. Froude has done good service to history, if only in making us understand at last the wondrous ‘butcher’s son.’ Shakspeare seems to have felt (though he could explain the reason neither to his auditors nor, perhaps, to himself) that Wolsey was, on the whole, an heroical man. Mr. Froude shows at once his strength and his weakness; his deep sense of the rottenness of the Church; his purpose to purge her from those abominations which were as well known, it seems, to him as they were afterwards to the whole people of England; his vast schemes for education; his still vaster schemes for breaking the alliance with Spain, and uniting France and England as fellow-servants of the Pope, and twin-pillars of the sacred fabric of the Church, which helped so much toward his interest in Catherine’s divorce, as a ‘means’ (these are his own words) ‘to bind my most excellent sovereign and this glorious realm to the holy Roman See in faith and obedience for ever’; his hopes of deposing the Emperor, putting down the German heresies, and driving back the Turks beyond the pale of Christendom; his pathetic confession to the Bishop of Bayonne that ‘if he could only see the divorce arranged, the King re-married, the succession settled, and the laws and the Church reformed, he would retire from the world, and would serve God the remainder of his days.’ Peace be with him! He was surely a noble soul; misled, it may be—as who is not when his turn comes?—by the pride of conscious power; and ‘though he loved England well, yet loving Rome better’: but still it is a comfort to see, either in past or in present, one more brother whom we need not despise, even though he may have wasted his energies on a dream. And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning. As Mr. Froude, in a noble passage, says:—