At last Henry was free. He had desired Jane Seymour, and everything had been invented—adultery, incest—to break the bonds that united him to the queen. The proofs of Anne's crimes failing, the ferocious acts of the king were to supply their place. Could those who witnessed the cruelty of the husband venture to doubt the guilt of the wife? Henry had become inhuman that he might not appear faithless. Now that the object was obtained, it only remained to profit by his crime. His impatience to gratify his passions made him brave all propriety. The mournful death of his queen; the Christian words that she had uttered, kissing as it were the cruel hand that struck her—nothing softened that man's heart, and the very next day he married the youthful maid of honor. It would have been difficult to say in a more striking manner: 'This is why Anne Boleyn is no more!' When we see side by side the blood-stained block on which Anne had received her death-blow, and the brilliant altar before which Henry and Jane were united, we all understand the story.[356] The prince, at once voluptuous and cruel, liked to combine the most contrary objects in the same picture—crime and festivities, marriage and death, sensuality and hatred. He showed himself the most magnificent and most civilized monarch of Europe; but also the rival of those barbarous kings of savage hordes who take delight in cutting off the heads of those who have been their favorites and even the objects of their most passionate love. We must employ different standards in judging of the same person, when we regard him as a private and as a public individual. The Tudor prince, so guilty as a husband, father, and friend, did much good as a ruler for England. Louis XIV., as well as Henry VIII., had some of the characteristics of a great king; and his moral life was certainly not better than that of his prototype in England. He had as many, and even more mistresses than the predecessor of the Stuarts had wives; but the only advantage which the French monarch had over the English one, is that he knew how to get rid of them without cutting off their heads.