If Henry had married solely for the purpose of begetting children, he never would have divorced and slaughtered Anne Boleyn. During her brief connection with him, she gave birth to two children, one a still-born son, and the other the future Queen Elizabeth, who lived to her seventieth year, and whose enormous vitality and intellectual energy speak well for the physical excellence of her mother. The miscarriage that Anne experienced in February, 1536, was probably the occasion of her repudiation and murder in the following May, as Henry was always inclined to attribute disappointments of this kind to his wives, who ever dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death.[Footnote: Henry thought of divorcing Catharine of Aragon some years before she had become too old to bear children. She was born in the last month of 1485, and the "King's secret matter," as the divorce question was called, was in agitation as early as the first half of 1527, and probably at an earlier period. Catharine was the mother of five children, but one of whom lived, namely, the Princess Mary, afterward Mary I.] The most charitable view that can be taken of Henry's abominable treatment of his second wife is, that he was led by his superstitious feelings, which _he_ called religion, to sacrifice her to the manes of his first wife, whom Anne had badly treated, and who died on the 7th of January, 1536. Henry, after his fashion, was much moved by Catharine's death, and by perusal of the letter which she wrote him from her dying bed; and so he resolved to make the only atonement of which his savage nature was capable, and one, too, which the bigoted Spanish woman would have been satisfied with, could she have foreseen it. As the alliance between the royal houses of England and Spain was sealed with the blood of the innocent Warwick, who was sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father, Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the Tower Green. Heaven's judgement would seem to have been openly pronounced against that blood-cemented alliance, formed by two of the greatest of those royal ruffians who figured in the fifteenth century, and destined to lead to nothing but misery to all who were brought together in consequence of it's having been made. If one were seeking for proofs of the direct and immediate interposition of a Higher Power in the ordering of human affairs, it would be no difficult matter to discover them in the history of the royal houses of England during the existence of the Lancastrian, the York, and the Tudor families. Crime leads to crime therein in regular sequence, the guiltless suffering with the guilty, and because of their connection with the