No tyrant ever was preceded to the tomb by such an array of victims as Henry VIII. If Shakspeare had chosen to bring the highest of those victims around the last bed that Henry was to press on earth, after the fashion in which he sent the real or supposed victims of Richard III. to haunt the last earthly sleep of the last royal Plantagenet, he would have had to bring them up by sections, and not individually, in battalions, and not as single spies. Buckingham, Wolsey, More, Fisher, Catharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury, Surrey,--these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the King's "jealous rage." Undoubtedly some of these persons had justly incurred death, but it is beyond belief that they were all guilty of the crimes laid to their charge; yet Mr. Froude can find as little good in any of them as of evil in Henry's treatment of them. He would have us believe that Henry was scrupulously observant of the law! and that he allowed Cromwell to perish because he had violated the laws of England, and sought to carry out that "higher law" which politicians out of power are so fond of appealing to, but which politicians in power seldom heed. And such stuff we are expected to receive as historical criticism, and the philosophy of history! And pray, of what breach of the law had the Countess of Salisbury been guilty, that she should be sent to execution when she had arrived at so advanced an age that she must soon have passed away in the course of Nature? She was one of Cromwell's victims, and as he had been deemed unfit to live because of his violations of the laws of the realm, it would follow that one whose attainder had been procured through his devices could not be fairly put to death. She suffered ten months after Cromwell, and could have committed no fresh offence in the interval, as she was a prisoner in the Tower at the time of her persecutor's fall, and so remained until the day of her murder. The causes of her death, however, are not far to seek: she was the daughter of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV., and Henry hated every member of that royal race which the Tudors had supplanted; and she was the mother of Reginald Pole, whom the King detested both for his Plantagenet blood and for the expositions which he made of the despot's crimes.