Before accepting a conclusion so disgraceful--before consigning the men who achieved so great a victory, and risked and lost their lives in the battle, to final execration--it is at least permissible to pause. The difficulty can only be made light of by impatience, by prejudice, or by want of thought. To me at any rate, who wished to discover what the real history of the Reformation had been, it seemed so considerable, that, dismissing the polemical invectives of later writers, I turned to the accounts of their conduct, which had been left behind by the authors of it themselves. Among the fortunate anomalies of the situation, Henry departed from previous custom in holding annual parliaments. At every step which he took, either in the rearrangement of the realm or in his own domestic confusions, he took the Lords and Commons into his council, and ventured nothing without their consent. The preambles of the principal statutes contain a narrative clear and precise of the motives of everything that he did--a narrative which at least may have been a true one, which was not put forward as a defence, but was a mere explanation of acts which on the surface seemed violent and arbitrary. If the explanation is correct, it shows us a time of complications and difficulties, which, on the whole, were successfully encountered. It shows us severe measures severely executed, but directed to public and necessary purpose, involving no sycophancy or baseness, no mean subservience to capricious tyranny, but such as were the natural safeguards during a dangerous convulsion, or remedies of accidents incidental to hereditary monarchy. The story told is clear and distinct; pitiless, but not dishonourable. Between the lines can be read the storm of popular passions, the beating of the national heart when it was stirred to its inmost depths. We see established institutions rooted out, idols overthrown, and injured worshippers exasperated to fury; the air, as was inevitable at such a crisis, full of flying rumours, some lies, some half lies with fragments of truth attaching to them, bred of malice or dizzy brains, the materials out of which the popular tradition has been built. It was no insular revolution. The stake played for was the liberty of mankind. All Europe was watching England, for England was the hinge on which the fate of the Reformation turned. Could it be crushed in England, the Catholics were assured of universal victory, and therefore tongues and pens were busy everywhere throughout Christendom, Catholic imagination representing Henry as an incarnate Satan, for which, it must be admitted, his domestic misadventures gave them tempting opportunities. So thick fell the showers of calumny, that, bold as he was, he at times himself winced under it. He complained to Charles V. of the libels circulated about him in France and Flanders. Charles, too, had suffered in the same way. He answered, humorously, that "if kings gave occasion to be