Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/200

186 preparations to his own destruction. He had given great hints of the divorce of Henry, and of his probable marriage with a princess of the Court of France. He told Louise, the king's mother, that "if she lived another year, she should see as great union on one side, and disunion on the other, as she would ask or wish for. "These," he added, "were not idle words. Let her treasure them up in her memory; time would explain them."

The cardinal had, in fact, been looking round him at the French Court for a wife for Henry, and had pitched on the Princess Renée, sister of the late Queen Claude, whilst Henry himself had settled his choice nearer home. On the return of Wolsey, all being now prepared, Henry communicated to the astonished man the secret of his intended marriage with Anne. Confounded at the disclosure, the proud cardinal dropped on his knees, and, it is said, remained there for some hours pleading with the king against this infatuation, as he deemed it, and which he saw compromised himself with the Court of France, and menaced him darkly in the future, from the deep enmity of her who would thus become his queen. His pleadings and arguments were vain. His fair enemy had made her ground wholly secure in his absence, and Wolsey withdrew with gloomy forebodings.



The conduct of Anne Boleyn in this matter has been earnestly discussed and variously represented by different parties. By the Papist world she has been loaded with unmitigated censure, as a selfish, designing, and unprincipled woman, ready to raise herself by the sacrifice of her own sovereign mistress, a woman of great excellence, and of the most meek forbearance towards herself. By the Protestants, who regard Anne as the great champion of the introduction of the Reformation, she has been treated as everything perfect and estimable. The reality, as usual, lies between. Anne, with all her virtues and accomplishments, was a woman with the weakness and the ambition of a woman; and we have only to look forward, and see what a train of other women were ready to tread in her steps, and mount the same throne by the side of this royal Blue Beard, even when it was dripping with the blood of murdered queens, to mitigate our censures and modify our judgment. But no reasonings, no pleas based on the frailties of human nature, can remove the principles of eternal right; the force of