Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/240

220, and untainted with alloy of baser matter, was altogether irreparable.

We approach another subject of scarcely less importance than this famous statute, and scarcely less stern. Before we enter upon it we may pause for a moment over one of the few scenes of a softer kind which remain among the records of this iron age. It is but a single picture. Richard Cromwell, writing from the Court of some unimportant business which the King had transacted, closes his letter with adding: 'This done, his Grace went to the prince, and there hath solaced all the day with much mirth and with dallying with him in his arms a long space, and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people.' A saying is recorded of Henry: 'Happy those who never saw a king, and whom a king never saw.' It is something, though it be but for once, to be admitted behind the shows of royalty, and to know that he, too, the queller of the Pope, the terror of conspirators, the dread lord who was the pilot of England in the sharpest convulsion which as yet had tried her substance, was nevertheless a man like the rest of us, with a human heart and human tenderness.

But to go on with our story.

The English criminal law was in its letter one of the most severe in Europe: in execution it was the most uncertain and irregular. There were no colonies to draw off the criminals, no galley system, as in