she is disposed, began to wax something wroth with his prosperous estate, [and] thought she would devise a mean to abate his high port; wherefore she procured Venus, the insatiate Goddess, to be her instrument. To work her purpose, she brought the King in love with a gentlewoman, that, after she perceived and felt the King's goodwill towards her, and how diligent he was both to please her, and to grant all her requests, she wrought the Cardinal much displeasure; as hereafter shall be more at large declared."

Pretty Anne Bullen completed the ruin of Wolsey for having thwarted her, and not long afterwards was sent out of this very house from which she ousted him, to the scaffold, herself ruined by another rival. On the Cardinal's downfall, Henry seized his house and goods, and converted York Place into a royal residence, under the title of Westminster Place, then, for the first time, called also Whitehall.

"It is not impossible," says Mr. Brayley (Londiniana, vol. ii. p. 27.) "that the Whitehall, properly so called, was erected by Wolsey, and obtained its name from the newness and freshness of its appearance, when compared with the ancient buildings of York Place. Shakspeare, in his play of King Henry VIII., makes one of the interlocutors say, in describing the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn :

'So she parted,

And with the same full state paced back again
To York Place, where the feast is held.'

that is past.

Must no more call it York Place,

For since the Cardinal fell, that title's lost:

'Tis now the King's, and called Whitehall.''

It is curious to observe the links between ancient names and their modern representatives, and the extraordinary contrast sometimes exhibited between the two.

The

"Judge," who by Henry's orders went to turn Wolsey out of his house, without any other form of law,-a proceeding which excited even the fallen slave to a remonstrance, was named Shelly, and was one of the ancestors of the poet! the most independent-minded and generous of

238

CHAP. XI.

Henry the Eighth. - His Person and Character. - Modern Qualifications of it considered. - Passages respecting him from Lingard, Sir Thomas Wyat, and others. His Additions to Whitehall. — A Retrospect at Elizabeth. - Court of James resumed. Its gross Habits. — Letter of Sir John Harrington respecting them.-James's Drunkenness.— Testimonies of Welldon, Sully, and Roger Coke. Curious Omission in the Invective of Churchill the Poet. - Welldon's Portrait of James. Buckingham, the Favourite. - Frightful Story of Somerset. - Masques.- Banqueting House. - Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson. Court of Charles the First. Cromwell. Charles the Second. James the Second.

W

E have said more about Wolsey than we intend to say of Henry the Eighth; for the son of the butcher was a great man, and his master was only a king. Henry, born a prince, became a butcher; Wolsey, a butcher, became a prince. And we are not playing upon the word as applied to the king; for Henry was not only a butcher of his wives, he resembled a brother of the trade in its better and more ordinary course. His pleasures were of the same order; his language was coarse and jovial; he had the very straddle of a fat butcher, as he stands in his doorway. Take any picture or statue of Henry the Eighth, fancy its cap off, and a knife in its girdle, and it seems in the very act of saying — “What d'ye buy? What d'ye buy?" There is even the petty complacency in the mouth, after the phrase is uttered.

Disturb the

And how formidable is that petty unfeeling mouth, in the midst of those wide and wilful cheeks! self-satisfaction of that man, derange his

bile for an

instant, make him suppose that you do not quite think him

and what hope have you from the sentence of that mass of pampered egotism?

Let us not do injustice, however, even to the doers of it. What better was to be looked for, in those times, from the circumstances under which Henry was born and bred, from the son of a wilful father, and an unfeeling state marriage, - from the educated combiner of church and state, instinctively led to entertain the worldliest notions of both, and of heaven itself, — from the inheriter of the greatest wealth, and power, and irresponsibility, ever yet concentrated in an English sovereign? It has been attempted of late by various writers (and the attempt is a good symptom, being on the charitable side) to make out a case for Henry the Eighth, as if he were a sort of rough but honest fellow, a kind of John Bull of that age, who meant well upon the whole, and thought himself bound to keep up the conventionalities of his country. We know not what compliment is intended to be implied by this, either to Henry or his countrymen; but really when a man sends his wives, one after the other, to the scaffold, evidently as much to enable him to marry another as to vindicate any propriety, when he "cuts" and sacrifices his best friends and servants, and pounces upon their goods, when he takes every licence himself, though he will not allow others even to be suspected of it, - when he grows a brute beast in size as well as in shedding superfluous blood to the last, our parts, as Englishmen, but be glad of some better excuses for him of the kind above stated, than such as are to be found in the roots of the national character, however

habits, and dies

we cannot, for

jovial. Imagine only the endearments that must have passed between this man and Anne Bullen, and then fancy the heart that could have sent the poor little, hysterical, half-laughing, half-crying thing to the scaffold! The man was mad with power and vanity. That is his real

excuse.

It has been said, that all which he did was done by law, or at least under the forms of it, and by the consent, sometimes by the recommendation, of his statesmen. The assertion is not true in all instances; and where it is, what does it prove but that his tyrannical spirit had helped to make his statesmen slaves? They knew what he wished, and notoriously played the game into his hands. When they did not, their heads went off. That circumstances had spoilt them altogether, and that society, with all its gaudiness, was but in a half-barbarous state, is granted; but it is no less true, that his office, his breeding, and his natural temper, conspired to make Henry the worst and most insolent of a violent set of men; and he stands straddling out accordingly in history, as he does in his pictures, an image of sovereign brutality.

Excessive vanity, aggravated by all the habits of despotism and luxury, and accompanied, nevertheless, by that unconscious misgiving which is natural to inequalities between a man's own powers and those which he derives from his position, is the clue to the character of Henry the Eighth. Accordingly, no man gave greater ear to tale-bearers and sowers of suspicion, nor resented more cruelly or meanly the wounds inflicted on his selflove, even by those who least intended them, or to whom he had shown the greatest fondness. The latter, indeed, he treated the worst, out of a frenzy of egotistical disappointment; for his love arose, not from any real regard for their merits, but from what he had taken for a flattery to his own. Sir Thomas More knew him well, when,