BOOBS.

MR. GAIRDNER has done real service to historical knowledge by his republication of Mr. Brewer's memorable Prefaces. In their former shape, richly as they deserved readers, they were not likely to meet with many. They came in the successive volumes —volumes of prodigious thickness—of the " Calendars of State Papers" edited for the Master of the Rolls. None but special and diligent students of the period were likely to look for them there. Bishop Stubbs' wonderful pictures of the early Angevin kings and their contemporaries are, we fear, known to but few even of the readers of his " Constitutional History." Mr. Brewer's pictures of Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey are likely to be known to a still smaller class. For Bishop Stubbs' Prefaces are at least attached to editions of original writers, while Mr. Brewer's Prefaces are attached to these Calendars. These last are, in their own nature, to be referred to rather than to be read, while it is to be supposed that there are here and there some who do read original writers. If we rightly re- member, some foolish man in the House of Commons caused Mr. Brewer's series of Prefaces to be stopped, as offending the prejudices of some class or other. Certainly nothing is more likely than that Mr. Brewer's writings should offend the prejudices of a good many classes. They are likely to offend the holders of any conventional party view ; most of all are they likely to offend the newest sect that has been formed with regard to the king who is their chief subject. It was perhaps hardly necessary for the Lords of the Treasury, in allowing their republication, to give the warning that " the Prefaces have no official character or authority." Certainly nothing was ever less like an official document of any kind. Nothing that ever was written bears more thoroughly the personal impress of the writer. We are in every page reading Mr. Brewer and nobody else. And we are reading Mr. Brewer at his very best. Mr. Brewer had his weaknesses like other people, and in some of his writings he showed them. It was an unkind act to his memory to reprint in his " English Studies " his article in the Quarterly Review on Mr. Green's " Short History." Mr. Brewer and Mr. Green were of different politics ; Mr. Brewer had not mastered the early ages of English history, and Mr. Green had. On these grounds Mr. Brewer got very angry, and a good deal of unfair and inaccurate criticism was the result. Even in the present work it is well to remember that Mr. Brewer, like other people, takes a side, and that it is wise to make some allowance in his case, as well as in that of other people. It is easy to see that he has a vast deal more to say on behalf of his side than some others have to say on behalf of another side; one is even tempted to see in his views the antidote to certain other views which have latterly been popular ; but he is still by nature a controversialist and an advocate,—a most skilful controversialist, a most powerful advocate, but certainly not a judge. And even here, where Mr. Brewer is dealing with a subject and a time of which he was thoroughly master, we now and then see slight signs,—very few to be sure and very slight compared with what we see in some against whom Mr. Brewer has to strive,—which The Reign of Henry VIII., from hie demotion to the Deaf h of Wavy. Revised and Illustrated from Original Documents by the late 3. S. Brewer, M A. edited by James Gairdner. In 2 vole. London: Murray. 1824.

make us doubt for a moment whether he had taken an absca lutely all-round grasp of European history as a whole. That his work is not an all-round history of the time that he deals with is much to be regretted ; but that it is not so is no fault of Mr. Brewer. That is to say, it would have been a great gain if Mr. Brewer had undertaken and finished such a history ; but we could not expect to find such a history in the book before us. Mr. Brewer had to write a preface to a calendar of certain State -papers. Many a man would have made a very dull piece of work of such a commission. Mr. Brewer has given us a very brilliant and a very instructive piece of work. It is wonderful how much Mr. Brewer has made out of the materials on which he had to work. But in the nature of things, he could not make a full and complete history of the time out of them. He could only "review and illustrate " such subjects as his State papers suggested to him, and those subjects he has reviewed and illustrated with wonderful life and power. But in their own nature they led him to review and illustrate one side of the history of the time much more than others. His work mainly lay with foreign affairs, with the dealings of princes and ambassadors with one another. Now and then his range takes in some marked internal event, a political trial and execution, such as that of the Duke of Buckingham. But with the domestic history of the nation, with the general life of the people, even with the action of Parliaments, such materials as Mr. Brewer had to work upon had comparatively little to do. He does say a good deal incidentally ; he would clearly have liked to say more, and we should have been well pleased to hear more from him ; but matters of this kind form but a small part of the book. Mr. Brewer comes nearer than any other man to being the historian of those years of the reign of Henry VIII. which fixed the character of his reign ; he has treated such aspects of them as it was his business to treat with a power, a truth, and a fulness, such as have never been brought to bear on them before. But, as he has not dealt at all with the whole reign of Heury VIII., so he has not written what can strictly be called a history of the years with which he has dealt.

Mr. Brewer, as it seems to us, was remarkably lucky im the period of which he had to calendar the State papers, and, while calendaring, to review and illustrate. He had, in a sense, to deal mainly with foreign affairs, at least with affairs in which foreign powers are actors. But there was no time in which the foreign concerns of England so deeply touched her domestic concerns. A large part of the book is necessarily devoted to the transactions connected with the divorce between Henry and Katharine. These transactions necessarily took the shape of negotiations with foreign powers. It could not be other- wise when the Pope had to be directly applied to, and when the Emperor and the King of France had very near interests in what might be the result of the application. All Western Europe was stirred because the King of England wanted to get rid of his wife. But the question was, after all, an English question. England was more directly concerned in it than any other part of the world ; it became a foreign question at all only because with some kinds of domestic questions men could not in those days help carrying their wishes and disputes before the Bishop of Rome. And Mr. Brewer is, we think, lucky on another ground. We said above that the politics of Mr. Brewer were not the politics of Mr. Green. Without in any way com- mitting ourselves to all Mr. Green's notions, to say this comes in the main to saying that Mr. Brewer's politics were not our politics. But while there is no time in English history in which foreign affairs more directly touched domestic affairs, there is no time in which domestic affairs are less touched by ordinary party politics. It is not in this respect like many other times, both earlier and later, when our estimate of men and things cannot fail to be affected by the side which we take as to living questions. Only a few years later than Mr. Brewer's time, we come to the greatest danger of all, to the influence of theological differences on history. But at this stage, none but the most prejudiced can bring these differences in either way. If anybody still believes that "Gospel light flashed from Boleyn's eyes," it is no more use arguing with him than with a votary of Anglo-Israel.

Mr. Brewer, like other people, had his likes and dislikes, and, as in the case of other people, something must be deducted on the strength of them. He is the champion of Wolsey, and, from his point of view, he has little difficulty in making out a good case for Wolsey. That the Cardinal was a great foreign

minister no one can doubt ; that be was vilely used by Henry admits of still less doubt. One is used to mean things in those days, especially at the hands of kings, but Francis I., swearing on the faith of a gentleman, could hardly have done anything meaner than Henry did when he perverted the letter of the law to destroy the minister who, in everything that be was charged with, had acted by the King's own order. We wonder that Wolsey did not make that defence ; in some earlier and some later times be doubtless would have done so ; but he knew well how thoroughly law had become the instrument of a despotic will, and that his only hope lay in the most unreserved surrender of himself to the King's personal mercy. But had Mr. Brewer been writing a complete history of the time, he must have enlarged more fully on the darker sides of the great Cardinal's

character. Few churchmen, even in his day, seem to have more utterly forgotten that they had only duties as. churchmen,—or one might perhaps ather say, few of those churchmen who at all approached the stature of Wolsey. One may doubt whether

any man in England, at least since the days of Edward the

Confessor, had ever been a pluralist on so vast a scale. To be sure, even his pluralities have been exaggerated by writers who

fancied that he held all at once the preferments which he held in succession. But he held the archbishopric of York, which he never went near, and with it some other bishopric, changed from time to time as richer sees fell vacant; and to all this, secular priest as he was, he added the abbey of Saint Albans. Of avarice, in the meaner sense of the word, Wolsey was in- capable ; his vast wealth was spent munificently, and largely to noble purposes ; but a Church does indeed need reform when a man like this was far from being the worst of her prelates. Mr.

Brewer in no way hides this side of his favourite ; it naturally comes out incidentally over and over again. But it is not brought out as it must have been in a complete history or a complete biography. From the worst particular charge brought against Wolsey, personal eagerness to bring about the death of the Duke of Buckingham, Mr. Brewer brings evidence which goes a long way to absolve him.

But how Mr. Brewer deals with Wolsey is less important than how he deals with Henry. The materials for a portrait which Mr. Brewer ever and anon throws off make us wish all the more

that he had had the opportunity for giving us the full-length picture. They bring to us only the more painfully the feeling that the reign of Henry VIII. has yet to be written. Mr. Brewer, we believe, could well have written it. The reign is so memorable in its results, the man himself is so strange a study, that we mourn the more the loss of the best chance that we ever had of a real history of the man and his life. Mr. Brewer could have given such an one, written with real

knowledge and understanding of facts, with real power of writing, and without the least tendency to conventional prejudices on either side. Mr. Brewer's Henry is very far from being a mere monster ; but neither is he the self-forgetting patriot who, out of sheer zeal for the public good, cuts off his wife's head one day and marries her maid the next morning. To this stage of Henry's life Mr. Brewer's subject does not lead him. But he goes far enough to show that we can understand and can set forth the gradual corruption of one in whose nature there was much that was noble, and who in his worst days carried about with him some kind of notion, however perverted, of acting according to a principle of right. Of many striking passages in which Mr. Brewer deals with the character of Henry, one of the most striking is at vol. ii., p. 257. He is dealing with the per- sonal devotion of Wolsey to the King, a devotion often expressed in language which seems to us amazing and even humiliating. He calls on us to look at Henry as he seemed to his people in the early years of his reign :-

" Manly and beautiful in person, beyond all his contemporaries ; noble and kingly in his thoughts, words, and actions ; a most scru- pulous observer of his religious duties ; learned and devout, gracious and magnificent above all sovereigns of his time, and, with all his love of courtliness and splendour, never forgetting the man in the trappings of the monarch, there was no one who in all respects so completely realised to Englishmen their ideal of a king. It is not strange that they were unwilling to be undeceived ; that it was long before they would admit the existence of glaring faults and vices, which, undeveloped in his youth, and controlled by better influ- ences, were strongly and sharply manifested in maturer years. Racked and distressed by the Civil Wars, accustomed to the severe, precise, and suspicious rule of Henry VII., England suddenly sprang forth, as at the dawn of a new day, upon the accession of Henry VIII. Gayest among the gay, the head and centre of the brilliant throng by whom he was surrounded, the young King, in the flower of his youth and beauty, brave as a paladin, courteous as a knight of old, mixed freely as no sovereign had ever mixed with his people, and, fond of popularity, was popular with all classes, as no king had ever been. Loyalty was not a duty, but a fascination ; and not the less because the older influences which had divided or absorbed the zeal and devotion of mankind had fallen to decay. Popes and emperors bad sank to the level of ordinary humanity. The Church produced no saints. Little art, and less literature, existed to interest and divide the thoughts of men. The ideal loyalty of the young gentry in the court of Elizabeth was mixed with gallantry prompted by her sex. It was somewhat artificial at the best. But the loyalty which drew men round her father, Henry VIII., was of an intenser kind ; and though it showed itself in its most passionate form in Wolsey, to a degree inconsistent with modern notions, it pervaded all classes of the community, and all diversities of opinion. In the light of that loyalty Englishmen judged the King ; and in the light of that loyalty they refused to condemn him, let him do what he would."

Elsewhere, in another passage of equal power (i., 508), Mr. Brewer sets forth at length the nature of the fascination—so he calls it—which Henry exercised over all who had much to do with him, above all, the wonderful zeal and devotion shown to him by successive ministers. One point is that, " in his general im- partiality, in the coolness and strength of his judgment, except where his passions were concerned, whenever his ministers tendered advice, they were sure of receiving that most grateful of all recog- nitions to those who volunteer advice,—a full, patient, and unbiassed attention." In other passages Mr. Brewer warns us pointedly against thinking that at any time of his life Henry was given up to his own pleasures, and left all business to Wolsey. From the very beginning, amid all his sports, all his splendours, Henry emphatically governed as well as reigned. He had a great minister, a minister who, as regarded him at least, was blameless; but the minister remained the minister, the carrier out of the King's will. The King's policy might be the Cardinal's policy, but it was the King's policy also ; it was a policy which the King made his own, adopting it, not on trust, but as one strong understanding adopts the suggestions of another. He points out to us how good, on the whole, the influence of Wolsey was, by showing how fast Henry changed for the worse when he had cast Wolsey aside. The base side of his nature, above all the low greediness, compatible throughout his life with a certain kind of munificence, which forms a ruling feature in Henry's character, then came out in its fullness. It is touching to see how the Cardinal in his fall still cares, more than for almost anything else, for his colleges that were growing up at Oxford and Ipswich. And Henry never looks baser than in the low lust of gain which sought enrichment for himself in the utter destruction of one and the grievous laming of the other. All this makes us the more regret that Mr. Brewer had not the chance of setting before us a later stage of the same strangely-mingled character. He could have drawn us the picture—he could have gone nearer than most men towards sounding the depth that lay beneath the picture—of the tyrant steeped in blood and sacrilege, destroy- ing and spoiling all that other ages had looked on as holy, and yet stopping for a while to write with his own hand the statutes of his new foundation at Canterbury, in a fit of piety which was in words as fervid, and which for the moment may have been as sincere, as if he had been Alfred or Saint Lewis, and not the slayer of More and Whiting.

We deeply regret then that we have not from Mr. Brewer's hand, a picture of Henry down 0 the end of his reign and life, But it is no small gain to have what we have. After his general account of what we have and have not in the volumes before us, we hope, in another notice, to call attention to a few of the special points which they suggest, a few only, it must be, out of many.