BOOKS.

WE rejoice at the appearance of this book ; but we rejoice with somewhat of a sigh. If Mr. Friedmann is held to have made good his case, a great deal of mischievous error which has lately been afloat will be got rid of for ever ; but then it looks very much as if some deeply-cherished notions of our own would have to be got rid of also. He must be very obstinate indeed who can go through Mr. Friedmann's volumes, giving weight to his authorities at each step, and still cleave to the picture of Henry VIII. as a patriotic king, wise and virtuous, guided by the purest of motives, but who, having the bad luck to live in a world where women were allowed to have a place, was driven, purely by that bad luck, to marry, divorce, and behead a greater number of them than falls to the lot of most men or of most kings.

• The poet's brother, Demetrius Soutsos, was one of the four captains of the Sacred Legion who formed the vanguard of the Army of Alexander Hypsilantie, and wore annihilated in a forlorn-hope at Dragatzin, at the outset of the insurrection.

t Anne Boleyn : a Chapter of English History. 1527-1536. By Paul Friedmann. In 2 vols. London : Macmillan and Co. 1894.

This picture can hardly live through the facts that Mr. Fried- mann has taught us out of Chapnis' reports to Charles V. and. his Minister. And surely the sooner that strange paradox is dead and buried the better. But there is another picture with which we are more concerned, that which we our- selves tried to paint a little time back in reviewing the last edition of Mr. Brewer's great Prefaces. We bad always looked on Henry VIII. as a very remarkable study of a very unusual type of human nature. We had always looked on him as a man of strong purpose and no small ability, who played a part in the general affairs of Europe which was certainly not discreditable either to himself or to his kingdom. We had also looked on him as a man, who, though guilty of great crimes, still kept a kind of conscience, and was always ready with an ingenious argument t) prove to himself that his crimes were no crimes at all. He has always been in our eyes the type of the tyrant who contrives to do all his worst acts under legal forms. Now this creation of ours is, we do not say wholly upset, but certainly rather rudely shaken by Mr. Friedmann's volumes. We certainly do not wish to look on Henry either as a mere vulgar scoundrel, or as, perhaps not exactly a fool, but certainly a nearer approach to that character than we had ever fancied. We are perhaps sum- ming-up the results of Mr. Friedmann's researches in a rather strong shape ; but that is the direction in which they at least tend. Mr. Friedmann's Henry is both a smaller and a worse man than the Henry of our imagination. We still are not clear that some points of his life do not need some theory very like our own to explain him. Still our image of Henry VIII., if not altogether broken in pieces, is at any rate shaken on its pedestal. We are a little uneasy, but we do not repine. Let truth prevail, whatever may come of it.

And Mr. Friedmann is one who has emphatically a right to speak. Those who have known about such matters have beenaware for some years that he had collected a vast mass of documents from various Continental sources, from the archives of Vienna, Brussels, and elsewhere, which throw an altogether new light on many things in the English history of the sixteenth century.

Those who wish to have error cleared away at any cost had long been hoping for the publication of Mr. Friedmann's materials, or of some work founded on them. Their hopes are at last in some measure fulfilled. Mr. Friedmann has in these volumes treated one very important part of the story at some length, and with constant reference to his authorities. What Mr. Friedmann himself believes himself to have done is best told in his own words. We do not often listen to words at once so manly and so modest :—

" My object has been to show that very little is known of the events of those times, and that the history of Henry's first divorce, and of the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, has yet to be written. If I have contributed to dispel a few errors, or have in any way helped to the desired end, I shall be satisfied. The task I set myself will have been fulfilled."

We do not often light on a man who has moral courage enough to say that he has written two volumes, full of research, full of new matter, merely in order to enable somebody else to do the same work over again. Mr. Friedmann has fully grasped the great truth that we must sometimes put up with negative results, and that it is often worth a good deal of trouble merely to prove that a thing was not so and so. He knows the truth of history well enough not to be frightened at the necessary results of such a position. He must be quite ready to meet and to despise the illogical cavil, " If you say that a thing was not so-and-so, tell us how it was." But Mr. Friedmann's results are assuredly not wholly negative. We will not flatter him by saying that we think that his two volumes can be the final his- tory of the times which he has treated of. In truth there is no such thing as a final history. Mr. Friedmann's materials must be largely recast ; if by his own hand, so much the better. But, as it is, he has certainly done a great deal more than what he modestly says that he shall be satisfied if he is held to have done.

Before we say anything further of the matter of Mr. Fried- mann's volumes, let us first of all congratulate him on his admirable mastery of our language. One really feels ashamed after reading his book, as we often do after reading books written by foreigners in English, how very few of us could write as well back again in Mr. Friedmann's language or in any other Euro- pean language. Mr. Friedmann's English is clear, straightfor- ward, and to the purpose. It is the rarest thing to catch him in any foreign idiom. If it has any fault, it is the fault of being a

little bald and over-familiar, by no means a fault on the wrong side, as the temptation which commonly besets a foreigner writing in English is that of going off into the high-polite style. Anything like rhetoric or metaphor is not in Mr. Friedmann's line ; yet, when he is put on his mettle, he can tell a tale with effect. There is a good deal of power in the very last stage of his story ; and it is none the worse for being quite free from all talk about daisies, stars, streams, clocks, and all that kind of thing. We are not sure that we can speak quite so highly of Mr. Friedmann's arrangement of his matter. He had a difficult problem to meet, and he has not always succeeded in grappling with it. He is not writing a history of England during certain years, but a history of Anne Boleyn, and he fully understands- the difference between the two. He is in no way called on to narrate at length all that was going on in England during the time with which he deals, a time than which none in all English history was richer in startling events. The story of Anne Boleyn is indirectly connected with the great changes of the time, the series of statutes which abolished the authority of the Pope, the dissolution of the lesser monasteries, and a good many of Henry's judicial murders, those of More and Fisher before all. A historian of Anne Boleyn is in no way bound to tell all these things in detail ; but he is bound to remind us clearly at every step of the personal narrative to what point of the public narrative we have got. This Mr. Friedmann sometimes does, and sometimes does not. About Fisher he has a good deal that is new to tell us ; on some of the other matters we light now and then in a kind of casual way. Mr. Friedmann is most likely neither so interested in nor so familiar with our internal history, civil and ecclesiastical, as he is with a personal history which so largely and so strangely connects itself with continental affairs. His references to such matters are a little lacking in insight, perhaps merely in interest. But we do not think that there are any positive mistakes as to English institu- tions and customs, such as those which so constantly disfigure that great work of Ranke to which we are indebted for so much light as to our relation to the rest of the world.

And now as to the general view of Henry VIII. to which Mr. Friedmann has been led by his very diligent study of his very important authorities. If it is to be accepted as a whole, Henry VIII. becomes, as we have already hinted, both a worse man and a smaller man than we had taken him to be. We had always given him credit for a certain straightforwardness, both at home and abroad ; we had always thought that, though his scruples of conscience arose very conveniently for his purpose, yet they did arise, and were not mere pretence. And specially we never looked on him as a vulgar profligate like Francis of France. He had always seemed to us a man of strong passions, but whose passions were singularly enduring of restraint, and who would go through any amount of waiting, any amount of trouble, even- to turning the world upside down, in order to gratify his passions in a lawful manner. He goes through a vast deal of hard work in order that he might get rid of Katharine and marry Anne ; and then he goes through some more hard work in order that he may get rid of Anne and marry Jane. These last are plain facts which of course Mr. Friedmann does not in any way gainsay. But they are somewhat hard to reconcile with his picture of Henry as-a man of very fickle affections, roving with great speed from mistress to mistress, having at least two between Anne and Jane, that is, after he had tired of Anne, but before he had taken to Jane. It is certainly strange that a man of this kind should wait six years for Anne Boleyn, and should end by marrying her. Mr. Friedmann thinks, as we did in reviewing Mr. Brewer, that, notwithstanding Anne's strange relations towards the king for so many years, she never was technically his mistress till a short time before her marriage. He holds that the marquisate of Pembroke was the price of her virtue. Still Henry married her ; he married her, it may be said, in hopes of a legitimate son; but he did marry her, and it is not the usual custom of kings to marry their mistresses under such circumstances, even when they are able to marry them without bringing about great civil and ecclesiastical revolu- tions for that purpose. One cannot fancy Francis I. going through such an experience as this. Mr. Friedmann's ex- planation is that, while other women, it would seem, yielded easily to the king's will, Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour after her, held out, less, he holds, from virtue than from policy. They saw a chance of becoming queens, and they would not throw it away. Yet Anne, according to him, did yield at the last, and yet did become Queen. But it does not seem inconsistent with Mr. Friedmann's evidence if we hold that the ladies of the Court for whom Henry at one time and another showed a passing fancy, were not necessarily his mistresses in any criminal sense. If they were, we certainly come to the very strangest relations anywhere recorded. We have, in the interval between Anne's marriage and Katharine's death, two rival wives who have their causes severally maintained by two rival mistresses. All this depends on the meaning and the value of such expressions as those of Chapuis in a letter to the Emperor (ii., 57) "La demoiselle questoit nagnieres en faveur de ce roy ne rest plus, et a succ6de en son lieu une consine germaine de la concubine." This last word is that which is regularly applied by Chapuis to Anne Boleyn, though she was now the acknow- ledged Queen. We do not know whether modern ambassadors ever write stories of this kind to modern kings ; anyhow Chapuis' story is not likely to be mere invention, either of himself or of anybody else ; but we must not forget that, if Charles V. liked scandal of this kind, his ambassador would be under a strong temptation to make the most of every such story that he could lay hold of.

We are almost more startled with Mr. Friedmanu's account of Henry's earlier life. As we understand him, the divorce from Katharine was thought of by Henry simply as a means to get possession of Anne. "Although the idea of a divorce had presented itself to many minds at an earlier date, no allusion is made to it in the State Papers before 1527 It is only in the spring of 15'27, long after the king had been sighing at Anne's feet, that the divorce is first seriously mentioned." It was in 1527 that the Bishop of Tarbes threw out that strange hint as to the legitimacy of Mary which must have been prompted by something or somebody, and which with many passed for a device of Wolsey. We can well believe that Henry's passion for Anne made him think much more " seriously " of a divorce than he had ever thought before ; but Mr. Friedmann's facts do not prove that it was that passion which first suggested the thought. He was tired of a wife six years older than himself ; he longed for a son. We do not even see why he may not have had scruples which he himself took to be real ; though we may be sure that, if the scruples had not fallen in with his inclinations, he would never have thought of them.

Mr. Friedmann quite understands this feature in Henry's character; though he hardly sees that it is more than a feature, that it is of a truth the character itself, that which specially distinguishes Henry, and gives the key to his whole life. Yet Mr. Friedmann puts the matter with a good deal of force :-

" Henry was a liar to his own conscience. He was a thoroughly immoral man, and he dared not own it to himself. He tried by all kinds of casuistic subterfuges to make his most dishonest acts appear pure virtue, to make himself believe in his own goodness. And this he did not only after the deed had been committed, so as to stifle the pains of his conscience; before the act he contrived by sophisms to convince himself that what he desired was quite moral and right."

This last habit, one by no means uncommon with mankind, but which Henry carried to more amazing lengths than any other

man into whose mind we can see so freely, is just what we have always held to be the ruling element in Henry's character. Mr. Friedmann here sets it forth very well and clearly in a general statement ; he seems hardly to allow for it in estimating parti- cular cases. For instance, he does not directly commit himself

to the opinion that Henry had Katharine poisoned ; but he does not at all decidedly reject it (vol. ii., p. 177). To us it seems quite inconsistent with Henry's whole character. We could far more easily believe that he had thoughts of get- ting rid of her by bill of attainder. The bill of attainder would

be in keeping with Henry's character as described by Mr. Friedmann ; the poisoning would not. No sophism could

justify the poisoning ; the consent of the Lords and Commons, if it could have been had, would have seemed quite enough to justify an execution by bill of attainder. Mr. Friedmann's account of the circumstances attending Katharine's death is one of the most curious and valuable parts of his book. The story does look very like poisoning ; but there is nothing so easy to invent as a poisoning story, and Katharine did not die in Italy. And it is quite off the point when Mr. Friedmann says :—

" The behaviour of Henry II. towards Thomas k. Becket was not worse than that of Henry VIII. towards Catherine, and historians are generally agreed in saying that Henry II. prompted a murder."

Henry IL "prompted a murder" in the sense that a hasty word of his suggested the thought of the murder of Thomas;

and for the moment he may really have wished that some one would put Thomas to death. But he certainly had no deliberate purpose of murder. But if Katharine was poisoned, as Mr. Friedmann suggests, not by Henry's direct order, but by those who knew that such an act would not displease him, there must have been a very deliberate purpose of murder of the basest kind. There is really no likeness between the two cases.

We are again somewhat startled at Mr. Friedmann's view of Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne. He not only accepts the story that she had been Henry's mistress before be entered into any relations with Anne, but he puts the story in an uglier light than we have been used to see it. It becomes a story of adultery after Mary's marriage with William Carey. Mary again is made to be the younger, not the elder, sister of Anne. And Mr. Friedmann accepts the view, supported by Lingard, that the ground on which Anne is said to have " confessed " the invalidity of her marriage with the King was his former con- nexion with her sister. This is of course not new ; but we have always wondered how Anne could be said to " confess " a thing in which she had no part, and of which she might conceivably never have heard. StillMr. Friedmann brings strong evidence on his side; and the word "confess" may perhaps mean simply that she " allowed " or " admitted" the obstacle. Mr. Friedmann, we think, says nothing as to the seeming inconsistency of the twofold means employed to get rid of Anne, a beheading which implied that she was the King's wife, and a divorce which declared that she was not. Perhaps we may see in the two the action of Henry and the action of his counsellors. According to Mr. Friedmann, the charges against Anne were the work of a plot in which Thomas Cromwell was the chief plotter. How far they were true, how far false, was, it seems, a matter of no concern to Cromwell, and it is not of very much concern to Mr. Friedmann. There is no evidence for the particular charges; but Anne was likely enough to have been as bad as the charges represented her- This we cannot admit. We are dealing with an age not very remarkable either for chastity or for truth ; but the charges against Anne overleap all ordinary bounds. It is only in Borgian Italy that we expect either that such deeds should be done or that they should be invented if they were not done. If then we accept Mr. Friedmann's picture, we get a very much worse Henry, a very much smaller Henry, than we have been used to fancy. And we are not prepared to accept every word of Mr. Friedmann's new indictment without a little more time for thinking and weighing of evidence. Bnt it is a heavy indict- ment, and one that cannot be despised. Mr. Friedmann has a right to speak, and his words are weighty. Let the matter rest a little while.

Meanwhile, in another article we hope to point out some other among the special points raised by Mr. Friedmann's book, among them some which have less to do with the personal character of Henry VIII., and more to do with the general history of the time.