“But he was wrong in contending for the supremacy of the Pope, was he not?” said an incipient theologian.
“Undoubtedly; but as a modern historian, not usually credited with Catholic sympathies, says of the Carthusian martyrs who died for the same belief, ‘We will not regret their cause; there is no cause for which any man can more nobly suffer, than to witness that it is better for him to die than to speak words which, he does not mean?’”[58]
“What a wicked monster Henry the Eighth must have been!”
“Yet he had, perhaps, the majority of the nation with him; and doubtless his heart was hardened by continued prosperity and the flattery which he breathed as his vital air. I shall never forget the solemn thoughts which came upon me when I once stood over the plain stone which marks his grave at Windsor: the remembrance of his many victims, the devout Catharine, the stately Wolsey, the learned More, the pious Fisher, the faithful monks of the Charterhouse, the Protestant martyrs, the gallant Surrey, and a host of others. Then came the thought, he has long since met his victims at the judgment-seat, and he and they have been judged by One ‘too wise to err, too good to be unkind;’ let us leave him to that judgment, which also awaits us all. But hark, there is the Chapel bell.”
Exeunt omnes.
FOOTNOTES
[58] Froude, Vol. III., Cap. ix.