What Providence may intend by such instruments, is one thing: what we are constituted to think of them, is another: charitably, no doubt, when we think our utmost; but still with a discrimination, for fear of consequences. As to what was thought of Henry in his own time or afterwards, we must not rely on the opinion of Baker, Holinshed, and other servile chroniclers, of mean understanding and time-serving habits, who were the least honourable kind of "waiters upon Providence," taking the commonest appearances of adversity and prosperity (so to speak) for vice and virtue, and flattering every arbitrary and conventional opinion, as though it were not to perish in its turn. We are to recollect what More said of him (as above) in his confidential moments and Wolsey in his agony, and Pole and others, when, having got to a safe distance, they returned him foul language for his own bullying, and blustered out what was thought of him by those who knew him thoroughly. Observe also the manifest allusions in what was written upon the court of those days, by one of the wisest and best of its ornaments, Sir Thomas Wyat—a friend of Anne Bullen's. The verses are entitled, "Of a Courtier's Life," and it may be observed, by the way, that they furnish the second example, in the English language, of the use of the Italian rime terzette, or triplets, in which Dante's poem is written, and which had been first introduced among us by Sir Thomas's friend, the Earl of Surrey (another of Henry's victims):—
Mine owne John Poynes, sins ye delight to know
The causes why that homeward I me draw
And flee the prease of courtes whereso they goe,
Rather than to live thrall under the awe
Of lordly lookes, wrapped within my cloke,
To will and lust learning to set a law,
It is not, that because I storme or mocke
The power of those whom fortune here hath lent
Charge over us, of right to strike the stroke;