But the crime of all the rest seemed pale by the side of Rochford's. He had been raised to the peerage by Henry, as an expression of his kindness to the Boleyn family. He was the brother of Anne; and whilst the others had offended by simple adultery with Anne, his crime was incestuous adultery; and his dying words appeared (to the auditors), 'if not,' says Mr. Froude, 'a confession, yet something too nearly resembling it.'
From such dreadful offences, all readers are glad to hurry away; yet in one respect this awful impeachment has a reconciling effect. No reader after this wishes for further life to Anne. For her own sake it is plain that through death must lie the one sole peaceful solution of her unhappy and erring life. Some people have most falsely supposed that the case against the brother and sister, whatever might be pronounced upon the four other cases, laboured under antecedent improbabilities so great as to vitiate, or to load with suspicion, the entire case of the Privy Council. But, on the contrary, the shocking monstrosity of the charge strengthens the anti-Boleyn impeachment. As a means for getting rid of Anne, the Rochford case was not at all needed. If it could even in dreams be represented as false, the injury offered to the Boleyns, whilst quite superfluous for any purpose of Henry's, would be too atrocious an outrage upon truth and natural justice for human nature to tolerate. The very stones would mutiny against such a calumny coming as a crown or crest to other injuries separately unendurable, if they could once be regarded as injuries at all. Under these circumstances, what should we think of a call upon Lord Berkshire, the very father of Anne Boleyn, to sit as one of the judges upon the cases. Not, indeed, upon the cases of his son and his daughter; from such Roman trials of fortitude he was excused; but on the other cases he was required to officiate as one of the judges. And, in fact, the array of rank and splendour, as exhibited in the persons of those who composed the court, surpassed anything previously known in England. On the part of the crown, it was too keenly felt that the deep personal interest of the king, in obtaining liberty to form a new marriage connection with Jane Seymour, would triumphantly outweigh all the justice that ever could be arrayed against the two Boleyns. Nothing could win a moment's audience for the royal cause, except an unparalleled and matchless splendour in the composition of the court. This, therefore, was secured. Pretty nearly the whole peerage of that period was embattled upon the bench of judges.
Meantime, the tragedy, so far as the queen is concerned, took a turn which convicts all parties of a blunder; of a blunder the most needless and superfluous. This blunder was exposed by Bishop Burnet about a hundred and fifty years later, but most insufficiently exposed; and to this hour it has not been satisfactorily cleared up. Let us pursue the arrears of the case. The four gentlemen, together with Mark Smeton, were executed (as we have seen) on Wednesday, the 17th of May, 1536. Two days later Queen Anne Boleyn was brought out at noonday upon the verdant lawn within the Tower, and with very slight ceremonies she suffered decapitation. A single cannon-shot proclaimed to London and Westminster the final catastrophe of this unhappy romance. Anne had offered not one word of self-vindication on this memorable occasion; and, if her motive to so signal a forbearance were really consideration for the interests of her infant daughter, it must be granted that she exhibited, in the farewell act of her life, a grandeur of self-conquest which no man could have anticipated. For this act she has never received the homage which she deserved; whilst, on the other hand, praise most unmerited has been given for three centuries to the famous letter of self-defence which she is reputed to have addressed to the king at the opening of her trial. This letter, beyond all doubt a forgery, was first brought into effectual notice by the Spectator somewhere about 1710; and, whether authentic or not, is most injudiciously composed. It consists of five paragraphs, each one of which is pulling distractedly in contradictory directions.
Meantime, that or any other act of Anne Boleyn's was superseded by a fatal discovery, which changed utterly the relations of all parties, which in effect acquitted Anne of treason, and which summarily rehabilitated as untainted subjects of the king those five men who had suffered death in the character of traitors. The marriage of Anne to the king, it was suddenly discovered, had from the beginning been void. It is true that we have long ceased to accredit those objections from precontracts, &c., which in the papal courts would be held to establish a nullity. But we are to proceed by the laws as then settled. Grounds of scruple, which would now raise at most a mere case of irregularity, at that time, unless met ab initio by a papal dispensation, did legally constitute a flaw such as even a friendly pope could not effectually cure; far less that angry priest, blazing up with wrath, and at intervals meditating an interdict, who at present occupied the chair of St. Peter. Here was a discovery to make, after so much irreparable injustice had been already perpetrated! If (which is too certain), under the marriage laws then valid, Anne Boleyn never had been the lawful wife of Henry, then, as Bishop Burnet suddenly objected when too late by one hundred and fifty years, what became of the adultery imputed to Anne, and the five young courtiers? Not being the king's wife, both she was incapable in law of committing adultery as against the king, and by an inevitable consequence they were incapable of participating in a crime which she was incapable of committing.
When was this fatal blunder detected? Evidently before any of the victims had become cold in their graves. And the probability is—that, when the blunder was first perceived, the dreadful consequences of that blunder, and the legal relations of those consequences, were not immediately discerned. What convinces us of this is, that the first impulse of the king and his advisers, upon discovering through a secret communication made by Anne the existence of a precontract, and the consequent vitiation of her marriage with the king, had been, to charge upon Anne a new and scandalous offence. Not until they had taken time to review the case, did they become aware of the injustice that had been perpetrated by their own precipitance: and as this was past all reparation, probably it was agreed amongst the few who were parties to the fatal oversight, that the safest course was to lock up the secret in darkness. But it is singular to watch the fatality of error which pursued this ill-starred marriage. Every successive critic, in exposing the errors of his predecessor, has himself committed some fresh blunder. Bishop Burnet, for instance, first of all in a Protestant age indicated the bloody mistakes of papal lawyers in 1536; not meaning at all to describe these mistakes as undetected by those who were answerable for them. Though hushed up, they were evidently known to their unhappy authors. Next upon Burnet, down comes Mr. Froude. Burnet had shaped his criticism thus: 'If,' he says, 'the queen was not married to the king, there was no adultery.' Certainly not. But, says Mr. Froude, Burnet forgets that she was condemned for conspiracy and incest, as well as for adultery. Then thirdly come we, and reverting to this charge of forgetfulness upon Burnet, we say, Forgets! but how was he bound to remember? The conspiracy, the incest, the adultery, all alike vanish from the record exactly as the character of wife vanishes from Anne. With any or all of these crimes Henry had no right to intermeddle. They were the crimes of one who never had borne any legal relation to him; crimes, therefore, against her own conscience, but not against the king in any character that he was himself willing permanently to assume.
On this particular section of Henry's reign, the unhappy episode of his second wife, Mr. Froude has erred by insufficient rigour of justice. Inclined to do more justice than is usually done to the king, and not blind to the dissolute character of Anne, he has yet been carried, by the pity inalienable from the situation, to concede more to the pretences of doubt and suspense than is warranted by the circumstances of the case. Anne Boleyn was too surely guilty up to the height of Messalina's guilt, and far beyond that height in one atrocious instance.
Passing from that to the general pretensions of this very eloquent and philosophic book, we desire to say—that Mr. Froude is the first writer (first and sole) who has opened his eyes to comprehend the grandeur of this tremendous reign.
THE ENGLISH IN INDIA.
In now reproducing the three series of notes on the Indian Mutiny written by De Quincey for me in Titan, I must advert briefly to the agony of apprehension under which the two earlier chapters were written. I can never forget the intense anxiety with which he studied daily the columns of The Scotsman and The Times, looking wistfully for tidings from Roorkhee where his daughter Florence was shut up. The father's heart was on the rack until news arrived that the little garrison was saved.