Summary of Henry's Reign.

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bowling, and the cross-waster." In their desire for spiritual food they applied to the rector of the next parish, who had come occasionally and given them a sermon, and had taught them to read the New Testament; when suddenly on Good Friday "the unthrifty curate entered the pulpit where he had set no foot for years, and admonished his parishioners to give no credence to the new-fangled fellows which read the new books." "They be like knaves and Pharisees," he said; they be like a dog that knaweth a marrow-bone and never cometh to the pith, therefore avoid their company; and if any man will preach the New Testament, if I may hear him, I am ready to fight with him incontinent;" "and indeed," added the petitioners, "he applyeth in such wise his school of fence so sore continually, that he feareth all his parishioners."'-Vol. iii., pp. 237, 238.

In one respect Mr. Froude signally resembles the monarch whose reign he has so well described; and it is impossible to read his narrative without being struck with his admiration for bold and manly character. Wolsey, Cromwell, Aske, Latimer, and to a certain extent Reginald Pole, are allowed to share the respect which Henry's uncompromising vigour has inspired in the writer's breast. And it is exactly the same principle of judgment which leads him to be somewhat less than just in his estimate of Cranmer and of Sir Thomas More. We are the more surprised at this low estimate of Cranmer, because there were many qualities in the man that are calculated to call forth regard. No doubt Cranmer thoroughly knew and feared his master, and his temporizing disposition enabled him to bend before the rising storms of passion; and he was thus permitted to fill a post to which he might have been thought to be hardly equal. But, in the long list of criminal trials which darkened Henry's reign, it was rarely that the archbishop's voice was not raised on the side of mercy; and none but he ventured to intercede for Anne Boleyn or for Cromwell in the hour of their distress. That Henry appreciated Cranmer's worth, the wellknown story of his deliverance from the plot which Gardiner had contrived for his ruin is a sufficient evidence. Few characters, we think, have received such scant justice as has that of Cranmer in modern times.

The vigour of Henry's administration reached to a terrible height as years rolled on, and stamped his whole reign with features which Mr. Froude has hardly, we think, sufficiently pondered. It was a reign of blood. From the fall of Wolsey to the King's death, the stream of human blood flowed down, gathering strength and velocity in its onward course. More, Fisher, Dacre, Aske, Cromwell, Exeter, Grey, Surrey, Anne Boleyn, Catharine Howard, the Countess of Salisbury, and a

host of others, all perished before the same fell accusation of treason. We are not ignorant that each of these cases must be judged upon its individual merits; and Mr. Froude has laboured, and in many instances successfully, to show that the sufferers deserved to die. We have already given some examples, in which we deem his vindication to be complete; but the great fact stands out in letters that cannot be obliterated, that the same fatal destiny impended over friends and foes equally in this terrible epoch. To oppose the King or to serve him led to the same deadly issue, and one block awaited the insurgent whose open rebellion had been crushed, and the long-trusted servant whose policy had become distasteful.

So long as these facts stand out in bold relief, without fuller shading to modify the effect than that which is supplied in these four volumes, we think it hopeless to anticipate a favourable verdict upon Henry's character. Of all the executions that marked this reign none seems to us less excusable than that of Cromwell. Let it be granted for the moment that he could be technically or fairly brought within the purport of the law against high treason was no consideration due to the long-tried fidelity of an able minister, whose capacity had safely carried the kingdom through the most critical period in its history? Are past services, performed in a full sense of the responsibility which they involved, and the honest advocacy of measures whose advantage might be questioned by opponents, but whose peril to their promoter was undoubted, and whose issues had been signally successful, to have no weight against the errors that were laid to his charge? Granted that the law knows nothing of set-off, yet the King's prerogative to pardon was unquestioned, and often had Cromwell invoked its exercise on behalf of those who were far less deserving of mercy.

But Mr. Froude has unfolded the whole truth in a passing sentence. With Henry,' he says, 'guilt was ever in proportion to rank he was never known to pardon a convicted traitor of noble blood.' Herein lies the essence of the stigma which will ever attach to Henry's name. In a period of transition, when the world was rocking to and fro, and men were floundering on dangerously to an unknown haven,-when the minds of men were so unsettled that the difficulty of choosing a right course must have been greatly aggravated,-when, in the indecision consequent upon such a state of affairs, the King himself was inconsistent, and swayed alternately to the progressive and retrograde parties in the nation,-when the weakness of our poor human nature was more sorely tried than in any subsequent period of English story, one man sat aloof from all others, wielding an

almost despotic power. It was not his fault that the crisis of opinion reached its height in his own time. It was not his fault that the condition of the nation demanded an intricate policy. We would not even assign it as his fault that he began by persecuting what he afterwards accepted, or that he failed to understand the principles of tolerance, which alone were consistent with his changed position. But it was and ever will be his crime, that, consistent in his inconsistency, as a man he had no pity, as a monarch he had no mercy; and the blood shed under all the forms of justice still cries out against him from the ground.

There is one grand lesson clearly written upon the transactions of this reign, a lesson which we wonder Mr. Froude has not set forth in the forcible language which he can employ with such striking felicity. In the strange events which finally led to the reformation of religion in this country,-in the course forced most inevitably upon a reluctant monarch, who desired to break neither with Rome nor Germany,-alike in the grand tendency of events in their combination and in the minor incidents which marked their progress,-in the foreign policy of Francis, which compelled Henry to conciliate the Lutheran princes, and in the so-called accident by which the courier was detained at the crisis of an arrangement between Henry and Paul III.,—in all these we may clearly trace the guidance of an overruling Hand. In all the puissance of his power, Henry VIII. was but a creature in the hand of the Lord God of Hosts, who ruled the nations then as now according to the counsel of His own will, and to whose Providence we owe the inestimable blessing of an open Bible and a pure creed.

ART. IX.-Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the State of Popular Education in England. London. 1861.

IT has been a principle generally received in Europe, at least since the Middle Ages, that neither religion nor education can be self-supporting; that is, that neither the clergy nor the secular teachers of the people can be left to depend on the support of those who enjoy the benefit of their labours. The independent feelings of the wealthy middle class in England have successfully combated this principle. Subscription churches and chapels have been found to yield adequate incomes to popular preachers; proprietary schools have been found to

succeed; private teachers have made fortunes; and among this class, at least, it has been proved that people will pay liberally for what they find to suit them, whether in secular or religious teaching. But the experiment has gone little further. The lowest classes are admitted unable to pay competent instructors, and the highest are unwilling; that is, they show a decided preference for the services of those who are by legally secured endowments rendered independent to a great extent of any income arising from actual success in their respective vocations. We attempt not either to justify or to combat their reasons; but simply note them, as the two grounds on which instruction is accepted at the public expense:-on the one hand, inability to support the instructors; and, on the other, the desire of seeing them independent.

Before, and for some time after, the Reformation, the general idea of eleemosynary education was to provide an academic course for those among the poor who seemed to have special aptitude, with the view of their entering the then numerous ranks of the clergy; and, perhaps, we are scarcely in a position now to estimate how great was the intellectual and moral influence which resulted from a considerable number of individuals of the humbler classes thus receiving a liberal and religious education, and again for the most part mingling freely among the ranks from which they sprang. But when, in the course of time, a university education became the luxury of the rich, instead of the bread of the poor, when even the lowest places in the learned professions were gladly filled by men of gentle birth, the literary objects of the ancient endowments were gradually divorced from the eleemosynary; the funds were almost of course held for the former; literature was supported for the rich, and the poor were left to their ignorance. Such has been the fate of our college and grammar school foundations.

The idea of elementary education for the lower classes in general, an education not to remove them from the sphere of manual labour, but to enable them to occupy it intelligently, is quite of modern origin. It has sprung out of, or, rather, has grown side by side with, the extension of political rights; the diffusion of cheap literature; the introduction of penny postal communication; the demand for skilled labour rather than brute force, which has arisen from the invention of machinery; and a variety of other causes which have materially altered the position of the working classes since the commencement of the present century. An education of some kind for these is now admitted on all hands to be a crying necessity; but we look in vain for

Historical View of the Question.

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the funds which the piety of past ages accumulated for the education of the poor through future generations. They have long since been otherwise appropriated, and are now deemed irrecoverable. When M. Guizot was preparing to legislate for national education in his own country, he said, 'All the ancient and various establishments for public instruction have disappeared with the masters and the property, the corporations and the endowments. We have no longer within the great community small communities of a private kind, subsisting independently, and devoted to the various kinds of education. What has been restored, or is struggling into birth, of this description, is evidently not in a position to meet the public wants...... We have destroyed everything, we must create anew.' What was true of every kind of education in France when M. Guizot laid his plans, was true of England with respect to the great masses of the people till within a very recent period, and has scarcely ceased to be so; but our rulers are not so ready as the French to take the initiative in matters of this sort; they would rather consolidate and give increased effect to what they find in existence, than start new projects, or expend money on schemes extemporized on paper. Warned by the experience of past ages, the pious rich of our day seldom lay permanent foundations for charitable education. It is kept for the most part dependent on voluntary subscriptions continually to be renewed. The State has hitherto declined making more than a yearly provision, and has thus kept open the question of what is a suitable education for the masses, and by what means it ought to be diffused. There has been abundance of noisy controversy and keen debate among politicians, ecclesiastics, and philanthropic theorists; there has also been a sphere of actual life and labour, displaying a large amount of individual enthusiasm, of associational generosity, and of national liberality; but all these activities have been experimental and tentative. No one has pretended to say what permanent methods would secure the objects in view for the whole; but each has prosecuted those which commended themselves most to his own judgment. Some have looked on the rapidly increasing powers of the once unconsidered masses, and have fondly hoped that they might be made not only an intelligent but a well-informed community. Such have devoted their attention to raising the standard of knowledge in the common day schools, and devising the best means of retaining the children in attendance upon them; while others, despairing that the claims of labour will ever in this country yield to those of education, have desired nothing more ambitious than the commonest elements of secular instruction, with full attention to