EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 55 



Henry assuredly was one ; he was probably not such 

 a monster if the term implies a furious and over- 

 mastering passion which tramples down every obstacle 

 and all self-control. If the views put forward in these 

 pages have any basis of fact, Henry's portraits and the 

 descriptions of him tell us that he was a man of 

 active and less impassioned temperament. He was fat, 

 big, of markedly pink skin and scanty face hair; his 

 spinal curves were marked, his neck short, his head so 

 advanced that his chin rested on his chest. 



No sane man is ever the embodiment of a single 

 passion, and the passions, however restrained some or 

 unrestrained others, run more or less together. Henry, 

 it is significant to note, had not a single deep passion 

 neither deep love, nor deep hate, nor deep pity. 

 The defections of Ann Boleyn and Catherine Howard 

 wounded his self-importance, not his affections. He was 

 peevish and petulant and undignified enough, but 

 never profoundly angry ; not when fanatics burst into 

 his privacy and rated him in God's name; not, to the 

 surprise of historians, when the result of the long 

 drawn out Campeggio inquiry was told to him. King 

 David indeed would not have waited seven years for a 

 commission to decide upon his dealings with Bath- 

 sheba and her husband Uriah. No impassioned man 

 no average man could witness unmoved, as Henry 

 did, the death of a wife and a young mother in giving 

 birth to a son especially a long wished for dynastic 

 heir. Three weeks after Jane Seymour's death he 

 was intriguing for a continental marriage from motives 

 of state only, not of passion. In fact, monsters of 

 lust, crowned or uncrowned, adopt quite other methods 

 than those of changing wives. Henry, I repeat, was 

 the embodiment of fitfulness, of fussiness, of self-will 



