OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
Ir would not be easy to name any king who has left 
behind him a more odious memory than Henry VIII. 
of England. The incidents of his domestic life have 
won for him a solitary kind of immortality. The 
picture of him with which most of us have grown up 
from childhood is that of a Bluebeard who, as soon 
as he got tired of a wife, would have her beheaded 
and forthwith marry another. Probably the popular 
notion of his reign does not contain much more than 
this, unless it be a vague remembrance of his quarrel 
with Rome. But forty years ago Mr. Froude set 
before the world a very different conception of King 
Henry, in which he appears as a patriot ruler, endowed 
with many excellent qualities of mind and heart, and 
much to be pitied for the perversity of fortune which 
attended his selection of wives. In these conclusions 
Mr. Froude no doubt went rather too far, as is often 
the case when novel views are propounded. With 
regard to its general effects upon the English people, 
Henry’s rule was, on the whole, eminently good; but 
the fierce reign of terror which counted Sir Thomas 
More among its victims is something to which one 
is not easily reconciled, and in the king’s character 
there are features of the ruffian which no ingenuity 
can explain away. As for the Bluebeard notion, 
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