Note 37 — Chapter I

Burnet has taken much pains with the subject, and set her innocence in a very clear light (i. 197 and iii. 114). See also Strype, i. 280, and Ellis's Letters, ii. 52. But Anne had all the failings of a vain, weak woman, raised suddenly to greatness. She behaved with unamiable vindictiveness towards Wolsey, and perhaps (but this worst charge is not fully authenticated) exasperated the king against More. A remarkable passage in Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, p. 103, edit. 1667, strongly displays her indiscretion.

A late writer, whose acuteness and industry would raise him to a very respectable place among our historians, if he could have repressed the inveterate partiality of his profession, has used every oblique artifice to lead his readers into a belief of Anne Boleyn's guilt, while he affects to hold the balance, and state both sides of the question without determining it. Thus he repeats what he must have known to be the strange and extravagant lies of Sanders about her birth; without vouching for them indeed, but without any reprobation of their absurd malignity. Lingard's Hist. of England, vi. 153 (8vo. edit). Thus he intimates that "the records of her trial and conviction have perished, perhaps by the hands of those who respected her memory" (p. 316); though, had he read Burnet with any care, he would have found that they were seen by that historian, and surely have not perished since by any unfair means; not to mention that the record of a trial contains nothing from which a party's guilt or innocence can be inferred. Thus he says that those who were executed on the same charge with the queen, neither admitted nor denied the offence, for which they suffered; though the best informed writers assert that Norris constantly declared the queen's innocence and his own.

Dr. Lingard can hardly be thought serious, when he takes credit to himself, in the commencement of a note at the end of the same volume, for not "rendering his book more interesting, by representing her as an innocent and injured woman, falling a victim to the intrigues of a religious faction." He well knows that he could not have done so, without contradicting the tenor of his entire work, without ceasing, as it were, to be himself. All the rest of this note is a pretended balancing of evidence, in the style of a judge who can hardly bear to put for a moment the possibility of a prisoner's innocence.

I regret very much to be compelled, in this edition, to add the name of Mr. Sharon Turner to those who have countenanced the supposition of Anne Boleyn's guilt. But Mr. Turner, a most worthy and painstaking man, to whose earlier writings our literature is much indebted, has, in his history of Henry VIII., gone upon the strange principle of exalting that tyrant's reputation at the expense of every one of his victims, to whatever party they may have belonged. Odit damnatos. Perhaps he is the first, and will be the last, who has defended the attainder of Sir Thomas More. A verdict of a jury, an assertion of a statesman, a recital of an act of parliament, are, with him, satisfactory proofs of the most improbable accusations against the most blameless character.