The Press. — London, England, 1856-04-26 00:00:00

fr 400 thought to be dead by this time, and past my pain.' I told her it should be no pain, it was so subtle ; and then she said, I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,' and put her hands about it, laughing heartily. I have seen many men, and also women exe• cnted, and they have been in great sorrow ; and to my knowledge, this lady bath much joy and pleasure in death." The " worst returns to laughter," says Shakespeare. When the spirits are borne down by an accumulation of sorrow too great for endurance, too potent for expression, nature strives to relieve itself by an explosion of hysterical mirth. Was the demeanour of the Queen, as witnessed by her keeper, that of suffering innocence, or that of the shame less guilt which had known five paramours, and her own brother among them ? We must follow Mr. Fronde to the end of his narrative. The day after the Queen's execution Henry married Jane Seymour :- The indecent hasto is usually considered a proof en' tirely conclusive of the cause of Anne lioleyn's ruin. To myself the haste is an evidence of something very different. The King was urged to an immediate re marriage by his council, and Mr. Froudo sup poses that " he looked on matrimony as an in " different official act, which his duty required " at the moment." When the Parliament which had been summoned by Henry in anticipation of his Queen's guilt assembled, every step which had been taken was sanctioned : The criminality of the Queen was considered to have been proved; the sentence upon her to hate been just. The King was thanked in the name of the nation for having made haste with the marriage which has been re garded as the temptation to his crime. Then, as a question of succession arose through the illegitimacy of, the two Princesses,— The Parliament, with as much boldness as good sense, cut the knot, by granting Henry the power to bequeath the crown by will. It was an expression of confidence as honourable to the country as the King; and if we may believe, as the records say, that the tragedy of the past month had indeed grieved and saddened Henry, the gene rous language in which the Legislature committed the future of the nation into his hands, may have something soothed his wounds. Here we close our extracts. We have been anxious to let Mr. Froude state his case in his own wa). He requires us to believe that in those days juries were independent, and par liaments free. But ho produces no proofs that they were so. Such a task would be be yond his power. Surely Mr. Froude must know that a royal indictment was equivalent to a conviction, and that the guilt or innocence of a prisoner once threatened by Henry had no more to do with judgment than had the soundness of the arguments in the dispute between the King and Lambert to do with the sentence which gave to the flames the unfortu nate controversialist who denied the real Presence. Throughout Henry's reign juries and parliaments were used but as instruments to enrol the King's decrees and confirm his pleasure. It is questionable whether in State trials the juries ever thought of exercising an independent jurisdiction. Certain formulaiies were gone through, and that was all. The secrecy with which the criminal charge against the Queen was got up, the rapidity with which the proceedings were hurried on, the haste with which the trial itself was gone through, and the impossibility of the accused being able, alone and unsupported, to refute the charges against them, supply a presumption that their trial was in reality only a mere mockery—their conviction, instead of estab lishing prima facie their guilt, in reality estab- lishes nothing except this, that the King had made up his mind that the) should be guilty. The only circumstance against the accused is the confession of Smeton ; but we have seen how Henry, with murderous craft, at tempted to ensnare the Queen into confession, and how Brereton complained that he had been similarly tampered with. Smeton was but a menial ; and it does not appear im• probable that the story which gained currency at a later date was literally correct, that he had been frightened into a confession, through a hope that he might be spared. We can but indicate very generally the grounds for doubt ing Mr. Froude's case. We hope it may be subjected ere long to a critical and elaborate examination. One word on the authenticity of tho State records which have conic down to us. May not those records be, of all kind of evidence, THE PRESS. the most open to suspicion? Who prepared them and preserved them? What confidence can we possibly feel in their truth? The re cent researches of Mr. Prescott and Mr. Motley have shown that Philip 11. prepared with great elaboration a series of false docu ments relative to the death of two envoys from the Netherlands. Those documents were naturally presumed to be authentic; but the King was so sure that posterity would do jus tice to his acts as a good Inquisitor and Papist, that he secretly preserved an account of his cruel and bloody faithlessness, which accident has but lately brought to light. What will Mr. Froude say to the subsequent State trials of Henry's reign ? Was Cromwell really a traitor? Was he justly executed ? Did the Countess of Salisbury have a fair trial, and was her execution a proof of the King's benign disposition? And Norfolk and Surrey, did they have fair trials ? Were their juries independent—did they fairly examine evidence and return true verdicts ? Only on the supposition that Mr. Fronde will answer affirmatively can we understand why he should lay stress on the constitution of the courts which condemned the Queen, and the persons accused with her. There are other points of Mr. Froude's history to which we can merely direct atten tion. He assumes throughout that all the executions which took place for religious opinion were just arid necessary. On the exe cution of Sir Thomas More he writes To me it appears most piteous and most inevitable. The hour of retribution had come at length The voices crying underneath the altar had been heard upon the throne of the Most High, and woe to the generation of whom the dark account should be demanded. It is in this spirit that the tortures and execu tions which accompanied the Reformation are narrated. Mr. Fronde conceives that they were necessary, and therefore excusable. We do not peruse his "retributive" narratives without a feeling akin to horror. The histori cal advocate,.in the midst of his zeal, ought not to forget that he is first retained for the in terests of humanity, and that, whatever defence he may make for individuals acting iu the spirit of their time, being moved by its pas sions and impulses, and conceiving that the most horrible crimes were the highest virtues by reason of their convictions, it is his part to clearly condemn the crimes themselves arid to judge them by the purer light he has. His tory may pity or excuse the fanatic, but is it to defend his excesses ? Men may perhaps be estimated by the moral atmosphere in which they lived, but assuredly their acts themselves should be judged by the purest conceptions we can form of the immutable standard of Divine justice. Disagreeing with much of Mr. Froude's narrative, and thinking moreover that parts of it are written in questionable taste, as where he nonsensically exclaims, " Better far it would " have been if the dust had been allowed to " settle down over the grave of Anne Boleyn, " and her remembrance buried in forgetful " ness," as if the investigation of truth should ever be matter of indifference, we y et willingly give it this praise,—it is an original book, it is on the whole eminently skilful in narrative, it places before the reader a vast body of infor mation never before published in an easily accessible shape, and it is well calculated to promote thought, and to stimulate historical inquiry. Apparitions. A New Theory. By Newton Crosland. London : Effingham Wilson. IT has been often objected by the " scoffing logician " against the " candid ghostseer" (wo quote Mr. Crosland) that, even though wo should admit the spectral appearance of de parted persons, no satisfactory explanation can be given of the appearance of their garments. This is undoubtedly a grave diffi culty ; for hitherto ghosts have generally re visited their friends, like Mr. Scrooge, in their " usual waistcoats," and, whether to insure recognition, or to avoid catching cold, have almost invariably taken the precaution of dressing themselves before venturing out on their nocturnal rambles. On the one hand, while we deny immortality almost universally to brutes, can we concede it, with perfect con- SATURDAY, sistency, to cast-off suits of clothes? ~W 1 1; " should a horse, a dog, a rat, have lif e , and " thou no breath at all?" says Lear ; why should a waistcoat, a shirt-front, a collar, be allowed the privilege of permanence hereafter, says the " narrow logician," while the faithful Newfoundland, and the frolicsome Skye, ar c assumed to conclude their independent exist ence as soon as the performance of their vital functions terminate ? Yet, on the other hand, it may be fairly allowed that, whil e we maintain the immortality of table-turners and mediums, we lay ourselves open to a home thrust from the advocate of the immortality of overcoats, who might easily advance argu ments in support of his benevolent theory of ultra-universalism which we should be fairly puzzled to rebut. Be this as it may, however, the difficulty really exists; and many a weak brother, in Mr. Crosland's opinion, has fairly succumbed beneath its pressure. Armed with a new " theory," "hypothesis," or whatever, by a curious abuse of scientific terminology, its author choose to misname it, he therefore comes forward, in the eyes of Europe, the Don Quixote of wronged inexpressibles. His notion is, that in the spirit world all the significant actions of our lives are photo graphed in the garments which we wear, ready to be displayed by the angels, under Divine guidance, to those who have the faculty of spiritual vision. We cannot agree with Mr. Crosland in his admiration of this extraordinary fiction; to us it seems the cul minating absurdity of spiritualism. The be lief that immortal souls should employ their eternal existence even in some useful oc cupation, such as the manufacture of " thunder, lightning, and of rain," seems absurd and incredible enough; or that de parted spirits should fill up the golden hours of their glorious emancipation, like used-up men about town, in any trifle to get through the burden of the day, by turning mahogany dining-tables and revealing the locality of missing family papers, is perhaps rather more absurd still. But the idea that the angels of Heaven should be occupied, by Divine per mission, in exhibiting sun-pictures of human trivialities to a few nervous youths with dis ordered digestions for the benefit of a few " bad heads," whose only chance of notice from the public lies in the vehement assertion of some delusion of the moment, brings us down to positive blasphemy, and only fails in exciting laughter by moving sincere indigna tion. The only recommendation of this strangest of all conceivable fictions is the explanation which it affords of the so-called facts; for it does not fulfil one of the remain ing conditions of a genuine scientific theory, or even of a plausible hypothesis. The cause which it supplies to the phenomena needing an explanation is quite incapable of verification from other sources, and is, d priori, highly improbable. Nobody ever saw the angels en gaged in their photographic occupations, and it is highly inconsistent with the dignity which we associate with their characters to suppose them so occupied at all. Again, the cause itself is superfluous, and falls before the inexorable principle, entia non stint multipli canda prater necessitatem ; for the spectral appearance of garments might be very well explained in the same manner as that of the deceased persons whom they cover, and itself throws a doubt on the external reality of the latter; or, to concede as much to spiritualism as possible, we might entirely suspend our judgment with reference to the explanation of the curious facts submitted to our senses, and, while admitting the reality of the stories, refuse our assent to that theory which assigns to them a supernatural origin. Only when we have exhausted all the sources of physical causation are we warranted in recurring to the hyperphysical as a last resource. The second part of Mr. Crosland's pam phlet only is devoted to the enunciation of his theory—the first serving as an introduction to the rest. He opens his case by informing the public that he is quite conscious of his own insignificance, that he is a very ordinal} , mortal, and so forth. He might have spared himself the trouble of the declaration. The public will find, with the greatest facility, that the only well-grounded opinion Mr. Crosland entertains is this very one of himself, which lie