Not many men
would have borne themselves through the same trials with the same
integrity; but the circumstances of those trials had not tested the true
defects in his moral constitution. Like all princes of the Plantagenet
blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will. His impulses,
in general nobly directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life,
when his character was formed, he was forced into collision with
difficulties with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to
contend. Education had done much for him, but his nature required more
correction than his position had permitted, whilst unbroken prosperity and
early independence of control had been his most serious misfortune. He had
capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greatest
of men. With all his faults about him, he was still perhaps the greatest of
his contemporaries; and the man best able of all living Englishmen to
govern England, had been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.
The other person whose previous history we have to ascertain is one, the
tragedy of whose fate has blotted the remembrance of her sins--if her sins
were, indeed, and in reality, more than imaginary. Forgetting all else in
shame and sorrow, posterity has made piteous reparation for her death in
the tenderness with which it has touched her reputation; and with the
general instincts of justice, we have refused to qualify our indignation at
the wrong which she experienced, by admitting either stain or shadow on her
fame.
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