He has left it on record that Macaulay's unfairness to Cranmer in the celebrated review of Hallam's Constitutional History first suggested to him the project of his own book.

His besetting sin was not so much Erastianism, or secularism, as a love of paradox.

Henry VIII seemed to him not merely a great statesman and a true patriot, but a victim of persistent misrepresentation, whose lofty motives had been concealed, and displaced by vile, baseless calumnies.

More and Fisher, honoured for three centuries as saints, he suspected, and, as he thought, discovered to have been traitors who justly expiated their offences on the block.

He was not satisfied with proving that there was a case for Henry, and that the triumph of Rome would have been the end of civil as well as spiritual freedom: he must go on to whitewash the tyrant himself, and to prove that his marriage with Anne Boleyn, like his separation from Katharine of Aragon, was simply the result of an unselfish desire to provide the country with a male heir.