Why, he asked himself should Henry, this bloody and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular in his own lifetime?
Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate classes of the community, why had they stood by him?
No doubt he could dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges.

But to submit without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not like Englishmen, before or since.

When Erasmus visited England he found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and avaricious.

No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for his task than Froude.

Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the unpublished documents in the Chapter House at Westminster which dealt with the later years of Wolsey's Government, and to the action of Parliament after the Cardinal' s fall.