council of regency during the minority; and finally we shall see him, in the following reign, throwing himself heartily into the reaction, flinging reform to the winds, and taking the lead in the submission to that very papal supremacy, which he had aided and abetted Henry in subverting and trampling on.
It is, however, by no means necessary to believe, with the modern partisan historians, that the leaders, either on the one side or on the other, were the thorough-paced knaves and scoundrels which these writers represent them. When a great cause is in dispute among men, it is seldom or never true that all the right is on one side and all the wrong on the other, and still less that all the good men are on one side and all the bad men on the other. In the tangled web of human affairs, no man but a complete fanatic, or an entirely selfish and unscrupulous person, can ever act from a single motive, and the man who professes to do so is mostly one so ignorant of his own nature, and so blind to his own faults, that he entirely overlooks the real springs of his actions. If we could suppose a person quite free from selfishness, prejudice, and all other human errors and weaknesses, even such a man could hardly act in a complicated case from a single motive, and, if he did, would probably produce an effect totally different from that at which he aimed, because the very faults from which he was himself free, were still present both in those with whom and those against whom he was acting-. In practice, however, every man enters on his career biassed in one direction or another by the influences of birth, family, friendship), education, interest, association, sentiment, or inclined to take one side rather than another by the mere intellectual constitution of his mind; and even these several motives act mostly not
