Henry VIII (and his Six Wives) by AF Pollard [Audiobook] #England #History

HENRY the 8th. BY A. F.  POLLARD. Read by illacertus. PREFACE. It is perhaps a matter rather for regret  than for surprise that so few attempts have been made to describe, as a whole, the life and  character of Henry the Eighth. No ruler has left a deeper impress on the history of his country, or  done work which has been the subject of more keen and lasting contention. Courts of law are still  debating the intention of statutes, the tenor of which he dictated; and the moral, political, and  rel

igious, are as much in dispute as the legal, results of his reign. He is still the Great  Erastian, the protagonist of laity against clergy. His policy is inextricably interwoven with the  high and eternal dilemma of Church and State; and it is well-nigh impossible for one  who feels keenly on these questions to treat the reign of Henry the Eighth in  a reasonably judicial spirit. No period illustrates more vividly the contradiction  between morals and politics. In our desire to reprobate the im

morality of Henry's  methods, we are led to deny their success; or, in our appreciation of the greatness of  the ends he achieved, we seek to excuse the means he took to achieve them. As with his  policy, so with his character. There was nothing commonplace about him; his good and  his bad qualities alike were exceptional. It is easy, by suppressing the one or the  other, to paint him a hero or a villain. He lends himself readily to polemic; but to  depict his character in all its varied aspects

, extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in  malice, is a task of no little difficulty. It is two centuries and a half since Lord  Herbert produced his Life and Reign of Henry the Eighth. The late Mr. Brewer, in  his prefaces to the first four volumes of the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry  the Eighth, published under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, dealt adequately  with the earlier portion of Henry's career. But Mr. Brewer died when his work reached the  year 1530; his s

uccessor, Dr. James Gairdner, was directed to confine his prefaces to the later  volumes within the narrowest possible limits; and students of history were deprived of the prospect  of a satisfactory account of Henry's later years from a writer of unrivalled learning. Henry's  reign, from 1530 onwards, has been described by the late Mr. Froude in one of the most brilliant  and fascinating masterpieces of historical literature, a work which still holds the field  in popular, if not in scholarly,

estimation. But Mr. Froude does not begin until Henry's reign was  half over, until his character had been determined by influences and events which lie outside the  scope of Mr. Froude's inquiry. Moreover, since Mr. Froude wrote, a flood of light has been  thrown on the period by the publication of the above-mentioned Letters and Papers;  they already comprise a summary of between thirty and forty thousand documents in  twenty thousand closely printed pages, and, when completed, will constitute

the  most magnificent body of materials for the history of any reign, ancient  or modern, English or foreign. Simultaneously there have appeared a dozen volumes  containing the State papers preserved at Simancas, Vienna and Brussels and similar series  comprising the correspondence relating to Venice, Scotland and Ireland; while the  despatches of French ambassadors have been published under the auspices of the Ministry  for Foreign Affairs at Paris. Still further information has been provided

by the labours of  the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Camden, the Royal Historical, and other learned Societies.  These sources probably contain at least a million definite facts relating to the reign of Henry  the Eighth; and it is obvious that the task of selection has become heavy as well as invidious. Mr. Froude has expressed his concurrence in the dictum that the facts of history are like  the letters of the alphabet; by selection and arrangement they can be made to spell anything, 

and nothing can be arranged so easily as facts. Experto crede. Yet selection is inevitable,  and arrangement essential. The historian has no option if he wishes to be intelligible. He will  naturally arrange his facts so that they spell what he believes to be the truth; and he must of  necessity suppress those facts which he judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the scale on  which he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts compels both selection and suppression,  it counsels no l

ess a restraint of judgment. A case in a court of law is not simplified by  a cloud of witnesses; and the new wealth of contemporary evidence does not solve the  problems of Henry's reign. It elucidates some points hitherto obscure, but it raises  a host of others never before suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements  written hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no better; in modern  history we frequently have half a dozen witnesses giving inconsistent accoun

ts of  what they have seen with their own eyes. Dogmatism is merely the result of ignorance;  and no honest historian will pretend to have mastered all the facts, accurately weighed all  the evidence, or pronounced a final judgment. The present volume does not profess to do more  than roughly sketch Henry the Eighth's more prominent characteristics, outline  the chief features of his policy, and suggest some reasons for the measure of  success he attained. Episodes such as the divorce of Catheri

ne of Aragon, the dissolution  of the monasteries, and the determination of the relations between Church and State, would  severally demand for adequate treatment works of much greater bulk than the present. On the  divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan Ehses in his Römische Dokumente. The dissolution of the monasteries has been exhaustively treated from one point of view by Dr.  Gasquet; but an adequate and impartial history of what is called the Reformation still remai

ns to  be written. Here it is possible to deal with these questions only in the briefest outline, and in  so far as they were affected by Henry's personal action. For my facts I have relied entirely on  contemporary records, and my deductions from these facts are my own. I have depended as little  as possible even on contemporary historians, and scarcely at all on later writers. I have, however, made frequent use of Dr. Gairdner's articles in the Dictionary of  National Biography, particularly o

f that on Henry the Eighth, the best summary extant of his  career; and I owe not a little to Bishop Stubbs's two lectures on Henry the Eighth, which contain  some fruitful suggestions as to his character. CHAPTER 1. THE EARLY TUDORS. In the  whole range of English history there is no monarch whose character has been more  variously depicted by contemporaries or more strenuously debated by posterity than the  "majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome". To one historian an inhuman embodiment of

cruelty  and vice, to another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and strength of will, Henry  the Eighth has, by an almost universal consent, been placed above or below the grade of humanity.  So unique was his personality, so singular his achievements, that he appears in the light of  a special dispensation sent like another Attila to be the scourge of mankind, or like a second  Hercules to cleanse, or at least to demolish, Augean stables. The dictates of his will seemed  as inexorable

as the decrees of fate, and the history of his reign is strewn with records of  the ruin of those who failed to placate his wrath. Of the six queens he married, two he divorced,  and two he beheaded. Four English cardinals lived in his reign; one perished by the executioner's  axe, one escaped it by absence, and a third by a timely but natural death. Of a similar number  of dukes half were condemned by attainder; and the same method of speedy despatch accounted  for six or seven earls and visco

unts and for scores of lesser degree. He began his reign  by executing the ministers of his father, he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold.  The Tower of London was both palace and prison, and statesmen passed swiftly from one to the  other; in silent obscurity alone lay salvation. Religion and politics, rank and profession  made little difference; priest and layman, cardinal-archbishop and "hammer of the monks,"  men whom Henry had raised from the mire, and peers, over whose heads t

hey were placed,  were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More, Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same  dizzy path to the same fatal end; and the English people looked on powerless  or unmoved. They sent their burgesses and knights of the shire to Westminster without  let or hindrance, and Parliament met with a regularity that grew with the rigour of Henry's  rule; but it seemed to assemble only to register the royal edicts and clothe with a legal  cloak the naked violence of Henry's acts. It reme

mbered its privileges only to lay  them at Henry's feet, it cancelled his debts, endowed his proclamations with the force of laws,  and authorised him to repeal acts of attainder and dispose of his crown at will. Secure of its  support Henry turned and rent the spiritual unity of Western Christendom, and settled at a blow  that perennial struggle between Church and State, in which kings and emperors had bitten the dust.  With every epithet of contumely and scorn he trampled under foot the jurisd

iction of him who  was believed to hold the keys of heaven and hell. Borrowing in practice the old maxim of Roman law,  cujus regio, ejus religio, he placed himself in the seat of authority in religion and presumed  to define the faith of which Leo had styled him defender. Others have made themselves  despots by their mastery of many legions, through the agency of a secret police, or by means  of an organised bureaucracy. Yet Henry's standing army consisted of a few gentlemen pensioners  and yeo

men of the guard; he had neither secret police nor organised bureaucracy. Even then  Englishmen boasted that they were not slaves like the French, and foreigners pointed  a finger of scorn at their turbulence. Had they not permanently or temporarily  deprived of power nearly half their kings who had reigned since William the Conqueror? Yet  Henry the Eighth not only left them their arms, but repeatedly urged them to keep those arms  ready for use. He eschewed that air of mystery with which tyran

ts have usually sought  to impose on the mind of the people. All his life he moved familiarly and almost  unguarded in the midst of his subjects, and he died in his bed, full of years, with the  spell of his power unbroken and the terror of his name unimpaired. What manner of man was this,  and wherein lay the secret of his strength? Is recourse necessary to a theory of  supernatural agency, or is there another and adequate solution? Was Henry's individual  will of such miraculous force that he

could ride roughshod in insolent pride over public opinion  at home and abroad? Or did his personal ends, dictated perhaps by selfish motives  and ignoble passions, so far coincide with the interests and prejudices of the  politically effective portion of his people, that they were willing to condone a violence and  tyranny, the brunt of which fell after all on the few? Such is the riddle which propounds  itself to every student of Tudor history. It cannot be answered by pæans in honour of  Henr

y's intensity of will and force of character, nor by invectives against his vices and  lamentations over the woes of his victims. The miraculous interpretation of history is as  obsolete as the catastrophic theory of geology, and the explanation of Henry's career must  be sought not so much in the study of his character as in the study of his environment,  of the conditions which made things possible to him that were not possible before or  since and are not likely to be so again. It is a singul

ar circumstance that  the king who raised the personal power of English monarchy to a height  to which it had never before attained, should have come of humble race and belonged to  an upstart dynasty. For three centuries and a half before the battle of Bosworth one family had  occupied the English throne. Even the usurpers, Henry of Bolingbroke and Richard of York, were  directly descended in unbroken male line from Henry the Second, and from 1154 to 1485 all the  sovereigns of England were Pla

ntagenets. But who were the Tudors? They were a Welsh family  of modest means and doubtful antecedents. They claimed, it is true, descent from  Cadwallader, and their pedigree was as long and quite as veracious as most Welsh genealogies; but  Henry the Seventh's great-grandfather was steward or butler to the Bishop of Bangor. His son, Owen  Tudor, came as a young man to seek his fortune at the Court of Henry the Fifth , and obtained  a clerkship of the wardrobe to Henry's Queen, Catherine of Fra

nce. So skilfully did he use or  abuse this position of trust, that he won the heart of his mistress; and within a few years of  Henry's death his widowed Queen and her clerk of the wardrobe were secretly, and possibly without  legal sanction, living together as man and wife. The discovery of their relations resulted in  Catherine's retirement to Bermondsey Abbey, and Owen's to Newgate prison. The  Queen died in the following year, but Owen survived many romantic adventures.  Twice he escaped fr

om prison, twice he was recaptured. Once he took sanctuary in  the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and various attempts to entrap him were made  by enticing him to revels in a neighbouring tavern. Finally, on the outbreak of the Wars of  the Roses, he espoused the Lancastrian cause, and was beheaded by order of Edward the Fourth  after the battle of Mortimer's Cross. Two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were born of this singular  match between Queen and clerk of her wardrobe. Both enjoyed the favour of

their royal  half-brother, Henry the Sixth. Edmund, the elder, was first knighted and then created  Earl of Richmond. In the Parliament of 1453, he was formally declared legitimate; he was  enriched by the grant of broad estates and enrolled among the members of Henry's council.  But the climax of his fortunes was reached when, in 1455, he married the Lady Margaret  Beaufort. Owen Tudor had taken the first step which led to his family's  greatness; Edmund took the second. The blood-royal of Fra

nce flowed in his  veins, the blood-royal of England was to flow in his children's; and the union between  Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort gave Henry the Seventh such claim as he had by descent  to the English throne. The Beauforts were descended from Edward the Third, but a bar  sinister marred their royal pedigree. John of Gaunt had three sons by Catherine  Swynford before she became his wife. That marriage would, by canon law, have made  legitimate the children, but the barons had, on a fa

mous occasion, refused to assimilate  in this respect the laws of England to the canons of the Church; and it required  a special Act of Parliament to confer on the Beauforts the status of legitimacy.  When Henry the Fourth confirmed this Act, he introduced a clause specifically barring  their contingent claim to the English throne. This limitation could not legally abate the  force of a statute; but it sufficed to cast a doubt upon the Beaufort title, and has  been considered a sufficient expla

nation of Henry the Seventh's reluctance to  base his claim upon hereditary right. However that may be, the Beauforts played  no little part in the English history of the fifteenth century; their influence was  potent for peace or war in the councils of their royal half-brother, Henry the Fourth,  and of the later sovereigns of the House of Lancaster. One was Cardinal-Bishop of  Winchester, another was Duke of Exeter, and a third was Earl of Somerset. Two of the  sons of the Earl became Dukes of

Somerset; the younger fell at St. Albans, the earliest  victim of the Wars of the Roses, which proved so fatal to his House; and the male line of  the Beauforts failed in the third generation. The sole heir to their claims was the  daughter of the first Duke of Somerset, Margaret, now widow of Edmund Tudor; for, after a  year of wedded life, Edmund had died in November, 1456. Two months later his widow gave birth  to a boy, the future Henry the Seventh; and, incredible as the fact may seem, the

youthful  mother was not quite fourteen years old. When fifteen more years had passed, the murder  of Henry the Sixth and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor in undisputed  possession of the Lancastrian title. A barren honour it seemed. Edward the Fourth  was firmly seated on the English throne. His right to it, by every test, was immeasurably  superior to the Tudor claim, and Henry showed no inclination and possessed not the means to dispute  it. The usurpation by Richard the Third

, and the crimes which polluted his reign, put a different  aspect on the situation, and set men seeking for an alternative to the blood-stained  tyrant. The battle of Bosworth followed, and the last of the Plantagenets gave way to  the first of the Tudors. For the first time, since the Norman Conquest, a king of decisively  British blood sat on the English throne. His lineage was, indeed, English in only a minor  degree; but England might seem to have lost at the battle of Hastings her right to

native kings;  and Norman were succeeded by Angevin, Angevin by Welsh, Welsh by Scots, and Scots by Hanoverian  sovereigns. The Tudors were probably more at home on the English throne than most of England's  kings; and their humble and British origin may have contributed to their unique capacity for  understanding the needs, and expressing the mind, of the English nation. It was well for them  that they established their throne in the hearts of their people, for no dynasty grasped  the sceptre

with less of hereditary right. Judged by that criterion, there were many  claimants whose titles must have been preferred to Henry's. There were the daughters  of Edward the Fourth and the children of George, Duke of Clarence; and their existence may  account for Henry's neglect to press his hereditary claim. But there was a still  better reason. Supposing the Lancastrian case to be valid and the Beauforts to be the  true Lancastrian heirs, even so the rightful occupant of the throne was not Hen

ry the  Seventh, but his mother, Margaret Beaufort. England had never recognised a Salic law at home;  on occasion she had disputed its validity abroad. But Henry the Seventh was not disposed to let his  mother rule; she could not unite the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims by marriage, and, in addition  to other disabilities, she had a second husband in Lord Stanley, who might demand the crown  matrimonial. So Henry the Seventh's hereditary title was judiciously veiled in vague obscurity.  Parliam

ent wisely admitted the accomplished fact and recognised that the crown was vested in  him, without rashly venturing upon the why or the wherefore. He had in truth been raised to  the throne because men were weary of Richard. He was chosen to vindicate no theory of hereditary  or other abstract right, but to govern with a firm hand, to establish peace within his gates and  give prosperity to his people. That was the true Tudor title, and, as a rule, they remembered  the fact; they were de facto

kings, and they left the de jure arguments to the Stuarts.  Peace, however, could not be obtained at once, nor the embers of thirty years' strife stamped  out in a moment. For fifteen years open revolt and whispered sedition troubled the rest of the realm  and threatened the stability of Henry's throne. Ireland remained a hot-bed of Yorkist  sympathies, and Ireland was zealously aided by Edward the Fourth's sister, Margaret  of Burgundy; she pursued, like a vendetta, the family quarrel with Henr

y the Seventh, and  earned the title of Henry's Juno by harassing him as vindictively as the Queen of Heaven vexed the  pious Æneas. Other rulers, with no Yorkist bias, were slow to recognise the parvenu king  and quick to profit by his difficulties. Pretenders to their rivals' thrones were  useful pawns on the royal chess-board; and though the princes of Europe had no reason to  desire a Yorkist restoration, they thought that a little judicious backing of Yorkist claimants  would be amply repai

d by the restriction of Henry's energies to domestic affairs. Seven  months after the battle of Bosworth there was a rising in the West under the Staffords, and in the  North under Lovell; and Henry himself was nearly captured while celebrating at York the feast  of St. George. A year later a youth of obscure origin, Lambert Simnel, claimed to be first  the Duke of York and then the Earl of Warwick. The former was son, and the latter was nephew,  of Edward the Fourth. Lambert was crowned king at

Dublin amid the acclamations of the Irish  people. Not a voice was raised in Henry's favour; Kildare, the practical ruler of Ireland, earls  and archbishops, bishops and barons, and great officers of State, from Lord Chancellor downwards,  swore fealty to the reputed son of an Oxford tradesman. Ireland was only the volcano which gave  vent to the subterranean flood; treason in England and intrigue abroad were working in secret concert  with open rebellion across St. George's Channel. The Queen

Dowager was secluded in Bermondsey  Abbey and deprived of her jointure lands. John de la Pole, who, as eldest  son of Edward the Fourth's sister, had been named his successor by Richard the Third  , fled to Burgundy; thence his aunt Margaret sent Martin Schwartz and two thousand mercenaries  to co-operate with the Irish invasion. But, at East Stoke, De la Pole and Lovell, Martin  Schwartz and his merry men were slain; and the most serious of the revolts against Henry  ended in the consignment of

Simnel to the royal scullery and of his tutor to the Tower. Lambert,  however, was barely initiated in his new duties when the son of a boatman of Tournay started  on a similar errand with a less congenial end. An unwilling puppet at first, Perkin Warbeck was  on a trading visit to Ireland, when the Irish, who saw a Yorkist prince in every likely face,  insisted that Perkin was Earl of Warwick. This he denied on oath before the Mayor of Cork. Nothing  deterred, they suggested that he was Richar

d the Third's bastard; but the bastard was safe in  Henry's keeping, and the imaginative Irish finally took refuge in the theory that Perkin was Duke of  York. Lambert's old friends rallied round Perkin; the re-animated Duke was promptly summoned to the  Court of France and treated with princely honours. When Charles the Eighth had used him to beat down  Henry's terms, Perkin found a home with Margaret, aunt to all the pretenders. As usual, there  were traitors in high places in England. Sir Wil

liam Stanley, whose brother had married  Henry's mother, and to whom Henry himself owed his victory at Bosworth, was implicated.  His sudden arrest disconcerted the plot, and when Perkin's fleet appeared off the  coast of Kent, the rustics made short work of the few who were rash enough to land. Perkin  sailed away to the Yorkist refuge in Ireland, but Kildare was no longer deputy.  Waterford, to which he laid siege, was relieved, and the pretender sought  in Scotland a third basis of operations

. An abortive raid on the Borders and a high-born  Scottish wife were all that he obtained of James the Fourth, and in 1497, after a second attempt in  Ireland, he landed in Cornwall. The Cornishmen had just risen against Henry's extortions, marched  on London and been defeated at Blackheath; but Henry's lenience encouraged a fresh  revolt, and three thousand men flocked to Perkin's standard. They failed to take Exeter;  Perkin was seized at Beaulieu and sent up to London to be paraded through t

he streets  amid the jeers and taunts of the people. Two years later a foolish attempt at  escape and a fresh personation of the Earl of Warwick by one Ralf Wulford led to  the execution of all three, Perkin, Wulford, and the real Earl of Warwick, who had been a  prisoner and probably the innocent centre of so many plots since the accession of Henry the  Seventh. Warwick's death may have been due to the instigation of Ferdinand and Isabella of  Spain, who were negotiating for the marriage of Cat

herine of Aragon with Prince Arthur.  They were naturally anxious for the security of the throne their daughter was to share  with Henry's son; and now their ambassador wrote triumphantly that there remained in  England not a doubtful drop of royal blood. There were no more pretenders, and for the  rest of Henry's reign England enjoyed such peace as it had not known for nearly a  century. The end which Henry had sought by fair means and foul was attained,  and there was no practical alternative

to his children in the succession to the  English throne. But all his statecraft, his patience and labour would have been writ in  water without children to succeed him and carry on the work which he had begun; and at times it  seemed probable that this necessary condition would remain unfulfilled. For the Tudors were  singularly luckless in the matter of children. They were scarcely a sterile race, but their  offspring had an unfortunate habit of dying in childhood. It was the desire for a male

heir that  involved Henry the Eighth in his breach with Rome, and led Mary into a marriage which raised  a revolt; the last of the Tudors perceived that heirs might be purchased at too great a  cost, and solved the difficulty by admitting its insolubility. Henry the Eighth had six wives,  but only three children who survived infancy; of these, Edward the Sixth withered away at the age  of fifteen, and Mary died childless at forty-two. By his two mistresses he seems to have had  only one son, wh

o died at the age of eleven, and as far as we know, he had not a single  grandchild, legitimate or other. His sisters were hardly more fortunate. Margaret's eldest son  by James the Fourth died a year after his birth; her eldest daughter died at birth;  her second son lived only nine months; her second daughter died at birth; her third  son lived to be James the Fifth , but her fourth found an early grave. Mary, the other sister of  Henry the Eighth, lost her only son in his teens. The appalling

death-rate among Tudor infants  cannot be attributed solely to medical ignorance, for Yorkist babies clung to life with a  tenacity which was quite as inconvenient as the readiness with which Tudor infants  relinquished it; and Richard the Third, Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth  all found it necessary to accelerate, by artificial means, the exit from the world of  the superfluous children of other pretenders. This drastic process smoothed their path,  but could not completely solve the p

roblem; and the characteristic Tudor infirmity was already  apparent in the reign of Henry the Seventh. He had three sons; two predeceased him, one at the  age of fifteen years, the other at fifteen months. Of his four daughters, two died in infancy,  and the youngest cost the mother her life. The fruit of that union between the Red Rose and  the White, upon which so much store had been set, seemed doomed to fail. The hopes built upon  it had largely contributed to the success of Henry's raid up

on the English throne, and before  he started on his quest he had solemnly promised to marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward  the Fourth, and heiress of the House of York. But he was resolute to avoid all  appearance of ruling in her right; his title had been recognised by Parliament,  and he had been five months de facto king before he wedded his Yorkist wife . Eight months  and two days later, the Queen gave birth, in the priory of St. Swithin's, at Winchester, to  her first-born son. Fou

r days later, on Sunday, 24th September, the child was christened in  the minster of the old West Saxon capital, and given in baptism the name  of Arthur, the old British king. It was neither Yorkist nor Lancastrian, it  evoked no bitter memories of civil strife, and it recalled the fact that the Tudors  claimed a pedigree and boasted a title to British sovereignty, beside the antiquity  of which Yorkist pretentions were a mushroom growth. Duke of Cornwall from his birth,  Prince Arthur was, whe

n three years old, created Prince of Wales. Already negotiations  had been begun for his marriage with Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella  of Castile. Both were cautious sovereigns, and many a rebellion had to be put  down and many a pretender put away, before they would consent to entrust their  daughter to the care of an English king. It was not till 2nd October, 1501,  that Catherine landed at Plymouth. At her formal reception into England,  and at her marriage, six w

eeks later, in St. Paul's, she was led by the hand of  her little brother-in-law, Prince Henry, then ten years old. Against the advice of his  council, Henry the Seventh sent the youthful bride and bridegroom to live as man and wife at Ludlow  Castle, and there, five and a half months later, their married life came to a sudden end. Prince  Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502, and was buried in princely state in Worcester Cathedral. CHAPTER 2. PRINCE HENRY AND HIS ENVIRONMENT. The Prince, who now succ

eeded to the position  of heir-apparent, was nearly five years younger than his brother. The third child and second  son of his parents, he was born on 28th June, 1491, at Greenwich, a palace henceforth intimately  associated with the history of Tudor sovereigns. The manor of Greenwich had belonged  to the alien priory of Lewisham, and, on the dissolution of those houses, had passed  into the hands of Henry the Fourth Then it was granted to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester,  who began to enclose the

palace grounds; on his death it reverted to the Crown;  and Edward the Fourth, many of whose tastes and characteristics were inherited by his  grandson, Henry the Eighth, took great delight in beautifying and extending the palace. He gave it  to his Queen, Elizabeth, and in her possession it remained until her sympathy with Yorkist plots  was punished by the forfeiture of her lands. Henry the Seventh then bestowed it on his wife,  the dowager's daughter, and thus it became the birthplace of her

younger children. Here was  the scene of many a joust and tournament, of many a masque and revel; here the young  Henry, as soon as he came to the throne, was wedded to Catherine of Aragon; here Henry's  sister was married to the Duke of Suffolk; and here were born all future Tudor sovereigns,  Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth. At Greenwich, then, through the forfeit of his  grandmother, Henry was born; he was baptised in the Church of the Observant Friars, an Order, the  object first of h

is special favour, and then of an equally marked dislike; the ceremony was performed  by Richard Fox, then Bishop of Exeter, and afterwards one of the child's chief advisers. His  nurse was named Ann Luke, and years afterwards, when Henry was King, he allowed her the annual  pension of twenty pounds, equivalent to about three hundred in modern currency. The details  of his early life are few and far between. Lord Herbert, who wrote his Life and Reign a  century later, records that the young Prin

ce was destined by his father for the see of Canterbury,  and provided with an education more suited to a clerical than to a lay career. The motive ascribed  to Henry the Seventh is typical of his character; it was more economical to provide for younger  sons out of ecclesiastical, than royal, revenues. But the story is probably a mere  inference from the excellence of the boy's education, and from his father's thrift.  If the idea of an ecclesiastical career for young Henry was ever entertained

, it  was soon abandoned for secular preferment. On 5th April, 1492, before the child was  ten months old, he was appointed to the ancient and important posts of Warden  of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. A little later he received the  still more honourable office of Earl Marshal; the duties were performed by deputy, but  a goodly portion of the fees was doubtless appropriated for the expenses of the boy's  establishment, or found its way into the royal coffers. Further promotio

n awaited him  at the mature age of three. On 12th September, 1494, he became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland;  six weeks later he was created Duke of York, and dubbed, with the usual quaint and  formal ceremonies, a Knight of the Bath. In December, he was made Warden of the  Scottish Marches, and he was invested with the Garter in the following May. The  accumulation of these great offices of State, any one of which might have taxed the powers of  a tried administrator, in the feeble hands of a chil

d appears at first sight a trifle irrational;  but there was always method in Henry's madness. In bestowing these administrative posts upon his  children he was really concentrating them in his own person and bringing them directly under his  own supervision. It was the policy whereby the early Roman Emperors imposed upon Republican Rome  the substance, without the form, of despotism. It limited the powers of mischief which  Henry's nobles might otherwise have enjoyed, and provided incomes for h

is children without  increasing taxation or diminishing the privy purse. The work of administration could be done  at least as effectively, much more economically, and with far less danger to internal peace by  deputies of lower rank than the dukes and earls and barons who had been wont to abuse these high  positions for the furtherance of private ends, and often for the levying of private  war. Nowhere were the advantages of Henry's policy more conspicuous than in his  arrangements for the gove

rnment of Ireland. Ever since Richard, Duke of York, and George,  Duke of Clarence, had ruled as Irish viceroys, Ireland had been a Yorkist stronghold.  There Simnel had been crowned king, and there peers and peasants had fought  for Perkin Warbeck. Something must be done to heal the running sore. Possibly Henry  thought that some of Ireland's loyalty might be diverted from Yorkist channels by the  selection of a Tudor prince as its viceroy; but he put his trust in more solid measures. As  deput

y to his infant son he nominated one who, though but a knight, was perhaps the  ablest man among his privy council. It was in this capacity that Sir Edward Poynings  crossed to Ireland about the close of 1494, and called the Parliament of Drogheda.  Judged by the durability of its legislation, it was one of the most memorable of parliaments;  and for nearly three hundred years Poynings' laws remained the foundation upon which rested the  constitutional relations between the sister kingdoms. Even

more lasting was the precedent  set by Prince Henry's creation as Duke of York; from that day to this, from Henry the Eighth  to the present Prince of Wales, the second son of the sovereign or of the heir-apparent has  almost invariably been invested with that dukedom. The original selection of the title  was due to substantial reasons. Henry's name was distinctively Lancastrian, his  title was no less distinctively Yorkist; it was adopted as a concession to Yorkist  prejudice. It was a practic

al reminder of the fact which the Tudor laureate, Skelton,  celebrated in song: "The rose both red and white, in one rose now doth grow". It was  also a tacit assertion of the death of the last Duke of York in the Tower  and of the imposture of Perkin Warbeck, now pretending to the title. But thoughts of the  coercion of Ireland and conciliation of Yorkists were as yet far from the mind of the child, round  whose person these measures were made to centre. Precocious he must have been, if the phe

nomenal  development of brow and the curiously mature expression attributed to him in his portrait are  any indication of his intellectual powers at the age at which he is represented. Without the  childish lips and nose, the face might well be that of a man of fifty; and with the addition  of a beard, the portrait would be an unmistakable likeness of Henry himself in his later years. When  the Prince was no more than a child, says Erasmus, he was set to study. He had, we are told, a  vivid and

active mind, above measure able to execute whatever tasks he undertook; and he never  attempted anything in which he did not succeed. The Tudors had no modern dread of educational  over-pressure when applied to their children, and the young Henry was probably as forward a  pupil as his son, Edward the Sixth , his daughter, Elizabeth, or his grand-niece, Lady  Jane Grey. But, fortunately for Henry, a physical exuberance corrected his  mental precocity; and, as he grew older, any excessive devotio

n to the Muses was  checked by an unwearied pursuit of bodily culture. He was the first of English sovereigns  to be educated under the new influence of the Renaissance. Scholars, divines and poets  thronged the Court of Henry the Seventh. Margaret Beaufort, who ruled in Henry's household,  was a signal benefactor to the cause of English learning. Lady Margaret professors commemorate  her name in both our ancient universities, and in their bidding prayers she is to this day  remembered. Two coll

eges at Cambridge revere her as their foundress; Caxton, the greatest of  English printers, owed much to her munificence, and she herself translated into English  books from both Latin and French. Henry the Seventh, though less accomplished  that the later Tudors, evinced an intelligent interest in art and letters, and provided  for his children efficient instructors; while his Queen, Elizabeth of York, is described  by Erasmus as possessing the soundest judgment and as being remarkable for her

prudence  as well as for her piety. Bernard André, historian and poet, who had  been tutor to Prince Arthur, probably took no small part in the education  of his younger brother; to him he dedicated, after Arthur's death, two of the annual summaries  of events which he was in the habit of compiling. Giles D'Ewes, apparently a Frenchman and  the author of a notable French grammar, taught that language to Prince Henry, as many  years later he did to his daughter, Queen Mary; probably either D'Ewes

or André trained his  handwriting, which is a curious compromise between the clear and bold Italian style, soon  to be adopted by well-instructed Englishmen, and the old English hieroglyphics in  which more humbly educated individuals, including Shakespeare, concealed the meaning  of their words. But the most famous of Henry's teachers was the poet Skelton, the greatest name  in English verse from Lydgate down to Surrey. Skelton was poet laureate to Henry the Seventh’s  Court, and refers in his

poems to his wearing of the white and green of Tudor liveries. He  celebrated in verse Arthur's creation as Prince of Wales and Henry's as Duke of York; and  before the younger prince was nine years old, this "incomparable light and ornament of British  Letters," as Erasmus styles him, was directing Henry's studies. Skelton himself writes. The  honor of England I learned to spell,I gave him drink of the sugred wellOf Helicon's waters  crystalline,Acquainting him with the Muses nine. The coarsen

ess of Skelton's satires and  his open disregard of the clerical vows of chastity may justify some doubt of the value  of the poet's influence on Henry's character; but he so far observed the conventional duties  of his post as to dedicate to his royal pupil, in 1501, a moral treatise in Latin of  no particular worth. More deserving of Henry's study were two books inscribed  to him a little later by young Boerio, son of the King's Genoese physician and a pupil  of Erasmus, who, according to his

own account, suffered untold afflictions from  the father's temper. One was a translation of Isocrates' De Regno, the other  of Lucian's tract against believing calumnies. The latter was, to judge from  the tale of Henry's victims, a precept which he scarcely laid to heart in  youth. In other respects he was apt enough to learn. He showed "remarkable docility for  mathematics," became proficient in Latin, spoke French with ease, understood Italian, and,  later on, possibly from Catherine of Arag

on, acquired a knowledge of Spanish. In 1499  Erasmus himself, the greatest of the humanists, visited his friend, Lord Mountjoy, near  Greenwich, and made young Henry's acquaintance. "I was staying," he writes, "at Lord Mountjoy's  country house when Thomas More came to see me, and took me out with him for a walk as far as  the next village, where all the King's children, except Prince Arthur, who was then the eldest son,  were being educated. When we came into the hall, the attendants not only

of the palace, but also  of Mountjoy's household, were all assembled. In the midst stood Prince Henry, now nine  years old, and having already something of royalty in his demeanour in which there was a  certain dignity combined with singular courtesy. On his right was Margaret, about eleven years of  age, afterwards married to James, King of Scots; and on his left played Mary, a child of four.  Edmund was an infant in arms. More, with his companion Arnold, after paying his respects to the  boy H

enry, the same that is now King of England, presented him with some writing. For my part,  not having expected anything of the sort, I had nothing to offer, but promised that, on  another occasion, I would in some way declare my duty towards him. Meantime, I was angry with  More for not having warned me, especially as the boy sent me a little note, while we were at  dinner, to challenge something from my pen. I went home, and in the Muses' spite,  from whom I had been so long divorced, finished

the poem within three days. "  The poem, in which Britain speaks her own praise and that of her princes,  Henry the Seventh and his children, was dedicated to the Duke of York and accompanied  by a letter in which Erasmus commended Henry's devotion to learning. Seven years later Erasmus  again wrote to Henry, now Prince of Wales, condoling with him upon the death of his  brother-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, King of Castile. Henry replied in cordial manner, inviting  the great scholar to continue

the correspondence. The style of his letter so impressed Erasmus that  he suspected, as he says, "some help from others in the ideas and expressions. In a conversation  I afterwards had with William, Lord Mountjoy, he tried by various arguments to dispel that  suspicion, and when he found he could not do so he gave up the point and let it pass until  he was sufficiently instructed in the case. On another occasion, when we were talking  alone together, he brought out a number of the Prince's lett

ers, some to other people  and some to himself, and among them one which answered to mine: in these letters  were manifest signs of comment, addition, suppression, correction and alteration—You  might recognise the first drafting of a letter, and you might make out the second and third,  and sometimes even the fourth correction; but whatever was revised or added was in  the same handwriting. I had then no further grounds for hesitation, and, overcome by  the facts, I laid aside all suspicion. "

Neither, he adds, would his correspondent doubt  Henry the Eighth's authorship of the book against Luther if he knew that king's "happy genius". That  famous book is sufficient proof that theological studies held no small place in Henry's education.  They were cast in the traditional mould, for the Lancastrians were very orthodox, and  the early Tudors followed in their steps. Margaret Beaufort left her husband to devote  herself to good works and a semi-monastic life; Henry the Seventh converte

d a heretic at the  stake and left him to burn; and the theological conservatism, which Henry the Eighth imbibed  in youth, clung to him to the end of his days. Nor were the arts neglected, and in his early  years Henry acquired a passionate and lifelong devotion to music. Even as Duke of York he had a  band of minstrels apart from those of the King and Prince Arthur; and when he was king his minstrels  formed an indispensable part of his retinue, whether he went on progress through his kingdom,

  or crossed the seas on errands of peace or war. He became an expert performer on the lute, the  organ and the harpsichord, and all the cares of State could not divert him from practising  on those instruments both day and night. He sent all over England in search of  singing men and boys for the chapel royal, and sometimes appropriated choristers  from Wolsey's chapel, which he thought better provided than his own. From Venice he  enticed to England the organist of St. Mark's, Dionysius Memo,

and on occasion Henry and his  Court listened four hours at a stretch to Memo's organ recitals. Not only did he take delight  in the practice of music by himself and others; he also studied its theory and  wrote with the skill of an expert. Vocal and instrumental pieces of his  own composition, preserved among the manuscripts at the British Museum, rank  among the best productions of the time; and one of his anthems, "O Lorde, the Maker of  all thyng," is of the highest order of merit, and still

remains a favourite in  English cathedrals. In April, 1502, at the age of ten, Henry became the  heir-apparent to the English throne. He succeeded at once to the dukedom of Cornwall,  but again a precedent was set which was followed but yesterday; and ten months were allowed to  elapse before he was, on 18th February, 1503, created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, the  dukedom of York becoming void until a king or an heir apparent should again have a second son. The  first sign of his incre

ased importance was his implication in the maze of matrimonial intrigues  which formed so large a part of sixteenth-century diplomacy. The last thing kings considered was  the domestic felicity of their children; their marriages were pieces in the diplomatic game and  sometimes the means by which States were built up. While Duke of York, Henry had been  proposed as a husband for Eleanor, daughter of the Archduke Philip; and his sister  Mary as the bride of Philip's son Charles, who, as the heir

of the houses of Castile and  of Aragon, of Burgundy and of Austria, was from the cradle destined to wield the  imperial sceptre of Cæsar. No further steps were taken at the time, and Prince Arthur's  death brought other projects to the front. Immediately on receiving the news, and  two days before they dated their letter of condolence to Henry the Seventh, Ferdinand  and Isabella commissioned the Duke of Estrada to negotiate a marriage between the widowed  Catherine and her youthful brother-in-

law. No doubt was entertained but that the Pope  would grant the necessary dispensation, for the spiritual head of Christendom was  apt to look tenderly on the petitions of the powerful princes of this world. A more serious  difficulty was the question of the widow's dower. Part only had been paid, and Ferdinand  not merely refused to hand over the rest, but demanded the return of his previous  instalments. Henry, on the other hand, considered himself entitled to the  whole, refused to refund a

penny, and gave a cold reception to the proposed marriage  between Catherine and his sole surviving son. He was, however, by no means blind to the  advantages of the Spanish matrimonial and political alliance, and still less to  the attractions of Catherine's dower; he declined to send back the Princess,  when Isabella, shocked at Henry the Seventh's proposal to marry his daughter-in-law  himself, demanded her return; and eventually, when Ferdinand reduced his terms, he suffered  the marriage tr

eaty to be signed. On 25th June, 1503, Prince Henry and Catherine were solemnly  betrothed in the Bishop of Salisbury's house, in Fleet Street. The papal dispensation arrived  in time to solace Isabella on her death-bed in November, 1504; but that event once more  involved in doubt the prospects of the marriage. The crown of Castile passed from  Isabella to her daughter Juaña; the government of the kingdom was claimed  by Ferdinand and by Juaña's husband, Philip of Burgundy. On their way from th

e  Netherlands to claim their inheritance, Philip and Juaña were driven on English shores.  Henry the Seventh treated them with all possible courtesy, and made Philip a Knight of the  Garter, while Philip repaid the compliment by investing Prince Henry with the Order of  the Golden Fleece. But advantage was taken of Philip's plight to extort from him the surrender  of the Earl of Suffolk, styled the White Rose, and a commercial treaty with the Netherlands,  which the Flemings named the Malus Int

ercursus. Three months after his arrival in Castile,  Philip died, and Henry began to fish in the troubled waters for a share in his dominions. Two  marriage schemes occurred to him; he might win the hand of Philip's sister Margaret, now Regent of  the Netherlands, and with her hand the control of those provinces; or he might marry Juaña  and claim in her right to administer Castile. On the acquisition of Castile he set his mind.  If he could not gain it by marriage with Juaña, he thought he cou

ld do so by marrying her son and  heir, the infant Charles, to his daughter Mary. Whichever means he took to further his design,  it would naturally irritate Ferdinand and make him less anxious for the completion of the  marriage between Catherine and Prince Henry. Henry the Seventh was equally averse from  the consummation of the match. Now that he was scheming with Charles's other grandfather,  the Emperor Maximilian, to wrest the government of Castile from Ferdinand's grasp, the alliance  of

the King of Aragon had lost its attraction, and it was possible that the Prince of Wales  might find elsewhere a more desirable bride. Henry's marriage with Catherine was to have  been accomplished when he completed the age of fourteen; but on the eve of his fifteenth  birthday he made a solemn protestation that the contract was null and void, and that he would  not carry out his engagements. This protest left him free to consider other proposals, and  enhanced his value as a negotiable asset. M

ore than once negotiations were started for  marrying him to Marguerite de Valois, sister of the Duke of Angoulême, afterwards famous as  Francis the First ; and in the last months of his father's reign, the Prince of Wales was giving  audience to ambassadors from Maximilian, who came to suggest matrimonial alliances between the  prince and a daughter of Duke Albert of Bavaria, and between Henry the Seventh and the Lady  Margaret of Savoy, Regent of the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Ferdinand, threate

ned on all  sides, first came to terms with France; he married a French princess, Germaine  de Foix, abandoned his claim to Navarre, and bought the security of Naples by giving Louis  the Twelfth a free hand in the north of Italy. He then diverted Maximilian from his designs on  Castile by humouring his hostility to Venice. By that bait he succeeded in drawing off his enemies,  and the league of Cambrai united them all, Ferdinand and Louis, Emperor and Pope,  in an iniquitous attack on the Itali

an Republic. Henry the Seventh, fortunately for  his reputation, was left out of the compact. He was still cherishing his design  on Castile, and in December, 1508, the treaty of marriage between Mary and  Charles was formally signed. It was the last of his worldly triumphs; the days of his  life were numbered, and in the early months of 1509 he was engaged in making a peace with his  conscience. The twenty-four years during which Henry the Seventh had guided the destinies  of England were a mom

entous epoch in the development of Western civilisation. It was  the dawn of modern history, of the history of Europe in the form in which we know it to-day.  The old order was in a state of liquidation. The mediæval ideal, described by Dante, of a  universal monarchy with two aspects, spiritual and temporal, and two heads, emperor and pope, was  passing away. Its place was taken by the modern but narrower ideal of separate polities, each  pursuing its own course, independent of, and often in co

nflict with, other societies. Unity gave way  to diversity of tongues, of churches, of states; and the cosmopolitan became nationalist, patriot,  separatist. Imperial monarchy shrank to a shadow; and kings divided the emperor's power at the  same time that they consolidated their own. They extended their authority on both sides,  at the expense of their superior, the emperor, and at the expense of their subordinate feudal  lords. The struggle between the disruptive forces of feudalism and the ce

ntral power of  monarchy ended at last in monarchical triumph; and internal unity prepared the way for  external expansion. France under Louis the Eleventh was first in the field.  She had surmounted her civil troubles half a century earlier than England.  She then expelled her foreign foes, crushed the remnants of feudal independence, and  began to expand at the cost of weaker States. Parts of Burgundy, Provence, and  Brittany became merged in France; the exuberant strength of the new-formed  n

ation burst the barriers of the Alps and overflowed into the plains of Italy.  The time of universal monarchy was past, but the dread of it remained; and from Charles  the Eighth's invasion of Italy in 1494 to Francis the First's defeat at Pavia in 1525,  French dreams of world-wide sovereignty were the nightmare of other kings. Those dreams  might, as Europe feared, have been realised, had not other States followed France in the  path of internal consolidation. Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabe

lla of Castile, drove out the  Moors, and founded the modern Spanish kingdom. Maximilian married Mary, the daughter of  Charles the Bold, and joined the Netherlands to Austria. United France found herself  face to face with other united States, and the political system of modern Europe  was roughly sketched out. The boundaries of the various kingdoms were fluctuating. There  still remained minor principalities and powers, chiefly in Italy and Germany, which offered  an easy prey to their ambitio

us neighbours; for both nations had sacrificed internal  unity to the shadow of universal dominion, Germany in temporal, and  Italy in spiritual, things. Mutual jealousy of each other's growth at the  expense of these States gave rise to the theory of the balance of power; mutual adjustment of  each other's disputes produced international law; and the necessity of watching each other's  designs begat modern diplomacy. Parallel with these developments in the relations  between one State and anoth

er marched a no less momentous revolution in the domestic  position of their sovereigns. National expansion abroad was marked by a corresponding  growth in royal authority at home. The process was not new in England; every step in the  path of the tribal chief of Saxon pirates to the throne of a united England denoted  an advance in the nature of kingly power. Each extension of his sway intensified his  authority, and his power grew in degree as it increased in area. So with fifteenth-century  s

overeigns. Local liberties and feudal rights which had checked a Duke of Brittany or a  King of Aragon were powerless to restrain the King of France or of Spain. The sphere of  royal authority encroached upon all others; all functions and all powers tended to  concentrate in royal hands. The king was the emblem of national unity,  the centre of national aspirations, and the object of national reverence. The  Renaissance gave fresh impetus to the movement. Men turned not only to the theology, lit

erature,  and art of the early Christian era; they began to study anew its political organisation and  its system of law and jurisprudence. The code of Justinian was as much a revelation as the  original Greek of the New Testament. Roman imperial law seemed as superior to the barbarities  of common law as classical was to mediæval Latin; and Roman law supplanted indigenous systems in  France and in Germany, in Spain and in Scotland. Both the Roman imperial law and the Roman imperial  constitutio

n were useful models for kings of the New Monarchy; the Roman Empire was a despotism;  quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem ran the fundamental principle of Roman Empire. Nor was  this all; Roman emperors were habitually deified, and men in the sixteenth century seemed to  pay to their kings while alive the Divine honours which Romans paid to their emperors when  dead. "Le nouveau Messie," says Michelet, "est le roi. " Nowhere was the king more emphatically  the saviour of society than in E

ngland. The sixty years of Lancastrian rule were in the  seventeenth century represented as the golden age of parliamentary government, a sort of time before  the fall to which popular orators appealed when they wished to paint in vivid colours the evils  of Stuart tyranny. But to keen observers of the time the pre-eminent characteristic of Lancastrian  rule appeared to be its "lack of governance" or, in modern phrase, administrative anarchy.  There was no subordination in the State. The weaknes

s of the Lancastrian title  left the king at the mercy of Parliament, and the limitations of Parliament were never  more apparent than when its powers stood highest. Even in the realm of legislation, the  statute book has seldom been so barren. Its principal acts were to narrow the  county electorate to an oligarchy, to restrict the choice of constituencies to  resident knights and burgesses, and to impair its own influence as a focus of public opinion.  It was not content with legislative autho

rity; it interfered with an executive which it could  hamper but could not control. It was possessed by the inveterate fallacy that freedom and  strong government are things incompatible; that the executive is the natural enemy  of the Legislature; that if one is strong, the other must be weak; and of the two  alternatives it vastly preferred a weak executive. So, to limit the king's power, it sought to  make him "live of his own," when "his own" was absolutely inadequate to meet the barest  nec

essities of government. Parliament was in fact irresponsible; the connecting link between  it and the executive had yet to be found. Hence the Lancastrian "lack of governance";  it ended in a generation of civil war, and the memory of that anarchy explains much in  Tudor history. The problems of Henry the Eighth's reign can indeed only be solved by realising the  misrule of the preceding century, the failure of parliamentary government, and the strength of  the popular demand for a firm and mast

erful hand. It is a modern myth that Englishmen have  always been consumed with enthusiasm for parliamentary government and with a  thirst for a parliamentary vote. The interpretation of history, like that of  the Scriptures, varies from age to age; and present political theories colour our views  of the past. The political development of the nineteenth century created a parliamentary  legend; and civil and religious liberty became the inseparable stage properties of the  Englishman. Whenever he

appeared on the boards, he was made to declaim about the rights of  the subject and the privileges of Parliament. It was assumed that the desire for a voice  in the management of his own affairs had at all times and all seasons been the mainspring  of his actions; and so the story of Henry's rule was made into a political mystery. In  reality, love of freedom has not always been, nor will it always remain, the predominant  note in the English mind. At times the English people have pursued it th

rough battle  and murder with grim determination, but other times have seen other ideals.  On occasion the demand has been for strong government irrespective of its methods, and good  government has been preferred to self-government. Wars of expansion and wars of defence have often  cooled the love of liberty and impaired the faith in parliaments; and generally English  ideals have been strictly subordinated to a passion for material prosperity. Never  was this more apparent than under the Tudor

s. The parliamentary experiment of the  Lancastrians was premature and had failed. Parliamentary institutions were discredited and  people were indifferent to parliamentary rights and privileges: "A plague on both your Houses,"  was the popular feeling, "give us peace, above all peace at home to pursue new avenues of wealth,  new phases of commercial development, peace to study new problems of literature, religion, and  art"; and both Houses passed out of the range of popular imagination, and al

most out of the  sphere of independent political action. Parliament played during the sixteenth century a modester  part than it had played since its creation. Towards the close of the period Shakespeare  wrote his play of King John, and in that play there is not the faintest allusion to  Magna Carta. Such an omission would be inconceivable now or at any time since the death  of Elizabeth; for the Great Charter is enshrined in popular imagination as the palladium of the  British constitution. It

was the fetish to which Parliament appealed against the Stuarts. But no  such appeal would have touched a Tudor audience. It needed and desired no weapon against a  sovereign who embodied national desires, and ruled in accord with the national  will. References to the charter are as rare in parliamentary debates as  they are in the pages of Shakespeare. The best hated instruments of Stuart tyranny  were popular institutions under the Tudors; and the Star Chamber itself found its main  difficult

y in the number of suitors which flocked to a court where the king was judge, the  law's delays minimised, counsel's fees moderate, and justice rarely denied merely because  it might happen to be illegal. England in the sixteenth century put its trust in its  princes far more than it did in its parliaments; it invested them with attributes  almost Divine. By Tudor majesty the poet was inspired with thoughts of  the divinity that doth hedge a king. "Love for the King," wrote a Venetian of Henry 

the Eighth in the early years of his reign, "is universal with all who see him, for his  Highness does not seem a person of this world, but one descended from heaven. " Le  nouveau Messie est le Roi. Such were the tendencies which Henry the Seventh  and Henry the Eighth crystallised into practical weapons of absolute government.  Few kings have attained a greater measure of permanent success than the first of  the Tudors; it was he who laid the unseen foundations upon which Henry the Eighth erec

ted  the imposing edifice of his personal authority. An orphan from birth and an exile from  childhood, he stood near enough to the throne to invite Yorkist proscription,  but too far off to unite in his favour Lancastrian support. He owed his elevation to  the mistakes of his enemies and to the cool, calculating craft which enabled him to use  those mistakes without making mistakes of his own. He ran the great risk of his life in  his invasion of England, but henceforth he left nothing to chanc

e. He was never betrayed by  passion or enthusiasm into rash adventures, and he loved the substance, rather than  the pomp and circumstance of power. Untrammelled by scruples, unimpeded by principles,  he pursued with constant fidelity the task of his life, to secure the throne for himself  and his children, to pacify his country, and to repair the waste of the civil wars.  Folly easily glides into war, but to establish a permanent peace required all Henry's patience,  clear sight and far sight,

caution and tenacity. A full exchequer, not empty glory, was his first  requisite, and he found in his foreign wars a mine of money. Treason at home was turned  to like profit, and the forfeited estates of rebellious lords accumulated in the hands of  the royal family and filled the national coffers. Attainder, the characteristic instrument  of Tudor policy, was employed to complete the ruin of the old English peerage  which the Wars of the Roses began: and by 1509 there was only one duke and o

ne  marquis left in the whole of England. Attainder not only removed the particular traitor, but  disqualified his family for place and power; and the process of eliminating feudalism from the  region of government, started by Edward the First, was finished by Henry the Seventh. Feudal  society has been described as a pyramid; the upper slopes were now washed  away leaving an impassable precipice, with the Tudor monarch alone in his glory at  its summit. Royalty had become a caste apart. Marriag

es between royal children and English  peers had hitherto been no uncommon thing; since Henry the Seventh's accession there have  been but four, two of them in our own day. Only one took place in the sixteenth century, and the  Duke of Suffolk was by some thought worthy of death for his presumption in marrying the sister  of Henry the Eighth. The peerage was weakened not only by diminishing numbers, but by the  systematic depression of those who remained. Henry the Seventh, like Ferdinand of Ara

gon, preferred  to govern by means of lawyers and churchmen; they could be rewarded by judgeships and bishoprics,  and required no grants from the royal estates. Their occupancy of office kept out  territorial magnates who abused it for private ends. Of the sixteen regents  nominated by Henry the Eighth in his will, not one could boast a peerage of twelve years'  standing; and all the great Tudor ministers, Wolsey and Cromwell, Cecil and Walsingham,  were men of comparatively humble birth. With

similar objects Henry the Seventh. passed laws  limiting the number of retainers and forbidding the practice of maintenance. The courts of  Star Chamber and Requests were developed to keep in order his powerful subjects and  give poor men protection against them. Their civil law procedure, influenced by  Roman imperial maxims, served to enhance the royal power and dignity, and helped  to build up the Tudor autocracy. To the office of king thus developed and magnified,  the young Prince who stood

upon the steps of the throne brought personal qualities of  the highest order, and advantages to which his father was completely a stranger. His  title was secure, his treasury overflowed, and he enjoyed the undivided affections of  his people. There was no alternative claimant. The White Rose, indeed, had languished in the  Tower since his surrender by Philip, and the Duke of Buckingham had some years before been mentioned  as a possible successor to the throne; but their claims only served to

remind men that nothing  but Henry's life stood between them and anarchy, for his young brother Edmund, Duke of Somerset,  had preceded Arthur to an early grave. Upon the single thread of Henry's life hung the peace of  the realm; no other could have secured the throne without a second civil war. It was small wonder if  England regarded Henry with a somewhat extravagant loyalty. Never had king ascended the throne more  richly endowed with mental and physical gifts. He was ten weeks short of his

eighteenth  year. From both his parents he inherited grace of mind and of person. His father in later  years was broken in health and soured in spirit, but in the early days of his reign he  had charmed the citizens of York with his winning smile. His mother is described by  the Venetian ambassador as a woman of great beauty and ability. She transmitted to Henry many  of the popular characteristics of her father, Edward the Fourth, though little of the military  genius of that consummate comman

der who fought thirteen pitched battles and lost not one.  Unless eye-witnesses sadly belied themselves, Henry the Eighth must have  been the desire of all eyes. "His Majesty," wrote one a year or two later,  "is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine  calf to his leg; his complexion fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the  French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman, his th

roat  being rather long and thick. .. .He speaks French, English, Latin, and a little Italian;  plays well on the lute and harpsichord, sings from the book at sight, draws the bow  with greater strength than any man in England, and jousts marvellously. " Another  foreign resident in 1519 described him as "extremely handsome. Nature  could not have done more for him. He is much handsomer than any other sovereign  in Christendom; a great deal handsomer than the King of France; very fair and his  w

hole frame admirably proportioned. On hearing that Francis the First wore a beard, he  allowed his own to grow, and as it is reddish, he has now got a beard that looks like gold.  He is very accomplished, a good musician, composes well, is a capital horseman, a fine  jouster, speaks French, Latin, and Spanish. .. . He is very fond of hunting, and never takes his  diversion without tiring eight or ten horses which he causes to be stationed beforehand along the  line of country he means to take, a

nd when one is tired he mounts another, and before he gets  home they are all exhausted. He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest  thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.  " The change from the cold suspicious Henry the Seventh to such a king as this was inevitably  greeted with a burst of rapturous enthusiasm. "I have no fear," wrote Mountjoy to Erasmus,  "but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry the Eighth,

whom we may well call our  Octavius, had succeeded to his father's throne, all your melancholy left you at once. For what  may you not promise yourself from a Prince, with whose extraordinary and almost Divine  character you are well acquainted. .. .But when you know what a hero he now  shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what  affection he bears to the learned, I will venture to swear that you will need no wings to make  you fly to behold this new a

nd auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is  rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not  contain your tears for joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of  honey, of nectar! Avarice is expelled the country. Liberality scatters wealth with a bounteous hand.  Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality. "  The picture is overdrawn for modern taste, b

ut making due allowance for Mountjoy's turgid  efforts to emulate his master's eloquence, enough remains to indicate the impression  made by Henry on a peer of liberal education. His unrivalled skill in national sports  and martial exercises appealed at least as powerfully to the mass of his people. In  archery, in wrestling, in joust and in tourney, as well as in the tennis court or on the  hunting field, Henry was a match for the best in his kingdom. None could draw a bow, tame  a steed, or sh

iver a lance more deftly than he, and his single-handed tournaments on  horse and foot with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, are likened by  one who watched them to the combats of Achilles and Hector. These are no mere  trifles below the dignity of history; they help to explain the extraordinary hold  Henry obtained over popular imagination. Suppose there ascended the throne to-day a  young prince, the hero of the athletic world, the finest oar, the best bat, the crack  marksman of his d

ay, it is easy to imagine the enthusiastic support he would receive from  thousands of his people who care much for sport, and nothing at all for politics. Suppose also  that that prince were endowed with the iron will, the instinctive insight into the hearts  of his people, the profound aptitude for government that Henry the Eighth displayed,  he would be a rash man who would guarantee even now the integrity of parliamentary  power or the continuance of cabinet rule. In those days, with thirty

years of civil war and  fifteen more of conspiracy fresh in men's minds, with no alternative to anarchy save Henry the  Eighth, with a peerage fallen from its high estate, and a Parliament almost lost to respect,  royal autocracy was not a thing to dread or distrust. "If a lion knew his strength," said Sir  Thomas More of his master to Cromwell, "it were hard for any man to rule him. " Henry the Eighth  had the strength of a lion; it remains to be seen how soon he learnt it, and what use he made

of  that strength when he discovered the secret. CHAPTER 3. THE APPRENTICESHIP OF HENRY THE EIGHTH. Quietly and peacefully,  without a threat from abroad or a murmur at home, the crown, which his father had won amid the storm  and stress of the field of battle, devolved upon Henry the Eighth. With an eager profusion of zeal  Ferdinand of Aragon placed at Henry's disposal his army, his fleet, his personal services. There  was no call for this sacrifice. For generations there had been no such tra

nquil demise of the  crown. Not a ripple disturbed the surface of affairs as the old King lay sick in April, 1509,  in Richmond Palace at Sheen. By his bedside stood his only surviving son; and to him the dying  monarch addressed his last words of advice. He desired him to complete his marriage with  Catherine, he exhorted him to defend the Church, and to make war on the infidel; he commended to  him his faithful councillors, and is believed to have urged upon him the execution of De  la Pole, E

arl of Suffolk, the White Rose of England. On the 22nd he was dead. A fortnight  later the funeral procession wended its way from Sheen to St. Paul's, where the illustrious John  Fisher, cardinal and martyr, preached the éloge. Thence it passed down the Strand, between hedges  and willows clad in the fresh green of spring, to That acre sown indeedWith the richest,  royallest seedThat the earth did e'er drink in. There, in the vault beneath the chapel in  Westminster Abbey, which bears his name a

nd testifies to his magnificence in building, Henry  the Seventh was laid to rest beside his Queen; dwelling, says Bacon, "more richly dead in  the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond or any of his palaces". For years before  and after, Torrigiano, the rival of Buonarotti, wrought at its "matchless altar," not a stone  of which survived the Puritan fury of the civil war. On the day of his father's death, or the  next, the new King removed from Richmond Palace to the Tower, whence,

on 23rd April, was  dated the first official act of his reign. He confirmed in ampler form the general  pardon granted a few days before by Henry the Seventh; but the ampler form was no bar to the  exemption of fourscore offenders from the act of grace. Foremost among them were the three brothers  De la Pole, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. The exclusion of Empson and Dudley from the  pardon was more popular than the pardon itself. If anything could have enhanced Henry's favour  with his

subjects, it was the condign punishment of the tools of his father's extortion. Their  death was none the less welcome for being unjust. They were not merely refused pardon and brought  to the block; a more costly concession was made when their bonds for the payment of  loans were cancelled. Their victims, so runs the official record, had been  "without any ground or matter of truth, by the undue means of certain of  the council of our said late father, thereunto driven contrary to law, reason a

nd  good conscience, to the manifest charge and peril of the soul of our said late father".  If filial piety demanded the delivery of his father's soul from peril, it counselled no  less the fulfilment of his dying requests, and the arrangements for Catherine's marriage  were hurried on with an almost indecent haste. The instant he heard rumours  of Henry the Seventh. 's death, Ferdinand sent warning to his envoy in  England that Louis of France and others would seek by all possible means to bre

ak off  the match. To further it, he would withdraw his objections to the union of Charles and  Mary; and a few days later he wrote again to remove any scruples Henry might entertain  about marrying his deceased brother's wife; while to Catherine herself he declared with  brutal frankness that she would get no other husband than Henry. All his paternal anxiety  might have been spared. Long before Ferdinand's persuasions could reach Henry's ears, he had  made up his mind to consummate the marriag

e. He would not, he wrote to Margaret of  Savoy, disobey his father's commands, reinforced as they were by the dispensation  of the Pope and by the friendship between the two families contracted by his sister Mary's  betrothal to Catherine's nephew Charles. There were other reasons besides those he alleged. A  council trained by Henry the Seventh. was loth to lose the gold of Catherine's dower; it was of  the utmost importance to strengthen at once the royal line; and a full-blooded youth of Hen

ry's  temperament was not likely to repel a comely wife ready to his hand, when the dictates of his  father's policy no longer stood between them. So on 11th June, barely a month after Henry  the Seventh's obsequies, the marriage, big with destinies, of Henry the Eighth and  Catherine of Aragon was privately solemnised by Archbishop Warham "in the Queen's closet"  at Greenwich. On the same day the commission of claims was appointed for the King's and Queen's  coronation. A week then sufficed for

its business, and on Sunday, 24th June, the Abbey was  the scene of a second State function within three months. Its splendour  and display were emblematic of the coming reign. Warham placed the crown on the  King's head; the people cried, "Yea, yea! " in a loud voice when asked if  they would have Henry as King; Sir Robert Dymock performed the office  of champion; and a banquet, jousts and tourneys concluded the ceremonies. Though he  had wedded a wife and been crowned a king, Henry was as yet

little more than a boy. A  powerful mind ripens slowly in a vigorous frame, and Henry's childish precocity had given way  before a youthful devotion to physical sports. He was no prodigy of early development. His  intellect, will and character were of a gradual, healthier growth; they were not matured  for many years after he came to the throne. He was still in his eighteenth year; and like  most young Englishmen of means and muscle, his interests centred rather in the field  than in the study.

Youth sat on the prow and pleasure at the helm. "Continual feasting"  was the phrase in which Catherine described their early married life. In the winter evenings  there were masks and comedies, romps and revels, in which Henry himself, Bessie Blount and other  young ladies of his Court played parts. In the spring and summer there were archery and tennis.  Music, we are told, was practised day and night. Two months after his accession Henry wrote to  Ferdinand that he diverted himself with jous

ts, birding, hunting, and other innocent and  honest pastimes, in visiting various parts of his kingdom, but that he did not therefore  neglect affairs of State. Possibly he was as assiduous in his duties as modern university  athletes in their studies; the neglect was merely comparative. But Ferdinand's ambassador  remarked on Henry's aversion to business, and his councillors complained that he  cared only for the pleasures of his age. Two days a week, said the Spaniard, were devoted  to single

combats on foot, initiated in imitation of the heroes of romance, Amadis and Lancelot; and  if Henry's other innocent and honest pastimes were equally exacting, his view of the requirements  of State may well have been modest. From the earliest days of his reign the general outline of  policy was framed in accord with his sentiments, and he was probably consulted on most questions of  importance. But it was not always so; in August, 1509, Louis the Twelfth acknowledged a letter  purporting to c

ome from the English King with a request for friendship and peace. "Who  wrote this letter? " burst out Henry. "I ask peace of the King of France,  who dare not look me in the face, still less make war on me! " His pride at the  age of eighteen was not less than his ignorance of what passed in his name. He had yet to learn  the secret that painful and laborious mastery of detail is essential to him who aspires not  merely to reign but to rule; and matters of detail in administration and diplomac

y were  still left in his ministers' hands. With the exception of Empson and Dudley, Henry made little  or no change in the council his father bequeathed him. Official precedence appertained to his  Chancellor, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Like most of Henry the Seventh's prelates,  he received his preferment in the Church as a reward for services to the State. Much of  the diplomatic work of the previous reign had passed through his hands; he helped to arrange the  marriage of Arthur and C

atherine, and was employed in the vain attempt to obtain Margaret of Savoy  as a bride for Henry the Seventh. As Archbishop he crowned and married Henry the Eighth, and as  Chancellor he delivered orations at the opening of the young King's first three Parliaments. They  are said to have given general satisfaction, but apart from them, Warham, for some unknown  reason, took little part in political business. So far as Henry can be said at this time to have  had a Prime Minister, that title belon

gs to Fox, his Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Winchester. Fox  had been even more active than Warham in politics, and more closely linked with the personal  fortunes of the two Tudor kings. He had shared the exile of Henry of Richmond; the  treaty of Étaples, the Intercursus Magnus, the marriage of Henry's elder daughter  to James the Fourth , and the betrothal of his younger to Charles, were largely  the work of his hands. Malicious gossip described him as willing to consent to his own  father's

death to serve the turn of his king, and a better founded belief ascribed to  his wit the invention of "Morton's fork". He was Chancellor of Cambridge  in 1500, as Warham was of Oxford, but won more enduring fame by founding the college  of Corpus Christi in the university over which the Archbishop presided. He had baptised Henry the  Eighth and advocated his marriage to Catherine; and to him the King extended the largest share in  his confidence. Badoer, the Venetian ambassador, called him "al

ter rex," and Carroz, the  Spaniard, said Henry trusted him most; but Henry was not blind to the failings  of his most intimate councillors, and he warned Carroz that the Bishop of Winchester  was, as his name implied, a fox indeed. A third prelate, Ruthal of Durham, divided  with Fox the chief business of State; and these clerical advisers were supposed  to be eager to guide Henry's footsteps in the paths of peace, and counteract the  more adventurous tendencies of their lay colleagues. At the

head of the latter  stood Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, soon to be rewarded for his victory at Flodden  by his restoration to the dukedom of Norfolk. He and his son, the third duke, were Lord High  Treasurers throughout Henry's reign; but jealousy of their past, Tudor distrust of their rank, or  personal limitations, impaired the authority that would otherwise have attached to their official  position; and Henry never trusted them as he did ministers whom he himself had raised from the  dust. S

urrey had served under Edward the Fourth and Richard the Third; he had fought against  Henry at Bosworth, been attainted and sent to the Tower. Reflecting that it was better to be a  Tudor official at Court than a baronial magnate in prison, he submitted to the King and was set up as  a beacon to draw his peers from their feudal ways. The rest of the council were men of little  distinction. Shrewsbury, the Lord High Steward, was a pale reflex of Surrey, and illustrious  in nought but descent. Ch

arles Somerset, Lord Herbert, who was Chamberlain  and afterwards Earl of Worcester, was a Beaufort bastard, and may have derived some  little influence from his harmless kinship with Henry the Eighth. Lovell, the Treasurer,  Poynings the Controller of the Household, and Harry Marney, Chancellor of the Duchy of  Lancaster, were tried and trusty officials. Bishop Fisher was great as a Churchman, a scholar,  a patron of learning, but not as a man of affairs; while Buckingham, the only duke in Engl

and,  and his brother, the Earl of Wiltshire, were rigidly excluded by dynastic jealousy  from all share in political authority. The most persistent of Henry's advisers was none  of his council. He was Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Aragon; and to his inspiration has  been ascribed the course of foreign policy during the first five years of his son-in-law's  reign. He worked through his daughter; the only thing she valued in life, wrote Catherine a month  after her marriage, was her father's co

nfidence. When Membrilla was recalled because he failed to  satisfy Catherine's somewhat exacting temper, she was herself formally commissioned to act in his  place as Ferdinand's ambassador at Henry's Court; Henry was begged to give her implicit credence  and communicate with Spain through her mediation! "These kingdoms of your highness," she wrote to  her father, "are in great tranquillity. " Well might Ferdinand congratulate himself on the result  of her marriage, and the addition of fresh, t

o his already extensive, domains. He needed them all to  ensure the success of his far-reaching schemes. His eldest grandson, Charles, was heir not only  to Castile and Aragon, Naples and the Indies, which were to come to him from his mother,  Ferdinand's imbecile daughter, Juaña, but to Burgundy and Austria, the lands of  his father, Philip, and of Philip's father, the Emperor Maximilian. This did not  satisfy Ferdinand's grasping ambition; he sought to carve out for his second grandson,  named

after himself, a kingdom in Northern Italy. On the Duchy of Milan, the republics of Venice,  Genoa and Florence, his greedy eyes were fixed. Once conquered, they would bar the path of France  to Naples; compensated by these possessions, the younger Ferdinand might resign his share  in the Austrian inheritance to Charles; while Charles himself was to marry the only  daughter of the King of Hungary, add that to his other dominions, and revive the empire of  Charlemagne. Partly with these objects

in view, partly to draw off the scent from his own track,  Ferdinand had, in 1508, raised the hue and cry after Venice. Pope and Emperor, France and  Spain, joined in the chase, but of all the parties to the league of Cambrai, Louis the  Twelfth was in a position to profit the most. His victory over Venice at Agnadello , secured him  Milan and Venetian territory as far as the Mincio; it also dimmed the prospects of Ferdinand's  Italian scheme and threatened his hold on Naples; but the Spanish Ki

ng was restrained from  open opposition to France by the fact that Louis was still mediating between him  and Maximilian on their claims to the administration of Castile, the realm  of their daughter and daughter-in-law, Juaña. Such was the situation with which Henry  the Eighth and his council were required to deal. The young King entered the arena of Europe,  a child of generous impulse in a throng of hoary intriguers—Ferdinand, Maximilian, Louis  the Twelfth, Julius the Second … each of whom

was nearly three times his age. He was shocked  to see them leagued to spoil a petty republic, a republic, too, which had been for ages  the bulwark of Christendom against the Turk and from time immemorial the ally of England.  Venice had played no small part in the revival of letters which appealed so strongly to Henry's  intellectual sympathies. Scholars and physicians from Venice, or from equally threatened Italian  republics, frequented his Court and Cabinet. Venetian merchants developed the

commerce of  London; Venetian galleys called twice a year at Southampton on their way to and from Flanders,  and their trade was a source of profit to both nations. Inevitably Henry's sympathies  went out to the sore-pressed republic. They were none the less strong because  the chief of the spoilers was France, for Henry and his people were imbued with  an inborn antipathy to everything French. Before he came to the throne he was reported  to be France's enemy; and speculations were rife as to

the chances of his invading it and  imitating the exploits of his ancestor Henry the Fifth It needed no persuasion from Ferdinand  to induce him to intervene in favour of Venice. Within a few weeks of his accession he refused  to publish the papal bull which cast the halo of crusaders over the bandits of Cambrai. The  day after his coronation he deplored to Badoer Louis' victory at Agnadello, and a week later  he wrote to the sovereigns of Europe urging the injustice of their Venetian crusade. I

n September  he sent Bainbridge, Cardinal-Archbishop of York, to reside at the Papal Court, and watch  over the interests of Venice as well as of England. "Italy," wrote Badoer, "was  entirely rescued from the barbarians by the movements of the English King; and, but  for that, Ferdinand would have done nothing. " Henry vainly endeavoured to persuade  Maximilian, the Venetian's lifelong foe, to accept arbitration; but he succeeded in inducing the Doge  to make his peace with the Pope, and Julius

to remove his ecclesiastical censures. To Ferdinand  he declared that Venice must be preserved as a wall against the Turk, and he hinted that  Ferdinand's own dominions in Italy would, if Venice were destroyed, "be unable to resist the  ambitious designs of certain Christian princes". The danger was as patent to Julius and Ferdinand  as it was to Henry; and as soon as Ferdinand had induced Louis to give a favourable verdict in his  suit with the Emperor, the Catholic King was ready to join Henr

y and the Pope in a league of defence.  But, in spite of Venetian, Spanish and papal instigations to "recover his noble inheritance  in France," in spite of his own indignation at the treatment of Venice, and the orders issued  in the first year of his reign to his subjects to furnish themselves with weapons of war, for  which the long peace had left them unprepared, Henry, or the peace party in his council, was  unwilling to resort to the arbitrament of arms. He renewed his father's treaties no

t only  with other powers, but, much to the disgust of Ferdinand, Venice and the Pope, with Louis  himself. His first martial exploit, apart from 1,500 archers whom he was bound by treaty to  send to aid the Netherlands against the Duke of Guelders, was an expedition for the destruction  of the enemies of the faith. Such an expedition, he once said, he owed to God for his peaceful  accession; at another time he declared that he cherished, like an heirloom, the ardour against  the infidel which h

e inherited from his father. He repressed that ardour, it must be added, with  as much success as Henry the Seventh; and apart from this one youthful indiscretion, he did not  suffer his ancestral zeal to escape into action. His generous illusions soon vanished before  the sordid realities of European statecraft; and the defence of Christendom  became with him, as with others, a hollow pretence, a diplomatic fiction,  the infinite varieties of which age could not wither nor custom stale. Did a m

onarch  wish for peace? Peace at once was imperative to enable Christian princes to combine  against the Turk. Did he desire war? War became a disagreeable necessity to  restrain the ambition of Christian princes who, "worse than the infidel," disturbed the peace of  Christendom and opened a door for the enemies of the Church. Nor did the success of Henry's  first crusade encourage him to persist in similar efforts. It sailed from Plymouth in May,  1511, to join in Ferdinand's attack on the Moor

s, but it had scarcely landed when bickerings  broke out between the Christian allies, and Ferdinand informed the English  commanders that he had made peace with the Infidel, to gird his loins  for war with the Most Christian King. In the midst of their preparation against  infidels, so runs the preamble to the treaty in which Henry and Ferdinand signified  their adhesion to the Holy League, they heard that Louis was besieging the Pope  in Bologna. The thought of violent hands being laid on the

Vicar of Christ stirred Henry to a  depth of indignation which no injuries practised against a temporal power could rouse. His  ingenuous deference to the Papacy was in singular contrast to the contempt with which  it was treated by more experienced sovereigns, and they traded on the weight which Henry  always attached to the words of the Pope. He had read Maximilian grave lectures on  his conduct in countenancing the schismatic conciliabulum assembled by Louis at Pisa. He  wrote to Bainbridge a

t the Papal Court that he was ready to sacrifice goods, life and kingdom  for the Pope and the Church; and to the Emperor that at the beginning of his reign he thought  of nothing else than an expedition against the Infidel. But now he was called by the Pope and  the danger of the Church in another direction; and he proceeded to denounce the impiety and  schism of the French and their atrocious deeds in Italy. He joined Ferdinand in requiring  Louis to desist from his impious work. Louis turned

a deaf ear to their  demands; and in November, 1511, they bound themselves to defend the Church  against all aggression and make war upon the aggressor. This reversal of the pacific  policy which had marked the first two and a half years of Henry's reign was not  exclusively due to the King's zeal for the Church. The clerical party of peace in his  council was now divided by the appearance of an ecclesiastic who was far more remarkable than  any of his colleagues, and to whose turbulence and ene

rgy the boldness of English policy must,  henceforth, for many years be mainly ascribed. Thomas Wolsey had been appointed Henry's  almoner at the beginning of his reign, but he exercised no apparent influence  in public affairs. It was not till 1511 that he joined the council, though during the  interval he must have been gradually building up his ascendancy over the King's mind. To  Wolsey, restlessly ambitious for himself, for Henry, and England, was attributed the  responsibility for the sudd

en adoption of a spirited foreign policy; and it was in  the preparations for the war of 1512 that his marvellous industry and grasp  of detail first found full scope. The main attack of the English and Spanish  monarchs was to be on Guienne, and in May, 1512, Henry went down to Southampton to  speed the departing fleet. It sailed from Cowes under Dorset's command on 3rd June, and a  week later the army disembarked on the coast of Guipuscoa. There it remained throughout the  torrid summer, await

ing the Spanish King's forces to co-operate in the invasion of France.  But Ferdinand was otherwise occupied. Navarre was not mentioned in the treaty with Henry, but  Navarre was what Ferdinand had in his mind. It was then an independent kingdom, surrounded on  three sides by Spanish territory, and an easy prey which would serve to unite all Spain beyond the  Pyrenees under Ferdinand's rule. Under pretence of restoring Guienne to the English crown,  Dorset's army had been enticed to Passages, an

d there it was used as a screen against the French,  behind which Ferdinand calmly proceeded to conquer Navarre. It was, he said, impossible to march into  France with Navarre unsubdued in his rear. Navarre was at peace, but it might join the French, and  he invited Dorset to help in securing the prey. Dorset refused to exceed his commission,  but the presence of his army at Passages was admitted by the Spaniards to be "quite  providential," as it prevented the French from assisting Navarre. Eng

lish indignation was  loud and deep; men and officers vowed that, but for Henry's displeasure, they would  have called to account the perfidious King. Condemned to inactivity, the troops almost  mutinied; they found it impossible to live on their wages of sixpence a day , drank  Spanish wine as if it were English beer, and died of dysentery like flies in the autumn.  Discipline relaxed; drill was neglected. Still Ferdinand tarried, and in October, seeing  no hope of an attempt on Guienne that ye

ar, the army took matters into its own hands and  embarked for England. Henry's first military enterprise had ended in disgrace and disaster. The  repute of English soldiers, dimmed by long peace, was now further tarnished. Henry's own envoys  complained of the army's insubordination, its impatience of the toils, and inexperience of the  feats, of war; and its ignominious return exposed him to the taunts of both friends and foes. He  had been on the point of ordering it home, when it came of its

own accord; but the blow to his  authority was not, on that account, less severe. His irritation was not likely to be soothed  when he realised the extent to which he had been duped by his father-in-law. Ferdinand was  loud in complaints and excuses. September and October were, he said, the proper months for  a campaign in Guienne, and he was marching to join the English army at the moment of its  desertion. In reality, it had served his purpose to perfection. Its presence had diverted French 

levies from Italy, and enabled him, unmolested, to conquer Navarre. With that he was content.  Why should he wish to see Henry in Guienne? He was too shrewd to involve his own forces in  that hopeless adventure, and the departure of the English furnished him with an excuse for entering  into secret negotiations with Louis. His methods were eloquent of sixteenth-century diplomacy. He  was, he ordered Carroz to tell Henry many months later, when concealment was no longer possible or  necessary, se

nding a holy friar to his daughter in England; the friar's health did not permit of his  going by sea; so he went through France, and was taken prisoner. Hearing of his fame for piety, the  French Queen desired his ghostly advice, and took the opportunity of the interview to persuade the  friar to return to Spain with proposals of peace. Ferdinand was suddenly convinced that death was  at hand; his confessor exhorted him to forgive and make peace with his enemies. This work of piety  he could no

t in conscience neglect. So he agreed to a twelvemonth's truce, which secured Navarre.  In spite of his conscience he would never have consented, had he not felt that the truce was  really in Henry's interests. But what weighed with him most was, he said, the reformation of  the Church. That should be Henry's first and noblest work; he could render no greater service  to God. No reformation was possible without peace, and so long as the Church was unreformed,  wars among princes would never ceas

e. Such reasoning, he thought, would appeal to  the pious and unsophisticated Henry. To other sovereigns he used arguments more suited to their  experience of his diplomacy. He told Maximilian that his main desire was to serve the Emperor's  interests, to put a curb on the Italians, and to frustrate their design of driving himself,  Louis and Maximilian across the Alps. But the most monumental falsehood he reserved for the  Pope; his ambassador at the Papal Court was to assure Julius that he had

failed in his efforts  to concert with Henry a joint invasion of France, that Henry was not in earnest over the war and  that he had actually made a truce with France. This had enabled Louis to pour fresh troops  into Italy, and compelled him, Ferdinand, to consult his own interests and make peace!  Two days later he was complaining to Louis that Henry refused to join in the truce. To  punish Henry for his refusal he was willing to aid Louis against him, but he would prefer to  settle the diffe

rences between the French and the English kings by a still more treacherous  expedient. Julius was to be induced to give a written promise that, if the points at  issue were submitted to his arbitration, he would pronounce no verdict till it had been  secretly sanctioned by Ferdinand and Louis. This promise obtained, Louis was  publicly to appeal to the Pope; Henry's devotion to the Church would prevent  his refusing the Supreme Pontiff's mediation; if he did, ecclesiastical censures could be  i

nvoked against him. Such was the plot Ferdinand was hatching for the benefit of his daughter's  husband. The Catholic King had ever deceit in his heart and the name of God on his lips. He was  accused by a rival of having cheated him twice; the charge was repeated to Ferdinand.  "He lies," he broke out, "I cheated him three times. " He was faithful to one principle  only, self-aggrandisement by fair means or foul. His favourite scheme was a kingdom in  Northern Italy; but in the way of its reali

sation his own overreaching ambition  placed an insuperable bar. Italy had been excluded from his truce with France to leave  him free to pursue that design; but in July, 1512, the Italians already suspected his  motives, and a papal legate declared that they no more wished to see Milan Spanish  than French. In the following November, Spanish troops in the pay and alliance of  Venice drove the French out of Brescia. By the terms of the Holy League, it should  have been restored to its owner, the

Venetian Republic. Ferdinand kept it himself; it was to  form the nucleus of his North Italian dominion. Venice at once took alarm and made a compact with  France which kept the Spaniards at bay until after Ferdinand's death. The friendship between Venice  and France severed that between France and the Emperor; and, in 1513, the war went on with a  rearrangement of partners, Henry and Maximilian on one side, against France and Venice on  the other, with Ferdinand secretly trying to trick them a

ll. For many months Henry knew  not, or refused to credit, his father-in-law's perfidy. To outward appearance, the Spanish King  was as eager as ever for the war in Guienne. He was urging Henry to levy 6,000 Germans to  serve for that purpose in conjunction with Spanish forces; and, in April, Carroz, in ignorance of his  master's real intentions, signed on his behalf a treaty for the joint invasion of France. This  forced the Catholic King to reveal his hand. He refused his ratification; now he

declared the  conquest of Guienne to be a task of such magnitude that preparations must be complete before April,  a date already past; and he recommended Henry to come into the truce with Louis, the  existence of which he had now to confess. Henry had not yet fathomed the depths; he  even appealed to Ferdinand's feelings and pathetically besought him, as a good father,  not to forsake him entirely. But in vain; his father-in-law deserted him at his sorest  hour of need. To make peace was out of

the question. England's honour had suffered a  stain that must at all costs be removed. No king with an atom of spirit would let the dawn  of his reign be clouded by such an admission of failure. Wolsey was there to stiffen his  temper in case of need; with him it was almost a matter of life and death to retrieve the  disaster. His credit was pledged in the war. In their moments of anger under the Spanish  sun, the English commanders had loudly imputed to Wolsey the origin of the war and the ca

use of  all the mischief. Surrey, for whose banishment from Court the new favourite had expressed  to Fox a wish, and other "great men" at home, repeated the charge. Had Wolsey failed to bring  honour with peace, his name would not have been numbered among the greatest of England's  statesmen. Henry's temper required no spur. Tudors never flinched in the face of danger, and  nothing could have made Henry so resolved to go on as Ferdinand's desertion and advice to desist.  He was prepared to aven

ge his army in person. There were to be no expeditions to distant  shores; there was to be war in the Channel, where Englishmen were at home on the sea; and  Calais was to be the base of an invasion of France over soil worn by the tramp of English troops. In  March, 1513, Henry, to whom the navy was a weapon, a plaything, a passion, watched his fleet sail  down the Thames; its further progress was told him in letters from its gallant admiral, Sir  Edmund Howard, who had been strictly charged to

inform the King of the minutest details  in the behaviour of every one of the ships. Never had such a display of naval  force left the English shores; twenty-four ships ranging downwards from the  1,600 tons of the Henry Imperial, bore nearly 5,000 marines and 3,000 mariners. The French dared  not venture out, while Howard swept the Channel, and sought them in their ports. Brest was  blockaded. A squadron of Mediterranean galleys coming to its relief anchored in the shallow water  off Conquêt. H

oward determined to cut them out; he grappled and boarded their admiral's galley.  The grappling was cut away, his boat swept out in the tide, and Howard, left unsupported, was  thrust overboard by the Frenchmen's pikes. His death was regarded as a national disaster,  but he had retrieved England's reputation for foolhardy valour. Meanwhile, Henry's army  was gathering at Calais. On 30th June, at 7 p. m. , the King himself landed. Before his  departure, the unfortunate Edmund de la Pole, Earl of

Suffolk, was brought to the block for an  alleged correspondence with his brother in Louis' service, but really because rumours were  rife of Louis' intention to proclaim the White Rose as King of England. On 21st July, Henry  left Calais to join his army, which had already advanced into French territory. Heavy rains  impeded its march and added to its discomfort. Henry, we are told, did not put off his clothes,  but rode round the camp at three in the morning, cheering his men with the remark,

"Well,  comrades, now that we have suffered in the beginning, fortune promises us better things, God  willing". Near Ardres some German mercenaries, of whom there were 8,000 with Henry's forces,  pillaged the church; Henry promptly had three of them hanged. On 1st August the army  sat down before Thérouanne; on the 10th, the Emperor arrived to serve as a private at a  hundred crowns a day under the English banners. Three days later a large French force arrived at  Guinegate to raise the siege;

a panic seized it, and the bloodless rout that followed was  named the Battle of Spurs. Louis d'Orléans, Duc de Longueville, the famous Chevalier Bayard,  and others of the noblest blood in France, were among the captives. Ten days after this defeat  Thérouanne surrendered; and on the 24th Henry made his triumphal entry into the first town captured  by English arms since the days of Jeanne Darc. On the 26th he removed to Guinegate, where he  remained a week, "according," says a curious document,

"to the laws of arms, for in case any  man would bid battle for the besieging and getting of any city or town, then the winner to give  battle, and to abide the same certain days". No challenge was forthcoming, and on 15th  September Henry besieged Tournay, then said to be the richest city north of Paris. During the  progress of the siege the Lady Margaret of Savoy, the Regent of the Netherlands, joined her  father, the Emperor, and Henry, at Lille. They discussed plans for renewing the war nex

t  year and for the marriage of Charles and Mary. To please the Lady Margaret and to exhibit  his skill Henry played the gitteron, the lute and the cornet, and danced and jousted  before her. He "excelled every one as much in agility in breaking spears as in nobleness  of stature". Within a week Tournay fell; on 13th October Henry commenced his return, and  on the 21st he re-embarked at Calais. Thérouanne, the Battle of Spurs, and Tournay were not  the only, or the most striking, successes in th

is year of war. In July, Catherine,  whom Henry had left as Regent in England, wrote that she was "horribly busy with making  standards, banners, and badges" for the army in the North; for war with France had brought,  as usual, the Scots upon the English backs. James the Fourth, though Henry's brother-in-law,  preferred to be the cat's paw of the King of France; and in August the Scots forces  poured over the Border under the command of James himself. England was prepared; and on  9th September

, "at Flodden hills," sang Skelton, "our bows and bills slew all the flower of  their honour". James the Fourth was left a mutilated corpse upon the field of battle. "He  has paid," wrote Henry, "a heavier penalty for his perfidy than we would have wished.  " There was some justice in the charge. James was bound by treaty not to go to war  with England; he had not even waited for the Pope's answer to his request for absolution  from his oath; and his challenge to Henry, when he was in France and

could not meet  it, was not a knightly deed. Henry wrote to Leo for permission to bury the excommunicated  Scottish King with royal honours in St. Paul's. The permission was granted, but the interment did  not take place. In Italy, Louis fared no better; at Novara, on 6th June, the Swiss infantry  broke in pieces the grand army of France, drove the fragments across the Alps, and restored  the Duchy of Milan to the native house of Sforza. The results of the campaign of 1513 were a  striking vind

ication of the refusal of Henry the Eighth and Wolsey to rest under the stigma of  their Spanish expedition of 1512. English prestige was not only restored, but raised higher than  it had stood since the death of Henry the Fifth, whose "name," said Pasqualigo, a Venetian in  London, "Henry the Eighth would now renew". He styled him "our great King". Peter Martyr, a  resident at Ferdinand's Court, declared that the Spanish King was "afraid of the over-growing power  of England". Another Venetian

in London reported that "were Henry ambitious of dominion like  others, he would soon give law to the world". But, he added, "he is good and has a  good council. His quarrel was a just one, he marched to free the Church, to obtain his own, and to liberate Italy from the French. " The  pomp and parade of Henry's wars have, indeed, somewhat obscured the fundamentally pacific  character of his reign. The correspondence of the time bears constant witness to the peaceful  tendencies of Henry and his

council. "I content myself," he once said to Giustinian, "with my  own, I only wish to command my own subjects; but, on the other hand, I do not choose that any  one shall have it in his power to command me. " On another occasion he said: "We want all  potentates to content themselves with their own territories; we are content with this  island of ours"; and Giustinian, after four years' residence at Henry's Court, gave it as his  deliberate opinion to his Government, that Henry did not covet hi

s neighbours' goods, was satisfied  with his own dominions, and "extremely desirous of peace". Ferdinand said, in 1513, that his pensions  from France and a free hand in Scotland were all that Henry really desired; and Carroz, his  ambassador, reported that Henry's councillors did not like to be at war with any one. Peace,  they told Badoer, suited England better than war. But Henry's actions proclaimed louder than the  words of himself or of others that he believed peace to be the first of Engl

ish interests. He  waged no wars on the continent except against France; and though he reigned thirty-eight years,  his hostilities with France were compressed into as many months. The campaigns of 1512-13,  Surrey's and Suffolk's inroads of 1522 and 1523, and Henry's invasion of 1544, represent the sum  of his military operations outside Great Britain and Ireland. He acquired Tournay in 1513 and  Boulogne in 1544, but the one was restored in five years for an indemnity, and the other was to be 

given back in eight for a similar consideration. These facts are in curious contrast with  the high-sounding schemes of recovering the crown of France, which others were  always suggesting to Henry, and which he, for merely conventional reasons, was in the  habit of enunciating before going to war; and in view of the tenacity which  Henry exhibited in other respects, and the readiness with which he relinquished  his regal pretensions to France, it is difficult to believe that they were any  rea

l expression of settled policy. They were, indeed, impossible of achievement,  and Henry saw the fact clearly enough. Modern phenomena such as huge armies sweeping  over Europe, and capitals from Berlin to Moscow, Paris to Madrid, falling before them, were quite  beyond military science of the sixteenth century. Armies fought, as a rule, only in the five summer  months; it was difficult enough to victual them for even that time; and lack of commissariat  or transport crippled all the invasions o

f Scotland. Hertford sacked Edinburgh, but he  went by sea. No other capital except Rome saw an invading army. Neither Henry nor Maximilian,  Ferdinand nor Charles, ever penetrated more than a few miles into France, and French armies got no  further into Spain, the Netherlands, or Germany. Machiavelli points out that the chief safeguard of  France against the Spaniards was that the latter could not victual their army sufficiently to  pass the Pyrenees. If in Italy it was different, it was becaus

e Italy herself invited the invaders,  and was mainly under foreign dominion. Henry knew that with the means at his disposal he could  never conquer France; his claims to the crown were transparent conventions, and he was always  ready for peace in return for the status quo and a money indemnity, with a town or so for security.  The fact that he had only achieved a small part of the conquest he professed to set out to accomplish  was, therefore, no bar to negotiations for peace. There were many

reasons for ending the war;  the rapid diminution of his father's treasures; the accession to the papal throne of the pacific  Leo in place of the warlike Julius; the absolution of Louis as a reward for renouncing the council of  Pisa; the interruption of the trade with Venice; the attention required by Scotland now that  her king was Henry's infant nephew; and lastly, his betrayal first by Ferdinand and now by the  Emperor. In October, 1513, at Lille, a treaty had been drawn up binding Henry, M

aximilian and  Ferdinand to a combined invasion of France before the following June. On 6th December, Ferdinand  wrote to Henry to say he had signed the treaty. He pointed out the sacrifices he was making  in so doing; he was induced to make them by considering that the war was to be waged in the  interests of the Holy Church, of Maximilian, Henry, and Catherine, and by his wish and hope  to live and die in friendship with the Emperor and the King of England. He thought, however,  that to make s

ure of the assistance of God, the allies ought to bind themselves, if  He gave them the victory, to undertake a general war on the infidel. Ferdinand seems to  have imagined that he could dupe the Almighty as easily as he hoped to cheat his allies,  by a pledge which he never meant to fulfil. A fortnight after this despatch he ordered  Carroz not to ratify the treaty he himself had already signed. The reason was not far to  seek. He was deluding himself with the hope, which Louis shrewdly encour

aged, that the  French King would, after his recent reverses, fall in with the Spaniard's Italian  plans. Louis might even, he thought, of his own accord cede Milan and Genoa,  which would annihilate the French King's influence in Italy, and greatly  facilitate the attack on Venice. That design had occupied him throughout the  summer, before Louis had become so amenable; then he was urging Maximilian that the Pope  must be kept on their side and persuaded "not to forgive the great sins committed

by  the King of France"; for if he removed his ecclesiastical censures, Ferdinand and  Maximilian "would be deprived of a plausible excuse for confiscating the territories they  intended to conquer". Providence was, as usual, to be bribed into assisting in the robbery of  Venice by a promise to make war on the Turk. But now that Louis was prepared to give  his daughter Renée in marriage to young Ferdinand and to endow the couple with  Milan and Genoa and his claims on Naples, his sins might be

forgiven. The two monarchs  would not be justified in making war upon France in face of these offers. Venice  remained a difficulty, for Louis was not likely to help to despoil his faithful ally;  but Ferdinand had a suggestion. They could all make peace publicly guaranteeing the Republic's  possessions, but Maximilian and he could make a "mental reservation" enabling them to partition  Venice, when France could no longer prevent it. So on 13th March, 1514, Ferdinand  renewed his truce with Fran

ce, and Maximilian joined it soon after. The old  excuses about the reformation of the Church, his death-bed desire to make peace with  his enemies, could scarcely be used again; so Ferdinand instructed his agent to say, if  Henry asked for an explanation, that there was a secret conspiracy in Italy. If he had said  no more, it would have been literally true, for the conspiracy was his own; but he went on  to relate that the conspiracy was being hatched by the Italians to drive him and the Emper

or  out of the peninsula. The two were alike in their treachery; both secretly entered the truce  with France and broke their promise to Henry. Another engagement of longer standing was  ruptured. Since 1508, Henry's sister Mary had been betrothed to Maximilian's grandson  Charles. The marriage was to take place when Charles was fourteen; the pledge had been  renewed at Lille, and the nuptials fixed not later than 15th May, 1514. Charles  wrote to Mary signing himself votre mari, while Mary was

styled Princess of Castile,  carried about a bad portrait of Charles, and diplomatically sighed for his presence ten  times a day. But winter wore on and turned to spring; no sign was forthcoming of Maximilian's  intention to keep his grandson's engagement, and Charles was reported as having said  that he wanted a wife and not a mother. All Henry's inquiries were met by  excuses; the Ides of May came and went, but they brought no wedding between  Mary and Charles. Henry was learning by bitter ex

perience. Not only was he left  to face single-handed the might of Louis; but Ferdinand and Maximilian had secretly  bound themselves to make war on him, if he carried out the treaty to which they had all three  publicly agreed. The man whom he said he loved as a natural father, and the titular sovereign of  Christendom, had combined to cheat the boy-king who had come to the throne with youthful  enthusiasms and natural, generous instincts. "Nor do I see," said Henry to Giustinian,  "any faith i

n the world save in me, and therefore God Almighty, who knows this,  prospers my affairs. " This absorbing belief in himself and his righteousness led  to strange aberrations in later years, but in 1514 it had some justification. "Je vous  assure," wrote Margaret of Savoy to her father, the Emperor, "qu'en lui n'a nulle faintise.  " "At any rate," said Pasqualigo, "King Henry has done himself great honour, and kept  faith single-handed. " A more striking testimony was forthcoming a year or two 

later. When Charles succeeded Ferdinand, the Bishop of Badajos drew up for Cardinal Ximenes  a report on the state of the Prince's affairs. In it he says: "The King of England has  been truer to his engagements towards the House of Austria than any other prince. The  marriage of the Prince with the Princess Mary, it must be confessed, did not take place, but  it may be questioned whether it was the fault of the King of England or of the Prince and his  advisers. However that may be, with the exc

eption of the marriage, the King of England has generally  fulfilled his obligations towards the Prince, and has behaved as a trusty friend. An alliance  with the English can be trusted most of all. " But the meekest and saintliest monarch could  scarce pass unscathed through the baptism of fraud practised on Henry; and Henry was  at no time saintly or meek. Ferdinand, he complained, induced him to enter upon the war, and urged the Pope to use his influence with him  for that purpose; he had bee

n at great expense, had assisted Maximilian, taken Tournay,  and reduced France to extremities; and now, when his enemy was at his feet, Ferdinand talked  of truce: he would never trust any one again. "Had the King of Spain," wrote a Venetian  attaché, "kept his promise to the King of England, the latter would never have made peace with  France; and the promises of the Emperor were equally false, for he had received many thousands  of pounds from King Henry, on condition that he was to be in per

son at Calais in the month of May,  with a considerable force in the King's pay; but the Emperor pocketed the money and never came. His  failure was the cause of all that took place, for, as King Henry was deceived in every direction,  he thought fit to take this other course. " He discovered that he, too, could play at  the game of making peace behind the backs of his nominal friends; and when once he had made  up his mind, he played the game with vastly more effect than Maximilian or Ferdinand

. It was he  who had been really formidable to Louis, and Louis was therefore prepared to pay him a higher  price than to either of the others. In February Henry had got wind of his allies' practices with  France. In the same month a nuncio started from Rome to mediate peace between Henry and Louis;  but, before his arrival, informal advances had probably been made through the Duc de Longueville,  a prisoner in England since the Battle of Spurs. In January Louis' wife, Anne of Brittany, had  die

d. Louis was fifty-two years old, worn out and decrepit; but at least half a dozen brides were  proposed for his hand. In March it was rumoured in Rome that he would choose Henry's sister Mary,  the rejected of Charles. But Henry waited till May had passed, and Maximilian had proclaimed to the  world his breach of promise. Negotiations for the alliance and marriage with Louis then proceeded  apace. Treaties for both were signed in August. Tournay remained in Henry's hands, Louis increased  the p

ensions paid by France to England since the Treaty of Étaples, and both kings bound themselves  to render mutual aid against their common foes. Maximilian and Ferdinand were left out in the  cold. Louis not only broke off his negotiations with them, but prepared to regain Milan and  discussed with Henry the revival of his father's schemes for the conquest of Castile. Henry was to  claim part of that kingdom in right of his wife, the late Queen's daughter; later on a still  more shadowy title by

descent was suggested. As early as 5th October, the Venetian Government  wrote to its ambassador in France, "commending extremely the most sage proceeding of Louis in  exhorting the King of England to attack Castile". Towards the end of the year it declared that  Louis had wished to attack Spain, and sought to arrange details in an interview with Henry;  but the English King would not consent, delayed the interview, and refused the six thousand  infantry required for the purpose. But Henry had c

ertainly urged Louis to reconquer Navarre,  and from the tenor of Louis' reply to Henry, late in November, it would be inferred that the  proposed conquest of Castile also emanated from the English King or his ministers. Louis professed  not to know the laws of succession in Spain, but he was willing to join the attack, apart from  the merits of the case on which it was based. Whether the suggestion originated in France or  in England, whether Henry eventually refused it or not, its serious disc

ussion shows how far  Henry had travelled in his resentment at the double dealing of Ferdinand. Carroz complained  that he was treated by the English "like a bull at whom every one throws darts," and  that Henry himself behaved in a most offensive manner whenever Ferdinand's  name was mentioned. "If," he added, "Ferdinand did not put a bridle on this  young colt," it would afterwards become impossible to control him. The young colt  was, indeed, already meditating a project, to attain which he,

in later years, took the  bit in his teeth and broke loose from control. He was not only betrayed into casting in  Catherine's teeth her father's ill faith, but threatening her with divorce. Henry had  struck back with a vengeance. His blow shivered to fragments the airy castles which Maximilian  and Ferdinand were busy constructing. Their plans for reviving the empire of Charlemagne, creating  a new kingdom in Italy, inducing Louis to cede Milan and Genoa and assist in the conquest  of Venice,

disappeared like empty dreams. The younger Ferdinand found no provision in  Italy; he was compelled to retain his Austrian inheritance, and thus to impair the power of the  future Charles the Fifth; while the children's grandparents were left sadly reflecting on means  of defence against the Kings of England and France. The blot on the triumph was Henry's  desertion of Sforza, who, having gratefully acknowledged that to Henry he owed his restoration  of Milan, was now left to the uncovenanted me

rcies of Louis. But neither the credit nor discredit is  due mainly to Henry. He had learnt much, but his powers were not yet developed enough to make him  a match for the craft and guile of his rivals. The consciousness of the fact made him rely  more and more upon Wolsey, who could easily beat both Maximilian and Ferdinand at their  own game. He was not more deceitful than they, but in grasp of detail, in boldness and assiduity,  he was vastly superior. While Ferdinand hawked, and Maximilian h

unted the chamois, Wolsey  worked often for twelve hours together at the cares of the State. Possibly, too, his  clerical profession and the cardinalate which he was soon to hold gave him an  advantage which they did not possess; for, whenever he wanted to obtain credence for a  more than usually monstrous perversion of truth, he swore "as became a cardinal and  on the honour of the cardinalate". His services were richly rewarded;  besides livings, prebends, deaneries and the Chancellorship of C

ambridge University, he  received the Bishoprics of Lincoln and of Tournay, the Archbishopric of York, and finally, in  1515, Cardinalate. This dignity he had already, in May of the previous year, sent  Polydore Vergil to claim from the Pope; Vergil's mission was unknown to Henry,  to whom the grant of the Cardinal's hat was to be represented as Leo's own idea. CHAPTER 4. THE THREE RIVALS. The edifice which Wolsey had so laboriously  built up was, however, based on no surer foundation than the f

eeble life of a  sickly monarch already tottering to his grave. In the midst of his preparations for the conquest  of Milan and his negotiations for an attack upon Spain, Louis the Twelfth died on 1st January,  1515; and the stone which Wolsey had barely rolled up the hill came down with a rush. The  bourgeois Louis was succeeded by the brilliant, ambitious and warlike Francis the First, a monarch  who concealed under the mask of chivalry and the culture of arts and letters a libertinism beside 

which the peccadilloes of Henry or Charles seem virtue itself; whose person was tall and  whose features were described as handsome; but of whom an observer wrote with unwonted  candour that he "looked like the Devil". The first result of the change was an episode of  genuine romance. The old King's widow, "la reine blanche," was one of the most fascinating women  of the Tudor epoch. "I think," said a Fleming, "never man saw a more beautiful creature, nor  one having so much grace and sweetness

. " "He had never seen so beautiful a lady," repeated  Maximilian's ambassador, "her deportment is exquisite, both in conversation and  in dancing, and she is very lovely. " "She is very beautiful," echoed the staid old  Venetian, Pasqualigo, "and has not her match in England; she is tall, fair, of a light complexion  with a colour, and most affable and graceful"; he was warranted, he said, in describing her as  "a nymph from heaven". A more critical observer of feminine beauty thought her eyes

and  eyebrows too light, but, as an Italian, he may have been biassed in favour of brunettes,  and even he wound up by calling Mary "a Paradise". She was eighteen at the time; her marriage with  a dotard like Louis had shocked public opinion; and if, as was hinted, the gaieties in  which his youthful bride involved him, hastened the French King's end, there was some  poetic justice in the retribution. She had, as she reminded Henry herself, only consented  to marry the "very aged and sickly" mon

arch on condition that, if she survived him, she  should be allowed to choose her second husband herself. And she went on to declare,  that "remembering the great virtue" in him, she had, as Henry himself was aware, "always  been of good mind to my Lord of Suffolk". She was probably fascinated less by  Suffolk's virtue than by his bold and handsome bearing. A bluff Englishman after the  King's own heart, he shared, as none else did, in Henry's love of the joust and tourney,  in his skill with th

e lance and the sword; he was the Hector of combat, on foot and  on horse, to Henry's Achilles. His father, plain William Brandon, was Henry of  Richmond's standard-bearer on Bosworth field; and as such he had been singled out and killed  in personal encounter by Richard the Third His death gave his son a claim on the gratitude  of Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth; and similarity of tastes secured him  rapid promotion at the young King's Court. Created Viscount Lisle, he served in 1513 as 

marshal of Henry's army throughout his campaign in France. With the King there were said to be  "two obstinate men who governed everything"; one was Wolsey, the other was Brandon. In July  he was offering his hand to Margaret of Savoy, who was informed that Brandon was "a  second king," and that it would be well to write him "a kind letter, for it is he  who does and undoes". At Lille, in October, he continued his assault on Margaret  as a relief from the siege of Tournay; Henry favoured his su

it, and when Margaret  called Brandon a larron for stealing a ring from her finger, the King was called  in to help Brandon out with his French. Possibly it was to smooth the course of  his wooing that Brandon, early in 1514, received an extraordinary advancement in rank.  There was as yet only one duke in England, but now Brandon was made Duke of Suffolk, at the same time  that the dukedom of Norfolk was restored to Surrey for his victory at Flodden. Even a dukedom could  barely make the son of

a simple esquire a match for an emperor's daughter, and the suit did not  prosper. Political reasons may have interfered. Suffolk, too, is accused by the Venetian  ambassador of having already had three wives. This seems to be an exaggeration, but the  intricacy of the Duke's marital relationships, and the facility with which he renounced them might  well have served as a precedent to his master in later years. In January, 1515, the Duke was sent  to Paris to condole with Francis on Louis' deat

h, to congratulate him on his own accession, and  renew the league with England. Before he set out, Henry made him promise that he would not marry  Mary until their return. But Suffolk was not the man to resist the tears of a beautiful woman  in trouble, and he found Mary in sore distress. No sooner was Louis dead than his  lascivious successor became, as Mary said, "importunate with her in divers matters not to  her honour," in suits "the which," wrote Suffolk, "I and the Queen had rather be ou

t of the  world than abide". Every evening Francis forced his attentions upon the beautiful  widow. Nor was this the only trouble which threatened the lovers. There were reports  that the French would not let Mary go, but marry her somewhere to serve  their own political purposes. Henry, too, might want to betroth her again to  Charles; Maximilian was urging this course, and telling Margaret that Mary must be recovered  for Charles, even at the point of the sword. Early in January, Wolsey had wr

itten to her,  warning her not to make any fresh promise of marriage. Two friars from England, sent apparently  by Suffolk's secret enemies, told Mary the same tale, that if she returned to England she would  never be suffered to marry the Duke, but made to take Charles for her husband, "than which," she  declared, "I would rather be torn in pieces". Suffolk tried in vain to soothe her fears. She  refused to listen, and brought him to his knees with the announcement that unless he would wed her 

there and then, she would continue to believe that he had come only to entice her back to England  and force her into marriage with Charles. What was the poor Duke to do, between his promise  to Henry and the pleading of Mary? He did what every other man with a heart in his breast  and warm blood in his veins would have done, he cast prudence to the winds and secretly married  the woman he loved. The news could not be long concealed, but unfortunately we have only Wolsey's  account of how it wa

s received by Henry. He took it, wrote the cardinal to Suffolk, "grievously  and displeasantly," not only on account of the Duke's presumption, but of the breach of  his promise to Henry. "You are," he added, "in the greatest danger man was ever in;"  the council were calling for his ruin. To appease Henry and enable the King to satisfy  his council, Suffolk must induce Francis to intervene in his favour, to pay Henry two  hundred thousand crowns as Mary's dowry, and to restore the plate and jew

els she had  received; the Duke himself was to return the fortune with which Henry had endowed his  sister and pay twenty-four thousand pounds in yearly instalments for the expenses of her  marriage. Francis proved unexpectedly willing; perhaps his better nature was  touched by the lovers' distress. He also saw that Mary's marriage with Suffolk  prevented her being used as a link to bind Charles to Henry; and he may have thought that  a service to Suffolk would secure him a powerful friend at th

e English Court, a calculation that  was partly justified by the suspicion under which Suffolk henceforth laboured, of being too partial  to Francis. Yet it was with heavy hearts that the couple left Paris in April and wended their  way towards Calais. Henry had given no sign; from Calais, Mary wrote to him saying  she would go to a nunnery rather than marry against her desire. Suffolk  threw himself on the King's mercy; all the council, he said, except Wolsey,  were determined to put him to dea

th. Secretly, against his promise, and without Henry's  consent, he had married the King's sister, an act the temerity of which no one has since ventured  to rival. He saw the executioner's axe gleam before his eyes, and he trembled. At Calais,  Mary said she would stay until she heard from the King. His message has not been preserved,  but fears were never more strangely belied than when the pair crossed their Rubicon. So far  from any attempt being made to separate them, their marriage was pub

licly solemnised before  Henry and all his Court on 13th May, at Greenwich. In spite of all that happened, wrote the Venetian  ambassador, Henry retained his friendship for Suffolk; and a few months later he asserted, with  some exaggeration, that the Duke's authority was scarcely less than the King's. He and Mary were  indeed required to return all the endowment, whether in money, plate, jewels or furniture,  that she received on her marriage. But both she and the Duke had agreed to these terms

before  their offence. They were not unreasonable. Henry's money had been laid out for political  purposes which could no longer be served; and Mary did not expect the splendour, as Duchess of  Suffolk, which she had enjoyed as Queen of France. The only stipulation that looks like  a punishment was the bond to repay the cost of her journey to France; though  not only was this modified later on, but the Duke received numerous grants of land  to help to defray the charge. They were indeed require

d to live in the country; but the Duke  still came up to joust as of old with Henry on great occasions, and Mary remained  his favourite sister, to whose issue, in preference to that of Margaret, he left  the crown by will. The vindictive suspicions which afterwards grew to rank luxuriance in  Henry's mind were scarcely budding as yet; his favour to Suffolk and affection for Mary  were proof against the intrigues in his Court. The contrast was marked between the event and the  terrors which Wols

ey had painted; and it is hard to believe that the Cardinal played an entirely  disinterested part in the matter. It was obviously his cue to exaggerate the King's anger, and to  represent to the Duke that its mitigation was due to the Cardinal's influence; and it is more  than possible that Wolsey found in Suffolk's indiscretion the means of removing a dangerous  rival. The "two obstinate men" who had ruled in Henry's camp were not likely to remain long  united; Wolsey could hardly approve of a

ny "second king" but himself, especially a "second king"  who had acquired a family bond with the first. The Venetian ambassador plainly hints that it  was through Wolsey that Suffolk lost favour. In the occasional notices of him during the  next few years it is Wolsey, and not Henry, whom Suffolk is trying to appease; and we even  find the Cardinal secretly warning the King against some designs of the Duke that probably  existed only in his own imagination. This episode threw into the shade the

main purpose of Suffolk's  embassy to France. It was to renew the treaty concluded the year before, and apparently also the  discussions for war upon Spain. Francis was ready enough to confirm the treaty, particularly as  it left him free to pursue his designs on Milan. With a similar object he made terms with  the Archduke Charles, who this year assumed the government of the Netherlands, but was  completely under the control of Chièvres, a Frenchman by birth and sympathy, who  signed his lette

rs to Francis "your humble servant and vassal". Charles bound himself  to marry Louis the Twelfth's daughter Renée, and to give his grandfather Ferdinand no  aid unless he restored Navarre to Jean d'Albret. Thus safeguarded from attack  on his rear, Francis set out for Milan. The Swiss had locked all the passes  they thought practicable; but the French generals, guided by chamois hunters  and overcoming almost insuperable obstacles, transported their artillery over the Alps near  Embrun; and on

13th September, at Marignano, the great "Battle of the Giants" laid the whole  of Northern Italy at the French King's feet. At Bologna he met Leo the Tenth , whose lifelong  endeavour was to be found on both sides at once, or at least on the side of the bigger battalions;  the Pope recognised Francis's claim to Milan, while Francis undertook to  support the Medici in Florence, and to countenance Leo's project for securing  the Duchy of Urbino to his nephew Lorenzo. Henry watched with ill-conceal

ed jealousy  his rival's victorious progress; his envy was personal, as well as political. "Francis,"  wrote the Bishop of Worcester in describing the interview between the French King and  the Pope at Bologna, "is tall in stature, broad-shouldered, oval and handsome in  face, very slender in the legs and much inclined to corpulence. " His appearance was the  subject of critical inquiry by Henry himself. On May Day, 1515, Pasqualigo was summoned to  Greenwich by the King, whom he found dressed i

n green, "shoes and all," and mounted on a bay  Frieslander sent him by the Marquis of Mantua; his guard were also dressed in green and armed with  bows and arrows for the usual May Day sports. They breakfasted in green bowers some distance from  the palace. "His Majesty," continues Pasqualigo, "came into our arbor, and addressing me in French,  said: 'Talk with me awhile. The King of France, is he as tall as I am? ' I told him there was  but little difference. He continued, 'Is he as stout? ' I

said he was not; and he then inquired,  'What sort of legs has he? ' I replied 'Spare'. Whereupon he opened the front of his doublet, and  placing his hand on his thigh, said: 'Look here; and I also have a good calf to my leg'. He then  told me he was very fond of this King of France, and that on more than three occasions  he was very near him with his army, but that he would never allow himself to be seen,  and always retreated, which His Majesty attributed to deference for King Louis, who did

not choose  an engagement to take place. " After dinner, by way of showing his prowess, Henry "armed  himself cap-à-pie and ran thirty courses, capsizing his opponent, horse and all".  Two months later, he said to Giustinian: "I am aware that King Louis, although  my brother-in-law, was a bad man. I know not what this youth may be; he is,  however, a Frenchman, nor can I say how far you should trust him;" and Giustinian says he at once  perceived the great rivalry for glory between the two youn

g kings. Henry now complained that Francis  had concealed his Italian enterprise from him, that he was ill-treating English subjects, and  interfering with matters in Scotland. The last was his real and chief ground for resentment.  Francis had no great belief that Henry would keep the peace, and resist the temptation to attack  him, if a suitable opportunity were to arise. So he had sent the Duke of Albany to provide  Henry with an absorbing disturbance in Scotland. Since the death of James the

Fourth  at Flodden, English influence had, in Margaret's hands, been largely increased.  Henry took upon himself to demand a voice in Scotland's internal affairs. He claimed  the title of "Protector of Scotland"; and wrote to the Pope asking him to appoint  no Scottish bishops without his consent, and to reduce the Archbishopric of St. Andrews  to its ancient dependence on York. Many urged him to complete the conquest of Scotland, but  this apparently he refused on the ground that his own siste

r was really its ruler  and his own infant nephew its king. Margaret, however, as an Englishwoman, was  hated in Scotland, and she destroyed much of her influence by marrying the Earl of  Angus. So the Scots clamoured for Albany, who had long been resident at the French  Court and was heir to the Scottish throne, should James the Fourth's issue fail. His  appearance was the utter discomfiture of the party of England; Margaret was besieged  in Stirling and ultimately forced to give up her childre

n to Albany's keeping, and seek  safety in flight to her brother's dominions. Technically, Francis had not broken his treaty  with England, but he had scarcely acted the part of a friend; and if Henry could retaliate  without breaking the peace, he would eagerly seize any opportunity that offered. The alliance  with Ferdinand and Maximilian was renewed, and a new Holy League formed under Leo's auspices. But  Leo soon afterwards made his peace at Bologna with France. Charles was under French infl

uence, and  Henry's council and people were not prepared for war. So he refused, says Giustinian, Ferdinand's  invitations to join in an invasion of France. He did so from no love of Francis, and it was  probably Wolsey's ingenuity which suggested the not very scrupulous means of gratifying  Henry's wish for revenge. Maximilian was still pursuing his endless quarrel with Venice;  and the seizure of Milan by the French and Venetian allies was a severe blow to Maximilian  himself, to the Swiss, an

d to their protégé, Sforza. Wolsey now sought to animate them  all for an attempt to recover the duchy, and Sforza promised him 10,000 ducats a  year from the date of his restoration. There was nothing but the spirit of his treaty  with France to prevent Henry spending his money as he thought fit; and it was determined  to hire 20,000 Swiss mercenaries to serve under the Emperor in order to conquer Milan and  revenge Marignano. The negotiation was one of great delicacy; not only was secrecy abso

lutely  essential, but the money must be carefully kept out of Maximilian's reach. "Whenever," wrote Pace,  "the King's money passed where the Emperor was, he would always get some portion of it by  force or false promises of restitution. " The accusation was justified by Maximilian's  order to Margaret, his daughter, to seize Henry's treasure as soon as he heard it was on the  way to the Swiss. "The Emperor," said Julius the Second, "is light and inconstant, always  begging for other men's mone

y, which he wastes in hunting the chamois. " The envoy selected  for this difficult mission was Richard Pace, scholar and author, and friend of Erasmus and  More. He had been in Bainbridge's service at Rome, was then transferred to that of Wolsey  and Henry, and as the King's secretary, was afterwards thought to be treading  too close on the Cardinal's heels. He set out in October, and arrived in Zurich  just in time to prevent the Swiss from coming to terms with Francis. Before winter had ended

  the plans for invasion were settled. Maximilian came down with the snows from the mountains  in March; on the 23rd he crossed the Adda; on the 25th he was within nine miles of Milan, and  almost in sight of the army of France. On the 26th he turned and fled without striking a blow. Back  he went over the Adda, over the Oglio, up into Tyrol, leaving the French and Venetians in secure  possession of Northern Italy. A year later they had recovered for Venice the last of the places of  which it ha

d been robbed by the League of Cambrai. Maximilian retreated, said Pace, voluntarily  and shamefully, and was now so degraded that it signified little whether he was a friend  or an enemy. The cause of his ignominious flight still remains a mystery; countless  excuses were made by Maximilian and his friends. He had heard that France and England  had come to terms; 6,000 of the Swiss infantry deserted to the French on the eve of the  battle. Ladislaus of Hungary had died, leaving him guardian of

his son, and he  must go to arrange matters there. He had no money to pay his troops. The last has  an appearance of verisimilitude. Money was at the bottom of all his difficulties, and  drove him to the most ignominious shifts. He had served as a private in Henry's army for  100 crowns a day. His councillors robbed him; on one occasion he had not money to pay for  his dinner; on another he sent down to Pace, who was ill in bed, and extorted a loan  by force. He had apparently seized 30,000 crow

ns of Henry's pay for the Swiss;  the Fuggers, Welzers and Frescobaldi, were also accused of failing to keep their  engagements, and only the first month's pay had been received by the Swiss when they  reached Milan. On the Emperor's retreat the wretched Pace was seized by the Swiss and  kept in prison as security for the remainder. His task had been rendered all the more  difficult by the folly of Wingfield, ambassador at Maximilian's Court, who, said Pace,  "took the Emperor for a god and beli

eved that all his deeds and thoughts proceeded ex Spiritu  Sancto". There was no love lost between them; the lively Pace nicknamed his colleague  "Summer shall be green," in illusion perhaps to Wingfield's unending platitudes,  or to his limitless belief in the Emperor's integrity and wisdom. Wingfield opened  Pace's letters and discovered the gibe, which he parried by avowing that he had never  known the time when summer was not green. On another occasion he forged Pace's signature,  with a vie

w of obtaining funds for Maximilian; and he had the hardihood to protest against  Pace's appointment as Henry's secretary. At last his conduct brought down a stinging rebuke  from Henry; but the King's long-suffering was not yet exhausted, and Wingfield continued as  ambassador to the Emperors Court. The failure of the Milan expedition taught Wolsey  and Henry a bitter but salutary lesson. It was their first attempt to intervene  in a sphere of action so distant from English shores and so remote

from English  interests as the affairs of Italian States. Complaints in England were loud against the  waste of money; the sagacious Tunstall wrote that he did not see why Henry should bind himself  to maintain other men's causes. All the grandees, wrote Giustinian, were opposed to Wolsey's policy,  and its adoption was followed by what Giustinian called a change of ministry in England. Warham  relinquished the burdens of the Chancellorship which he had long unwillingly borne; Fox sought  to at

one for twenty-eight years' neglect of his diocese by spending in it the rest of his  days. Wolsey succeeded Warham as Chancellor, and Ruthal, who "sang treble to Wolsey's  bass," became Lord Privy Seal in place of Fox. Suffolk was out of favour, and the  neglect of his and Fox's advice was, according to the Venetian, resented by the  people, who murmured against the taxes which Wolsey's intervention in foreign affairs  involved. But Wolsey still hoped that bribes would keep Maximilian faithful

to England and  induce him to counteract the French influences with which his grandson Charles was surrounded.  Ferdinand had died in January, 1516, having, said the English envoy at his Court, wilfully  shortened his life by hunting and hawking in all weathers, and following the advice of his  falconers rather than that of his physicians. Charles thus succeeded to  Castile, Aragon and Naples; but Naples was seriously threatened by the  failure of Maximilian's expedition and the omnipotence of F

rancis in Italy. "The Pope  is French," wrote an English diplomatist, "and everything from Rome to Calais. "  To save Naples, Charles, in July, 1516, entered into the humiliating Treaty of Noyon  with France. He bound himself to marry Francis's infant daughter, Charlotte, to do justice  to Jean d'Albret in the matter of Navarre, and to surrender Naples, Navarre, and  Artois, if he failed to keep his engagement. Such a treaty was not likely to stand; but, for  the time, it was a great feather in

Francis's cap, and a further step towards the isolation  of England. It was the work of Charles's Gallicised ministry, and Maximilian professed  the utmost disgust at their doings. He was eager to come down to the Netherlands with  a view to breaking the Treaty of Noyon and removing his grandson's advisers, but of  course he must have money from England to pay his expenses. The money accordingly came  from the apparently bottomless English purse; and in January, 1517, the Emperor marched  down t

o the Netherlands, breathing, in his despatches to Henry, threatenings  and slaughter against Charles's misleaders. His descent on Flanders eclipsed his  march on Milan. "Mon fils," he said to Charles, "vous allez tromper les Français,  et moi, je vais tromper les Anglais. " So far from breaking the Treaty of Noyon, he joined  it himself, and at Brussels solemnly swore to observe its provisions. He probably thought he  had touched the bottom of Henry's purse, and that it was time to dip into Fra

ncis's. Seventy-five  thousand crowns was his price for betraying Henry. In conveying the news to Wolsey, Tunstall  begged him to urge Henry "to refrain from his first passions" and "to draw his foot out of  the affair as gently as if he perceived it not, giving good words for good words which they  yet give us, thinking our heads to be so gross that we perceive not their abuses". Their  persistent advances to Charles had, he thought, done them more harm than good; let the King  shut his purse i

n time, and he would soon have Charles and the Emperor again at his feet.  Tunstall was ably seconded by Dr. William Knight, who thought it would be foolish for England  to attempt to undo the Treaty of Noyon; it contained within itself the  seeds of its own dissolution. Charles would not wait to marry Francis's  daughter, and then the breach would come. Henry and Wolsey had the good sense to  act on this sound advice. Maximilian, Francis and Charles formed at Cambrai a  fresh league for the par

tition of Italy, but they were soon at enmity and too much  involved with their own affairs to think of the conquest of others. Disaffection was  rife in Spain, where a party wished Ferdinand, Charles's brother, to be King. If Charles was  to retain his Spanish kingdoms, he must visit them at once. He could not go unless England  provided the means. His request for a loan was graciously accorded and his ambassadors  were treated with magnificent courtesy. "One day," says Chieregati, the papal en

voy in  England, "the King sent for these ambassadors, and kept them to dine with him privately in his  chamber with the Queen, a very unusual proceeding. After dinner he took to singing and playing on  every musical instrument, and exhibited a part of his very excellent endowments. At length  he commenced dancing," and, continues another narrator, "doing marvellous things, both in  dancing and jumping, proving himself, as he is in truth, indefatigable. " On another day there was  "a most statel

y joust. " Henry was magnificently attired in "cloth of silver with a raised pile,  and wrought throughout with emblematic letters". When he had made the usual display in the lists,  the Duke of Suffolk entered from the other end, with well-nigh equal array and pomp. He was  accompanied by fourteen other jousters. "The King wanted to joust with all of them; but this was  forbidden by the council, which, moreover, decided that each jouster was to run six courses and no  more, so that the entertai

nment might be ended on that day. .. .The competitor assigned to the King  was the Duke of Suffolk; and they bore themselves so bravely that the spectators fancied themselves  witnessing a joust between Hector and Achilles. " "They tilted," says Sagudino, "eight courses,  both shivering their lances at every time, to the great applause of the spectators. "  Chieregati continues: "On arriving in the lists the King presented himself before the Queen and  the ladies, making a thousand jumps in the

air, and after tiring one horse, he entered the tent  and mounted another. .. doing this constantly, and reappearing in the lists until the end of the  jousts". Dinner was then served, amid a scene of unparalleled splendour, and Chieregati avers  that the "guests remained at table for seven hours by the clock". The display of costume on  the King's part was equally varied and gorgeous. On one occasion he wore "stiff brocade  in the Hungarian fashion," on another, he "was dressed in white damask

in the Turkish  fashion, the above-mentioned robe all embroidered with roses, made of rubies and diamonds"; on a  third, he "wore royal robes down to the ground, of gold brocade lined with ermine"; while  "all the rest of the Court glittered with jewels and gold and silver, the pomp being  unprecedented". All this riot of wealth would no doubt impress the impecunious  Charles. In September he landed in Spain, so destitute that he was glad to accept the  offer of a hobby from the English ambassad

or. At the first meeting of his Cortes, they  demanded that he should marry at once, and not wait for Francis's daughter; the bride  his subjects desired was the daughter of the King of Portugal. They were no more willing  to part with Navarre; and Charles was forced to make to Francis the feeble excuse that he  was not aware, when he was in the Netherlands, of his true title to Navarre, but had learnt it  since his arrival in Spain; he also declined the personal interview to which Francis invit

ed him.  A rupture between Francis and Charles was only a question of time; and, to prepare for it,  both were anxious for England's alliance. Throughout the autumn of 1517 and spring of 1518,  France and England were feeling their way towards friendship. Albany had left Scotland, so that  source of irritation was gone. Henry had now a daughter, Mary, and Francis a son. "I will  unite them," said Wolsey; and in October, 1518, not only was a treaty of marriage and  alliance signed between England

and France, but a general peace for Europe. Leo the  Tenth sent Campeggio with blessings of peace from the Vicar of Christ, though he  was kept chafing at Calais for three months, till he could bring with him Leo's  appointment of Wolsey as legate and the deposition of Wolsey's enemy, Hadrian,  from the Bishopric of Bath and Wells. The ceremonies exceeded in splendour even  those of the year before. They included, says Giustinian, a "most sumptuous supper" at  Wolsey's house, "the like of which

, I fancy, was never given by Cleopatra or Caligula; the  whole banqueting hall being so decorated with huge vases of gold and silver, that I fancied myself  in the tower of Chosroes, when that monarch caused Divine honours to be paid him. After supper. ..  twelve male and twelve female dancers made their appearance in the richest and most sumptuous  array possible, being all dressed alike. .. . They were disguised in one suit of fine green  satin, all over covered with cloth of gold, undertied

together with laces of gold, and had  masking hoods on their heads; the ladies had tires made of braids of damask gold, with long hairs of  white gold. All these maskers danced at one time, and after they had danced they put off their  visors, and then they were all known. .. .The two leaders were the King and the Queen Dowager of  France, and all the others were lords and ladies. " These festivities were followed by the formal  ratification of peace. Approval of it was general, and the old coun

cillors who had been alienated by  Wolsey's Milan expedition, hastened to applaud. "It was the best deed," wrote Fox to Wolsey, "that  ever was done for England, and, next to the King, the praise of it is due to you. " Once more the  wheel had come round, and the stone of Sisyphus was lodged more secure than before some way  up the side of the hill. This general peace, which closed the wars begun ten years before by  the League of Cambrai, was not entirely due to a universal desire to beat sword

s into ploughshares  or to even turn them against the Turk. That was the everlasting pretence, but eighteen  months before, Maximilian had suffered a stroke of apoplexy; men, said Giustinian, commenting on the  fact, did not usually survive such strokes a year, and rivals were preparing to enter the  lists for the Empire. Maximilian himself, faithful to the end to his guiding  principle, found a last inspiration in the idea of disposing of his succession for  ready money. He was writing to Charl

es that it was useless to expect the Empire unless he  would spend at least as much as the French. "It would be lamentable," he said, "if we  should now lose all through some pitiful omission or penurious neglect;" and Francis was  "going about covertly and laying many baits," to attain the imperial crown. To Henry himself  Maximilian had more than once offered the prize, and Pace had declared that the offer  was only another design for extracting Henry's gold "for the electors would never  allo

w the crown to go out of their nation". The Emperor had first proposed it while  serving under Henry's banners in France. He renewed the suggestion in 1516,  inviting Henry to meet him at Coire. The brothers in arms were thence to  cross the Alps to Milan, where the Emperor would invest the English King with  the duchy; he would then take him on to Rome, resign the Empire himself, and have Henry  crowned. Not that Maximilian desired to forsake all earthly authority; he sought to  combine a spiri

tual with a temporal glory; he was to lay down the imperial crown  and place on his brows the papal tiara. Nothing was too fantastic for the Emperor  Maximilian; the man who could not wrest a few towns from Venice was always deluding himself  with the hope of leading victorious hosts to the seat of the Turkish Empire and the Holy City of  Christendom; the sovereign whose main incentive in life was gold, informed his daughter  that he intended to get himself canonised, and that after his death sh

e would have to  adore him. He died at Welz on 12th January, 1519, neither Pope nor saint, with  Jerusalem still in the hands of the Turk, and the succession to the Empire still  undecided. The contest now broke out in earnest, and the electors prepared  to garner their harvest of gold. The price of a vote was a hundredfold more  than the most corrupt parliamentary elector could conceive in his wildest dreams of avarice.  There were only seven electors and the prize was the greatest on earth. Fr

ancis the First said he  was ready to spend 3,000,000 crowns, and Charles could not afford to lag far behind. The Margrave  of Brandenburg, "the father of all greediness," as the Austrians called him, was particularly  influential because his brother, the Archbishop of Mainz, was also an elector and he required an  especially exorbitant bribe. He was ambitious as well as covetous, and the rivals endeavoured to  satisfy his ambitions with matrimonial prizes. He was promised Ferdinand's widow, Ger

maine  de Foix; Francis sought to parry this blow by offering to the Margrave's son the French Princess  Renée; Charles bid higher by offering his sister Catherine. Francis relied much on his personal  graces, the military renown he had won by the conquest of Northern Italy, and the assistance  of Leo. With the Pope he concluded a fresh treaty that year for the conquest of Ferrara, the  extension of the papal States, and the settlement of Naples on Francis's second son, on condition  that it was

meanwhile to be administered by papal legates, and that its king was to abstain  from all interference in spiritual matters. Charles, on the other hand, owed his advantages  to his position and not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none  of the physical or intellectual graces of Francis the First and Henry the Eighth. He  excelled in no sport, was unpleasant in features and repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity  or chivalry lightened his character, no deeds in war o

r statecraft yet sounded his fame. He  was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations had worn the imperial  crown; as such, too, he was a German prince, and the Germanic constitution forbade any  other the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire. Against this was the fact that his enormous  dominions, including Naples and Spain, would preclude his continued residence in Germany  and might threaten the liberties of the German people. But was there no third candidate? Leo  at he

art regarded the election of either as an absolute evil. He had always dreaded Maximilian's  claims to the temporal power of the Church, though Maximilian held not a foot of Italian soil. How  much more would he dread those claims in the hands of Francis or Charles! One threatened the papal  States from Milan, and the other from Naples. Of the two, he feared Francis the less; for  the union of Naples with the Empire had been such a terror to the Popes, that before  granting the investiture of th

at kingdom, they bound its king by oath not to compete  for the Empire. But a third candidate would offer an escape from between the  upper and the nether mill-stone; and Leo suggested at one time Charles's  brother Ferdinand, at another a German elector. Precisely the same recommendations  had been secretly made by Henry the Eighth. In public he followed the course he commended to  Leo; he advocated the claims of both Charles and Francis, when asked so to do, but sent trusty  envoys with his te

stimonials to explain that no credence was to be given them. He told the French  King that he favoured the election of Francis, and the Spanish King the election of Charles,  but like Leo he desired in truth the election of neither. Why should he not come forward  himself? His dominions were not so extensive that, when combined with the imperial dignity,  they would threaten to dominate Europe; and his election might seem to provide  a useful check in the balance of power. In March he had alread

y told Francis that his  claims were favoured by some of the electors, though he professed a wish to promote  the French King's pretensions. In May, Pace was sent to Germany with secret instructions  to endeavour to balance the parties and force the electors into a deadlock, from which the only  escape would be the election of a third candidate, either Henry himself or some German prince.  It is difficult to believe that Henry really thought his election possible or  was seriously pushing his cl

aim. He had repeatedly declined Maximilian's offers;  he had been as often warned by trusty advisers that no non-German prince stood a chance of  election; he had expressed his content with his own islands, which, Tunstall told him  with truth, were an Empire worth more than the barren imperial crown. Pace went far  too late to secure a party for Henry, and, what was even more fatal, he went without the  persuasive of money. Norfolk told Giustinian, after Pace's departure, that the election  wou

ld fall on a German prince, and such, said the Venetian, was the universal  belief and desire in England. After the election, Leo expressed his  "regret that Henry gave no attention to a project which would have made  him a near, instead of a distant, neighbour of the papal States". Under the  circumstances, it seems more probable that the first alternative in Pace's instructions  no more represented a settled design in Henry's mind than his often-professed intention of  conquering France, and t

hat the real purport of his mission was to promote the election of  the Duke of Saxony or another German prince. Whether that was its object or not the mission  was foredoomed to failure. The conclusion was never really in doubt. Electors might trouble  the waters in order to fish with more success. They might pretend to Francis that if he was free  with his money he might be elected, and to Charles that unless he was free with his money he would  not, but no sufficient reason had been shown why

they should violate national prejudices, the laws  of the Empire, and prescriptive hereditary right, in order to place Henry or Francis instead of a  German upon the imperial throne. Neither people nor princes nor barons, wrote Leo's envoys, would  permit the election of the Most Christian King; and even if the electors wished to elect  him, it was not in their power to do so. The whole of the nation, said Pace,  was in arms and furious for Charles; and had Henry been elected, they would in  th

eir indignation have killed Pace and all his servants. The voice of the German  people spoke in no uncertain tones; they would have Charles and no other to be their  ruler. Leo himself saw the futility of resistance, and making a virtue of necessity, he sent Charles  an absolution from his oath as King of Naples. As soon as it arrived, the electors unanimously  declared Charles their Emperor on 28th June. Thus was completed the shuffling of the cards  for the struggle which lasted till Henry's d

eath. Francis had now succeeded to Louis, Charles to  both his grandfathers, and Henry at twenty-eight was the doyen of the princes of Europe. He was  two years older than Francis and eight years older than Charles. Europe had passed under  the rule of youthful triumvirs whose rivalry troubled its peace and guided its destinies for  nearly thirty years. The youngest of all was the greatest in power. His dominions, it is true,  were disjointed, and funds were often to seek, but these defects have

been overrated. It was neither  of these which proved his greatest embarrassment. It was a cloud in Germany, as yet no bigger than a  man's hand, but soon to darken the face of Europe. Ferdinand and Maximilian had at times been  dangerous; Charles wielded the power of both. He ruled over Castile and Aragon, the Netherlands and  Naples, Burgundy and Austria; he could command the finest military forces in Europe; the infantry of  Spain, the science of Italy, the lance-knights of Germany, for whic

h Ferdinand sighed, were at his  disposal; and the wealth of the Indies was poured out at his feet. He bestrode the narrow world like  a Colossus, and the only hope of lesser men lay in the maintenance of Francis's power. Were that to  fail, Charles would become arbiter of Christendom, Italy a Spanish kingdom, and the Pope  little more than the Emperor's chaplain. "Great masters," said Tunstall, with reference  to a papal brief urged by Charles in excuse for his action in 1517, "could get great

clerks to  say what they liked. " The mastery of Charles in 1517 was but the shadow of what it became  ten years later; and if under its dominance "the great clerk" were called upon to decide  between "the great master" and Henry, it was obvious already that all Henry's services to the  Papacy would count for nothing. For the present, those services were to be remembered.  They were not, indeed, inconsiderable. It would be absurd to maintain that, since his  accession, Henry had been actuated by

respect for the Papacy more than by another motive;  but it is indisputable that that motive had entered more largely into his conduct than  into that of any other monarch. James the Fourth and Louis had been excommunicated,  Maximilian had obstinately countenanced a schismatic council and wished to arrogate  to himself the Pope's temporal power. Ferdinand's zeal for his house had eaten him up  and left little room for less selfish impulses; his anxiety for war with the Moor or the Turk  was bu

t a cloak; and the value of his frequent demands for a Reformation may be gauged by  his opinion that never was there more need for the Inquisition, and by his anger with Leo for  refusing the Inquisitors the preferments he asked. From hypocrisy like Ferdinand's Henry was, in his  early years, singularly free, and the devotion to the Holy See, which he inherited, was of a more  than conventional type. "He is very religious," wrote Giustinian, "and hears three masses daily  when he hunts, and som

etimes five on other days. He hears the office every day in  the Queen's chamber, that is to say, vesper and compline. " The best theologians  and doctors in his kingdom were regularly required to preach at his Court, when their  fee for each sermon was equivalent to ten or twelve pounds. He was generous in his  almsgiving, and his usual offering on Sundays and saints' days was six shillings  and eightpence or, in modern currency, nearly four pounds; often it was double that  amount, and there w

ere special offerings besides, such as the twenty shillings he sent every  year to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. In January, 1511, the gentlemen of the King's  chapel were paid what would now be seventy-five pounds for praying for the Queen's safe delivery,  and similar sums were no doubt paid on other occasions. In 1513, Catherine thought Henry's  success was all due to his zeal for religion, and a year or two later Erasmus wrote that  Henry's Court was an example to all Christendom f

or learning and piety. Piety went hand in hand  with a filial respect for the head of the Church. Not once in the ten years is there to be found any  expression from Henry of contempt for the Pope, whether he was Julius the Second or Leo the Tenth  There had been no occasion on which Pope and King had been brought into conflict, and almost  throughout they had acted in perfect harmony. It was the siege of Julius by Louis that drew  Henry from his peaceful policy to intervene as the champion of t

he Papal See, and it was as the  executor of papal censures that he made war on France. If he had ulterior views on that kingdom,  he could plead the justification of a brief, drawn up if not published, by Julius the  Second, investing him with the French crown. A papal envoy came to urge peace in 1514, and a  Pope claimed first to have suggested the marriage between Mary and Louis. The Milan expedition  of 1516 was made under cover of a new Holy League concluded in the spring of the previous  y

ear, and the peace of 1518 was made with the full approval and blessings of Leo. Henry's  devotion had been often acknowledged in words, and twice by tangible tokens of gratitude, in the  gift of the golden rose in 1510 and of the sword and cap in 1513. But did not his services merit  some more signal mark of favour? If Ferdinand was "Catholic," and Louis "Most Christian," might  not some title be found for a genuine friend? And, as early as 1515, Henry was pressing the Pope  for "some title as

protector of the Holy See". Various names were suggested, "King Apostolic,"  "King Orthodox," and others; and in January, 1516, we find the first mention of "Fidei Defensor".  But the prize was to be won by services more appropriate to the title than even ten years'  maintenance of the Pope's temporal interests. His championship of the Holy See had been the  most unselfish part of Henry's policy since he came to the throne; and his whole conduct had  been an example, which others were slow to fo

llow, and which Henry himself was soon to neglect. CHAPTER 5. KING AND CARDINAL. "Nothing," wrote  Giustinian of Wolsey in 1519, "pleases him more than to be called the arbiter of Christendom. "  Continental statesmen were inclined to ridicule and resent the Cardinal's claim. But the title  hardly exaggerates the part which the English minister was enabled to play during the next  few years by the rivalry of Charles and Francis, and by the apparently even balance of their  powers. The position w

hich England held in the councils of Europe in 1519 was a marvellous  advance upon that which it had occupied in 1509. The first ten years of Henry's reign had been a  period of fluctuating, but continual, progress. The campaign of 1513 had vindicated England's  military prowess, and had made it possible for Wolsey, at the peace of the following year, to  place his country on a level with France and Spain and the Empire. Francis's conquest of Milan, and  the haste with which Maximilian, Leo and

Charles sought to make terms with the victor, caused a  temporary isolation of England and a consequent decline in her influence. But the arrangements  made between Charles and Francis contained, in themselves, as acute English diplomatists saw,  the seeds of future disruption; and, in 1518, Wolsey was able so to play off these mutual  jealousies as to reassert England's position. He imposed a general peace, or rather a  truce, which raised England even higher than the treaties of 1514 had done,

and made  her appear as the conservator of the peace of Europe. England had almost usurped the place  of the Pope as mediator between rival Christian princes. These brilliant results were achieved  with the aid of very moderate military forces and an only respectable navy. They were due partly  to the lavish expenditure of Henry's treasures, partly to the extravagant faith of other  princes in the extent of England's wealth, but mainly to the genius for diplomacy  displayed by the great English

Cardinal. Wolsey had now reached the zenith of his power;  and the growth of his sense of his own importance is graphically described by the Venetian  ambassador. When Giustinian first arrived in England, Wolsey used to say, "His Majesty  will do so and so". Subsequently, by degrees, forgetting himself, he commenced saying, "We shall  do so and so". In 1519 he had reached such a pitch that he used to say, "I shall do so and so". Fox  had been called by Badoer "a second King," but Wolsey was now

"the King himself". "We have to  deal," said Fox, "with the Cardinal, who is not Cardinal, but King; and no one in the realm dares  attempt aught in opposition to his interests. " On another occasion Giustinian remarks:  "This Cardinal is King, nor does His Majesty depart in the least from the opinion and  counsel of his lordship". Sir Thomas More, in describing the negotiations for the peace of  1518, reports that only after Wolsey had concluded a point did he tell the council, "so that even 

the King hardly knows in what state matters are". A month or two later there was a curious  dispute between the Earl of Worcester and West, Bishop of Ely, who were sent to convey the  Treaty of London to Francis. Worcester, as a layman, was a partisan of  the King, West of the Cardinal. Worcester insisted that their detailed  letters should be addressed to Henry, and only general ones to Wolsey.  West refused; the important letters, he thought, should go to the Cardinal, the  formal ones to the

King; and, eventually, identical despatches were sent to  both. In negotiations with England, Giustinian told his Government, "if it were  necessary to neglect either King or Cardinal, it would be better to pass over the King; he  would therefore make the proposal to both, but to the Cardinal first, lest he should  resent the precedence conceded to the King". The popular charge against Wolsey, repeated by  Shakespeare, of having written Ego et rex meus, though true in fact, is false in intention

,  because no Latin scholar could put the words in any other order; but the Cardinal's  mental attitude is faithfully represented in the meaning which the familiar phrase  was supposed to convey. His arrogance does not rest merely on the testimony of personal  enemies like the historian, Polydore Vergil, and the poet Skelton, or of chroniclers like Hall,  who wrote when vilification of Wolsey pleased both king and people, but on the despatches  of diplomatists with whom he had to deal, and on th

e reports of observers  who narrowly watched his demeanour. "He is," wrote one, "the proudest prelate that  ever breathed. " During the festivities of the Emperor's visit to England, in 1520, Wolsey  alone sat down to dinner with the royal party, while peers, like the Dukes of Suffolk and  Buckingham, performed menial offices for the Cardinal, as well as for Emperor, King  and Queen. When he celebrated mass at the Field of Cloth of Gold, bishops invested him  with his robes and put sandals on hi

s feet, and "some of the chief noblemen in England"  brought water to wash his hands. A year later, at his meeting with Charles at Bruges,  he treated the Emperor as an equal. He did not dismount from his mule, but merely  doffed his cap, and embraced as a brother the temporal head of Christendom. When, after  a dispute with the Venetian ambassador, he wished to be friendly, he allowed  Giustinian, with royal condescension, and as a special mark of favour, to kiss his  hand. He never granted aud

ience either to English peers or foreign ambassadors until the  third or fourth time of asking. In 1515 it was the custom of ambassadors to dine with Wolsey  before presentation at Court, but four years later they were never served until the viands  had been removed from the Cardinal's table. A Venetian, describing Wolsey's embassy to France  in 1527, relates that his "attendants served cap in hand, and, when bringing the dishes, knelt  before him in the act of presenting them. Those who waited

on the Most Christian King, kept  their caps on their heads, dispensing with such exaggerated ceremonies. " Pretenders to royal  honours seldom acquire the grace of genuine royalty, and the Cardinal pursued with vindictive  ferocity those who offended his sensitive dignity. In 1515, Polydore Vergil said, in writing to  his friend, Cardinal Hadrian, that Wolsey was so tyrannical towards all men that his influence  could not last, and that all England abused him. The letter was copied by Wolsey's

secretary,  Vergil was sent to the Tower, and only released after many months at the repeated intercession of  Leo the Tenth His correspondent, Cardinal Hadrian, was visited with Wolsey's undying hatred. A  pretext for his ruin was found in his alleged complicity in a plot to poison the Pope;  the charge was trivial, and Leo forgave him. Not so Wolsey, who procured Hadrian's  deprivation of the Bishopric of Bath and Wells, appropriated the see for himself, and in  1518 kept Campeggio, the Pope's

legate, chafing at Calais until he could bring with  him the papal confirmation of these measures. Venice had the temerity to intercede with  Leo on Hadrian's behalf; Wolsey thereupon overwhelmed Giustinian with "rabid and insolent  language"; ordered him not to put anything in his despatches without his consent; and revoked the  privileges of Venetian merchants in England. In these outbursts of fury, he paid little respect to  the sacrosanct character of ambassadors. He heard that the papal nu

ncio, Chieregati, was sending  to France unfavourable reports of his conduct. The nuncio "was sent for by Wolsey, who took him  into a private chamber, laid rude hands upon him, fiercely demanding what he had written to the King  of France, and what intercourse he had held with Giustinian and his son, adding that he should not  quit the spot until he had confessed everything, and, if fair means were not sufficient, he  should be put upon the rack". Nine years later, Wolsey nearly precipitated wa

r between England  and the Emperor by a similar outburst against Charles's ambassador, De Praet. He  intercepted De Praet's correspondence, and confined him to his house. It was  a flagrant breach of international law. Tampering with diplomatic correspondence was  usually considered a sufficient cause for war; on this occasion war did not suit Charles's  purpose, but it was no fault of Wolsey's that his fury at an alleged personal slight did not  provoke hostilities with the most powerful prince

in Christendom. Englishmen fared no better than  others at Wolsey's hands. He used the coercive power of the State to revenge his private wrongs  as well as to secure the peace of the realm. In July, 1517, Sir Robert Sheffield,  who had been Speaker in two Parliaments, was sent to the Tower for complaining of Wolsey,  and to point the moral of Fox's assertion, that none durst do ought in opposition  to the Cardinal's interests. Again, the idea reflected by Shakespeare, that Wolsey  was jealous

of Pace, has been described as absurd; but it is difficult to draw any other inference  from the relations between them after 1521. While Wolsey was absent at Calais, he accused  Pace, without ground, of misrepresenting his letters to Henry, and of obtaining Henry's  favour on behalf of a canon of York; he complained that foreign powers were trusting  to another influence than his over the King; and, when he returned, he took care that  Pace should henceforth be employed, not as secretary to Hen

ry, but on  almost continuous missions to Italy. In 1525, when the Venetian ambassador was to thank  Henry for making a treaty with Venice, which Pace had concluded, he was instructed not to praise  him so highly, if the Cardinal were present, as if the oration were made to Henry alone;  and, four years later, Wolsey found an occasion for sending Pace to the Tower—treatment which  eventually caused Pace's mind to become unhinged. Wolsey's pride in himself, and his jealousy  of others, were not m

ore conspicuous than his thirst after riches. His fees as Chancellor were  reckoned by Giustinian at five thousand ducats a year. He made thrice that sum by New Year's  presents, "which he receives like the King". His demand for the Bishopric of Bath and  Wells, coupled with the fact that it was he who petitioned for Hadrian's deprivation, amazed  even the Court at Rome, and, "to avoid murmurs," compliance was deferred for a time. But these  scruples were allowed no more than ecclesiastical law

to stand in the way of Wolsey's preferment.  One of the small reforms decreed by the Lateran Council was that no bishoprics should be  held in commendam; the ink was scarcely dry when Wolsey asked in commendam for the see  of the recently conquered Tournay. Tournay was restored to France in 1518, but the Cardinal  took care that he should not be the loser. A sine qua non of the peace was that  Francis should pay him an annual pension of twelve thousand livres as compensation for  the loss of a b

ishopric of which he had never obtained possession. He drew other pensions for  political services, from both Francis and Charles; and, from the Duke of Milan, he obtained the  promise of ten thousand ducats a year before Pace set out to recover the duchy. It is scarcely  a matter for wonder that foreign diplomatists, and Englishmen, too, should have accused Wolsey  of spending the King's money for his own profit, and have thought that the surest way of  winning his favour was by means of a brib

e. When England, in 1521, sided with Charles against  Francis, the Emperor bound himself to make good to Wolsey all the sums he would lose by a breach with  France; and from that year onwards Charles paid—or owed—Wolsey eighteen thousand livres a year. It  was nine times the pensions considered sufficient for the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk; and even  so it does not include the revenue Wolsey derived from two Spanish bishoprics. These were not bribes  in the sense that they affected Wolsey's po

licy; they were well enough known to the King; to  spoil the Egyptians was considered fair game, and Henry was generous enough not to keep all  the perquisites of peace or war for himself. Two years after the agreement with  Charles, Ruthal, Bishop of Durham, died, and Wolsey exchanged Bath and Wells  for the richer see formerly held by his political ally and friend. But Winchester  was richer even than Durham; so when Fox followed Ruthal to the grave, in 1528, Wolsey  exchanged the northern for

the southern see, and begged that Durham might go to his natural  son, a youth of eighteen. All these were held in commendam with the Archbishopric of  York, but they did not satisfy Wolsey; and, in 1521, he obtained the grant of  St. Albans, the greatest abbey in England. His palaces outshone in splendour those  of Henry himself, and few monarchs have been able to display such wealth of  plate as loaded the Cardinal's table. Wolsey is supposed to have conceived  vast schemes of ecclesiastical

reform, which time and opportunity failed him to effect.  If he had ever seriously set about the work, the first thing to be reformed would have  been his own ecclesiastical practice. He personified in himself most of the clerical  abuses of his age. Not merely an "unpreaching prelate," he rarely said mass; his commendams and  absenteeism were alike violations of canon law. Three of the bishoprics he held he never  visited at all; York, which he had obtained fifteen years before, he did not visi

t till the  year of his death, and then through no wish of his own. He was equally negligent of the vow  of chastity; he cohabited with the daughter of "one Lark," a relative of the Lark who is  mentioned in the correspondence of the time as "omnipotent" with the Cardinal, and as resident  in his household. By her he left two children, a son, for whom he obtained a deanery,  four archdeaconries, five prebends, and a chancellorship, and sought the Bishopric  of Durham, and a daughter who became a

nun. The accusation brought against him by the Duke  of Buckingham and others, of procuring objects for Henry's sensual appetite, is a scandal, to  which no credence would have been attached but for Wolsey's own moral laxity, and the fact that the  governor of Charles the Fifth performed a similar office. Repellent as was Wolsey's character  in many respects, he was yet the greatest, as he was the last, of the ecclesiastical statesmen  who have governed England. As a diplomatist, pure and simpl

e, he has never been surpassed, and as an  administrator he has had few equals. "He is," says Giustinian, "very handsome, learned, extremely  eloquent, of vast ability and indefatigable. He alone transacts the same business as that  which occupies all the magistracies, offices, and councils of Venice, both civil and criminal;  and all State affairs are managed by him, let their nature be what it may. He is thoughtful,  and has the reputation of being extremely just; he favours the people exceedi

ngly, and  especially the poor, hearing their suits and seeking to despatch them instantly. He  also makes the lawyers plead gratis for all poor suitors. He is in very great repute,  seven times more so than if he were Pope. " His sympathy with the poor was no idle  sentiment, and his commission of 1517, and decree against enclosures in the following year, were the  only steps taken in Henry's reign to mitigate that curse of the agricultural population. The Evil  May Day riots of 1517 alone dist

urbed the peace of Wolsey's internal administration; and they were  due merely to anti-foreign prejudice, and to the idea that strangers within the gates monopolised  the commerce of England and diverted its profits to their own advantage. "Never," wrote Wolsey  to a bishop at Rome in 1518, "was the kingdom in greater harmony and repose than now; such is the  effect of my administration of justice and equity. " To Henry his strain was less arrogant. "And  for your realm," he says, "our Lord be t

hanked, it was never in such peace nor tranquillity;  for all this summer I have had neither of riot, felony, nor forcible entry, but that your laws  be in every place indifferently ministered without leaning of any manner. Albeit, there hath  lately been a fray betwixt Pygot, your Serjeant, and Sir Andrew Windsor's servants for the seisin  of a ward, whereto they both pretend titles; in the which one man was slain. I trust the  next term to learn them the law of the Star Chamber that they shall

ware how from henceforth  they shall redress their matter with their hands. They be both learned in the temporal law, and I  doubt not good example shall ensue to see them learn the new law of the Star Chamber, which,  God willing, they shall have indifferently administered to them, according to their  deserts. " Wolsey's "new law of the Star Chamber," his stern enforcement of the statutes  against livery and maintenance, and his spasmodic attempt to redress the evils of enclosures,  probably c

ontributed as much as his arrogance and ostentation to the ill-favour in which  he stood with the nobility and landed gentry. From the beginning there were frequent rumours of  plots to depose him, and his enemies abroad often talked of the universal hatred which he inspired  in England. The classes which benefited by his justice complained bitterly of the impositions  required to support his spirited foreign policy. Clerics who regarded him as a bulwark on the  one hand against heresy, and, on

the other, against the extreme view which Henry held from  the first of his authority over the Church, were alienated by the despotism Wolsey  wielded by means of his legatine powers. Even the mild and aged Warham felt his lash, and  was threatened with Præmunire for having wounded Wolsey's legatine authority by calling a  council at Lambeth. Peers, spiritual no less than temporal, regarded him as "the great  tyrant". Parliament he feared and distrusted; he had urged the speedy dissolution of th

at  of 1515; only one sat during the fourteen years of his supremacy, and with that the Cardinal  quarrelled. He possessed no hold over the nation, but only over the King, in whom alone he put  his trust. For the time he seemed secure enough. No one could touch a hair of his head so long as  he was shielded by Henry's power, and Henry seemed to have given over his royal authority to Wolsey's  hands with a blind and undoubting confidence. "The King," said one, in 1515, "is a youngling, cares  for

nothing but girls and hunting, and wastes his father's patrimony. " "He gambled," reported  Giustinian in 1519, "with the French hostages, occasionally, it was said, to the amount of six  or eight thousand ducats a day. " In the following summer Henry rose daily at four or five in the  morning and hunted till nine or ten at night; "he spares," said Pace, "no pains to convert  the sport of hunting into a martyrdom". "He devotes himself," wrote Chieregati, "to  accomplishments and amusements day

and night, is intent on nothing else, and leaves business  to Wolsey, who rules everything. " Wolsey, it was remarked by Leo the Tenth, made Henry  go hither and thither, just as he liked, and the King signed State papers without knowing  their contents. "Writing," admitted Henry, "is to me somewhat tedious and painful.  " When Wolsey thought it essential that autograph letters in Henry's hand should be sent  to other crowned heads, he composed the letters and sent them to Henry to copy out. Cou

ld the most  constitutional monarch have been more dutiful? But constitutional monarchy was not then invented,  and it is not surprising that Giustinian, in 1519, found it impossible to say much for Henry  as a statesman. Agere cum rege, he said, est nihil agere; anything told to the King was  either useless or was communicated to Wolsey. Bishop West was sure that Henry would not take the  pains to look at his and Worcester's despatches; and there was a widespread impression  abroad and at home

that the English King was a negligible quantity in the domestic  and foreign affairs of his own kingdom. For ten years Henry had reigned while first  his council, and then Wolsey, governed. Before another decade had passed, Henry was King  and Government in one; and nobody in the kingdom counted for much but the King. He stepped at  once into Wolsey's place, became his own prime minister, and ruled with a vigour which was  assuredly not less than the Cardinal's. Such transformations are not the

work of a moment,  and Henry's would have been impossible, had he in previous years been so completely the slave of  Vanity Fair, as most people thought. In reality, there are indications that beneath the superficial  gaiety of his life, Henry was beginning to use his own judgment, form his own conclusions,  and take an interest in serious matters. He was only twenty-eight in 1519,  and his character was following a normal course of development. From the  earliest years of his reign Henry had at

least two serious preoccupations, the  New Learning and his navy. We learn from Erasmus that Henry's Court was an example  to Christendom for learning and piety; that the King sought to promote learning among  the clergy; and on one occasion defended "mental and ex tempore prayer" against those  who apparently thought laymen should, in their private devotions, confine themselves  to formularies prescribed by the clergy. In 1519 there were more men of learning at the  English Court than at any u

niversity; it was more like a museum, says the great humanist, than  a Court; and in the same year the King endeavoured to stop the outcry against Greek, raised by the  reactionary "Trojans" at Oxford. "You would say," continues Erasmus, "that Henry was a universal  genius. He has never neglected his studies; and whenever he has leisure from his political  occupations, he reads, or disputes—of which he is very fond—with remarkable courtesy and unruffled  temper. He is more of a companion than a

king. For these little trials of wit, he prepares himself  by reading schoolmen, Thomas, Scotus or Gabriel. " His theological studies were encouraged  by Wolsey, possibly to divert the King's mind from an unwelcome interference in  politics, and it was at the Cardinal's instigation that Henry set to work on his famous  book against Luther. He seems to have begun it, or some similar treatise, which may afterwards  have been adapted to Luther's particular case, before the end of the year in which

the  German reformer published his original theses. In September, 1517, Erasmus heard that Henry had  returned to his studies, and, in the following June, Pace writes to Wolsey that, with respect  to the commendations given by the Cardinal to the King's book, though Henry does not think it worthy  such great praise as it has had from him and from all other "great learned" men, yet he says he is  very glad to have "noted in your grace's letters that his reasons be called inevitable, considering 

that your grace was sometime his adversary herein and of contrary opinion". It is obvious that  this "book," whatever it may have been, was the fruit of Henry's own mind, and that he adopted a  line of argument not entirely relished by Wolsey. But, if it was the book against Luther, it was  laid aside and rewritten before it was given to the world in its final form. Nothing more is  heard of it for three years. In April, 1521, Pace explains to Wolsey the delay in sending him  on some news-letter

s from Germany "which his grace had not read till this day after his dinner; and  thus he commanded me to write unto your grace, declaring he was otherwise occupied; the  Firste. , in scribendo contra Lutherum, as I do conjecture". Nine days later Pace  found the King reading a new book of Luther's, "which he dispraised"; and he took the opportunity  to show Henry Leo's bull against the Reformer. "His grace showed himself well contented with  the coming of the same; howbeit, as touching the publ

ication thereof, he said he would have  it well examined and diligently looked to afore it were published. " Even in the height of his  fervour against heresy, Henry was in no mood to abate one jot or one tittle of his royal authority  in ecclesiastical matters. His book was finished before 21st May, 1521, when the King wrote to  Leo, saying that "ever since he knew Luther's heresy in Germany, he had made it his study  how to extirpate it. He had called the learned of his kingdom to consider the

se errors and  denounce them, and exhort others to do the same. He had urged the Emperor and Electors, since  this pestilent fellow would not return to God, to extirpate him and his heretical books. He  thought it right still further to testify his zeal for the faith by his writings, that all  might see he was ready to defend the Church, not only with his arms, but with the resources  of his mind. He dedicated therefore, to the Pope, the first offerings of his intellect  and his little erudition

. " The letter had been preceded, on 12th May,  by a holocaust of Luther's books in St. Paul's Churchyard. Wolsey  sat in state on a scaffold at St. Paul's Cross, with the papal nuncio and the  Archbishop of Canterbury at his feet on the right, and the imperial ambassador and Tunstall, Bishop  of London, at his feet on the left; and while the books were being devoured by the flames, Fisher  preached a sermon denouncing the errors contained therein. But it was July before the fair copy of  Henry'

s book was ready for presentation to Leo; possibly the interval was employed by  learned men in polishing Henry's style, but the substance of the work was undoubtedly of  Henry's authorship. Such is the direct testimony of Erasmus, and there is no evidence to  indicate the collaboration of others. Pace was then the most intimate of Henry's  counsellors, and Pace, by his own confession, was not in the secret. Nor is the book so  remarkable as to preclude the possibility of Henry's authorship. Its

arguments  are respectable and give evidence of an intelligent and fairly extensive acquaintance  with the writings of the fathers and schoolmen; but they reveal no profound depth of theological  learning nor genius for abstract speculation. It does not rank so high in the realm of theology, as  do some of Henry's compositions in that of music. In August it was sent to Leo, with verses composed  by Wolsey and copied out in the royal hand. In September the English ambassador at Rome  presented L

eo his copy, bound in cloth of gold. The Pope read five leaves without interruption,  and remarked that "he would not have thought such a book should have come from the King's grace, who  hath been occupied, necessarily, in other feats, seeing that other men which hath occupied  themselves in study all their lives cannot bring forth the like". On 2nd October it was formally  presented in a consistory of cardinals; and, on the 11th, Leo promulgated his bull conferring  on Henry his coveted title,

"Fidei Defensor". Proud as he was of his scholastic achievement  and its reward at the hands of the Pope, Henry was doing more for the future  of England by his attention to naval affairs than by his pursuit of high-sounding  titles. His intuitive perception of England's coming needs in this respect is, perhaps, the  most striking illustration of his political foresight. He has been described as  the father of the British navy; and, had he not laid the foundations of England's  naval power, his

daughter's victory over Spain and entrance on the path that led  to empire would have been impossible. Under Henry, the navy was first  organised as a permanent force; he founded the royal dockyards at Woolwich and  Deptford, and the corporation of Trinity House; he encouraged the planting of timber for  shipbuilding, enacted laws facilitating inland navigation, dotted the coast  with fortifications, and settled the constitution of the naval service upon a plan  from which it has ever since ste

adily developed. He owed his inspiration to none of his  councillors, least of all to Wolsey, who had not the faintest glimmering of the importance  of securing England's naval supremacy, and who, during the war of 1522-23, preferred futile  invasions on land to Henry's "secret designs" for destroying the navy of France. The King's  interest in ships and shipbuilding was strong, even amid the alluring diversions of the first  years of his reign. He watched his fleet sail for Guienne in 1512, and

for France in 1513; he  knew the speed, the tonnage and the armament of every ship in his navy; he supervised the  minutest details of their construction. In 1520 his ambassador at Paris tells  him that Francis is building a ship, "and reasoneth in this mystery of shipman's craft  as one which had understanding in the same. But, sir, he approacheth not your highness in  that science. " A French envoy records how, in 1515, the whole English Court went  down to see the launch of the Princess Mary

. Henry himself "acted as pilot  and wore a sailor's coat and trousers, made of cloth of gold, and a gold chain with  the inscription, 'Dieu est mon droit,' to which was suspended a whistle, which  he blew nearly as loud as a trumpet". The launch of a ship was then almost  a religious ceremony, and the place of the modern bottle of champagne was taken by a  mass, which was said by the Bishop of Durham. In 1518 Giustinian tells how Henry went to  Southampton to see the Venetian galleys, and cause

d some new guns to be "fired  again and again, marking their range, as he is very curious about matters of this  kind". It was not long before Henry developed an active participation in serious matters other  than theological disputes and naval affairs. It is not possible to trace its growth with  any clearness because no record remains of the verbal communications which were sufficient to  indicate his will during the constant attendance of Wolsey upon him. But, as soon as monarch and  minister

were for some cause or another apart, evidence of Henry's activity in political matters  becomes more available. Thus, in 1515, we find Wolsey sending the King, at his own request,  the Act of Apparel, just passed by Parliament, for Henry's "examination and correction".  He also desires Henry's determination about the visit of the Queen of Scotland, that  he may make the necessary arrangements. In 1518 Henry made a prolonged stay at Abingdon,  partly from fear of the plague, and partly, as he t

old Pace, because at Abingdon  people were not continually coming to tell him of deaths, as they did daily in  London. During this absence from London, Henry insisted upon the attendance of sufficient  councillors to enable him to transact business; he established a relay of posts every  seven hours between himself and Wolsey; and we hear of his reading "every word  of all the letters" sent by his minister. Every week Wolsey despatched an account of such  State business as he had transacted; and

on one occasion, "considering the importance of Wolsey's  letters," Henry paid a secret and flying visit to London. In 1519 there was a sort of revolution  at Court, obscure enough now, but then a subject of some comment at home and abroad. Half a dozen  of Henry's courtiers were removed from his person and sent into honourable exile, receiving posts  at Calais, at Guisnes, and elsewhere. Giustinian thought that Henry had been gambling too  much and wished to turn over a new leaf. There were al

so rumours that these courtiers  governed Henry after their own appetite, to the King's dishonour; and Henry, annoyed at  the report and jealous as ever of royal prestige, promptly cashiered them, and filled their  places with grave and reverend seniors. Two years later Wolsey was abroad at the conference  of Calais, and again Henry's hand in State affairs becomes apparent. Pace, defending himself from the  Cardinal's complaints, tells him that he had done everything "by the King's express comma

ndment, who  readeth all your letters with great diligence". One of the letters which  angered Wolsey was the King's, for Pace "had devised it very different";  but the King would not approve of it; "and commanded me to bring your said letters  into his privy chamber with pen and ink, and there he would declare unto me what I should  write. And when his grace had your said letters, he read the same three times, and marked such  places as it pleased him to make answer unto, and commanded me to wr

ite and rehearse as liked  him, and not further to meddle with that answer; so that I herein nothing did but obeyed  the King's commandment, and especially at such time as he would upon good grounds  be obeyed, whosoever spake to the contrary. " Wolsey might say in his pride "I shall do so  and so," and foreign envoys might think that the Cardinal made the King "go hither and thither,  just as he liked"; but Wolsey knew perfectly well that when he thought fit, Henry "would be  obeyed, whosoever

spake to the contrary". He might delegate much of his authority, but men were under  no misapprehension that he could and would revoke it whenever he chose. For the time being, King  and Cardinal worked together in general harmony, but it was a partnership in which Henry could  always have the last word, though Wolsey did most of the work. As early as 1518 he had  nominated Standish to the bishopric of St. Asaph, disregarding Wolsey's candidate and  the opposition of the clerical party at Court,

who detested Standish for his advocacy of  Henry's authority in ecclesiastical matters, and dreaded his promotion as an evil omen  for the independence of the Church. Even in the details of administration, the King  was becoming increasingly vigilant. In 1519 he drew up a "remembrance of such things" as  he required the Cardinal to "put in effectual execution". They were twenty-one in number  and ranged over every variety of subject. The household was to be arranged;  "views to be made and book

s kept"; the ordnance seen to; treasurers were to make  monthly reports of their receipts and payments, and send counterparts to the King; the surveyor  of lands was to make a yearly declaration; and Wolsey himself and the judges were to make  quarterly reports to Henry in person. There were five points "which the King will debate with  his council," the administration of justice, reform of the exchequer, Ireland, employment of  idle people, and maintenance of the frontiers. The general plan of

Wolsey's negotiations  at Calais in 1521 was determined by King and Cardinal in consultation, and every important  detail in them and in the subsequent preparations for war was submitted to Henry. Not infrequently  they differed. Wolsey wanted Sir William Sandys to command the English contingent; Henry declared  it would be inconsistent with his dignity to send a force out of the realm under the command of any  one of lower rank than an earl. Wolsey replied that Sandys would be cheaper than an e

arl, but  the command was entrusted to the Earl of Surrey. Henry thought it unsafe, considering the imminence  of a breach with France, for English wine ships to resort to Bordeaux; Wolsey thought otherwise, and  they disputed the point for a month. Honours were divided; the question was settled for the time  by twenty ships sailing while the dispute was in progress. Apparently they returned in safety,  but the seizure of English ships at Bordeaux in the following March justified Henry's caution

.  The King was already an adept in statecraft, and there was at least an element of truth in  the praise which Wolsey bestowed on his pupil. "No man," he wrote, "can more groundly consider  the politic governance of your said realm, nor more assuredly look to the preservation  thereof, than ye yourself. " And again, "surely, if all your whole council had been  assembled together, they could not have more deeply perceived or spoken therein". The  Cardinal "could not express the joy and comfort w

ith which he noted the King's prudence";  but he can scarcely have viewed Henry's growing interference without some secret misgivings. For  he was developing not only Wolsey's skill and lack of scruple in politics, but also a choleric  and impatient temper akin to the Cardinal's own. In 1514 Carroz had complained  of Henry's offensive behaviour, and had urged that it would become impossible  to control him, if the "young colt" were not bridled. In the following year Henry  treated a French envoy

with scant civility, and flatly contradicted him twice as he described  the battle of Marignano. Giustinian also records how Henry went "pale with anger" at unpleasant  news. A few years later his successor describes Henry's "very great rage" when detailing  Francis's injuries; Charles made the same complaints against the French King, "but not so  angrily, in accordance with his gentler nature". On another occasion Henry turned his back  upon a diplomatist and walked away in the middle of his s

peech, an incident, we are told,  on which much comment was made in Rome. But these outbursts were rare and they grew rarer;  in 1527 Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, remarks that it was "quite the reverse  of the King's ordinary manner" to be more violent than Wolsey; and throughout the period  of strained relations with the Emperor, Chapuys constantly refers to the unfailing courtesy  and graciousness with which Henry received him. He never forgot himself so far as to lay  rude hands on an amb

assador, as Wolsey did; and no provocation betrayed him in his later  years, passionate though he was, into a neglect of the outward amenities of diplomatic and  official intercourse. Outbursts of anger, of course, there were; but they were often  like the explosions of counsel in law courts, and were "to a great extent diplomatically  controlled". Nor can we deny the consideration with which Henry habitually treated his  councillors, the wide discretion he allowed them in the exercise of their

duties, and  the toleration he extended to contrary opinions. He was never impatient of advice  even when it conflicted with his own views. His long arguments with Wolsey, and the  freedom with which the Cardinal justified his recommendations, even after Henry had  made up his mind to an opposite course, are a sufficient proof of the fact. In  1517, angered by Maximilian's perfidy, Henry wrote him some very "displeasant"  letters. Tunstall thought they would do harm, kept them back, and received

no censure for his  conduct. In 1522-23 Wolsey advised first the siege of Boulogne and then its abandonment. "The King,"  wrote More, "is by no means displeased that you have changed your opinion, as his highness  esteemeth nothing in counsel more perilous than one to persevere in the maintenance of  his advice because he hath once given it. He therefore commendeth and most  affectuously thanketh your faithful diligence and high wisdom in advertising him of  the reasons which have moved you to

change your opinion. " No king knew better than Henry  how to get good work from his ministers, and his warning against persevering in  advice, merely because it has once been given, is a political maxim for all time. A  lesson might also be learnt from a story of Henry and Colet told by Erasmus on Colet's own  authority. In 1513 war fever raged in England. Colet's bishop summoned him "into the King's  Court for asserting, when England was preparing for war against France, that an unjust  peace

was preferable to the most just war; but the King threatened his persecutor with  vengeance. After Easter, when the expedition was ready against France, Colet preached on  Whitsunday before the King and the Court, exhorting men rather to follow the example  of Christ their prince than that of Cæsar and Alexander. The King was afraid that this sermon  would have an ill effect upon the soldiers and sent for the Dean. Colet happened to be dining  at the Franciscan monastery near Greenwich. When the

King heard of it, he entered the  garden of the monastery, and on Colet's appearance dismissed his attendants;  then discussed the matter with him, desiring him to explain himself, lest his  audience should suppose that no war was justifiable. After the conversation was  over he dismissed him before them all, drinking to Colet's health and saying  'Let every man have his own doctor, this is mine'. " The picture is pleasing evidence  of Henry's superiority to some vulgar passions. Another instan

ce of freedom from popular  prejudice, which he shared with his father, was his encouragement of foreign  scholars, diplomatists and merchants; not a few of the ablest of Tudor agents were  of alien birth. He was therefore intensely annoyed at the rabid fury against them that  broke out in the riots of Evil May Day; yet he pardoned all the ringleaders but one. Tolerance and clemency were no small part of his  character in early manhood; and together with his other mental and physical graces, his

love  of learning and of the society of learned men, his magnificence and display, his supremacy  in all the sports that were then considered the peculiar adornment of royalty, they  contributed scarcely less than Wolsey's genius for diplomacy and administration  to England's renown. "In short," wrote Chieregati to Isabella d'Este in 1517, "the  wealth and civilisation of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians  appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very

elegant manners,  extreme decorum, and very great politeness. And amongst other things there is this most  invincible King, whose accomplishments and qualities are so many and excellent that I  consider him to surpass all who ever wore a crown; and blessed and happy may this country call itself  in having as its lord so worthy and eminent a sovereign; whose sway is more bland and gentle  than the greatest liberty under any other. " CHAPTER 6. FROM CALAIS TO ROME. The wonderful  success that had

attended Wolsey's policy during his seven years' tenure of power,  and the influential position to which he had raised England in the councils of  Christendom, might well have disturbed the mental balance of a more modest and  diffident man than the Cardinal; and it is scarcely surprising that he fancied himself,  and sought to become, arbiter of the destinies of Europe. The condition of continental politics  made his ambition seem less than extravagant. Power was almost monopolised by two young

princes  whose rivalry was keen, whose resources were not altogether unevenly matched, and whose disputes  were so many and serious that war could only be averted by a pacific determination on both sides  which neither possessed. Francis had claims on Naples, and his dependant, D'Albret, on Navarre.  Charles had suzerain rights over Milan and a title to Burgundy, of which his great-grandfather  Charles the Bold had been despoiled by Louis the Eleventh. Yet the Emperor had not the  slightest int

ention of compromising his possession of Naples or Navarre, and Francis was quite as  resolute to surrender neither Burgundy nor Milan. They both became eager competitors  for the friendship of England, which, if its resources were inadequate  to support the position of arbiter, was at least a most useful makeweight.  England's choice of policy was, however, strictly limited. She could not make war upon  Charles. It was not merely that Charles had a staunch ally in his aunt Catherine of Aragon, 

who is said to have "made such representations and shown such reasons against" the alliance with  Francis "as one would not have supposed she would have dared to do, or even to imagine". It was  not merely that in this matter Catherine was backed by the whole council except Wolsey,  and by the real inclinations of the King. It was that the English people were firmly  imperialist in sympathy. The reason was obvious. Charles controlled the wool-market  of the Netherlands, and among English export

s wool was all-important. War with Charles  meant the ruin of England's export trade, the starvation or impoverishment of thousands  of Englishmen; and when war was declared against Charles eight years later, it more nearly cost  Henry his throne than all the fulminations of the Pope or religious discontents, and after  three months it was brought to a summary end. England remained at peace with Spain so long  as Spain controlled its market for wool; when that market passed into the hands of the

  revolted Netherlands, the same motive dictated an alliance with the Dutch against Philip the Second  War with Charles in 1520 was out of the question; and for the next two years Wolsey and Henry  were endeavouring to make Francis and the Emperor bid against each other, in order that  England might obtain the maximum of concession from Charles when it should declare in  his favour, as all along was intended. By the Treaty of London Henry was bound to  assist the aggrieved against the aggressor.

But that treaty had been concluded between  England and France in the first instance; Henry's only daughter was betrothed to  the Dauphin; and Francis was anxious to cement his alliance with Henry by a personal  interview. It was Henry's policy to play the friend for the time; and, as a proof of  his desire for the meeting with Francis, he announced, in August, 1519, his resolve to  wear his beard until the meeting took place. He reckoned without his wife. On 8th November  Louise of Savoy, the

queen-mother of France, taxed Boleyn, the English ambassador, with  a report that Henry had put off his beard. "I said," writes Boleyn, "that, as I suppose, it  hath been by the Queen's desire; for I told my lady that I have hereafore time known when  the King's grace hath worn long his beard, that the Queen hath daily made him great  instance, and desired him to put it off for her sake. " Henry's inconstancy in the matter of his  beard not only caused diplomatic inconvenience, but, it may be pa

renthetically remarked, adds to  the difficulty of dating his portraits. Francis, however, considered the Queen's  interference a sufficient excuse, or was not inclined to stick at such  trifles; and on 10th January, 1520, he nominated Wolsey his proctor to  make arrangements for the interview. As Wolsey was also agent for Henry, the French  King saw no further cause for delay. The delay came from England; the meeting with Francis  would be a one-sided pronouncement without some corresponding fa

vour to Charles. Some  time before Henry had sent Charles a pressing invitation to visit England on his way from  Spain to Germany; and the Emperor, suspicious of the meeting between Henry and Francis, was  only too anxious to come and forestall it. The experienced Margaret of Savoy admitted that  Henry's friendship was essential to Charles; but Spaniards were not to be hurried,  and it would be May before the Emperor's convoy was ready. So Henry endeavoured  to postpone his engagement with Fran

cis. The French King replied that by the end  of May his Queen would be in the eighth month of her pregnancy, and that if the  meeting were further prorogued she must perforce be absent. Henry was nothing if not  gallant, at least on the surface. Francis's argument clinched the matter. The interview,  ungraced by the presence of France's Queen, would, said Henry, be robbed of most of its  charm; and he gave Charles to understand that, unless he reached England by the middle of  May, his visit wo

uld have to be cancelled. This intimation produced an unwonted despatch in  the Emperor's movements; but fate was against him, and contrary winds rendered his arrival  in time a matter of doubt till the last possible moment. Henry must cross to Calais on  the 31st of May, whether Charles came or not; and it was the 26th before the Emperor's ships  appeared off the cliffs of Dover. Wolsey put out in a small boat to meet him, and conducted  Charles to the castle where he lodged. During the night H

enry arrived. Early next day, which  was Whitsunday, the two sovereigns proceeded to Canterbury, where the Queen and Court had come  on the way to France to spend their Pentecost. Five days the Emperor remained with his  aunt, whom he now saw for the first time; but the days were devoted to business rather  than to elaborate ceremonial and show, for which there had been little time to  prepare. On the last day of May Charles took ship at Sandwich for Flanders. Henry  embarked at Dover for France

. The painting at Hampton Court depicting the scene has, like  almost every other picture of Henry's reign, been ascribed to Holbein; but six years were to  pass before the great artist visited England. The King himself is represented as being on  board the four-masted Henry Grace à Dieu, commonly called the Great Harry, the finest ship  afloat; though the vessel originally fitted out for his passage was the Katherine Pleasaunce. At  eleven o'clock he landed at Calais. On Monday, the 4th of June

, Henry and all his  Court proceeded to Guisnes. There a temporary palace of art had been erected,  the splendour of which is inadequately set forth in pages upon pages of contemporary  descriptions. One Italian likened it to the palaces described in Boiardo's Orlando  Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso; another declared that it could not have been  better designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. Everything was in harmony with this  architectural pomp. Wolsey was accompanied, it was said in

Paris, by two hundred gentlemen  clad in crimson velvet, and had a body-guard of two hundred archers. He was himself  clothed in crimson satin from head to foot, his mule was covered with crimson velvet,  and her trappings were all of gold. Henry, "the most goodliest prince that ever reigned  over the realm of England," appeared even to Frenchmen as a very handsome prince, "honnête,  hault et droit," in manner gentle and gracious, rather fat, and—in spite of his Queen—with  a red beard, large en

ough and very becoming. Another eye-witness adds the curious remark  that, while Francis was the taller of the two, Henry had the handsomer and more feminine  face! On the 7th of June the two Kings started simultaneously from Guisnes and Ardres  for their personal meeting in the valley mid-way between the two towns, already known as the  Val Doré. The obscure but familiar phrase, Field of Cloth of Gold, is a mistranslation  of the French Camp du Drap d'Or. As they came in sight a temporary suspi

cion  of French designs seized the English, but it was overcome. Henry and Francis rode  forward alone, embraced each other first on horseback and then again on foot, and made show  of being the closest friends in Christendom. On Sunday the 10th Henry dined with the French  Queen, and Francis with Catherine of Aragon. The following week was devoted to tourneys, which the  two Kings opened by holding the field against all comers. The official accounts are naturally silent  on the royal wrestling

match, recorded in French memoirs and histories. On the 17th Francis, as  a final effort to win Henry's alliance, paid a surprise visit to him at breakfast with only  four attendants. The jousts were concluded with a solemn mass said by Wolsey in a chapel built on  the field. The Cardinal of Bourbon presented the Gospel to Francis to kiss; he refused, offering it  to Henry who was too polite to accept the honour. The same respect for each other's dignity was  observed with the Pax, and the two Q

ueens behaved with a similarly courteous punctilio. After  a friendly dispute as to who should kiss the Pax first, they kissed each other instead. On the  24th Henry and Francis met to interchange gifts, to make their final professions of friendship,  and to bid each other adieu. Francis set out for Abbeville, and Henry returned to Calais.  The Field of Cloth of Gold was the last and most gorgeous display of the departing  spirit of chivalry; it was also perhaps the most portentous deception on

record. "These  sovereigns," wrote a Venetian, "are not at peace. They adapt themselves to circumstances, but  they hate each other very cordially. " Beneath the profusion of friendly pretences lay  rooted suspicions and even deliberate hostile intentions. Before Henry left England  the rumour of ships fitting out in French ports had stopped preparations for the interview;  and they were not resumed till a promise under the broad seal of France was given that no  French ship should sail before H

enry's return. On the eve of the meeting Henry is said to have  discovered that three or four thousand French troops were concealed in the neighbouring  country; he insisted on their removal, and Francis's unguarded visit to Henry was  probably designed to disarm the English distrust. No sooner was Henry's back turned than  the French began the fortification of Ardres, while Henry on his part went to  Calais to negotiate a less showy but genuine friendship with Charles. No  such magnificence ado

rned their meeting as had been displayed at the Field of Cloth  of Gold, but its solid results were far more lasting. On 10th July Henry rode to  Gravelines where the Emperor was waiting. On the 11th they returned together to Calais,  where during a three days' visit the negotiations begun at Canterbury were completed. The  ostensible purport of the treaty signed on the 14th was to bind Henry to proceed no  further in the marriage between the Princess Mary and the Dauphin, and Charles no further

  in that between himself and Francis's daughter, Charlotte. But more topics were discussed  than appeared on the surface; and among them was a proposal to marry Mary to the Emperor  himself. The design proves that Henry and Wolsey had already made up their minds to side with  Charles, whenever his disputes with Francis should develop into open hostilities.  That consummation could not be far off. Charles had scarcely turned his back upon Spain  when murmurs of disaffection were heard through th

e length and breadth of the land; and while he  was discussing with Henry at Calais the prospects of a war with France, his commons in Spain  broke out into open revolt. The rising had attained such dimensions by February, 1521,  that Henry thought Charles was likely to lose his Spanish dominions. The temptation was too  great for France to resist; and in the early spring of 1521 French forces overran Navarre,  and restored to his kingdom the exile D'Albret. Francis had many plausible excuses, a

nd sought  to prove that he was not really the aggressor. There had been confused fighting between  the imperialist Nassau and Francis's allies, the Duke of Guelders and Robert de la Marck,  which the imperialists may have begun. But Francis revealed his true motive, when he told  Fitzwilliam that he had many grievances against Charles and could not afford to neglect this  opportunity for taking his revenge. War between Emperor and King soon spread from Navarre to the  borders of Flanders and to

the plains of Northern Italy. Both sovereigns claimed the assistance  of England in virtue of the Treaty of London. But Henry would not be prepared for  war till the following year at least; and he proposed that Wolsey should go to Calais to  mediate between the two parties and decide which had been the aggressor. Charles, either because  he was unprepared or was sure of Wolsey's support, readily agreed; but Francis was more reluctant,  and only the knowledge that, if he refused, Henry would at

once side with Charles, induced him  to consent to the conference. So on 2nd August, 1521, the Cardinal again crossed the Channel.  His first interview was with the imperial envoys. They announced that Charles had  given them no power to treat for a truce. Wolsey refused to proceed without this  authority; and he obtained the consent of the French chancellor, Du Prat, to his  proposal to visit the Emperor at Bruges, and secure the requisite powers. He was absent  more than a fortnight, and not

long after his return fell ill. This served to pass time  in September, and the extravagant demands of both parties still further prolonged the  proceedings. Wolsey was constrained to tell them the story of a courtier who asked his King  for the grant of a forest; when his relatives denounced his presumption, he replied that he  only wanted in reality eight or nine trees. The French and imperial chancellors not merely  demanded their respective forests, but made the reduction of each single tree

a matter of  lengthy dispute; and as soon as a fresh success in the varying fortune of war was reported, they  returned to their early pretensions. Wolsey was playing his game with consummate skill; delay was  his only desire; his illness had been diplomatic; his objects were to postpone for a few months the  breach and to secure the pensions from France due at the end of October. The conference at  Calais was in fact a monument of perfidy worthy of Ferdinand the Catholic. The plan was  Wolsey'

s, but Henry had expressed full approval. As early as July the King was full of his secret  design for destroying the navy of France, though he did not propose to proceed with the enterprise  till Wolsey had completed the arrangements with Charles. The subterfuge about Charles refusing  his powers and the Cardinal's journey to Bruges had been arranged between Henry, Wolsey and  Charles before Wolsey left England. The object of that visit, so far from being to facilitate  an agreement, was to con

clude an offensive and defensive alliance against one of the two parties  between whom Wolsey was pretending to mediate. "Henry agrees," wrote Charles's ambassador on 6th  July, "with Wolsey's plan that he should be sent to Calais under colour of hearing the grievances  of both parties: and when he cannot arrange them, he should withdraw to the Emperor to treat of  the matters aforesaid". The treaty was concluded at Bruges on 25th August before he returned to  Calais; the Emperor promised Wolsey

the Papacy; the details of a joint invasion were  settled. Charles was to marry Mary; and the Pope was to dispense the two  from the disability of their kinship, and from engagements with others  which both had contracted. The Cardinal might be profuse in his protestations  of friendship for France, of devotion to peace, and of his determination to do justice to the  parties before him. But all his painted words could not long conceal the fact that behind  the mask of the judge were hidden the

features of a conspirator. It was an unpleasant time for  Fitzwilliam, the English ambassador at the French Court. The King's sister, Marguerite de Valois,  taxed Fitzwilliam with Wolsey's proceedings, hinting that deceit was being practised on  Francis. The ambassador grew hot, vowed Henry was not a dissembler, and that he would prove it on  any gentleman who dared to maintain that he was. But he knew nothing of Wolsey's intrigues; nor  was the Cardinal, to whom Fitzwilliam denounced the insinu

ation, likely to blush, though he knew  that the charge was true. Wolsey returned from Calais at the end of November, having failed to  establish the truce to which the negotiations had latterly been in appearance directed. But  the French half-yearly pensions were paid, and England had the winter in which to prepare  for war. No attempt had been made to examine impartially the mutual charges of aggression  urged by the litigants, though a determination of that point could alone justify England'

s  intervention. The dispute was complicated enough. If, as Charles contended, the Treaty of  London guaranteed the status quo, Francis, by invading Navarre, was undoubtedly the offender.  But the French King pleaded the Treaty of Noyon, by which Charles had bound himself to do justice  to the exiled King of Navarre, to marry the French King's daughter, and to pay tribute for Naples.  That treaty was not abrogated by the one concluded in London, yet Charles had fulfilled none of  his promises. M

oreover, the Emperor himself had, long before the invasion of Navarre, been  planning a war with France, and negotiating with Leo to expel the French from Milan, and to  destroy the predominant French faction in Genoa. His ministers were making little  secret of Charles's warlike intentions, when the Spanish revolt placed  irresistible temptation in Francis's way, and provoked that attack on Navarre, which  enabled Charles to plead, with some colour, that he was not the aggressor. This was the 

ground alleged by Henry for siding with Charles, but it was not his real reason for going to  war. Nearly a year before Navarre was invaded, he had discussed the rupture of Mary's engagement  with the Dauphin and the transference of her hand to the Emperor. The real motives of  England's policy do not appear on the surface. "The aim of the King of England,"  said Clement the Seventh in 1524, "is as incomprehensible as the causes  by which he is moved are futile. He may, perhaps, wish to revenge

himself for the  slights he has received from the King of France and from the Scots, or to punish the  King of France for his disparaging language; or, seduced by the flattery of the Emperor,  he may have nothing else in view than to help the Emperor; or he may, perhaps, really wish to  preserve peace in Italy, and therefore declares himself an enemy of any one who disturbs it. It  is even not impossible that the King of England expects to be rewarded by the Emperor after the  victory, and hopes

, perhaps, to get Normandy. " Clement three years before, when Cardinal  de Medici, had admitted that he knew little of English politics; and his ignorance may explain  his inability to give a more satisfactory reason for Henry's conduct than these tentative  and far-fetched suggestions. But after the publication of Henry's State papers, it is not  easy to arrive at any more definite conclusion. The only motive Wolsey alleges, besides the  ex post facto excuses of Francis's conduct, is the recov

ery of Henry's rights to the crown  of France; and if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to  the level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme, when  Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000 foot or 10,000 horse, without  hired contingents from Charles's domains; when, according to Giustinian, it would have been  hard to levy 100 men-at-arms or 1000 light cavalry in the whole island; when the only  respectable military force

was the archers, already an obsolete arm. Invading hosts could  never be victualled for more than three months, or stand a winter campaign; English  troops were ploughmen by profession and soldiers only by chance; Henry  the Seventh's treasure was exhausted, and efforts to raise money for fitful and  futile inroads nearly produced a revolt. Henry the Eighth himself was writing that to  provide for these inroads would prevent him keeping an army in Ireland; and Wolsey was  declaring that for the

same reason English interests in Scotland must take care of  themselves, that border warfare must be confined to the strictest defensive, and that  a "cheap" deputy must be found for Ireland, who would rule it, like Kildare,  without English aid. It is usual to lay the folly of the pretence to  the crown of France at Henry's door. But it is a curious fact that when Wolsey was  gone, and Henry was his own prime minister, this spirited foreign policy  took a very subordinate place, and Henry turn

ed his attention to the cultivation  of his own garden instead of seeking to annex his neighbour's. It is possible that he was  better employed in wasting his people's blood and treasure in the futile devastation of  France, than in placing his heel on the Church and sending Fisher and More to the scaffold;  but his attempts to reduce Ireland to order, and to unite England and Scotland, violent  though his methods may have been, were at least more sane than the quest for the crown of  France, or

even for the possession of Normandy. Yet if these were not Wolsey's aims, what  were his motives? The essential thing for England was the maintenance of a fairly  even balance between Francis and Charles; and if Wolsey thought that would best be secured  by throwing the whole of England's weight into the Emperor's scale, he must have strangely misread  the political situation. He could not foresee, it may be said, the French debacle.  If so, it was from no lack of omens. Even supposing he was i

gnorant,  or unable to estimate the effects, of the moral corruption of Francis, the  peculations of his mother Louise of Savoy, the hatred of the war, universal  among the French lower classes, there were definite warnings from more careful  observers. As early as 1517 there were bitter complaints in France of the gabelle and other  taxes, and a Cordelier denounced the French King as worse than Nero. In 1519 an anonymous Frenchman  wrote that Francis had destroyed his own people, emptied his ki

ngdom of money, and that the  Emperor or some other would soon have a cheap bargain of the kingdom, for he was more  unsteady on his throne than people thought. Even the treason of Bourbon, which contributed  so much to the French King's fall, was rumoured three years before it occurred, and in 1520 he  was known to be "playing the malcontent". At the Field of Cloth of Gold Henry is said to have  told Francis that, had he a subject like Bourbon, he would not long leave his head on his shoulders.

  All these details were reported to the English Government and placed among English archives;  and, indeed, at the English Court the general anticipation, justified by the event,  was that Charles would carry the day. No possible advantage could accrue to England  from such a destruction of the balance of power; her position as mediator was only tenable so long  as neither Francis nor Charles had the complete mastery. War on the Emperor was, no doubt, out  of the question, but that was no reaso

n for war on France. Prudence counselled England to  make herself strong, to develop her resources, and to hold her strength in reserve, while  the two rivals weakened each other by war. She would then be in a far better position to  make her voice heard in the settlement, and would probably have been able to extract from it all the  benefits she could with reason or justice demand. So obvious was the advantage of this policy that  for some time acute French statesmen refused to credit Wolsey wi

th any other. They said,  reported an English envoy to the Cardinal, "that your grace would make your profit with them  and the Emperor both, and proceed between them so that they might continue in war, and that the  one destroy the other, and the King's highness may remain and be their arbiter and superior".  If it is urged that Henry was bent on the war, and that Wolsey must satisfy the King or forfeit  his power, even the latter would have been the better alternative. His fall would have been

less  complete and more honourable than it actually was. Wolsey's failure to follow this course suggests  that, by involving Henry in dazzling schemes of a foreign conquest, he was seeking to divert  his attention from urgent matters at home; that he had seen a vision of impending ruin;  and that his actions were the frantic efforts of a man to turn a steed, over  which he has imperfect control, from the gulf he sees yawning ahead. The only  other explanation is that Wolsey sacrificed England's

interests in the hope of securing  from Charles the gift of the papal tiara. However that may be, it was not for Clement  the Seventh to deride England's conduct. The keen-sighted Pace had remarked in 1521  that, in the event of Charles's victory, the Pope would have to look to his affairs  in time. The Emperor's triumph was, indeed, as fatal to the Papacy as it was to Wolsey. Yet  Clement the Seventh, on whom the full force of the blow was to fall, had, as Cardinal de Medici, been  one of the

chief promoters of the war. In August, 1521, the Venetian, Contarini, reports Charles as  saying that Leo rejected both the peace and the truce speciously urged by Wolsey, and adds, on  his own account, that he believes it the truth. In 1522 Francis asserted that Cardinal de  Medici "was the cause of all this war"; and in 1527 Clement the Seventh sought to  curry favour with Charles by declaring that as Cardinal de Medici he had in 1521 caused  Leo the Tenth to side against France. In 1525 Charl

es declared that he had been mainly induced  to enter on the war by the persuasions of Leo, over whom his cousin, the Cardinal,  then wielded supreme influence. So complete was his sway over Leo, that,  on Leo's death, a cardinal in the conclave remarked that they wanted a new Pope, not  one who had already been Pope for years; and the gibe turned the scale against the future  Clement the Seventh Medici both, Leo and the Cardinal regarded the Papacy mainly as a means for  family aggrandisement.

In 1518 Leo had fulminated against Francis Maria della Rovere, Duke of  Urbino, as "the son of iniquity and child of perdition," because he desired to bestow the duchy  on his nephew Lorenzo. In the family interest he was withholding Modena and Reggio from Alfonso  d'Este, and casting envious eyes on Ferrara. In March, 1521, the French marched to seize  some Milanese exiles, who were harboured at Reggio. Leo took the opportunity to form an  alliance with Charles for the expulsion of Francis from

Italy. It was signed at Worms on the  8th of May, the day on which Luther was outlawed; and a war broke out in Italy, the effects of which  were little foreseen by its principal authors. A veritable Nemesis attended this policy conceived  in perfidy and greed. The battle of Pavia made Charles more nearly dictator of Europe than any  ruler has since been, except Napoleon Bonaparte. It led to the sack of Rome and the imprisonment  of Clement the Seventh by Charles's troops. The dependence of the

Pope on the Emperor made it  impossible for Clement to grant Henry's petition for divorce, and his failure to obtain the  divorce precipitated Wolsey's fall. Leo, meanwhile, had gone to his account on  the night of 1st-2nd December, 1521, singing "Nunc dimittis" for the expulsion of  the French from Milan; and amid the clangour of war the cardinals met to choose his successor.  Their spirit belied their holy profession. "All here," wrote Manuel, Charles's representative,  "is founded on avarice

and lies;" and again "there cannot be so much hatred and so many  devils in hell as among these cardinals". "The Papacy is in great decay" echoed the English  envoy Clerk, "the cardinals brawl and scold; their malicious, unfaithful and uncharitable demeanour  against each other increases every day. " Feeling between the French and imperial factions ran high,  and the only question was whether an adherent of Francis or Charles would secure election. Francis  had promised Wolsey fourteen French vo

tes; but after the conference of Calais he would  have been forgiving indeed had he wielded his influence on behalf of the English candidate.  Wolsey built more upon the promise of Charles at Bruges; but, if he really hoped for Charles's  assistance, his sagacity was greatly to seek. The Emperor at no time made any effort on Wolsey's  behalf; he did him the justice to think that, were Wolsey elected, he would be devoted  more to English than to imperial interests; and he preferred a Pope who wou

ld be  undividedly imperialist at heart. Pace was sent to join Clerk at Rome in urging  Wolsey's suit, and they did their best; but English influence at the  Court of Rome was infinitesimal. In spite of Campeggio's flattering assurance  that Wolsey's name appeared in every scrutiny, and that sometimes he had eight or nine votes, and  Clerk's statement that he had nine at one time, twelve at another, and nineteen at a third,  Wolsey's name only appears in one of the eleven scrutinies, and then he

received  but seven out of eighty-one votes. The election was long and keenly contested. The  conclave commenced on the 28th of December, and it was not till the 9th of  January, 1522, that the cardinals, conscious of each other's defects, agreed to  elect an absentee, about whom they knew little. Their choice fell on Adrian, Cardinal of Tortosa;  and it is significant of the extent of Charles's influence, that the new Pope had been his tutor,  and was proposed as a candidate by the imperial am

bassador on the day that the conclave opened.  Neither the expulsion of the French from Milan, nor the election of Charles's tutor as Pope,  opened Wolsey's eyes to the danger of further increasing the Emperor's power. He seems rather to  have thrown himself into the not very chivalrous design of completing the ruin of the weaker side,  and picking up what he could from the spoils. During the winter of 1521-22 he  was busily preparing for war, while endeavouring to delay the actual  breach till

his plans were complete. Francis, convinced of England's hostile intentions,  let Albany loose upon Scotland and refused to pay the pensions to Henry and Wolsey. They  made these grievances the excuse for a war on which they had long been determined. In March  Henry announced that he had taken upon himself the protection of the Netherlands during Charles's  impending visit to Spain. Francis asserted that this was a plain declaration of war, and  seized the English wine-ships at Bordeaux. But he

was determined not to take  the formal offensive, and, in May, Clarencieux herald proceeded to France to bid him  defiance. In the following month Charles passed through England on his way to the south, and fresh  treaties were signed for the invasion of France, for the marriage of Mary and for the extirpation  of heresy. At Windsor Wolsey constituted his legatine court to bind the contracting parties  by oaths enforced by ecclesiastical censures. He arrogated to himself a function usually  rese

rved for the Pope, and undertook to arbitrate between Charles and Henry if disputes  arose about the observance of their engagements. But he obviously found difficulty in raising  either money or men; and one of the suggestions at Windsor was that a "dissembled peace" or a  two years' truce should be made with France, to give England time for more preparations  for war. Nothing came of this last nefarious suggestion. In July Surrey captured and burnt  Morlaix; but, as he wrote from on board the

Mary Rose, Fitzwilliam's ships were without  flesh or fish, and Surrey himself had only beer for twelve days. Want of victuals  prevented further naval successes, and, in September, Surrey was sent into Artois, where  the same lack of organisation was equally fatal. It did not, however, prevent him from burning  farms and towns wherever he went; and his conduct evoked from the French commander a just rebuke of  his "foul warfare". Henry himself was responsible; for Wolsey wrote on his behalf urg

ing the  destruction of Dourlens and the adjacent towns. If Henry really sought to make these territories  his own, it was an odd method of winning the affections and developing the wealth of the  subjects he hoped to acquire. Nothing was really accomplished except devastation in France. Even  this useless warfare exhausted English energies, and left the Borders defenceless against one of  the largest armies ever collected in Scotland. Wolsey and Henry were only saved, from what  might have been

a most serious invasion, by Dacre's dexterity and Albany's cowardice.  Dacre, the warden of the marches, signed a truce without waiting for instructions, and  before it expired the Scots army disbanded. Henry and Wolsey might reprimand Dacre for  acting on his own responsibility, but they knew well enough that Dacre had done them magnificent  service. The results of the war from the English point of view had as yet been contemptible, but  great things were hoped for the following year. Bourbon,

Constable of France, and the most  powerful peer in the kingdom, intent on the betrayal of Francis, was negotiating with Henry  and Charles the price of his treason. The commons in France, worn to misery by the taxes of Francis  and the ravages of his enemies, were eager for anything that might promise some alleviation  of their lot. They would even, it appears, welcome a change of dynasty; everywhere, Henry  was told, they cried "Vive le roi d'Angleterre! " Never, said Wolsey, would there be a

better  opportunity for recovering the King's right to the French crown; and Henry exclaimed that  he trusted to treat Francis as his father did Richard the Third "I pray God," wrote Sir Thomas  More to Wolsey, "if it be good for his grace and for this realm, that then it may prove so, and  else in the stead thereof, I pray God send his grace an honourable and profitable peace. "  He could scarcely go further in hinting his preference for peace to the fantastic design  which now occupied the mi

nds of his masters. Probably his opinion of the war was not far  from that of old Bishop Fox, who declared: "I have determined, and, betwixt God and  me, utterly renounced the meddling with worldly matters, specially concerning war  or anything to it appertaining , thinking that if I did continual penance for it all  the days of my life, though I should live twenty years longer than I may do, I could  not yet make sufficient recompense therefor. And now, my good lord, to be called to  fortificat

ions of towns and places of war, or to any matter concerning the war, being  of the age of seventy years and above, and looking daily to die, the which if I  did, being in any such meddling of the war, I think I should die in despair. " Protests  like this and hints like More's were little likely to move the militant Cardinal, who  hoped to see the final ruin of France in 1523. Bourbon was to raise the standard of  revolt, Charles was to invade from Spain and Suffolk from Calais. In Italy French

  influence seemed irretrievably ruined. The Genoese revolution, planned before the war,  was effected; and the persuasions of Pace and the threats of Charles at last detached Venice and  Ferrara from the alliance of France. The usual delays postponed Suffolk's invasion till late in  the year. They were increased by the emptiness of Henry's treasury. His father's hoard had melted  away, and it was absolutely necessary to obtain lavish supplies from Parliament. But Parliament  proved ominously in

tractable. Thomas Cromwell, now rising to notice, in a temperate speech urged  the folly of indulging in impracticable schemes of foreign conquest, while Scotland  remained a thorn in England's side. It was three months from the meeting of  Parliament before the subsidies were granted, and nearly the end of August before  Suffolk crossed to Calais with an army, "the largest which has passed out of this  realm for a hundred years". Henry and Suffolk wanted it to besiege Boulogne, which might  hav

e been some tangible result in English hands. But the King was persuaded by Wolsey  and his imperial allies to forgo this scheme, and to order Suffolk to march into the heart of  France. Suffolk was not a great general, but he conducted the invasion with no little skill, and  desired to conduct it with unwonted humanity. He wished to win the French by abstaining  from pillage and proclaiming liberty, but Henry thought only the hope of plunder would  keep the army together. Waiting for the imperi

al contingent under De Buren, Suffolk did not leave  Calais till 19th September. He advanced by Bray, Roye and Montdidier, capturing all the towns  that offered resistance. Early in November, he reached the Oise at a point less than forty  miles from the French capital. But Bourbon's treason had been discovered; instead of joining  Suffolk with a large force, he was a fugitive from his country. Charles contented himself with taking  Fuentarabia, and made no effort at invasion. The imperial conti

ngent with Suffolk's army  went home; winter set in with unexampled severity, and Vendôme advanced. The  English were compelled to retire; their retreat was effected without loss,  and by the middle of December the army was back at Calais. Suffolk is represented  as being in disgrace for this retreat, and Wolsey as saving him from the effects of  his failure. But even Wolsey can hardly have thought that an army of twenty-five thousand men  could maintain itself in the heart of France, throughout

the winter, without support and with  unguarded communications. The Duke's had been the most successful invasion of France since the days  of Henry the Fifth from a military point of view. That its results were negative is due to the  policy by which it was directed. Meanwhile there was another papal election. Adrian, one  of the most honest and unpopular of Popes, died on 14th September, 1523, and by order of  the cardinals there was inscribed on his tomb: Hic jacet Adrianus Sextus cui nihil 

in vita infelicius contigit quam quod imperaret. With equal malice and keener  wit the Romans erected to his physician, Macerata, a statue with the title  Liberatori Patriæ. Wolsey was again a candidate. He told Henry he would rather  continue in his service than be ten Popes. That did not prevent him instructing  Pace and Clerk to further his claims. They were to represent to the cardinals Wolsey's  "great experience in the causes of Christendom, his favour with the Emperor, the King, and  othe

r princes, his anxiety for Christendom, his liberality, the great promotions to  be vacated by his election, his frank, pleasant and courteous inclinations, his  freedom from all ties of family or party, and the hopes of a great expedition  against the infidel". Charles was, as usual, profuse in his promise of aid. He  actually wrote a letter in Wolsey's favour; but he took the precaution to detain the  bearer in Spain till the election was over. He had already instructed his minister at Rome  t

o procure the election of Cardinal de Medici. That ambassador mocked at Wolsey's hopes;  "as if God," he wrote, "would perform a miracle every day". The Holy Spirit, by which  the cardinals always professed to be moved, was not likely to inspire the election of  another absentee after their experience of Adrian. Wolsey had not the remotest  chance, and his name does not occur in a single scrutiny. After the longest conclave  on record, the imperial influence prevailed; on 18th November De Medici

was proclaimed  Pope, and he chose as his title Clement the Seventh Suffolk's invasion was the last of  England's active participation in the war. Exhausted by her efforts, discontented with  the Emperor's failure to render assistance in the joint enterprise, or perceiving at last  that she had little to gain, and much to lose, from the overgrown power of Charles,  England, in 1524, abstained from action, and even began to make overtures to Francis.  Wolsey repaid Charles's inactivity of the pr

evious year by standing idly by, while the  imperial forces with Bourbon's contingent invaded Provence and laid siege to Marseilles.  But Francis still held command of the sea; the spirit of his people rose with the danger;  Marseilles made a stubborn and successful defence; and, by October, the invading army  was in headlong retreat towards Italy. Had Francis been content with defending  his kingdom, all might have been well; but ambition lured him on to destruction. He  thought he had passed t

he worst of the trouble, and that the prize of Milan might yet be his. So,  before the imperialists were well out of France, he crossed the Alps and sat down to besiege  Pavia. It was brilliantly defended by Antonio de Leyva. In November Francis's ruin was thought  to be certain; astrologers predicted his death or imprisonment. Slowly and surely Pescara,  the most consummate general of his age, was pressing north with imperial troops to  succour Pavia. Francis would not raise the siege. On 24th

February, 1525, he was attacked in front  by Pescara and in the rear by De Leyva. "The victory is complete," wrote the Abbot of  Najera to Charles from the field of battle, "the King of France is made prisoner. .. .The  whole French army is annihilated. .. .To-day is feast of the Apostle St. Mathias, on which, five  and twenty years ago, your Majesty is said to have been born. Five and twenty thousand times thanks  and praise to God for His mercy! Your Majesty is, from this day, in a position to

prescribe laws to  Christians and Turks, according to your pleasure. " Such was the result of Wolsey's policy since  1521, Francis a prisoner, Charles a dictator, and Henry vainly hoping that he might be  allowed some share in the victor's spoils. But what claim had he? By the most  extraordinary misfortune or fatuity, England had not merely helped Charles to a  threatening supremacy, but had retired from the struggle just in time to deprive herself of  all claim to benefit by her mistaken poli

cy. She had looked on while Bourbon invaded France,  fearing to aid lest Charles would reap all the fruits of success. She had sent no force  across the channel to threaten Francis's rear. Not a single French soldier had been diverted  from attacking Charles in Italy through England's interference. One hundred thousand crowns  had been promised the imperial troops, but the money was not paid; and secret negotiations  had been going on with France. In spite of all, Charles had won, and he was nat

urally not  disposed to divide the spoils. England's policy since 1521 had been disastrous  to herself, to Wolsey, to the Papacy, and even to Christendom. For the falling out of  Christian princes seemed to the Turk to afford an excellent opportunity for the faithful to  come by his own. After an heroic defence by the knights of St. John, Rhodes, the bulwark  of Christendom, had surrendered to Selim. Belgrade, the strongest citadel in  Eastern Europe, followed. In August, 1526, the King and the

flower of Hungarian  nobility perished at the battle of Mohacz; and the internecine strife of Christians  seemed doomed to be sated only by their common subjugation to the Turk. Henry and Wolsey  began to pay the price of their policy at home as well as abroad. War was no less costly for  being ineffective, and it necessitated demands on the purses of Englishmen, to which they  had long been unused. In the autumn of 1522 Wolsey was compelled to have recourse to a  loan from both spiritualty and

temporalty. It seems to have met with a response  which, compared with later receptions, may be described as almost cheerful. But the  loan did not go far, and before another six months had elapsed it was found necessary to  summon Parliament to make further provision. The Speaker was Sir Thomas More, who did all he  could to secure a favourable reception of Wolsey's demands. An unwonted spirit of independence  animated the members; the debates were long and stormy; and the Cardinal felt called 

upon to go down to the House of Commons, and hector it in such fashion that even  More was compelled to plead its privileges. Eventually, some money was reluctantly  granted; but it too was soon swallowed up, and in 1525 Wolsey devised fresh expedients.  He was afraid to summon Parliament again, so he proposed what he called an  Amicable Grant. It was necessary, he said, for Henry to invade France in  person; if he went, he must go as a prince; and he could not go as a prince without lavish  su

pplies. So he required what was practically a graduated income-tax. The Londoners resisted  till they were told that resistance might cost them their heads. In Suffolk and elsewhere open  insurrection broke out. It was then proposed to withdraw the fixed ratio, and allow each  individual to pay what he chose as a benevolence. A common councillor of London promptly retorted  that benevolences were illegal by statute of Richard the Third Wolsey cared little for the  constitution, and was astonishe

d that any one should quote the laws of a wicked usurper; but the  common councillor was a sound constitutionalist, if Wolsey was not. "An it please your grace,"  he replied, "although King Richard did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made, not  by him only, but by the consent of the body of the whole realm, which is Parliament.  " There was no answer; the demand was withdrawn. Never had Henry suffered such a  rebuff, and he never suffered the like again. Nor was this all; the whole of

London, Wolsey  is reported to have said, were traitors to Henry. Informations of "treasonable words"—that  ominous phrase—became frequent. Here, indeed, was a contrast to the exuberant loyalty  of the early years of Henry's reign. The change may not have been entirely due  to Wolsey, but he had been minister, with a power which few have equalled, during  the whole period in which it was effected, and Henry may well have begun to think  that it was time for his removal. Whether Wolsey was now an

xious to repair his  blunder by siding with Francis against Charles, or to snatch some profit from the Emperor's  victory by completing the ruin of France, the refusal of Englishmen to find more money for  the war left him no option but peace. In April, 1525, Tunstall and Sir Richard Wingfield  were sent to Spain with proposals for the exclusion of Francis and his children from  the French throne and the dismemberment of his kingdom. It is doubtful if Wolsey himself  desired the fulfilment of so

preposterous and iniquitous a scheme. It is certain  that Charles was in no mood to abet it. He had no wish to extract profit for  England out of the abasement of Francis, to see Henry King of France, or lord of any  French provinces. He had no intention of even performing his part of the Treaty of Windsor. He  had pledged himself to marry the Princess Mary, and the splendour of that match may have  contributed to Henry's desire for an alliance with Charles. But another matrimonial project  off

ered the Emperor more substantial advantages. Ever since 1517 his Spanish subjects had been  pressing him to marry the daughter of Emmanuel, King of Portugal. The Portuguese royal  family had claims to the throne of Castile which would be quieted by Charles's  marriage with a Portuguese princess. Her dowry of a million crowns  was, also, an argument not to be lightly disregarded in Charles's  financial embarrassments; and in March, 1526, the Emperor's wedding with Isabella of  Portugal was solem

nised. Wolsey, on his part, was secretly negotiating with Louise of Savoy  during her son's imprisonment in Spain. In August, 1525, a treaty of amity was signed, by  which England gave up all its claims to French territory in return for the promise of  large sums of money to Henry and his minister. The impracticability of enforcing Henry's  pretensions to the French crown or to French provinces, which had been urged as excuses  for squandering English blood and treasure, was admitted, even when

the French King was  in prison and his kingdom defenceless. But what good could the treaty do Henry or Francis?  Charles had complete control over his captive, and could dictate his own terms. Neither  the English nor the French King was in a position to continue the war; and the English  alliance with France could abate no iota of the concessions which Charles extorted from Francis  in January, 1526, by the Treaty of Madrid. Francis surrendered Burgundy; gave up his claims  to Milan, Genoa and

Naples; abandoned his allies, the King of Navarre, the Duke of Guelders and  Robert de la Marck; engaged to marry Charles's sister Eleanor, the widowed Queen of Portugal;  and handed over his two sons to the Emperor as hostages for the fulfilment of the treaty. But  he had no intention of keeping his promises. No sooner was he free than he protested that  the treaty had been extracted by force, and that his oath to keep it was not binding. The  Estates of France readily refused their assent, and

the Pope was, as usual, willing, for political  reasons, to absolve Francis from his oath. For the time being, consideration for the  safety of his sons and the hope of obtaining their release prevented him from openly breaking  with Charles, or listening to the proposals for a marriage with the Princess Mary, held out  as a bait by Wolsey. The Cardinal's object was merely to injure the Emperor as much as  he could without involving England in war; and by negotiations for Mary's marriage, first

  with Francis, and then with his second son, the Duke of Orléans, he was endeavouring to  draw England and France into a closer alliance. For similar reasons he was extending his patronage  to the Holy League, formed by Clement the Seventh between the princes of Italy to liberate that  distressful country from the grip of the Spanish forces. The policy of Clement, of Venice, and of  other Italian States had been characterised by as much blindness as that of England. Almost without  exception th

ey had united, in 1523, to expel the French from Italy. The result was to destroy the  balance of power south of the Alps, and to deliver themselves over to a bondage more galling  than that from which they sought to escape. Clement himself had been elected Pope by  imperial influence, and the Duke of Sessa, Charles's representative in Rome, described  him as entirely the Emperor's creature. He was, wrote Sessa, "very reserved, irresolute,  and decides few things himself. He loves money and pref

ers persons who know where  to find it to any other kind of men. He likes to give himself the appearance of  being independent, but the result shows that he is generally governed by others.  " Clement, however, after his election, tried to assume an attitude more becoming the head  of Christendom than slavish dependence on Charles. His love for the Emperor, he told Charles, had  not diminished, but his hatred for others had disappeared; and throughout 1524 he was seeking  to promote concord betw

een Christian princes. His methods were unfortunate; the failure of the  imperial invasion of Provence and Francis's passage of the Alps, convinced the Pope that  Charles's star was waning, and that of France was in the ascendant. "The Pope," wrote Sessa  to Charles the Fifth, "is at the disposal of the conqueror. " So, on 19th January, 1525, a Holy  League between Clement and Francis was publicly proclaimed at Rome, and joined by most of the  Italian States. It was almost the eve of Pavia. Char

les received the news of that victory with  astonishing humility. But he was not likely to forget that at the critical moment he had been  deserted by most of his Italian allies; and it was with fear and trembling that the Venetian  ambassador besought him to use his victory with moderation. Their conduct could hardly lead  them to expect much from the Emperor's clemency. Distrust of his intentions induced the  Holy League to carry on desultory war with the imperial troops; but mutual jealousies

, the  absence of effective aid from England or France, and vacillation caused by the feeling that  after all it might be safer to accept the best terms they could obtain, prevented the war from  being waged with any effect. In September, 1526, Hugo de Moncada, the imperial commander,  concerted with Clement's bitter foes, the Colonnas, a means of overawing  the Pope. A truce was concluded, wrote Moncada, "that the Pope, having laid  down his arms, may be taken unawares". On the 19th he marched

on Rome. Clement,  taken unawares, fled to the castle of St. Angelo; his palace was sacked, St. Peter's rifled,  and the host profaned. "Never," says Casale, "was so much cruelty and sacrilege. "  It was soon thrown into the shade by an outrage at which the whole world stood  aghast. Charles's object was merely to render the Pope his obedient slave;  neither God nor man, said Moncada, could resist with impunity the Emperor's  victorious arms. But he had little control over his own irresistible f

orces. With no enemy  to check them, with no pay to content them, the imperial troops were ravaging, pillaging,  sacking cities and churches throughout Northern Italy without let or hindrance. At length a  sudden frenzy seized them to march upon Rome. Moncada had shown them the way, and on 6th May,  1527, the Holy City was taken by storm. Bourbon was killed at the first assault; and the richest  city in Christendom was given over to a motley, leaderless horde of German, Spanish and Italian  sold

iery. The Pope again fled to the castle of St. Angelo; and for weeks Rome endured  an orgy of sacrilege, blasphemy, robbery, murder and lust, the horrors of which no brush  could depict nor tongue recite. "All the churches and the monasteries," says a cardinal who was  present, "both of friars and nuns, were sacked. Many friars were beheaded, even priests at  the altar; many old nuns beaten with sticks; many young ones violated, robbed and made  prisoners; all the vestments, chalices, silver, we

re taken from the churches. .. .Cardinals,  bishops, friars, priests, old nuns, infants, pages and servants—the very poorest—were tormented  with unheard-of cruelties—the son in the presence of his father, the babe in the sight of its  mother. All the registers and documents of the Camera Apostolica were sacked, torn in pieces,  and partly burnt. " "Having entered," writes an imperialist to Charles, "our men sacked the whole  Borgo and killed almost every one they found. .. . All the monasteries

were rifled, and the ladies  who had taken refuge in them carried off. Every person was compelled by torture to pay a ransom.  .. .The ornaments of all the churches were pillaged and the relics and other things thrown  into the sinks and cesspools. Even the holy places were sacked. The Church of St. Peter and  the papal palace, from the basement to the top, were turned into stables for horses. .. .Every  one considers that it has taken place by the just judgment of God, because the Court of Rom

e  was so ill-ruled. .. .We are expecting to hear from your Majesty how the city is to be governed  and whether the Holy See is to be retained or not. Some are of opinion it should not continue  in Rome, lest the French King should make a patriarch in his kingdom, and deny obedience to  the said See, and the King of England find all other Christian princes do the same. " So low  was brought the proud city of the Seven Hills, the holy place, watered with the blood of the  martyrs and hallowed by

the steps of the saints, the goal of the earthly pilgrim, the seat of  the throne of the Vicar of God. No Jew saw the abomination of desolation standing  where it ought not with keener anguish than the devout sons of the Church  heard of the desecration of Rome. If a Roman Catholic and an imperialist could  term it the just judgment of God, heretics and schismatics, preparing to burst the bonds of Rome  and "deny obedience to the said See," saw in it the fulfilment of the woes pronounced by St.

John  the Divine on the Rome of Nero, and by Daniel the Prophet on Belshazzar's Babylon. Babylon the great  was fallen, and become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit; her ruler  was weighed in the balances and found wanting; his kingdom was divided and given to kings and  peoples who came, like the Medes and the Persians, from the hardier realms of the North. CHAPTER 7. THE ORIGIN OF THE DIVORCE. Matrimonial  discords have, from the days of Helen of Troy, been the fruitf

ul source of public calamities;  and one of the most decisive events in English history, the breach with the Church of Rome,  found its occasion in the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. Its origin has been traced to various  circumstances. On one hand, it is attributed to Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn, on the other, to  doubts of the validity of Henry's marriage, raised by the Bishop of Tarbes in 1527, while negotiating  a matrimonial alliance between the Princess Mary and Francis the First Thes

e are the two most  popular theories, and both are demonstrably false. Doubts of the legality of Henry's marriage  had existed long before the Bishop of Tarbes paid his visit to England, and even before Anne  Boleyn was born. They were urged, not only on the eve of the completion of the marriage,  but when it was first suggested. In 1503, when Henry the Seventh applied to Julius  the Second for a dispensation to enable his second son to marry his brother's widow, the Pope  replied that "the disp

ensation was a great matter; nor did he well know, prima facie, if it  were competent for the Pope to dispense in such a case". He granted the dispensation,  but the doubts were not entirely removed. Catherine's confessor instilled them into  her mind, and was recalled by Ferdinand on that account. The Spanish King himself felt  it necessary to dispel certain "scruples of conscience" Henry might entertain as to the "sin"  of marrying his brother's widow. Warham and Fox debated the matter, and Wa

rham apparently  opposed the marriage. A general council had pronounced against the Pope's dispensing  power; and, though the Popes had, in effect, established their superiority over general  councils, those who still maintained the contrary view can hardly have failed to  doubt the legality of Henry's marriage. So good a papalist as the young King,  however, would hardly allow theoretical doubts of the general powers of the Pope  to outweigh the practical advantages of a marriage in his own par

ticular case; and it  is safe to assume that his confidence in its validity would have remained unshaken, but  for extraneous circumstances of a definite and urgent nature. On the 31st of January, 1510,  seven months after his marriage with Catherine, she gave birth to her first child; it  was a daughter, and was still-born. On the 27th of May following she told her  father that the event was considered in England to be of evil omen, but that Henry took  it cheerfully, and she thanked God for ha

ving given her such a husband. "The King," wrote  Catherine's confessor, "adores her, and her highness him. " Less than eight months later,  on the 1st of January, 1511, she was delivered of her first-born son. A tourney was held to  celebrate the joyous event, and the heralds received a handsome largess at the christening.  The child was named Henry, styled Prince of Wales, and given a serjeant-at-arms on the 14th, and  a clerk of the signet on the 19th of February. Three days later he was dead

; he was buried at the  cost of some ten thousand pounds in Westminster Abbey. The rejoicings were turned to grief,  which, aggravated by successive disappointments, bore with cumulative force on the mind of  the King and his people. In September, 1513, the Venetian ambassador announced the birth  of another son, who was either still-born, or died immediately afterwards. In June, 1514, there is again a reference to the christening  of the "King's new son," but he, too, was no sooner christened t

han dead. Domestic griefs  were now embittered by political resentments. Ferdinand valued his daughter  mainly as a political emissary; he had formally accredited her as  his ambassador at Henry's Court, and she naturally used her influence to maintain  the political union between her father and her husband. The arrangement had serious drawbacks;  when relations between sovereigns grew strained, their ambassadors could be recalled, but  Catherine had to stay. In 1514 Henry was boiling over with

indignation at his double  betrayal by the Catholic king; and it is not surprising that he vented some of his rage on  the wife who was Ferdinand's representative. He reproached her, writes Peter Martyr from  Ferdinand's Court, with her father's ill-faith, and taunted her with his own conquests. To this  brutality Martyr attributes the premature birth of Catherine's fourth son towards the end of  1514. Henry, in fact, was preparing to cast off, not merely the Spanish alliance, but his  Spanish w

ife. He was negotiating for a joint attack on Castile with Louis the Twelfth  and threatening the divorce of Catherine. "It is said," writes a Venetian from Rome in  August, 1514, "that the King of England means to repudiate his present wife, the daughter  of the King of Spain and his brother's widow, because he is unable to have children by her, and  intends to marry a daughter of the French Duke of Bourbon. .. .He intends to annul his own marriage,  and will obtain what he wants from the Pope

as France did from Pope Julius the Second" But the  death of Louis the Twelfth and the consequent loosening of the Anglo-French alliance made Henry  and Ferdinand again political allies; while, as the year wore on, Catherine was known to be once  more pregnant, and Henry's hopes of issue revived. This time they were not disappointed; the  Princess Mary was born on the 18th of February, 1516. Ferdinand had died on the 23rd of  January, but the news was kept from Catherine, lest it might add to th

e risks of her  confinement. The young princess seemed likely to live, and Henry was delighted.  When Giustinian, amid his congratulations, said he would have been better pleased had it  been a son, the King replied: "We are both young; if it was a daughter this time, by the  grace of God the sons will follow". All thoughts of a divorce passed away for the  time, but the desired sons did not arrive. In August, 1517, Catherine was reported to be  again expecting issue, but nothing more is heard o

f the matter, and it is probable that about this  time the Queen had various miscarriages. In July, 1518, Henry wrote to Wolsey from Woodstock  that Catherine was once more pregnant, and that he could not move the Court to London,  as it was one of the Queen's "dangerous times". His precautions were unavailing, and, on the  10th of November, his child arrived still-born. Giustinian notes the great vexation with which  the people heard the news, and expresses the opinion that, had it occurred a m

onth or two  earlier, the Princess Mary would not have been betrothed to the French dauphin, "as the one fear  of England was lest it should pass into subjection to France through that marriage". The child was  the last born of Catherine. For some years Henry went on hoping against every probability that  he might still have male issue by his Queen; and in 1519 he undertook to lead a crusade  against the Turk in person if he should have an heir. But physicians summoned from Spain were  no more s

uccessful than their English colleagues. By 1525 the last ray of hope had flickered  out. Catherine was then forty years old; and Henry at the age of thirty-four,  in the full vigour of youthful manhood, seemed doomed by the irony of fate and  by his union with Catherine to leave a disputed inheritance. Never did England's  interests more imperatively demand a secure and peaceful succession. Never before  had there been such mortality among the children of an English king; never before  had an E

nglish king married his brother's widow. So striking a coincidence could be only  explained by the relation of cause and effect. Men who saw the judgment of God in the sack  of Rome, might surely discern in the fatality that attended the children of Henry the Eighth a  fulfilment of the doom of childlessness pronounced in the Book of the Law against him who should  marry his brother's wife. "God," wrote the French ambassador in 1528, "has long ago Himself passed  sentence on it;" and there is no

reason to doubt Henry's assertion, that he had come to regard  the death of his children as a Divine judgment, and that he was impelled to question his  marriage by the dictates of conscience. The "scruples of conscience," which  Henry the Seventh had urged as an excuse for delaying the marriage, were merely  a cloak for political reasons; but scruples of conscience are dangerous playthings, and  the pretence of Henry the Seventh became, through the death of his children, a terrible  reality to

Henry the Eighth. Queen Catherine, too, had scruples of conscience about  the marriage, though of a different sort. When she first heard of Henry's intention to seek  a divorce, she is reported to have said that "she had not offended, but it was a judgment of God,  for that her former marriage was made in blood"; the price of it had been the head of the innocent  Earl of Warwick, demanded by Ferdinand of Aragon. Nor was she alone in this feeling. "He had  heard," witnessed Buckingham's chancell

or in 1521, "the Duke grudge that the Earl of Warwick was  put to death, and say that God would punish it, by not suffering the King's issue to prosper,  as appeared by the death of his sons; and that his daughters prosper  not, and that he had no issue male. " Conscience, however, often moves men  in directions indicated by other than conscientious motives, and, of the other  motives which influenced Henry's mind, some were respectable and some the reverse. The  most legitimate was his desire t

o provide for the succession to the throne. It was  obvious to him and his council that, if he died with no children but Mary,  England ran the risk of being plunged into an anarchy worse than that of the  civil wars. "By English law," wrote Falier, the Venetian ambassador, in 1531, "females are  excluded from the throne;" that was not true, but it was undoubtedly a widespread impression,  based upon the past history of England. No Queen-Regnant had asserted a right  to the English throne but on

e, and that one precedent provided the most effective  argument for avoiding a repetition of the experiment. Matilda was never crowned, though  she had the same claim to the throne as Mary, and her attempt to enforce her title involved  England in nineteen years of anarchy and civil war. Stephen stood to Matilda in precisely the  same relation as James the Fifth of Scotland stood to the Princess Mary; and in 1532, as  soon as he came of age, James was urged to style himself "Prince of England" a

nd Duke of  York, in manifest derogation of Mary's title. At that time Charles the Fifth was discussing  alternative plans for deposing Henry the Eighth. One was to set up James the Fifth, the other  to marry Mary to some great English noble and proclaim them King and Queen; Mary by herself  was thought to have no chance of success. John of Gaunt had maintained in Parliament that  the succession descended only through males; the Lancastrian case was that Henry the Fourth, the  son of Edward the

Third's fourth son, had a better title to the throne than Philippa, the daughter  of the third; an Act limiting the succession to the male line was passed in 1406; and Henry the  Seventh himself only reigned through a tacit denial of the right of women to sit on the English  throne. The objection to female sovereigns was grounded not so much on male disbelief in their  personal qualifications, as upon the inevitable consequence of matrimonial and dynastic problems.  If the Princess Mary succeede

d, was she to marry? If not, her death would leave the kingdom  no better provided with heirs than before; and in her weak state of health, her  death seemed no distant prospect. If, on the other hand, she married, her  husband must be either a subject or a foreign prince. To marry a subject would at  once create discords like those from which the Wars of the Roses had sprung; to marry  a foreign prince was to threaten Englishmen, then more jealous than ever of foreign  influence, with the fear

of alien domination. They had before their eyes numerous instances  in which matrimonial alliances had involved the union of states so heterogeneous as Spain and  the Netherlands; and they had no mind to see England absorbed in some continental empire. In  the matrimonial schemes arranged for the princess, it was generally stipulated that she  should, in default of male heirs, succeed to the throne of England; her  succession was obviously a matter of doubt, and it is quite certain that her marr

iage in  France or in Spain would have proved a bar in the way of her succession to the English throne,  or at least have given rise to conflicting claims. These rival pretensions began to be  heard as soon as it became evident that Henry the Eighth would have no male heirs  by Catherine of Aragon. In 1519, a year after the birth of the Queen's last child, Giustinian  reported to the Venetian signiory on the various nobles who had hopes of the crown. The Duke of  Norfolk had expectations in righ

t of his wife, a daughter of Edward the Fourth, and the Duke  of Suffolk in right of his Duchess, the sister of Henry the Eighth. But the Duke of Buckingham  was the most formidable: "It was thought that, were the King to die without male heirs,  that Duke might easily obtain the crown". His claims had been canvassed in 1503, when the  issue of Henry the Seventh seemed likely to fail, and now that the issue of Henry the Eighth was  in even worse plight, Buckingham's claims to the crown became ag

ain a matter of comment.  His hopes of the crown cost him his head; he had always been discontented with  Tudor rule, especially under Wolsey; he allowed himself to be encouraged with hopes  of succeeding the King, and possibly spoke of asserting his claim in case of Henry's death. This  was to touch Henry on his tenderest spot, and, in 1521, the Duke was tried by his peers, found  guilty of high treason, and sent to the block. In this, as in all the great trials of Henry's  reign, and indeed in

most state trials of all ages, considerations of justice were subordinated  to the real or supposed dictates of political expediency. Buckingham was executed, not because  he was a criminal, but because he was, or might become, dangerous; his crime was not treason, but  descent from Edward the Third Henry the Eighth, like Henry the Seventh, showed his grasp of the  truth that nothing makes a government so secure as the absence of all alternatives. Buckingham's  execution is one of the symptoms

that, as early as 1521, the failure of his issue had made Henry  nervous and susceptible about the succession. Even in 1519, when Charles the Fifth's  minister, Chièvres, was proposing to marry his niece to the Earl of Devonshire, a grandson  of Edward the Fourth. , Henry was suspicious, and Wolsey inquired whether Chièvres was "looking  to any chance of the Earl's succession to the throne of England. " If further proof were needed  that Henry's anxiety about the succession was not, as has been

represented, a mere afterthought  intended to justify his divorce from Catherine, it might be found in the extraordinary  measures taken with regard to his one and only illegitimate son.  The boy was born in 1519. His mother was Elizabeth Blount, sister of  Erasmus's friend, Lord Mountjoy; and she is noticed as taking part in the Court revels during  the early years of Henry's reign. Outwardly, at any rate, Henry's Court was long a model of  decorum; there was no parade of vice as in the days of

Charles the Second, and the existence of  this royal bastard was so effectually concealed that no reference to him occurs in the  correspondence of the time until 1525, when it was thought expedient to give  him a position of public importance. The necessity of providing some male successor  to Henry was considered so urgent that, two years before the divorce is said to  have occurred to him, he and his council were meditating a scheme for entailing the  succession on the King's illegitimate so

n. In 1525 the child was created Duke of Richmond  and Somerset. These titles were significant; Earl of Richmond had been Henry the  Seventh's title before he came to the throne; Duke of Somerset had been that of his  grandfather and of his youngest son. Shortly afterwards the boy was  made Lord High Admiral of England, Lord Warden of the Marches, and Lord  Lieutenant of Ireland, the two latter being offices which Henry the Eighth himself  had held in his early youth. In January, 1527, the Spani

sh ambassador reported that there was a  scheme on foot to make the Duke King of Ireland; it was obviously a design to prepare the way  for his succession to the kingdom of England. The English envoys in Spain were directed  to tell the Emperor that Henry proposed to demand some noble princess of near blood to  the Emperor as a wife for the Duke of Richmond. The Duke, they were to say, "is near of the  King's blood and of excellent qualities, and is already furnished to keep the state  of a grea

t prince, and yet may be easily, by the King's means, exalted to higher things".  The lady suggested was Charles's niece, a daughter of the Queen of Portugal; she was  already promised to the Dauphin of France, but the envoys remarked that, if that match  were broken off, she might find "another dauphin" in the Duke of Richmond. Another plan for  settling the succession was that the Duke should, by papal dispensation, marry his half-sister Mary!  Cardinal Campeggio saw no moral objection to this

. "At first I myself," he writes on his arrival in  England in October, 1528, "had thought of this as a means of establishing the succession, but I  do not believe that this design would suffice to satisfy the King's desires. " The Pope was  equally willing to facilitate the scheme, on condition that Henry abandoned his divorce  from Catherine. Possibly Henry saw more objections than Pope or Cardinal to a marriage  between brother and sister. At all events Mary was soon betrothed to the French p

rince, and the  Emperor recorded his impression that the French marriage was designed to remove the Princess  from the Duke of Richmond's path to the throne. The conception of this violent expedient is  mainly of interest as illustrating the supreme importance attached to the question of providing  for a male successor to Henry. He wanted an heir to the throne, and he wanted a fresh wife for  that reason. A mistress would not satisfy him, because his children by a mistress would  hardly succeed

without dispute to the throne, not because he laboured under any moral scruples  on the point. He had already had two mistresses, Elizabeth Blount, the mother of the Duke of  Richmond, and Anne's sister, Mary Boleyn. Possibly, even probably, there were other  lapses from conjugal fidelity, for, in 1533, the Duke of Norfolk told Chapuys that Henry  was always inclined to amours; but none are capable of definite proof, and if Henry had other  illegitimate children besides the Duke of Richmond it i

s difficult to understand why their existence  should have been so effectually concealed when such publicity was given their brother. The  King is said to have had ten mistresses in 1528, but the statement is based on a misrepresentation  of the only document adduced in its support. It is a list of New Year's presents,  which runs "To thirty-three noble ladies" such and such gifts, then  "to ten mistresses" other gifts; it is doubtful if the word then bore  its modern sinister signification; in

this particular instance it merely means  "gentlewomen," and differentiates them from the noble ladies. Henry's morals, indeed, compare  not unfavourably with those of other sovereigns. His standard was neither higher nor lower  than that of Charles the Fifth, who was at this time negotiating a marriage between  his natural daughter and the Pope's nephew; it was not lower than those of James the Second ,  of William the Third, or of the first two Georges; it was infinitely higher than the standa

rd of  Francis the First, of Charles the Second , or even of Henry of Navarre and Louis the Fourteenth.  The gross immorality so freely imputed to Henry seems to have as little foundation as the theory  that his sole object in seeking the divorce from Catherine and separation from Rome was the  gratification of his passion for Anne Boleyn. If that had been the case, there would be no  adequate explanation of the persistence with which he pursued the divorce. He was "studying  the matter so dilig

ently," Campeggio says, "that I believe in this case he knows  more than a great theologian and jurist"; he was so convinced of the justice of his cause  "that an angel descending from heaven would be unable to persuade him otherwise". He  sent embassy after embassy to Rome; he risked the enmity of Catholic Europe; he defied  the authority of the vicar of Christ; and lavished vast sums to obtain verdicts in his favour  from most of the universities in Christendom. It is not credible that all thi

s energy was  expended merely to satisfy a sensual passion, which could be satisfied without a murmur from  Pope or Emperor, if he was content with Anne Boleyn as a mistress, and is believed  to have been already satisfied in 1529, four years before the divorce was obtained.  So, too, the actual sentence of divorce in 1533 was precipitated not by Henry's passion for  Anne, but by the desire that her child should be legitimate. She was pregnant before Henry was  married to her or divorced from Ca

therine. But, though the representation of Henry's  passion for Anne Boleyn as the sole fons et origo of the divorce is far from convincing,  that passion introduced various complications into the question; it was not merely an  additional incentive to Henry's desires; it also brought Wolsey and Henry into conflict; and the unpopularity of the divorce was  increased by the feeling that Henry was losing caste by seeking to marry a lady  of the rank and character of Anne Boleyn. The Boleyns were w

ealthy merchants of London,  of which one of them had been Lord-Mayor, but Anne's mother was of noble blood, being  daughter and co-heir of the Earl of Ormonde, and it is a curious fact that all of  Henry's wives could trace their descent from Edward the First Anne's age is uncertain, but she  is generally believed to have been born in 1507. Attempts have been made to date her influence  over the King by the royal favours bestowed on her father, Sir Thomas, afterwards Viscount  Rochford and Earl

of Wiltshire, but, as these favours flowed in a fairly regular stream from the  beginning of the reign, as Sir Thomas's services were at least a colourable excuse for them, and  as his other daughter Mary was Henry's mistress before he fell in love with Anne, these grants are  not a very substantial ground upon which to build. Of Anne herself little is known except that, about  1519, she was sent as maid of honour to the French Queen, Claude; five years before, her sister Mary  had accompanied

Mary Tudor in a similar capacity on her marriage with Louis the Twelfth. In 1522,  when war with France was on the eve of breaking out, Anne was recalled to the English Court,  where she took part in revels and love-intrigues. Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, although a  married man, sued for her favours; Henry, Lord Percy made her more honest proposals, but  was compelled to desist by the King himself, who had arranged for her marriage with  Piers Butler, son of the Earl of Ormond, as a means to end

the feud between the Butler  and the Boleyn families. None of these projects advanced any farther, possibly because they  conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King himself. As Wyatt  complained in a sonnet, There is written her fair neck round aboutNoli me tangere; for Cæsar's  I amAnd wild for to hold, though I seem tame. But, for any definite documentary evidence to the  contrary, it might be urged that Henry's passion for Anne was subsequent to the commencement of  h

is proceedings for a divorce from Catherine. Those proceedings began at least as early  as March, 1527, while the first allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn  occurs in the instructions to Dr. William Knight, sent in the following autumn to procure a  dispensation for her marriage with Henry. The King's famous love-letters, the earliest of  which are conjecturally assigned to July, 1527, are without date and with but slight internal  indications of the time at which they we

re written; they may be earlier than 1527, they  may be as late as the following winter. It is unlikely that Henry would have sought for the  Pope's dispensation to marry Anne until he was assured of her consent, of which in some  of the letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other hand, it is difficult  to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an offer of marriage made by her  sovereign. Her reluctance was to fill a less honourable position, into which Henry  was not so wicked as to think

of forcing her. "I trust," he writes in one of his letters,  "your absence is not wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament my ill-fortune, and  by degrees abate my great folly. " His love for Anne Boleyn was certainly his "great folly," the  one overmastering passion of his life. There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in the letters  themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year been "wounded with the dart of love," and  is uncertain whether Anne returns his affection. I

n others he bewails her briefest absence  as though it were an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to Court; is torn  with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts her with the assurance that few women  have had it, and sends her a hart killed by his own hand, making the inevitable play on the  word. Later on, he alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the shortness  of a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over the book he was writing in  his o

wn defence and has a pain in his head. The series ends with an announcement that  he has been fitting up apartments for her, and with congratulations to himself and to  her that the "well-wishing" Legate, Campeggio, who has been sent from Rome to try the case,  has told him he was not so "imperial" in his sympathies as had been alleged. The secret of her  fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers. "Madame Anne," wrote a Venetian, "is not one  of the handsomest women in the world. She is o

f middling stature, swarthy complexion, long  neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the King's great appetite,  and her eyes, which are black and beautiful". She had probably learnt in France the art of  using her beautiful eyes to the best advantage; her hair, which was long and black, she wore  loose, and on her way to her coronation Cranmer describes her as "sitting in her hair". Possibly  this was one of the French customs, which somewhat scandalised the staide

r ladies of the English  Court. She is said to have had a slight defect on one of her nails, which she endeavoured to  conceal behind her other fingers. Of her mental accomplishments there is not much evidence; she  naturally, after some years' residence at the Court of France, spoke French, though she wrote  it in an orthography that was quite her own. Her devotion to the Gospel is the one great virtue  with which Foxe and other Elizabethans strove to invest the mother of the Good Queen Bess. B

ut  it had no nobler foundation than the facts that Anne's position drove her into hostility to the  Roman jurisdiction, and that her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the nobility  and the gentry of the time. Her place in English history is due solely to the circumstance  that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry's nature; she was pre-eminent neither  in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve  the respect of her own or subs

equent ages. It is otherwise with her rival, Queen Catherine,  the third of the principal characters involved in the divorce. If Henry's motives were not so  entirely bad as they have often been represented, neither they nor Anne Boleyn's can stand a  moment's comparison with the unsullied purity of Catherine's life or the lofty courage with  which she defended the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic figure  in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No breat

h of scandal touched her  fair name, or impugned her devotion to Henry. If she had the misfortune to be  identified with a particular policy, the alliance with the House of Burgundy, the  fault was not hers; she had been married to Henry in consideration of the advantages  which that alliance was supposed to confer; and, if she used her influence to further  Spanish interest, it was a natural feeling as near akin to virtue as to vice, and  Carroz at least complained, in 1514, that she had comple

tely identified herself  with her husband and her husband's subjects. If her miscarriages and the death of her children  were a grief to Henry, the pain and the sorrow were hers in far greater measure; if they had  made her old and deformed, as Francis brutally described her in 1519, the fact must have been  far more bitter to her than it was unpleasant to Henry. There may have been some hardship to Henry  in the circumstance that, for political motives, he had been induced by his council to mar

ry a wife  who was six years his senior; but to Catherine herself a divorce was the height of injustice.  The question was in fact one of justice against a real or supposed political necessity, and in  such cases justice commonly goes to the wall. In politics, men seek to colour with justice  actions based upon considerations of expediency. They first convince themselves, and  then they endeavour with less success to persuade mankind. So Henry the Eighth  convinced himself that the dispensation

granted by Julius the Second was null and void,  that he had never been married to Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's  wife was sin. "The King," he instructed his ambassador to tell Charles the Fifth in  1533, "taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it, but because he, being  learned, knoweth the matter to be right. .. . The justice of our cause is so rooted in  our breast that nothing can remove it, and even the canons say that a man should  rather en

dure all the censures of the Church than offend his conscience. " No man  was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set greater store on his own private  judgment. To that extent he was a Protestant; "though," he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell  the Lutheran princes, "the law of every man's conscience be but a private court, yet it is  the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice". God and his conscience, he told  Chapuys in 1533, were on very good terms. On another occasion h

e wrote to Charles Ubi  Spiritus Domini, ibi libertas, with the obvious implication that he possessed the spirit of the  Lord, and therefore he might do as he liked. To him, as to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and  Henry's appeals to the Pope, to learned divines, to universities at home and abroad, were not for  his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions to the profane herd, unskilled in royal learning  and unblessed with a kingly conscience. Against that conviction, so firmly rooted

in the  royal breast, appeals to pity were vain, and attempts to shake it were perilous. It was  his conscience that made Henry so dangerous. Men are tolerant of differences about things  indifferent, but conscience makes bigots of us all; theological hatreds are proverbially  bitter, and religious wars are cruel. Conscience made Sir Thomas More persecute, and glory in the  persecution of heretics, and conscience earned Mary her epithet "Bloody". They were moved by  conscientious belief in the C

atholic faith, Henry by conscientious belief in himself;  and conscientious scruples are none the less exigent for being reached by crooked paths. CHAPTER 8. THE POPE'S DILEMMA. In February, 1527, in pursuance of the alliance with France, which  Wolsey, recognising too late the fatal effects of the union with Charles, was seeking to make the  basis of English policy, a French embassy arrived in England to conclude a marriage between Francis  the First and the Princess Mary. At its head was Gabri

el de Grammont, Bishop of Tarbes; and in the  course of his negotiations he is alleged to have first suggested those doubts of the validity of  Henry's marriage, which ended in the divorce. The allegation was made by Wolsey three months  later, and from that time down to our own day it has done duty with Henry's apologists  as a sufficient vindication of his conduct. It is now denounced as an impudent fiction,  mainly on the ground that no hint of these doubts occurs in the extant records of  th

e negotiations. But unfortunately we have only one or two letters relating to  this diplomatic mission. There exists, indeed, a detailed narrative, drawn up  some time afterwards by Claude Dodieu, the French secretary; but the silence,  on so confidential a matter, of a third party who was not present when the doubts were  presumably suggested, proves little or nothing. Du Bellay, in 1528, reported to the French  Government Henry's public assertion that Tarbes had mentioned these doubts;  the st

atement was not repudiated; Tarbes himself believed in the validity of Henry's  case and was frequently employed in efforts to win from the Pope an assent to Henry's divorce. It  is rather a strong assumption to suppose in the entire absence of positive evidence that  Henry and Wolsey were deliberately lying. There is nothing impossible in the supposition  that some such doubts were expressed; indeed, Francis the First had every reason to  encourage doubts of Henry's marriage as a means of creat

ing a breach between him and  Charles the Fifth In return for Mary's hand, Henry was endeavouring to obtain various  advantages from Francis in the way of pensions, tribute and territory. Tarbes represented that  the French King was so good a match for the English princess, that there was little need  for further concession; to which Henry replied that Francis was no doubt an excellent match  for his daughter, but was he free to marry? His precontract with Charles the Fifth's sister,  Eleanor, w

as a complication which seriously diminished the value of Francis's offer; and the  papal dispensation, which he hoped to obtain, might not be forthcoming or valid. As a  counter to this stroke, Tarbes may well have hinted that the Princess Mary was not such  a prize as Henry made out. Was the dispensation for Henry's own marriage beyond cavil? Was  Mary's legitimacy beyond question? Was her succession to the English throne, a prospect  Henry dangled before the Frenchman's eyes, so secure? These

questions were not very  new, even at the time of Tarbes's mission. The divorce had been talked about in 1514,  and now, in 1527, the position of importance given to the Duke of Richmond was a matter of  public comment, and inevitably suggested doubts of Mary's succession. There is no documentary  evidence that this argument was ever employed, beyond the fact that, within three months  of Tarbes's mission, both Henry and Wolsey asserted that the Bishop had suggested doubts  of the validity of H

enry's marriage. Henry, however, does not say that Tarbes first  suggested the doubts, nor does Wolsey. The Cardinal declares that the Bishop objected  to the marriage with the Princess Mary on the ground of these doubts; and some time later, when  Henry explained his position to the Lord-Mayor and aldermen of London, he said, according to  Du Bellay, that the scruple of conscience, which he had long entertained, had terribly  increased upon him since Tarbes had spoken of it. However that may be

, before the Bishop's  negotiations were completed the first steps had been taken towards the divorce, or, as Wolsey  and Henry pretended, towards satisfying the King's scruples as to the validity of  his marriage. Early in April, 1527, Dr. Richard Wolman was sent down to Winchester  to examine old Bishop Fox on the subject. The greatest secrecy was observed and none of the  Bishop's councillors were allowed to be present. Other evidence was doubtless collected  from various sources, and, on 17t

h May, a week after Tarbes's departure, Wolsey summoned  Henry to appear before him to explain his conduct in living with his brother's widow. Wolman  was appointed promoter of the suit; Henry put in a justification, and, on 31st May, Wolman  replied. With that the proceedings terminated. In instituting them Henry was following a precedent  set by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. In very early days that nobleman had contracted to  marry Sir Anthony Browne's daughter, but for some reason

the match was broken off, and he sought  the hand of one Margaret Mortimer, to whom he was related in the second and third degrees  of consanguinity; he obtained a dispensation, completed the marriage, and cohabited with  Margaret Mortimer. But, like Henry the Eighth, his conscience or other considerations  moved him to regard his marriage as sin, and the dispensation as invalid. He caused  a declaration to that effect to be made by "the official of the Archdeacon of London,  to whom the cognisa

nce of such causes of old belongs," married Ann Browne, and,  after her death, Henry's sister Mary. A marriage, the validity of which depended,  like Henry's, upon a papal dispensation, and which, like Henry's, had been  consummated, was declared null and void on exactly the same grounds as those upon  which Henry himself sought a divorce, namely, the invalidity of the previous dispensation. On  12th May, 1528, Clement the Seventh issued a bull confirming Suffolk's divorce and pronouncing  eccle

siastical censures on all who called in question the Duke's subsequent marriages. That is  precisely the course Henry wished to be followed. Wolsey was to declare the marriage invalid on  the ground of the insufficiency of the papal dispensation; Henry might then marry whom he  pleased; the Pope was to confirm the sentence, and censure all who should dispute the  second marriage or the legitimacy of its possible issue. Another precedent was also  forced on Henry's mind. On 11th March, 1527, two

months before Wolsey opened his court, a  divorce was granted at Rome to Henry's sister Margaret, Queen of Scotland. Her pretexts  were infinitely more flimsy than Henry's own. She alleged a precontract on the part of  her husband, Angus, which was never proved. She professed to believe that James the Fourth had  survived Flodden three years, and was alive when she married Angus. Angus had been unfaithful, but  that was no ground for divorce by canon law; and she herself was living in shameless

adultery with  Henry Stewart, who had also procured a divorce to be free to marry his Queen. No objection was  found at Rome to either of these divorces; but neither Angus nor Margaret Mortimer had  an Emperor for a nephew; no imperial armies would march on Rome to vindicate the validity  of their marriages, and Clement could issue his bulls without any fear that their justice would  be challenged by the arms of powerful princes. Not so with Henry; while the secret  proceedings before Wolsey wer

e in progress, the world was shocked by the sack of Rome,  and Clement was a prisoner in the hands of the Emperor's troops. There was no hope that a Pope  in such a plight would confirm a sentence to the detriment of his master's aunt. "If the Pope,"  wrote Wolsey to Henry on receipt of the news, "be slain or taken, it will hinder the King's  affairs not a little, which have hitherto been going on so well. " A little later he declared  that, if Catherine repudiated his authority, it would be nec

essary to have the assent of  the Pope or of the cardinals to the divorce. To obtain the former the Pope must be liberated;  to secure the latter the cardinals must be assembled in France. To effect the Pope's  liberation, or rather to call an assembly of cardinals in France during Clement's captivity,  was the real object of the mission to France, on which Wolsey started in July. Such a  body, acting under Wolsey's presidency and in the territories of the French King,  was as likely to favour a

n attack upon the Emperor's aunt as the Pope in the hands of  Charles's armies was certain to oppose it. Wolsey went in unparalleled splendour, not  as Henry's ambassador but as his lieutenant; and projects for his own advancement  were, as usual, part of the programme. Louise of Savoy, the queen-mother of France,  suggested to him that all Christian princes should repudiate the Pope's authority  so long as he remained in captivity, and the Cardinal replied that, had  the overture not been made

by her, it would have been started by himself and  by Henry. It was rumoured in Spain that Wolsey "had gone into France to separate the  Church of England and of France from the Roman, not merely during the captivity of the Pope and  to effect his liberation, but for a perpetual division," and that Francis was offering Wolsey  the patriarchate of the two schismatic churches. To win over the Cardinal to the interest of Spain,  it was even suggested that Charles should depose Clement and offer the

Papacy to Wolsey. The  project of a schism was not found feasible; the cardinals at Rome were too numerous,  and Wolsey only succeeded in gaining four, three French and one Italian, to join him  in signing a protest repudiating Clement's authority so long as he remained in the Emperor's  power. It was necessary to fall back after all on the Pope for assent to Henry's divorce, and  the news that Charles had already got wind of the proceedings against Catherine made  it advisable that no time sho

uld be lost. The Emperor, indeed, had long been aware of  Henry's intentions; every care had been taken to prevent communication between Catherine  and her nephew, and a plot had been laid to kidnap a messenger she was sending in  August to convey her appeal for protection. All was in vain, for the very day  after Wolsey's court had opened in May, Mendoza wrote to Charles that Wolsey "as  the finishing stroke to all his iniquities, had been scheming to bring about the  Queen's divorce"; and on t

he 29th of July, some days before Wolsey had any suspicion that  a hint was abroad, Charles informed Mendoza that he had despatched Cardinal Quignon to Rome,  to act on the Queen's behalf and to persuade Clement to revoke Wolsey's legatine powers.  In ignorance of all this, Wolsey urged Henry to send Ghinucci, the Bishop of Worcester,  and others to Rome with certain demands, among which was a request for Clement's assent  to the abortive proposal for a council in France. But now a divergence be

came apparent between the  policy of Wolsey and that of his king. Both were working for a divorce, but Wolsey wanted  Henry to marry as his second wife Renée, the daughter of Louis the Twelfth, and thus bind  more closely the two kings, upon whose union the Cardinal's personal and political schemes were now  exclusively based. Henry, however, had determined that his second wife was to be Anne Boleyn, and of  this determination Wolsey was as yet uninformed. The Cardinal had good reason to dread t

hat lady's  ascendancy over Henry's mind; for she was the hope and the tool of the anti-clerical party, which had  hitherto been kept in check by Wolsey's supremacy. The Duke of Norfolk was her uncle, and he  was hostile to Wolsey for both private and public reasons; her father, Viscount Rochford, her  cousins, Sir William Fitzwilliam and Sir Francis Brian, and many more distant connections, were  anxious at the first opportunity to lead an attack on the Church and Cardinal. Before the divorce 

case began Wolsey's position had grown precarious; taxes at home and failure abroad had turned  the loyalty of the people to sullen discontent, and Wolsey was mainly responsible.  "Disaffection to the King," wrote Mendoza in March, 1527, "and hatred of  the Legate are visible everywhere. .. . The King would soon be obliged to change his  councillors, were only a leader to present himself and head the malcontents;" and in  May he reported a general rumour to the effect that Henry intended to reli

eve the  Legate of his share in the administration. The Cardinal had incurred the dislike of  nearly every section of the community; the King was his sole support and  the King was beginning to waver. In May there were high words between  Wolsey and Norfolk in Henry's presence; in July King and Cardinal were quarrelling over  ecclesiastical patronage at Calais, and, long before the failure of the divorce suit, there were  other indications that Henry and his minister had ceased to work together

in harmony. It is, indeed,  quite a mistake to represent Wolsey's failure to obtain a sentence in Henry's favour as the sole  or main cause of his fall. Had he succeeded, he might have deferred for a time his otherwise  unavoidable ruin, but it was his last and only chance. He was driven to playing a desperate  game, in which the dice were loaded against him. If his plan failed, he told Clement over and over  again, it would mean for him irretrievable ruin, and in his fall he would drag down the

Church.  If it succeeded, he would be hardly more secure, for success meant the predominance of Anne  Boleyn and of her anti-ecclesiastical kin. Under the circumstances, it is possible to  attach too much weight to the opinion of the French and Spanish ambassadors,  and of Charles the Fifth himself, that Wolsey suggested the divorce as the  means of breaking for ever the alliance between England and the House of Burgundy,  and substituting for it a union with France. The divorce fitted in so we

ll with Wolsey's French  policy, that the suspicion was natural; but the same observers also recorded the impression that  Wolsey was secretly opposing the divorce from fear of the ascendancy of Anne Boleyn. That suspicion  had been brought to Henry's mind as early as June, 1527. It was probably due to the facts  that Wolsey was not blinded by passion, as Henry was, to the difficulties in the way,  and that it was he who persuaded Henry to have recourse to the Pope in the first instance, when  t

he King desired to follow Suffolk's precedent, obtain a sentence in England, marry again, and  trust to the Pope to confirm his proceedings. It is not, however, impossible to trace Wolsey's  real designs behind these conflicting reports. He knew that Henry was determined to have a  divorce and that this was one of those occasions upon which "he would be obeyed, whosoever  spoke to the contrary". As minister he must therefore either resign—a difficult thing in the  sixteenth century—or carry out

the King's policy. For his own part he had no objection to the  divorce in itself; he was no more touched by the pathos of Catherine's fate than was her nephew  Charles the Fifth, he wished to see the succession strengthened, he thought that he might restore his  tottering influence by obtaining gratification for the King, and he was straining every nerve to  weaken Charles the Fifth, either because the Emperor's power was really too great, or out of  revenge for his betrayal over the papal elec

tion. But he was strenuously hostile to Henry's marriage  with Anne Boleyn for two excellent reasons: firstly she and her kin belonged to  the anti-ecclesiastical party which Wolsey had dreaded since 1515, and  secondly he desired Henry to marry the French Princess Renée in order to  strengthen his anti-imperial policy. Further, he was anxious that the divorce  problem should be solved by means of the Papacy, because its solution by merely national action  would create a breach between England a

nd Rome, would ruin Wolsey's chances of election  as Pope, would threaten his ecclesiastical supremacy in England, which was merely a  legatine authority dependent on the Pope, and would throw Clement into  the arms of Charles the Fifth, whereas Wolsey desired him to be an effective  member of the anti-imperial alliance. Thus Wolsey was prepared to go part of the way  with Henry the Eighth, but he clearly saw the point at which their paths would diverge; and  his efforts on Henry's behalf were h

ampered by his endeavours to keep the King on the track  which he had marked out. Henry's suspicions, and his knowledge that Wolsey would be  hostile to his marriage with Anne Boleyn, induced him to act for the time  independently of the Cardinal; and, while Wolsey was in France hinting at  a marriage between Henry and Renée, the King himself was secretly endeavouring to remove  the obstacles to his union with Anne Boleyn. Instead of adopting Wolsey's suggestion  that Ghinucci should be sent to

Rome as an Italian versed in the ways of the Papal Curia, he despatched his secretary, Dr. William  Knight, with two extraordinary commissions, the second of which he thought would not be  revealed "for any craft the Cardinal or any other can find". The first was to obtain from  the Pope a dispensation to marry a second wife, without being divorced from Catherine, the  issue from both marriages to be legitimate. This "licence to commit bigamy" has naturally  been the subject of much righteous in

dignation. But marriage-laws were lax in those days,  when Popes could play fast and loose with them for political purposes; and, besides the  "great reasons and precedents, especially in the Old Testament," to which Henry referred, he  might have produced a precedent more pertinent, more recent, and better calculated to appeal to  Clement the Seventh In 1521 Charles the Fifth 's Spanish council drew up a memorial on the subject  of his marriage, in which they pointed out that his ancestor, Henr

y the Fourth of Castile, had,  in 1437, married Dona Blanca, by whom he had no children; and that the Pope thereupon granted  him a dispensation to marry a second wife on condition that, if within a fixed time he had  no issue by her, he should return to his first. A licence for bigamy, modelled after this  precedent, would have suited Henry admirably, but apparently he was unaware of this useful  example, and was induced to countermand Knight's commission before it had been communicated  to Cle

ment. The demand would not, however, have shocked the Pope so much as his modern  defenders, for on 18th September, 1530, Casale writes to Henry: "A few days since the  Pope secretly proposed to me that your Majesty might be allowed two wives. I told him I could  not undertake to make any such proposition, because I did not know whether it would  satisfy your Majesty's conscience. I made this answer because I know that  the Imperialists have this in view, and are urging it; but why, I know not.

" Ghinucci  and Benet were equally cautious, and thought the Pope's suggestion was only a ruse; whether a ruse  or not, it is a curious illustration of the moral influence Popes were then likely to exert on their  flock. The second commission, with which Knight was entrusted, was hardly less strange than the  first. By his illicit relations with Mary Boleyn, Henry had already contracted affinity in the first  degree with her sister Anne, in fact precisely the same affinity as that which Catherin

e was alleged  to have contracted with him before their marriage. The inconsistency of Henry's conduct,  in seeking to remove by the same method from his second marriage the disability  which was held to invalidate his first, helps us to define the precise position  which Henry took up and the nature of his peculiar conscience. Obviously he did not at  this stage deny the Pope's dispensing power; for he was invoking its aid to enable  him to marry Anne Boleyn. He asserted, and he denied, no prin

ciple whatever,  though it must be remembered that his own dispensation was an almost, if not  quite, unprecedented stretch of papal power. To dispense with the "divine" law  against marrying the brother's wife, and to dispense with the merely canonical obstacle  to his marriage with Anne arising out of his relations with Mary Boleyn, were very different  matters; and in this light the breach between England and Rome might be represented as caused  by a novel extension of papal claims. Henry, ho

wever, was a casuist concerned exclusively  with his own case. He maintained merely that the particular dispensation, granted for his  marriage with Catherine, was null and void. As a concession to others, he condescended  to give a number of reasons, none of them affecting any principle, but only the legal  technicalities of the case—the causes for which the dispensation was granted, such as his  own desire, and the political necessity for the marriage were fictitious; he had himself protested 

against the marriage, and so forth. For himself, his own conviction was ample sanction; he knew  he was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was  a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The capacity for convincing himself of his  own righteousness is the most effective weapon in the egotist's armoury, and Henry's egotism  touched the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might think of  the maze of apparent inconsistencies in w

hich he was involved. In 1528 he was  in some fear of death from the plague; fear of death is fatal to the  peace of a guilty conscience, and it might well have made Henry pause in  his pursuit after the divorce and Anne Boleyn. But Henry never wavered; he went on in serene  assurance, writing his love letters to Anne, as a conscientiously unmarried man might do,  making his will, "confessing every day and receiving his Maker at every feast," paying  great attention to the morals of monasteries,

and to charges of malversation against  Wolsey, and severely lecturing his sister Margaret on the sinfulness of her life.  He hopes she will turn "to God's word, the vively doctrine of Jesu Christ,  the only ground of salvation—1 Cor. 3, etc. "; he reminds her of "the divine ordinance  of inseparable matrimony first instituted in Paradise," and urges her to avoid "the inevitable  damnation threatened against advoutrers". Henry's conscience was convenient and skilful.  He believed in the "ordina

nce of inseparable matrimony," so, when he wished to divorce  a wife, his conscience warned him that he had never really been married to her. Hence  his nullity suits with Catherine of Aragon, with Anne Boleyn and with Anne of Cleves.  Moreover, if he had never been married to Catherine, his relations with Mary Boleyn and  Elizabeth Blount were obviously not adultery, and he was free to denounce that sin in  Margaret with a clear conscience. Dr. Knight had comparatively little difficulty  in obt

aining the dispensation for Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn; but it was only to be  effective after sentence had been given decreeing the nullity of his marriage with Catherine  of Aragon; and, as Wolsey saw, that was the real crux of the question. Knight had scarcely  turned his steps homeward, when he was met by a courier with fresh instructions from Wolsey  to obtain a further concession from Clement; the Pope was to empower the Cardinal himself, or  some other safe person, to examine the o

riginal dispensation, and, if it were found invalid,  to annul Henry's marriage with Catherine. So Knight returned to the Papal Court; and  then began that struggle between English and Spanish influence at Rome which ended  in the victory of Charles the Fifth and the repudiation by England of the Roman  jurisdiction. Never did two parties enter upon a contest with a clearer perception  of the issues involved, or carry it on with their eyes more open to the magnitude of  the results. Wolsey himse

lf, Gardiner, Foxe, Casale, and every English envoy employed in  the case, warned and threatened Clement that, if he refused Henry's demands, he would involve  Wolsey and the Papal cause in England in a common ruin. "He alleged," says Campeggio of Wolsey,  "that if the King's desire were not complied with. . .there would follow the speedy and total  ruin of the kingdom, of his Lordship and of the Church's influence in this kingdom. " "I  cannot reflect upon it," wrote Wolsey himself, "and close

my eyes, for I see ruin, infamy and  subversion of the whole dignity and estimation of the See Apostolic if this course is persisted  in. You see in what dangerous times we are. If the Pope will consider the gravity of this cause, and  how much the safety of the nation depends upon it, he will see that the course he now  pursues will drive the King to adopt remedies which are injurious to the Pope, and  are frequently instilled into the King's mind. " On one occasion Clement confessed that,  tho

ugh the Pope was supposed to carry the papal laws locked up in his breast, Providence had not  vouchsafed him the key wherewith to unlock them; and Gardiner roughly asked in retort whether in  that case the papal laws should not be committed to the flames. He told how the Lutherans  were instigating Henry to do away with the temporal possessions of the Church. But  Clement could only bewail his misfortune, and protest that, if heresies and  schisms arose, it was not his fault. He could not affor

d to offend the all-powerful  Emperor; the sack of Rome and Charles's intimation conveyed in plain and set terms that it was  the judgment of God had cowed Clement for the rest of his life, and made him resolve  never again to incur the Emperor's enmity. From the point of view of justice, the Pope  had an excellent case; even the Lutherans, who denied his dispensing power, denounced  the divorce. Quod non fieri debuit, was their just and common-sense point, factum  valet. But the Pope's case had

been hopelessly weakened by the evil practice of  his predecessors and of himself. Alexander the Sixth had divorced Louis the  Twelfth from his Queen for no other reasons than that Louis the Twelfth wanted to unite  Brittany with France by marrying its duchess, and that Alexander, the Borgia Pope, required  Louis' assistance in promoting the interests of the iniquitous Borgia family. The injustice  to Catherine was no greater than that to Louis' Queen. Henry's sister Margaret, and  both the hus

bands of his other sister, Mary, had procured divorces from  Popes, and why not Henry himself? Clement was ready enough to grant Margaret's  divorce; he was willing to give a dispensation for a marriage between the Princess Mary  and her half-brother, the Duke of Richmond; the more insuperable the obstacle, the more  its removal enhanced his power. It was all very well to dispense with canons and divine laws,  but to annul papal dispensations—was that not to cheapen his own wares? Why, wrote Hen

ry to  Clement, could he not dispense with human laws, if he was able to dispense with divine at  pleasure? Obviously because divine authority could take care of itself, but papal  prerogatives needed a careful shepherd. Even this principle, such as it was, was not  consistently followed, for he had annulled a dispensation in Suffolk's case. Clement's real  anxiety was to avoid responsibility. More than once he urged Henry to settle the matter himself,  as Suffolk had done, obtain a sentence fro

m the courts in England, and marry his second wife.  The case could then only come before him as a suit against the validity of the second marriage,  and the accomplished fact was always a powerful argument. Moreover, all this would take time, and  delay was as dear to Clement as irresponsibility. But Henry was determined to have such a sentence  as would preclude all doubts of the legitimacy of his children by the second marriage, and  was as anxious to shift the responsibility to Clement's sho

ulders as the Pope was to avoid it.  Clement next urged Catherine to go into a nunnery, for that would only entail injustice  on herself, and would involve the Church and its head in no temporal perils. When  Catherine refused, he wished her in the grave, and lamented that he seemed doomed through  her to lose the spiritualties of his Church, as he had lost its temporalties through  her nephew, Charles the Fifth It was thus with the utmost reluctance that he  granted the commission brought by Kn

ight. It was a draft, drawn up by Wolsey, apparently  declaring the law on the matter and empowering Wolsey, if the facts were found to be such  as were alleged, to pronounce the nullity of Catherine's marriage. Wolsey desired that it  should be granted in the form in which he had drawn it up. But the Pope's advisers declared  that such a commission would disgrace Henry, Wolsey and Clement himself. The draft was  therefore amended so as to be unobjectionable, or, in other words, useless for prac

tical  purposes; and, with this commission, Knight returned to England, rejoicing in  the confidence of complete success. But, as soon as Wolsey had seen it, he pronounced  the commission "as good as none at all". The discovery did not improve his or Henry's  opinion of the Pope's good faith; but, dissembling their resentment, they despatched,  in February, 1528, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe to obtain fresh and more effective powers.  Eventually, on 8th June a commission was issued to Wolsey

and Campeggio to try the case and  pronounce sentence; even if one was unwilling, the other might act by himself; and all appeals  from their jurisdiction were forbidden. This was not a decretal commission; it did not bind  the Pope or prevent him from revoking the case. Such a commission was, however, granted on  condition that it should be shown to no one but the King and Wolsey, and that it should not  be used in the procedure. The Pope also gave a written promise, in spite of a protest lodg

ed  on Catherine's behalf by the Spanish ambassador, Muxetula, that he would not revoke, or do  anything to invalidate, the commission, but would confirm the cardinals' decision.  If, Clement had said in the previous December, Lautrec, the French commander in Italy, came  nearer Rome, he might excuse himself to the Emperor as having acted under pressure. He would  send the commission as soon as Lautrec arrived. Lautrec had now arrived; he had marched  down through Italy; he had captured Melfi; t

he Spanish commander, Moncada, had been killed;  Naples was thought to be on the eve of surrender. The Spanish dominion in Italy was waning, the  Emperor's thunderbolts were less terrifying, and the justice of the cause of his aunt less  apparent. On 25th July Campeggio embarked at Corneto, and proceeded by slow stages  through France towards England. Henry congratulated himself that his hopes  were on the eve of fulfilment. But, unfortunately for him, the basis, on which  they were built, was a

s unstable as water. The decision of his case  still depended upon Clement, and Clement wavered with every fluctuation in  the success or the failure of the Spanish arms in Italy. Campeggio had scarcely set out,  when Doria, the famous Genoese admiral, deserted Francis for Charles; on the 17th  of August Lautrec died before Naples; and, on 10th September, an English agent sent  Wolsey news of a French disaster, which he thought more serious than the battle of Pavia  or the sack of Rome. On the f

ollowing day Sanga, the Pope's secretary, wrote to Campeggio that,  "as the Emperor is victorious, the Pope must not give him any pretext for a fresh rupture, lest  the Church should be utterly annihilated. .. . Proceed on your journey to England, and there do  your utmost to restore mutual affection between the King and Queen. You are not to pronounce  any opinion without a new and express commission hence. " Sanga repeated the injunction a few days  later. "Every day," he wrote, "stronger reas

ons are discovered;" to satisfy Henry "involves the  certain ruin of the Apostolic See and the Church, owing to recent events. .. .If so great an  injury be done to the Emperor. .. the Church cannot escape utter ruin, as it is entirely  in the power of the Emperor's servants. You will not, therefore, be surprised at  my repeating that you are not to proceed to sentence, under any pretext, without express  commission; but to protract the matter as long as possible. " Clement himself wrote to Char

les that  nothing would be done to Catherine's detriment, that Campeggio had gone merely to urge  Henry to do his duty, and that the whole case would eventually be referred to Rome.  Such were the secret instructions with which Campeggio arrived in England in October. He  readily promised not to proceed to sentence, but protested against the interpretation  which he put upon the Pope's command, namely, that he was not to begin the trial. The English, he said, "would think  that I had come to hoo

dwink them, and might resent it. You know how  much that would involve. " He did not seem to realise that the refusal to pass  sentence was equally hoodwinking the English, and that the trial would only defer the  moment of their penetrating the deception; a trial was of no use without sentence. In  accordance with his instructions, Campeggio first sought to dissuade Henry from persisting in his  suit for the divorce. Finding the King immovable, he endeavoured to induce Catherine to go into a  n

unnery, as the divorced wife of Louis the Twelfth had done, "who still lived in the greatest honour  and reputation with God and all that kingdom". He represented to her that she had  nothing to lose by such a step; she could never regain Henry's affections or  obtain restitution of her conjugal rights. Her consent might have deferred the separation  of the English Church from Rome; it would certainly have relieved the Supreme Pontiff from  a humiliating and intolerable position. But these consi

derations of expediency weighed nothing  with Catherine. She was as immovable as Henry, and deaf to all Campeggio's solicitations.  Her conscience was, perhaps, of a rigid, Spanish type, but it was as clear as Henry's  and a great deal more comprehensible. She was convinced that her marriage was valid; to  admit a doubt of it would imply that she had been living in sin and imperil her immortal soul.  Henry did not in the least mind admitting that he had lived for twenty years with a woman  who w

as not his wife; the sin, to his mind, was continuing to live with her after he  had become convinced that she was really not his wife. Catherine appears, however, to  have been willing to take the monastic vows, if Henry would do the same.  Henry was equally willing, if Clement would immediately dispense with  the vows in his case, but not in Catherine's. But there were objections to this course, and  doubts of Clement's power to authorise Henry's re-marriage, even if Catherine did go into  a n

unnery. Meanwhile, Campeggio found help from an unexpected quarter in his efforts  to waste the time. Quite unknown to Henry, Wolsey, or Clement, there existed in Spain  a brief of Julius the Second fuller than the original bull of dispensation which he had  granted for the marriage of Henry and Catherine, and supplying any defects that might be found  in it. Indeed, so conveniently did the brief meet the criticisms urged against the bull,  that Henry and Wolsey at once pronounced it an obvious

forgery, concocted after the  doubts about the bull had been raised. No copy of the brief could be found in the English  archives, nor could any trace be discovered of its having been registered at Rome; while Ghinucci and  Lee, who examined the original in Spain, professed to see in it such flagrant inaccuracies as to  deprive it of all claim to be genuine. Still, if it were genuine, it shattered the whole of  Henry's case. That had been built up, not on the denial of the Pope's power to dispen

se, but on the  technical defects of a particular dispensation. Now it appeared that the validity of the marriage  did not depend upon this dispensation at all. Nor did it depend upon the brief, for Catherine  was prepared to deny on oath that the marriage with Arthur had been anything more than a form;  in that case the affinity with Henry had not been contracted, and there was no need of either  dispensation or brief. This assertion seems to have shaken Henry; certainly he began to shift  his

position, and, early in 1529, he was wishing for some noted divine, friar or other, who would  maintain that the Pope could not dispense at all. This was his first doubt as to the plenitude of  papal power; his marriage with Catherine must be invalid, because his conscience told him so;  if it was not invalid through defects in the dispensation, it must be invalid because  the Pope could not dispense. Wolsey met the objection with a legal point, perfectly  good in itself, but trivial. There were

two canonical disabilities which the dispensation  must meet for Henry's marriage to be valid; first, the consummation of Catherine's marriage  with Arthur; secondly, the marriage, even though it was not consummated, was yet celebrated in  facie ecclesiæ, and generally reputed complete. There was thus an impedimentum publicæ honestatis  to the marriage of Henry and Catherine, and this impediment was not mentioned in, and  therefore not removed by, the dispensation. But all this legal argument m

ight be invalidated  by the brief. It was useless to proceed with the trial until the promoters of the suit knew  what the brief contained. According to Mendoza, Catherine's "whole right" depended upon the brief,  a statement indicating a general suspicion that the bull was really insufficient. So the winter  of 1528-29 and the following spring were spent in efforts to get hold of the original brief,  or to induce Clement to declare it a forgery. The Queen was made to write to Charles that  it w

as absolutely essential to her case that the brief should be produced before the legatine  Court in England. The Emperor was not likely to be caught by so transparent an artifice. Moreover,  the emissary, sent with Catherine's letter, wrote, as soon as he got to France, warning Charles that  his aunt's letter was written under compulsion and expressed the reverse of her real desires.  In the spring of 1529 several English envoys, ending with Gardiner, were sent to Rome to obtain  a papal declara

tion of the falsity of the brief. Clement, however, naturally refused to declare the  brief a forgery, without hearing the arguments on the other side, and more important developments  soon supervened. Gardiner wrote from Rome, early in May, that there was imminent  danger of the Pope revoking the case, and the news determined Henry and Wolsey  to relinquish their suit about the brief, and push on the proceedings of the legatine  Court, so as to get some decision before the case was called to Ro

me. Once the legates  had pronounced in favour of the divorce, Clement was informed, the English cared little  what further fortunes befel it elsewhere. So, on the 31st of May, 1529, in the  great hall of the Black Friars, in London, the famous Court was formally opened, and  the King and Queen were cited to appear before it on the 18th of June. Henry was then  represented by two proxies, but Catherine came in person to protest against the competence of  the tribunal. Three days later both the K

ing and the Queen attended in person to hear the Court's  decision on this point. Catherine threw herself on her knees before Henry; she begged him to  consider her honour, her daughter's and his. Twice Henry raised her up; he protested  that he desired nothing so much as that their marriage should be found valid, in spite  of the "perpetual scruple" he had felt about it, and declared that only his love for her had kept  him silent so long; her request for the removal of the cause to Rome was un

reasonable,  considering the Emperor's power there. Again protesting against the jurisdiction of the  Court and appealing to Rome, Catherine withdrew. Touched by her appeal, Henry burst out in her  praise. "She is, my Lords," he said, "as true, as obedient, and as conformable a wife, as  I could, in my phantasy, wish or desire. She hath all the virtuous qualities that ought to  be in a woman of her dignity, or in any other of baser estate. " But these qualities had nothing  to do with the pitile

ss forms of law. The legate, overruled her protest, refused her appeal,  and summoned her back. She took no notice, and was declared contumacious. The  proceedings then went on without her; Fisher Bishop of Rochester, made a courageous  defence of the validity of the marriage, to which Henry drew up a bitter reply  in the form of a speech addressed to the legates. The speed with which the procedure  was hurried on was little to Campeggio's taste. He had not prejudged the case; he was still in  d

oubt as to which way the sentence would go; and he entered a dignified protest against the  orders he received from Rome to give sentence, if it came to that point, against Henry. He  would pronounce what judgment seemed to him just, but he shrank from the ordeal, and he did his  best to follow out Clement's injunctions to procrastinate. In this he succeeded completely. It  seemed that judgment could no longer be deferred; it was to be delivered on the 23rd of  July. On that day the King himself

, and the chief men of his Court, were  present; his proctor demanded sentence. Campeggio stood up, and instead of giving  sentence, adjourned the Court till October. "By the mass! " burst out Suffolk, giving the  table a great blow with his hand, "now I see that the old-said saw is true, that there was  never a legate nor cardinal that did good in England. " The Court never met again; and except  during the transient reaction, under Mary, it was the last legatine Court ever held in England.  Th

ey might assure the Pope, Wolsey had written to the English envoys at Rome a month before, that  if he granted the revocation he would lose the devotion of the King and of England to the See  Apostolic, and utterly destroy Wolsey for ever. Long before the vacation was ended, news reached  Henry that the case had been called to Rome; the revocation was, indeed, decreed a week before  Campeggio adjourned his court. Charles's star, once more in the ascendant, had cast its  baleful influence over He

nry's fortunes. The close alliance between England and France  had led to a joint declaration of war on the Emperor in January, 1528, into which the English  ambassadors in Spain had been inveigled by their French colleagues, against Henry's wishes. It was  received with a storm of opposition in England, and Wolsey had some difficulty in  justifying himself to the King. "You may be sure," wrote Du Bellay,  "that he is playing a terrible game, for I believe he is the only Englishman who wishes  a

war with Flanders. " If that was his wish, he was doomed to disappointment. Popular hatred  of the war was too strong; a project was mooted by the clothiers in Kent for seizing the  Cardinal and turning him adrift in a boat, with holes bored in it. The clothiers  in Wiltshire were reported to be rising; in Norfolk employers dismissed their workmen. War  with Flanders meant ruin to the most prosperous industry in both countries, and the attempt to  divert the Flanders trade to Calais had failed.

So Henry and Charles were soon discussing  peace; no hostilities took place; an agreement, that trade should go on as usual with Flanders,  was followed by a truce in June, and the truce by the Peace of Cambrai in the following year. That  peace affords the measure of England's decline since 1521. Wolsey was carefully excluded from all  share in the negotiations. England was, indeed, admitted as a participator, but only after Louise  and Margaret of Savoy had practically settled the terms, and

after Du Bellay had told Francis  that, if England were not admitted, it would mean Wolsey's immediate ruin. By the Treaty  of Cambrai Francis abandoned Italy to Charles. His affairs beyond the Alps had been going  from bad to worse since the death of Lautrec; and the suggested guard of French and English  soldiers which was to relieve the Pope from fear of Charles was never formed. That failure  was not the only circumstance which made Clement imperialist. Venice, the ally of England and  Franc

e, seized Ravenna and Cervia, two papal towns. "The conduct of the Venetians," wrote  John Casale from Rome, "moves the Pope more than anything else, and he would use the assistance of  any one, except the Devil, to avenge their injury. " "The King and the Cardinal," repeated Sanga  to Campeggio, "must not expect him to execute his intentions, until they have used their  utmost efforts to compel the Venetians to restore the Pope's territories. " Henry did his  best, but he was not sincerely help

ed by Francis; his efforts proved vain, and Clement thought  he could get more effective assistance from Charles. "Every one is persuaded," said one of  the Emperor's agents in Italy on 10th January, 1529, "that the Pope is now sincerely  attached to his Imperial Majesty. " "I suspect," wrote Du Bellay from London, in  the same month, "that the Pope has commanded Campeggio to meddle no further, seeing things  are taking quite a different turn from what he had been assured, and that the Emperor's

affairs  in Naples are in such a state that Clement dare not displease him. " The Pope had already  informed Charles that his aunt's petition for the revocation of the suit would be granted.  The Italian League was practically dissolved. "I have quite made up my mind," said Clement to the  Archbishop of Capua on 7th June, "to become an Imperialist, and to live and die as such. ..  I am only waiting for the return of my nuncio. " That nuncio had gone to Barcelona to negotiate  an alliance betwee

n the Pope and the Emperor; and the success of his mission completed Clement's  conversion. The revocation was only delayed, thought Charles's representative at Rome, to  secure better terms for the Pope. On 21st June, the French commander, St. Pol,  was utterly defeated at Landriano; "not a vestige of the army is left,"  reported Casale. A few days later the Treaty of Barcelona between  Clement and Charles was signed. Clement's nephew was to marry the Emperor's  natural daughter; the Medici tyr

anny was to be re-established in Florence; Ravenna, Cervia  and other towns were to be restored to the Pope; His Holiness was to crown Charles with  the imperial crown, and to absolve from ecclesiastical censures all those who were present  at, or consented to, the sack of Rome. It was, in effect, a family compact; and part of it  was the quashing of the legates' proceedings against the Emperor's aunt, with whom the  Pope was now to be allied by family ties. "We found out secretly," write the En

glish  envoys at Rome, on the 16th of July, "that the Pope signed the revocation yesterday  morning, as it would have been dishonourable to have signed it after the publication of the new  treaty with the Emperor, which will be published here on Sunday. " Clement knew that his motives  would not bear scrutiny, and he tried to avoid public odium by a characteristic subterfuge.  Catherine could hope for no justice in England, Henry could expect no justice at Rome. Political  expediency would dicta

te a verdict in Henry's favour in England; political expediency would  dictate a verdict for Catherine at Rome. Henry's ambassadors were instructed to appeal  from Clement to the "true Vicar of Christ," but where was the true Vicar of Christ to be  found on earth? There was no higher tribunal. It was intolerable that English suits should be  decided by the chances and changes of French or Habsburg influence in Italy, by the hopes  and the fears of an Italian prince for the safety of his temporal

power. The natural and  inevitable result was the separation of England from Rome. CHAPTER 9. THE CARDINAL'S FALL. The loss of their spiritual jurisdiction  in England was part of the price paid by the Popes for their temporal possessions in Italy. The  papal domains were either too great or too small. If the Pope was to rely on his temporal  power, it should have been extensive enough to protect him from the dictation  and resentment of secular princes; and from this point of view there was no

  little justification for the aims of Julius the Second Had he succeeded in driving the  barbarians across the Alps or into the sea, he and his successors might in safety have judged  the world, and the breach with Henry might never have taken place. If the Pope was to rely on his  spiritual weapons, there was no need of temporal states at all. In their existing extent and  position, they were simply the heel of Achilles, the vulnerable spot, through which secular  foes might wound the Vicar of

Christ. France threatened him from the north and  Spain from the south; he was ever between the upper and the nether mill-stone. Italy was  the cockpit of Europe in the sixteenth century, and the eyes of the Popes were perpetually  bent on the worldly fray, seeking to save or extend their dominions. Through the  Pope's temporal power, France and Spain exerted their pressure. He could only defend  himself by playing off one against the other, and in this game his spiritual powers were  his only

effective pieces. More and more the spiritual authority, with which he was  entrusted, was made to serve political ends. Temporal princes were branded as "sons of iniquity  and children of perdition," not because their beliefs or their morals were worse than other  men's, but because they stood in the way of the family ambitions of various popes. Their frequent  use and abuse brought ecclesiastical censures into public contempt, and princes soon ceased to be  frightened with false fires. James t

he Fourth , when excommunicated, said he would appeal to  Prester John, and that he would side with any council against the Pope, even if it contained  only three bishops. The Vicar of Christ was lost in the petty Italian prince. Corruptio optimi  pessima. The lower dragged the higher nature down. If the Papal Court was distinguished from the  courts of other Italian sovereigns, it was not by exceptional purity. "In this Court as in  others," wrote Silvester de Giglis from Rome, "nothing can be

effected without gifts. " The  election of Leo the Tenth was said to be free from bribery; a cardinal himself was amazed,  and described the event as Phœnix et rara avis. If poison was not a frequent weapon at Rome,  popes and cardinals at least believed it to be. Alexander the Sixth was said to have  been poisoned; one cardinal was accused of poisoning his fellow-cardinal, Bainbridge;  and others were charged with an attempt on the life of Leo the Tenth In 1517, Pace described  the state of aff

airs at Rome as plane monstra, omni dedecore et infamia plena;  omnis fides, omnis honestas, una cum religione, a mundo abvolasse videntur. Ten  years later, the Emperor himself declared that the sack of Rome was the just judgment of God, and  one of his ambassadors said that the Pope ought to be deprived of his temporal states, as they  had been at the bottom of all the dissensions. Clement himself claimed to have been the  originator of that war which brought upon him so terrible and so just a

punishment. Another result  of the merging of the Pope in the Italian prince was the practical exclusion of the English and  other Northern nations from the supreme council of Christendom. There was no apparent reason why an  Englishman should not be the head of the Christian Church just as well as an Italian; but there was  some incongruity in the idea of an Englishman ruling over Italian States, and no Englishman had  attained the Papacy for nearly four centuries. The double failure of Wolsey

made it clear that  the door of the Papacy was sealed to Englishmen, whatever their claims might be. The roll of  cardinals tells a similar tale; the Roman curia graciously conceded that there should generally  be one English cardinal in the sacred college, but one in a body of forty or fifty was  thought as much as England could fairly demand. It is not so very surprising  that England repudiated the authority of a tribunal in which its influence was  measured on such a contemptible scale. The

other nations of Europe thought much the same,  and it is only necessary to add up the number of cardinals belonging to each nationality to  arrive at a fairly accurate indication of the peoples who rejected papal pretensions.  The nations most inadequately represented in the college of cardinals broke away from Rome;  those which remained faithful were the nations which controlled in the present, or might hope to  control in the future, the supreme ecclesiastical power. Spain and France had li

ttle temptation  to abolish an authority which they themselves wielded in turn; for if the Pope was a Spaniard  to-day, he might well be a Frenchman to-morrow. There was no absurdity in Frenchmen or Spaniards  ruling over the papal States; for France and Spain already held under their sway more Italian  territory than Italian natives themselves. It was the subjection of the Pope to French and  Spanish domination that prejudiced his claims in English eyes. His authority was tolerable so long  as

the old ideal of the unity of Christendom under a single monarch retained its force, or even so  long as the Pope was Italian pure and simple. But when Italy was either Spanish or French, and  the Pope the chaplain of one or the other monarch, the growing spirit of nationality could bear  it no longer; it responded at once to Henry's appeals against the claims of a foreign  jurisdiction. It was a mere accident that the breach with Rome grew out of Spanish control  of the Pope. The separation was

nearly effected more than a century earlier, as a result of  the Pope's Babylonish captivity in France; and the wonder is, not that the breach took place  when it did, but that it was deferred for so long. At the beginning of the fifteenth century  all the elements were present but one for the ecclesiastical revolution which was reserved  for Henry the Eighth to effect. The Papacy had been discredited in English eyes by subservience  to France, just as it had in 1529 by subservience to Charles.

Lollardy was more powerful in England  in the reign of Henry the Fourth than heresy was in the middle of that of Henry the Eighth. There  was as strong a demand for the secularisation of Church property on the part of the lay peers  and gentry; and Wycliffe himself had anticipated the cardinal point of the later movement by  appealing to the State to reform the Church. But great revolutions depend on a number of causes  working together, and often fail for the lack of one. The element lacking i

n the reign of Henry  the Fourth was the King himself. The Lancastrians were orthodox from conviction and from the  necessities of their position; they needed the support of the Church to bolster up a weak title  to the crown. The civil wars followed; and Henry the Seventh was too much absorbed in securing  his throne to pursue any quarrels with Rome. But when his son began to rule as well as to  reign, it was inevitable that not merely questions of Church property and of the relations with the 

Papacy should come up for revision, but also those issues between Church and State which had remained  in abeyance during the fifteenth century. The divorce was the spark which ignited the flame, but  the combustible materials had been long existent. If the divorce had been all, there would have been  no Reformation in England. After the death of Anne Boleyn, Henry might have done some trifling  penance at his subjects' expense, made the Pope a present, or waged war on one of Clement's  orthodo

x foes, and that would have been the end. Much had happened since the days of  Hildebrand, and Popes were no longer able to exact heroic repentance. The divorce,  in fact, was the occasion, and not the cause, of the Reformation. That movement, so  far as Henry the Eighth was concerned, was not in essence doctrinal; neither was it  primarily a schism between the English and Roman communions. It was rather an episode in  the eternal dispute between Church and State. Throughout the quarrel, Henry a

nd Elizabeth  maintained that they were merely reasserting their ancient royal prerogative over the  Church, which the Pope of Rome had usurped. English revolutions have always been based  on specious conservative pleas, and the only method of inducing Englishmen to change has  been by persuasions that the change is not a change at all, or is a change to an older and  better order. The Parliaments of the seventeenth century regarded the Stuart pretensions, as Henry  and Elizabeth did those of th

e Pope, in the light of usurpations upon their own imprescriptible  rights; and more recently, movements to make the Church Catholic have been based on the  ground that it has never been anything else. The Tudor contention that the State  was always supreme over the Church has been transformed into a theory that the  Church was always at least semi-independent of Rome. But it is not so clear that  the Church has always been anti-papal, as that the English laity have always been  anti-clerical. T

he English people were certainly very anti-sacerdotal from the very beginning  of Henry the Eighth's reign. In 1512 James the Fourth complained to Henry that Englishmen  seized Scots merchants, ill-treated them, and abused them as "the Pope's men". At the end  of the same year Parliament deprived of their benefit of clergy all clerks under the rank  of sub-deacon who committed murder or felony. This measure at once provoked a cry of "the  Church in danger". The Abbot of Winchcombe preached that

the act was contrary to the law  of God and to the liberties of the Church, and that the lords, who consented thereto, had  incurred a liability to spiritual censures. Standish, warden of the Mendicant Friars of  London, defended the action of Parliament, while the temporal peers requested the bishops to  make the Abbot of Winchcombe recant. They refused, and, at the Convocation of 1515, Standish was  summoned before it to explain his conduct. He appealed to the King; the judges  pronounced that

all who had taken part in the proceedings against Standish  had incurred the penalties of præmunire. They also declared that the King could hold a  Parliament without the spiritual lords, who only sat in virtue of their temporalties. This opinion  seems to have nothing to do with the dispute, but it is remarkable that, in one list of the  peers attending the Parliament of 1515, there is not a single abbot. With regard to the Abbot  of Winchcombe and Friar Standish, the prelates claimed the same

liberty of speech for Convocation  as was enjoyed by Parliament; so that they could, without offence, have maintained certain acts of  Parliament to be against the laws of the Church. Wolsey interceded on their behalf, and begged that  the matter might be left to the Pope's decision, while Henry contented himself with  a declaration that he would maintain intact his royal jurisdiction. This was  not all that passed during that session of Parliament and Convocation. At the end  of his summary of

the proceedings, Dr. John Taylor, who was both clerk of Parliament  and prolocutor of Convocation, remarks: "In this Parliament and Convocation the  most dangerous quarrels broke out between the clergy and the secular power, respecting  the Church's liberties"; and there exists a remarkable petition presented to this Parliament  against clerical exactions; it complained that the clergy refused burial until after the gift  of the deceased's best jewel, best garment or the like, and demanded that

every curate should  administer the sacrament when required to do so. It was no wonder that Wolsey advised "the  more speedy dissolution" of this Parliament, and that, except in 1523, when financial  straits compelled him, he did not call another while he remained in power. His fall  was the sign for the revival of Parliament, and it immediately took up the work where it  was left in 1515. These significant proceedings did not stand alone. In 1515 the Bishop of  London's chancellor was indicted

for the murder of a citizen who had been found dead in  the Bishop's prison. The Bishop interceded with Wolsey to prevent the trial; any London  jury would, he said, convict any clerk, "be he innocent as Abel; they be so maliciously  set in favorem hæreticæ pravitatis". The heresy was no matter of belief, but hatred  of clerical immunities. The Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, wrote More to Erasmus in 1516, was  "popular everywhere"; and no more bitter a satire had yet been penned on the clergy. In

this matter  Henry and his lay subjects were at one. Standish, whom Taylor describes as the promoter and  instigator of all these evils, was a favourite preacher at Henry's Court. The King, said Pace,  had "often praised his doctrine". But what was it? It was no advocacy of Henry's loved  "new learning," for Standish denounced the Greek Testament of Erasmus, and is held  up to ridicule by the great Dutch humanist; Standish, too, was afterwards a stout  defender of the Pope's dispensing power, a

nd followed Fisher in his protest against the  divorce before the legatine Court. The doctrine, which pleased the King so much, was Standish's  denial of clerical immunity from State control, and his assertion of royal prerogatives over the  Church. In 1518 the Bishopric of St. Asaph's fell vacant. Wolsey, who was then at the height of  his power, recommended Bolton, prior of St. Bartholomew's, a learned man; but Henry was  resolved to reward his favourite divine, and Standish obtained the see.

Pace, a good  churchman, expressed himself to Wolsey as "mortified" at the result, but said it was  inevitable, as besides the King's good graces, Standish enjoyed "the favour of all the  courtiers for the singular assistance he has rendered towards subverting the Church  of England". Eleven more years were to roll before the Church was subverted.  They were years of Wolsey's supremacy; he alone stood between the Church and its  subjection. It was owing, wrote Campeggio, in 1528, to Wolsey's vig

ilance and solicitude  that the Holy See retained its rank and dignity. His ruin would drag down the Church, and the  fact was known to Anne Boleyn and her faction, to Campeggio and Clement the Seventh, as well as  to Henry the Eighth. "These Lords intend," wrote Du Bellay, on the eve of Wolsey's fall, "after  he is dead or ruined, to impeach the State of the Church, and take all its goods; which it  is hardly needful for me to write in cipher, for they proclaim it openly. I expect they will  do

fine miracles. " A few days later he says, "I expect the priests will  never have the great seal again; and that in this Parliament they will  have terrible alarms. I think Dr. Stephen will have a good deal to do with  the management of affairs, especially if he will abandon his order. " At Easter, 1529,  Lutheran books were circulating in Henry's Court, advocating the confiscation of ecclesiastical  property and the restoration of his Church to its primitive simplicity. Campeggio warned  the K

ing against them and maintained that it had been determined by councils and  theologians that the Church justly held her temporalties. Henry retorted that  according to the Lutherans "those decisions were arrived at by ecclesiastics and now it  was necessary for the laity to interpose". In his last interview with Henry,  Campeggio "alluded to this Parliament, which is about to be holden, and I earnestly  pressed upon him the liberty of the Church. He certainly seemed to me very well disposed  to

exert his power to the utmost. " "Down with the Church" was going to be the Parliament  cry. Whether Henry would really "exert his power" to maintain her liberties remained  to be seen, but there never was a flimsier theory than that the divorce of Catherine  was the sole cause of the break with Rome. The centrifugal forces were quite independent of  the divorce; its historical importance lies in the fact that it alienated from Rome the only  power in England which might have kept them in check

. So long as Wolsey and the clerical  statesmen, with whom he surrounded the King, remained supreme, the Church was comparatively  safe. But Wolsey depended entirely on Henry's support; when that was withdrawn, Church and  Cardinal fell together. Wolsey's ruin was, however, due to more causes than  his failure to get a divorce for the King. It was at bottom the result of the  natural development of Henry's character. Egotism was from the first his most prominent  trait; it was inevitably fostere

d by the extravagant adulation paid to Tudor sovereigns,  and was further encouraged by his realisation, first of his own mental powers, and  then of the extent to which he could force his will upon others. He could never  brook a rival in whatever sphere he wished to excel. In the days of his youth  he was absorbed in physical sports, in gorgeous pageantry and ceremonial; he was  content with such exhibitions as prancing before the ladies between every course in a  tourney, or acting as pilot o

n board ship, blowing a whistle as loud as a trumpet,  and arrayed in trousers of cloth of gold. Gradually, as time wore on, the athletic mania  wore off, and pursuits, such as architecture, took the place of physical sports. A generation  later, a writer describes Henry as "the only Phœnix of his time for fine and curious masonry".  From his own original designs York House was transformed into Whitehall Palace, Nonsuch Palace  was built, and extensive alterations were made at Greenwich and Hamp

ton Court. But architecture was  only a trifle; Henry's uncontrollable activity also broke out in political spheres, and the  eruption was fatal to Wolsey's predominance. The King was still in the full vigour of  manhood; he had not reached his fortieth year, and his physical graces were the marvel of  those who saw him for the first time. Falier, the new Venetian ambassador, who arrived in  England in 1529, is as rapturous over the King's personal attractions as Giustinian or Pasqualigo  had be

en. "In this Eighth Henry," he writes, "God has combined such corporeal and  intellectual beauty as not merely to surprise but astound all men. .. .His  face is angelic , rather than handsome; his head imperial and bold; and he wears  a beard, contrary to the English custom. Who would not be amazed, when contemplating such  singular beauty of person, coupled with such bold address, adapting itself with the greatest ease  to every manly exercise? " But Henry's physique was no longer proof against

every ailment;  frequent mention is made about this time of headaches which incapacitated him from business,  and it was not long before there appeared on his leg the fistula which racked him with pain  till the end of his life, and eventually caused his death. The divorce and the insuperable  obstacles, which he discovered in attaining the end he thought easy at first, did more to  harden Henry's temper than any bodily ills. He became a really serious man, and developed that  extraordinary pow

er of self-control which stood him in good stead in his later years. Naturally  a man of violent passions, he could never have steered clear of the dangers that beset him  without unusual capacity for curbing his temper, concealing his intentions, and keeping  his own counsel. Ministers might flatter themselves that they could read his mind and  calculate his actions, but it is quite certain that henceforth no minister read so clearly his  master's mind as the master did his minister's. "Three m

ay keep counsel," said  the King in 1530, "if two be away; and if I thought that my cap knew my  counsel, I would cast it into the fire and burn it. " "Never," comments a modern  writer, "had the King spoken a truer word, or described himself more accurately. Few  would have thought that, under so careless and splendid an exterior—the very ideal of bluff,  open-hearted good-humour and frankness—there lay a watchful and secret eye, that marked what  was going on, without appearing to mark it; kep

t its own counsel until it was time to strike,  and then struck, as suddenly and remorselessly as a beast of prey. It was strange to witness so  much subtlety, combined with so much strength. " In spite of his remorseless  blows and arbitrary temper, Henry was too shrewd and too great a  man to despise the counsel of others, or think any worse of an adviser because his  advice differed from his own. He loved to meet argument with argument, even when he might  command. To the end of his days he v

alued a councillor who would honestly maintain the  opposite of what the King desired. These councillors to whom he gave his confidence  were never minions or servile flatterers. Henry had his Court favourites with whom he hunted  and shot and diced; with whom he played—always for money—tennis, primero and bowls, and the more  mysterious games of Pope July, Imperial and Shovelboard; and to whom he threw many an acre of  choice monastic land. But they never influenced his policy. No man was ever

advanced to political  power in Henry's reign, merely because he pandered to the King's vanity or to his vices. No one was  a better judge of conduct in the case of others, or a sterner champion of moral probity, when  it did not conflict with his own desires or conscience. In 1528 Anne Boleyn and her friends  were anxious to make a relative abbess of Wilton. But she had been notoriously unchaste.  "Wherefore," wrote Henry to Anne herself, "I would not, for all the gold in the world, cloak  your

conscience nor mine to make her ruler of a house which is of so ungodly demeanour; nor I  trust you would not that neither for brother nor sister I should so distain mine honour or  conscience. " He objected, on similar grounds, to the prioress whom Wolsey wished to nominate;  the Cardinal neglected Henry's wishes, and thereby called down upon himself a  rebuke remarkable for dignity and delicacy. "The great affection and love I bear you," wrote  the King, "causeth me, using the doctrine of my

Master, saying Quem diligo, castigo, thus plainly,  as ensueth, to break to you my mind. .. .Methink it is not the right train of a trusty loving  friend and servant, when the matter is put by the master's consent into his arbitre and  judgment , to elect and choose a person which was by him defended . And yet another thing,  which much displeaseth me more,—that is, to cloak your offence made by ignorance of my pleasure,  saying that you expressly knew not my determinate mind in that behalf. " T

hen, after showing how  empty were Wolsey's excuses, he continues: "Ah! my Lord, it is a double offence, both to  do ill and colour it too; but with men that have wit it cannot be accepted so. Wherefore,  good my Lord, use no more that way with me, for there is no man living that more hateth  it. " He then proceeds to warn the Cardinal against sinister reports with regard to his  methods of raising money for his college at Oxford. "They say the college is a cloak for  all mischief. I perceive by

your letter that you have received money of the exempts  for having their old visitors. If your legacy is a cloak apud homines, it is not apud  Deum. I doubt not, therefore, you will desist. " Wolsey had used his legatine authority to  extort money from monasteries as the price of their immunity from his visitatorial powers. The  monasteries, too, had strenuously opposed the late Amicable Loan to the King; by Wolsey's means they  had been released from that obligation; and Henry strongly suspec

ted that they had purchased their  exemption from relieving his necessities by lavish contributions to the Cardinal's colleges.  "I pray you, my Lord," he concludes, "think not that it is upon any displeasure that I write  this unto you. For surely it is for my discharge afore God, being in the room that I am in; and  secondly for the great zeal I bear unto you. " Henry possessed in the highest degree not  a few of the best of kingly attributes. His words are not the words of a hypocrite without

  conscience, devoid of the fear of God and man. For all the strange and violent things that he  did, he obtained the sanction of his conscience, but his imperious egotism made conscience his  humble slave, and blinded to his own sins a judgment so keen to detect and chastise  the failings of others. These incidents, of more than a year before the Cardinal's fall,  illustrate the change in the respective positions of monarch and minister. There was no doubt now  which was the master; there was n

o king but one. Henry was already taking, as Du Bellay said, "the  management of everything". Wolsey himself knew that he had lost the King's confidence. He began  to talk of retirement. He told Du Bellay, in or before August, 1528, that when he had established  a firm amity between France and England, extinguished the hatred between the two  nations, reformed the laws and customs of England, and settled the succession, he would  retire and serve God to the end of his days. The Frenchman thought

this was merely to represent  as voluntary a loss of power which he saw would soon be inevitable; but the conversation is  a striking illustration of the difference between Henry and Wolsey, and helps to explain  why Wolsey accomplished so little that lasted, while Henry accomplished so much. The  Cardinal seems to have been entirely devoid of that keen perception of  the distinction between what was, and what was not, practicable, which  was Henry's saving characteristic. In the evening of his

days, after  sixteen years of almost unlimited power, he was speaking of plans, which might  have taxed the energies of a life-time, as preliminaries to a speedy withdrawal from  the cares of State. He had enjoyed an unequalled opportunity of effecting these reforms, but what  were the results of his administration? The real greatness and splendour of Henry's reign are  said to have departed with Wolsey's fall. The gilt and the tinsel were indeed stripped off,  but the permanent results of Henr

y's reign were due to its later course. Had he died when Wolsey  fell, what would have been his place in history? A brilliant figure, no doubt, who might  have been thought capable of much, had he not failed to achieve anything. He had made  wars from which England derived no visible profit; not an acre of territory had been acquired; the  wealth, amassed by Henry the Seventh, had been squandered, and Henry the Eighth, in 1529,  was reduced to searching for gold mines in England. The loss of his

subjects' blood and  treasure had been followed by the loss of their affections. The exuberant loyalty of 1509 had  been turned into the wintry discontent of 1527. England had been raised to a high place in the  councils of Europe by 1521, but her fall was quite as rapid, and in 1525 she counted for less  than she had done in 1513. At home the results were equally barren; the English hold on Ireland  was said, in 1528, to be weaker than it had been since the conquest; and the English statute-bo

ok  between 1509 and 1529 may be searched in vain for an act of importance, while the statute-book  between 1529 and 1547 contains a list of acts which have never been equalled for their supreme  importance in the subsequent history of England. Wolsey's policy was, indeed, a brilliant  fiasco; with a pre-eminent genius for diplomacy, he thought he could make England, by diplomacy  alone, arbiter of Europe. Its position in 1521 was artificial; it had not the means to  support a grandeur which was

only built on the wealth left by Henry the Seventh and  on Wolsey's skill. England owed her advance in repute to the fact that Wolsey made her  the paymaster of Europe. "The reputation of England for wealth," said an English  diplomatist in 1522, "is a great cause of the esteem in which it is held. " But, by  1523, that wealth had failed; Parliament refused to levy more taxes, and Wolsey's  pretensions collapsed like a pack of cards. He played no part in the peace of Cambrai, which  settled for

the time the conditions of Europe. When rumours of the clandestine negotiations  between France and Spain reached England, Wolsey staked his head to the King that they  were pure invention. He could not believe that peace was possible, unless it were made by him.  But the rumours were true, and Henry exacted the penalty. The positive results of the Cardinal's  policy were nil; the chief negative result was that he had staved off for many years the ruin  of the Church, but he only did it by plun

ging England in the maëlstrom of foreign intrigue and  of futile wars. The end was not long delayed. "I see clearly," writes Du Bellay on 4th  October, 1529, "that by this Parliament Wolsey will completely lose his influence;  I see no chance to the contrary. " Henry anticipated the temper of Parliament. A  bill of indictment was preferred against him in the Court of King's Bench, and on  the 22nd of October he acknowledged his liability to the penalties of præmunire. The  Great Seal was taken f

rom him by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. In November the House of  Lords passed a bill of attainder against him, but the Commons were persuaded by Cromwell,  acting with Henry's connivance, to throw it out. "The King," wrote Chapuys, "is thought  to bear the Cardinal no ill-will;" and Campeggio thought that he would "not go to  extremes, but act considerately in this matter, as he is accustomed to do in all his  actions. " Wolsey was allowed to retain the Archbishopric of York, a sum in mone

y  and goods equivalent to at least £70,000, and a pension of 1,000 marks from the See of  Winchester. In the following spring he set out to spend his last days in his northern see; six  months he devoted to his archiepiscopal duties, confirming thousands of children,  arranging disputes among neighbours, and winning such hold on the hearts of the people  as he had never known in the days of his pride. Crowds in London had flocked to gloat over the  sight of the broken man; now crowds in Yorkshi

re came to implore his blessing. He prepared for  his installation at York on 7th November, 1530; on the 4th he was arrested for treason. His  Italian physician, Agostini, had betrayed him; he was accused of having asked Francis the  First to intercede with Henry on his behalf, which was true; and he seems also to have  sought the mediation of Charles the Fifth But Agostini further declared that Wolsey  had written to Clement, urging him to excommunicate Henry and raise an insurrection,  by whic

h the Cardinal might recover his power. By Pontefract, Doncaster, Nottingham, with  feeble steps and slow, the once-proud prelate, broken in spirit and shattered in health, returned  to meet his doom. His gaol was to be the cell in the Tower, which had served for the Duke of  Buckingham. But a kindlier fate than a traitor's death was in store. "I am come," he said to  the monks of Leicester Abbey, "I am come to leave my bones among you. " He died there at eight  o'clock on St. Andrew's morning,

and there, on the following day, he was simply and quietly buried.  "If," he exclaimed in his last hour, "I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, He  would not have given me over in my grey hairs. " That cry, wrung from Wolsey, echoed throughout  the Tudor times. Men paid le nouveau Messie a devotion they owed to the old; they rendered  unto Cæsar the things that were God's. They reaped their reward in riches and pomp and  power, but they won no peace of mind. The favour of princ

es is fickle, and "the wrath  of the King is death". So thought Wolsey and Warham and Norfolk. "Is that all? " said More,  with prophetic soul, to Norfolk; "then in good faith between your grace and me is but this, that  I shall die to-day and you shall die to-morrow. " CHAPTER 10. THE KING AND HIS PARLIAMENT.  In the closing days of July, 1529, a courier came posting from Rome with despatches  announcing the alliance of Clement and Charles, and the revocation to the Papal Court of the suit  bet

ween Henry the Eighth and the Emperor's aunt. Henry replied with no idle threats or empty  reproaches, but his retort was none the less effective. On the 9th of August writs were issued  from Chancery summoning that Parliament which met on the 3rd of November and did not separate till  the last link in the chain which bound England to Rome was sundered, and the country was fairly  launched on that sixty years' struggle which the defeat of the Spanish Armada concluded.  The step might well seem a

desperate hazard. The last Parliament had broken up in discontent;  it had been followed by open revolt in various shires; while from others there had since then  come demands for the repayment of the loan, which Henry was in no position  to grant. Francis and Charles, on whose mutual enmity England's safety largely  depended, had made their peace at Cambrai; and the Emperor was free to foment disaffection  in Ireland and to instigate Scotland to war. His chancellor was boasting that the imperi

alists  could, if they would, drive Henry from his kingdom within three months, and he based his  hopes on revolt among Henry's own subjects. The divorce had been from the beginning, and  remained to the end, a stumbling-block to the people. Catherine received ovations wherever she  went, while the utmost efforts of the King could scarcely protect Anne Boleyn from popular insult.  The people were moved, not only by a creditable feeling that Henry's first wife was an injured  woman, but by the fe

ar lest a breach with Charles should destroy their trade in wool, on which, said  the imperial ambassador, half the realm depended for sustenance. To summon a Parliament at such a  conjuncture seemed to be courting certain ruin. In reality, it was the first and most striking  instance of the audacity and insight which were to enable Henry to guide the whirlwind and direct  the storm of the last eighteen years of his reign. Clement had put in his hands the weapon with  which he secured his divorc

e and broke the bonds of Rome. "If," wrote Wolsey a day or two before  the news of the revocation arrived, "the King be cited to appear at Rome in person or by proxy, and  his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will tolerate it. If he appears in Italy,  it will be at the head of a formidable army. " A sympathiser with Catherine expressed  his resentment at his King being summoned to plead as a party in his own  realm before the legatine Court; and it has even been suggested tha

t those  proceedings were designed to irritate popular feeling against the Roman jurisdiction. Far  more offensive was it to national prejudice, that England's king should be cited to appear  before a court in a distant land, dominated by the arms of a foreign prince. Nothing did more  to alienate men's minds from the Papacy. Henry would never have been able to obtain his divorce  on its merits as they appeared to his people. But now the divorce became closely interwoven  with another and a wide

r question, the papal jurisdiction in England; and on that question  Henry carried with him the good wishes of the vast bulk of the laity. There were few Englishmen  who would not resent the petition presented to the Pope in 1529 by Charles the Fifth and Ferdinand  that the English Parliament should be forbidden to discuss the question of divorce. By summoning  Parliament, Henry opened the floodgates of anti-papal and anti-sacerdotal feelings which  Wolsey had long kept shut; and the unpopular d

ivorce became merely a cross-current in the  main stream which flowed in Henry's favour. It was thus with some confidence that Henry  appealed from the Pope to his people. He could do so all the more surely, if, as is  alleged, there was no freedom of election, and if the House of Commons was packed with  royal nominees. But these assertions may be dismissed as gross exaggerations.  The election of county members was marked by unmistakable signs of genuine  popular liberty. There was often a rio

t, and sometimes a secret canvass among freeholders  to promote or defeat a particular candidate. In 1547 the council ventured to recommend  a minister to the freeholders of Kent. The electors objected; the council reprimanded  the sheriff for representing its recommendation as a command; it protested that it never dreamt of  depriving the shire of its "liberty of election," but "would take it thankfully" if the electors  would give their voices to the ministerial candidate. The electors were no

t to be soothed  by soft words, and that Government candidate had to find another seat. In the boroughs there  was every variety of franchise. In some it was almost democratic; in others elections  were in the hands of one or two voters. In the city of London the election for the  Parliament of 1529 was held on 5th October, immensa communitate tunc presente, in the  Guildhall; there is no hint of royal interference, the election being conducted in the customary way,  namely, two candidates were

nominated by the mayor and aldermen, and two by the citizens. The general  tendency had for more than a century, however, been towards close corporations in whose hands  the parliamentary franchise was generally vested, and consequently towards restricting  the basis of popular representation. The narrower that basis became, the greater the  facilities it afforded for external influence. In many boroughs elections were largely determined  by recommendations from neighbouring magnates, territoria

l or official. At Gatton the lords of  the manor nominated the members for Parliament, and the formal election was merely  a matter of drawing up an indenture between Sir Roger Copley and the sheriff, and  the Bishop of Winchester was wont to select representatives for more than one borough  within the bounds of his diocese. The Duke of Norfolk claimed to be able to return  ten members in Sussex and Surrey alone. But these nominations were not royal, and there  is no reason to suppose that the n

ominees were any more likely to be subservient to the  Crown than freely elected members unless the local magnate happened to be a royal minister.  Their views depended on those of their patrons, who might be opposed to the Court; and, in  1539, Cromwell's agents were considering the advisability of setting up Crown  candidates against those of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. The curious letter  to Cromwell in 1529, upon which is based the theory that the House of Commons consisted  of royal nom

inees, is singularly inconclusive. Cromwell sought Henry's permission to  serve in Parliament for two reasons; firstly, he was still a servant of the  obnoxious and fallen Cardinal; secondly, he was seeking to transfer himself to  Henry's service, and thought he might be useful to the King in the House of  Commons. If Henry accepted his offer, Cromwell was to be nominated for Oxford; if he  were not elected there, he was to be put up for one of the boroughs in the diocese of Winchester,  then va

cant through Wolsey's resignation. Even with the King's assent, his election  at Oxford was not regarded as certain; and, as a matter of fact, Cromwell sat neither for  Oxford, nor for any constituency in the diocese of Winchester, but for the borough of Taunton. Crown  influence could only make itself effectively felt in the limited number of royal boroughs; and  the attempts to increase that influence by the creation of constituencies susceptible to royal  influence were all subsequent in date

to 1529. The returns of members of Parliament  are not extant from 1477 to 1529, but a comparison of the respective number  of constituencies in those two years reveals only six in 1529 which had not sent members  to a previous Parliament; and almost if not all of these six owed their representation to  their increasing population and importance, and not to any desire to pack the House of  Commons. Indeed, as a method of enforcing the royal will upon Parliament, the creation  of half a dozen bo

roughs was both futile and unnecessary. So small a number of votes was  useless, except in the case of a close division of well-drilled parties, of which there is no  trace in the Parliaments of Henry the Eighth. The House of Commons acted as a whole, and not  in two sections. "The sense of the House" was more apparent in its decisions then than  it is to-day. Actual divisions were rare; either a proposal commended itself to the House,  or it did not; and in both cases the question was usually d

etermined without a vote. The creation of  boroughs was also unnecessary. Parliaments packed themselves quite well enough to suit Henry's  purpose, without any interference on his part. The limiting of the county franchise  to forty-shilling freeholders, and the dying away of democratic feeling in  the towns, left parliamentary representation mainly in the hands of the landed gentry  and of the prosperous commercial classes; and from them the Tudors derived their most  effective support. There w

as discontent in abundance during Tudor times, but it was social  and economic, and not as a rule political. It was directed against the enclosers of common  lands; against the agricultural capitalists, who bought up farms, evicted the tenants, and  converted their holdings to pasture; against the large traders in towns who monopolised commerce  at the expense of their poorer competitors. It was concerned, not with the one tyrant on the  throne, but with the thousand petty tyrants of the village

s and towns, against whom the poorer  commons looked to their King for protection. Of this discontent Parliament could not be the focus,  for members of Parliament were themselves the offenders. "It is hard," wrote a contemporary  radical, "to have these ills redressed by Parliament, because it pricketh them chiefly which  be chosen to be burgesses. .. .Would to God they would leave their old accustomed choosing of  burgesses! For whom do they choose but such as be rich or bear some office in th

e country,  many times such as be boasters and braggers? Such have they ever hitherto chosen; be he  never so very a fool, drunkard, extortioner, adulterer, never so covetous and crafty a  person, yet, if he be rich, bear any office, if he be a jolly cracker and bragger in the  country, he must be a burgess of Parliament. Alas, how can any such study, or give any godly  counsel for the commonwealth? " This passage gives no support to the theory that members  of Parliament were nothing but royal

nominees. If the constituencies themselves were  bent on electing "such as bare office in the country," there was no call for the King's  intervention; and the rich merchants and others, of whom complaint is made, were almost as much to  the royal taste as were the officials themselves. For the time being, in fact, the interests of  the King and of the lay middle classes coincided, both in secular and ecclesiastical affairs.  Commercial classes are generally averse from war, at least from war wa

ged within their own borders,  from which they can extract no profit. They had every inducement to support Henry's Government  against the only alternative, anarchy. In ecclesiastical politics they, as well  as the King, had their grievances against the Church. Both thought the clergy too rich,  and that ecclesiastical revenues could be put to better uses in secular hands. Community  of interests produced harmony of action; and a century and a half was to pass before  Parliament again met so oft

en, or sat so long, as it did during the latter half of Henry's  reign. From 1509 to 1515 there had been on an average a parliamentary session once a year, and  in February, 1512, Warham, as Lord Chancellor, had in opening the session discoursed on  the necessity of frequent Parliaments. Then there supervened the ecclesiastical despotism  of Wolsey, who tried, like Charles the First, to rule without Parliament, and with  the same fatal result to himself; but, from Wolsey's fall till Henry's  dea

th, there was seldom a year without a parliamentary session. Tyrants have  often gone about to break Parliaments, and in the end Parliaments have generally  broken them. Henry was not of the number; he never went about to break Parliament. He  found it far too useful, and he used it. He would have been as reluctant to break Parliament  as Ulysses the bow which he alone could bend. No monarch, in fact, was ever a more zealous  champion of parliamentary privileges, a more scrupulous observer of pa

rliamentary  forms, or a more original pioneer of sound constitutional doctrine. In 1543 he first  enunciated the constitutional principle that sovereignty is vested in the "King in  Parliament". "We," he declared to the Commons, "at no time stand so highly in our estate  royal as in the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are  conjoined and knit together in one body politic, so as whatsoever offence or injury during  that time is offered to the meanest member of the House,

is to be judged as done against  our person and the whole Court of Parliament. " He was careful to observe himself the  deference to parliamentary privilege which he exacted from others. It is no strange  aberration from the general tenor of his rule that in 1512 by Strode's case the freedom of  speech of members of Parliament was established, and their freedom from arrest by Ferrers'  case in 1543. In 1515 Convocation had enviously petitioned for the same liberty  of speech as was enjoyed in P

arliament, where members might even attack the law of the  land and not be called in question therefor. "I am," writes Bishop Gardiner, in 1547,  apologising for the length of a letter, "like one of the Commons' house, that, when I am  in my tale, think I should have liberty to make an end;" and again he refers to a speech he made  during Henry's reign "in the Parliament house, where was free speech without danger". Wolsey  had raised a storm in 1523 by trying to browbeat the House of Commons. H

enry never erred in  that respect. In 1532 a member moved that Henry should take back Catherine to wife. Nothing  could have touched the King on a tenderer spot. Charles the First, for a less offence, would  have gone to the House to arrest the offender. All Henry did was to argue the point of his  marriage with the Speaker and a deputation from the Commons; no proceedings whatever were taken  against the member himself. In 1529 John Petit, one of the members for London, opposed the  bill releas

ing Henry from his obligation to repay the loan; the only result apparently was to  increase Petit's repute in the eyes of the King, who "would ask in Parliament time if Petit were  on his side". There is, in fact, nothing to show that Henry the Eighth intimidated his Commons  at any time, or that he packed the Parliament of 1529. Systematic interference in elections was  a later expedient devised by Thomas Cromwell. It was apparently tried during the bye-elections  of 1534, and at the general e

lections of 1536 and 1539. Cromwell then endeavoured to secure  a majority in favour of himself and his own particular policy against the reactionary party  in the council. His schemes had created a division among the laity, and rendered necessary recourse  to political methods of which there was no need, so long as the laity remained united  against the Church. Nor is it without significance that its adoption was  shortly followed by Cromwell's fall. Henry did not approve of ministers who  soug

ht to make a party for themselves. The packing of Parliaments has in fact  been generally the death-bed expedient of a moribund Government. The Stuarts  had their "Undertakers," and the only Parliament of Tudor times which consisted  mainly of Government nominees was that gathered by Northumberland on the  eve of his fall in March, 1553; and that that body was exceptionally constituted  is obvious from Renard's inquiry in August, 1553, as to whether Charles the Fifth would advise  his cousin, Qu

een Mary, to summon a general Parliament or merely an assembly of "notables"  after the manner introduced by Northumberland. But, while Parliament was neither packed  nor terrorised to any great extent, the harmony which prevailed between it and the  King has naturally led to the charge of servility. Insomuch as it was servile at all, Parliament  faithfully represented its constituents; but the mere coincidence between the wishes of Henry  and those of Parliament is no proof of servility. That a

ccusation can only be substantiated by  showing that Parliament did, not what it wanted, but what it did not want, out of deference  to Henry. And that has never been proved. It has never been shown that the nation  resented the statutes giving Henry's proclamations the force of laws, enabling  him to settle the succession by will, or any of the other acts usually adduced  to prove the subservience of Parliament. When Henry was dead, Protector Somerset  secured the repeal of most of these laws,

but he lost his head for his pains. There  is, indeed, no escape from the conclusion that the English people then approved of a  dictatorship, and that Parliament was acting deliberately and voluntarily when it made Henry  dictator. It made him dictator because it felt that he would do what it wanted, and better  with, than without, extraordinary powers. The fact that Parliament rejected some of Henry's  measures is strong presumption that it could have rejected more, had it been so minded. No p

rojects  were more dear to Henry's heart than the statutes of Wills and of Uses, yet both were rejected  twice at least in the Parliament of 1529-36. The general harmony between King and Parliament was  based on a fundamental similarity of interests; the harmony in detail was worked out, not  by the forcible exertion of Henry's will, but by his careful and skilful manipulation of  both Houses. No one was ever a greater adept in the management of the House of Commons,  which is easy to humour but

hard to drive. Parliaments are jealous bodies, but they  are generally pleased with attentions; and Henry the Eighth was very assiduous  in the attentions he paid to his lay Lords and Commons. From 1529 he suffered no  intermediary to come between Parliament and himself. Cromwell was more and more employed  by the King, but only in subordinate matters, and when important questions were at issue  Henry managed the business himself. He constantly visited both Houses and remained  within their pre

cincts for hours at a time, watching every move in the game and taking  note of every symptom of parliamentary feeling. He sent no royal commands to his faithful Commons;  in this respect he was less arbitrary than his daughter, Queen Elizabeth. He submitted points for  their consideration, argued with them, and frankly gave his reasons. It was always done, of course,  with a magnificent air of royal condescension, but with such grace as to carry the conviction  that he was really pleased to con

descend and to take counsel with his subjects, and that  he did so because he trusted his Parliament, and expected his Parliament to  place an equal confidence in him. Henry the Eighth acted more as the leader of  both Houses than as a King; and, like modern parliamentary leaders, he demanded the bulk of  their time for measures which he himself proposed. The fact that the legislation of Henry's reign was  initiated almost entirely by Government is not, however, a conclusive proof of the servili

ty  of Parliament. For, though it may have been the theory that Parliament existed to pass laws of its  own conception, such has never been the practice, except when there has been chronic opposition  between the executive and the legislature. Parliament has generally been  the instrument of Government, a condition essential to strong  and successful administration; and it is still summoned mainly to discuss such  measures as the executive thinks fit to lay before it. Certainly the proportion of

Government  bills to other measures passed in Henry's reign was less than it is to-day. A private member's  bill then stood more chance of becoming law, and a Government bill ran greater risks of being  rejected. That, of course, is not the whole truth. One of the reasons why Henry's House  of Commons felt at liberty to reject bills proposed by the King, was that such  rejection did not involve the fall of a Government which on other grounds the House  wished to support. It did not even entail

a dissolution. Not that general elections  possessed any terrors for sixteenth-century Parliaments. A seat in the House of Commons was  not considered a very great prize. The classes, from which its members were drawn, were much more  bent on the pursuit of their own private fortunes than on participation in public affairs.  Their membership was not seldom a burden, and the long sessions of the Reformation  Parliament constituted an especial grievance. One member complained that those sessions c

ost him  equivalent to about five hundred pounds over and above the wages paid him by his constituents.  Leave to go home was often requested, and the imperial ambassador records  that Henry, with characteristic craft, granted such licences to hostile members, but  refused them to his own supporters. That was a legitimate parliamentary stratagem. It was  not Henry's fault if members preferred their private concerns to the interests of Catherine of  Aragon or to the liberties of the Catholic Chur

ch. Henry's greatest advantage lay, however, in  a circumstance which constitutes the chief real difference between the Parliaments of the  sixteenth century and those of to-day. His members of Parliament were representatives rather than  delegates. They were elected as fit and proper persons to decide upon such questions as should  be submitted to them in the Parliament House, and not merely as fit and proper persons to register  decisions already reached by their constituents. Although they we

re in the habit of rendering to  their constituents an account of their proceedings at the close of each session, and although the  fact that they depended upon their constituencies for their wages prevented their acting in  opposition to their constituents' wishes, they received no precise instructions. They  went to Parliament unfettered by definite pledges. They were thus more susceptible,  not only to pressure, but also to argument; and it is possible that in those days votes  were sometimes

affected by speeches. The action of members was determined, not by  previous engagements or party discipline, but by their view of the merits and  necessities of the case before them. Into that view extraneous circumstances, such  as fear of the King, might to a certain extent intrude; but such evidence as is available points  decisively to the conclusion that co-operation between the King and Parliament was secured,  partly by Parliament doing what Henry wanted, and partly by Henry doing what

Parliament wanted.  Parliament did not always do as the King desired, nor did the King's actions always commend  themselves to Parliament. Most of the measures of the Reformation Parliament were matters of  give and take. It was due to Henry's skill, and to the circumstances of the time that the  King's taking was always to his own profit, and his giving at the expense of the clergy. He secured the support of the Commons for his own  particular ends by promising the redress of their grievances a

gainst the bishops and priests. It is  said that he instituted the famous petitions urged against the clergy in 1532, and it is hinted that  the abuses, of which those petitions complained, had no real existence. No doubt Henry encouraged  the Commons' complaints; he had every reason to do so, but he did not invent the abuses. If the  Commons did not feel the grievances, the King's promise to redress them would be no inducement  to Parliament to comply with the royal demands. The hostility of th

e laity to the  clergy, arising out of these grievances, was in fact the lever with which  Henry overthrew the papal authority, and the basis upon which he built his  own supremacy over the Church. This anti-ecclesiastical bias on the part of  the laity was the dominant factor in the Reformation under Henry the Eighth. But the word  in its modern sense is scarcely applicable to the ecclesiastical policy of that King. Its common  acceptation implies a purification of doctrine, but it is doubtful

whether any idea of interfering  with dogma ever crossed the minds of the monarchs, who, for more than a generation, had been  proclaiming the need for a reformation. Their proposal was to reform the practice of  the clergy; and the method they favoured most was the abolition of clerical privileges  and the appropriation of ecclesiastical property. The Reformation in England, so far  as it was carried by Henry the Eighth, was, indeed, neither more nor less than a violent  self-assertion of the l

aity against the immunities which the Church had herself enjoyed,  and the restraints which she imposed upon others. It was not primarily a breach between the  Church of England and the Roman communion, a repudiation on the part of English ecclesiastics  of a harassing papal yoke; for it is fairly obvious that under Henry the Eighth the Church  took no measures against Rome that were not forced on it by the State. It was not till the  reigns of Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth that the Church acco

rded a consent, based on conviction,  to a settlement originally extorted by force. The Reformation was rather a final assertion by the  State of its authority over the Church in England. The breach with the Roman Church, the repudiation  of papal influence in English ecclesiastical affairs, was not a spontaneous clerical movement;  it was the effect of the subjection of the Church to the national temporal power. The Church in  England had hitherto been a semi-independent part of the political c

ommunity. It was  semi-national, semi-universal; it owed one sort of fealty to the universal Pope, and  another to the national King. The rising spirit of nationality could brook no divided allegiance;  and the universal gave way to the national idea. There was to be no imperium in imperio, but  "one body politic," with one Supreme Head. Henry the Eighth is reported by Chapuys as saying  that he was King, Emperor and Pope, all in one, so far as England was concerned. The Church was to be  nation

alised; it was to compromise its universal character, and to become the Church of England,  rather than a branch of the Church universal in England. The revolution was inevitably effected  through the action of the State rather than that of the Church. The Church, which, like religion  itself, is in essence universal and not national, regarded with abhorrence the prospect of being  narrowed and debased to serve political ends. The Church in England had moreover no means and no weapons wherewith

to effect an internal  reformation independent of the Papacy; as well might the Court of King's Bench endeavour  to reform itself without the authority of King and Parliament. The whole jurisdiction of the  Church was derived in theory from the Pope; when Wolsey wished to reform the monasteries  he had to seek authority from Leo the Tenth; the Archbishop of Canterbury held a court  at Lambeth and exercised juridical powers, but he did so as legatus natus of the Apostolic  See, and not as archbis

hop, and this authority could at any time be superseded by that of a  legate a latere, as Warham's was by Wolsey's. It was not his own but the delegated  jurisdiction of another. Bishops and archbishops were only the channels of a  jurisdiction flowing from a papal fountain. Henry charged Warham in 1532 with præmunire  because he had consecrated the Bishop of St. Asaph before the Bishop's temporalties  had been restored. The Archbishop in reply stated that he merely acted as commissary of  the P

ope, "the act was the Pope's act," and he had no discretion of his own. He was bound  to consecrate as soon as the Bishop had been declared such in consistory at Rome. Chapters  might elect, the Archbishop might consecrate, and the King might restore the temporalties; but  none of these things gave a bishop jurisdiction. There were in fact two and only two sources of  power and jurisdiction, the temporal sovereign and the Pope; reformation must be effected  by the one or the other. Wolsey had id

eas of a national ecclesiastical reformation, but  he could have gone no farther than the Pope, who gave him his authority, permitted. Had  the Church in England transgressed that limit, it would have become dead in schism, and Wolsey's  jurisdiction would have ipso facto ceased. Hence the fundamental impossibility of Wolsey's  scheme; hence the ultimate resort to the only alternative, a reformation by the temporal  sovereign, which Wycliffe had advocated and which the Anglicans of the sixteenth

century justified  by deriving the royal supremacy from the authority conceded by the early Fathers to the Roman  Emperor—an authority prior to the Pope's. Hence, too, the agency employed was Parliament and  not Convocation. The representatives of the clergy met of course as frequently as those of the  laity, but their activity was purely defensive. They suggested no changes themselves, and  endeavoured without much success to resist the innovations forced upon them by King  and by Parliament.

They had every reason to fear both Henry and the Commons. They  were conscious that the Church had lost its hold upon the nation. Its impotence  was due in part to its own corruption, in part to the fact that thriving  commercial and industrial classes, like those which elected Tudor Parliaments, are  as a rule impatient of religious or at least sacerdotal dictation. God and Mammon, in spite of  all efforts at compromise, do not really agree. In 1529, before the meeting of Parliament,  Campeggio

had appealed to Henry to prevent the ruin of the Church; he felt that without State  protection the Church could hardly stand. In 1531 Warham, the successor of Becket and Langton,  excused his compliance with Henry's demands by pleading Ira principis mors est. In the draft  of a speech he drew up just before his death, the Archbishop referred to the case of St.  Thomas, hinted that Henry the Eighth was going the way of Henry the Second, and compared  his policy with the constitutions of Clarend

on. The comparison was extraordinarily apt; Henry  the Eighth was doing what Henry the Second had failed to do, and the fate that attended the  Angevin king might have befallen the Tudor had Warham been Becket and the Church of the  sixteenth been the same as the Church of the twelfth century. But they were not, and Warham  appealed in vain to the liberties of the Church granted by Magna Carta, and to the "ill end"  of "several kings who violated them". Laymen, he complained, now "advanced" thei

r own laws  rather than those of the Church. The people, admitted so staunch a churchman as Pole,  were beginning to hate the priests. "There were," wrote Norfolk, "infinite clamours  of the temporalty here in Parliament against the misuse of the spiritual jurisdiction. .. .This  realm did never grudge the tenth part against the abuses of the Church at no Parliament  in my days, as they do now. " These infinite clamours and grudging were not the result of  the conscientious rejection of any Cath

olic or papal doctrine. Englishmen are singularly  free from the bondage of abstract ideas, and they began their Reformation not  with the enunciation of some new truth, but with an attack on clerical fees. Reform  was stimulated by a practical grievance, closely connected with money, and not by  a sense of wrong done to the conscience. No dogma plays such a part in the English  Reformation as Justification by Faith did in Germany, or Predestination in Switzerland.  Parliament in 1530 had not be

en appreciably affected by Tyndale's translation of the Bible  or by any of Luther's works. Tyndale was still an exile in the Netherlands, pleading in vain for the  same toleration in England as Charles the Fifth permitted across the sea. Frith was in the Tower—a  man, wrote the lieutenant, Walsingham, whom it would be a great pity to lose, if only he could  be reconciled—and Bilney was martyred in 1531. A parliamentary inquiry was threatened in the  latter case, not because Parliament sympathis

ed with Bilney's doctrine, but because it was said  that the clergy had procured his burning before obtaining the State's consent. Parliament  was as zealous as Convocation against heresy, but wanted the punishment of heretics left in  secular hands. In this, as in other respects, the King and his Parliament were in the  fullest agreement. Henry had already given proof of his anti-clerical bias  by substituting laymen for churchmen in those great offices of State  which churchmen had usually hel

d. From time immemorial the Lord Chancellor had  been a Bishop, but in 1529 Wolsey was succeeded by More, and, later on, More by Audley. Similarly,  the privy seal had been held in Henry's reign by three bishops successively, Fox, Ruthal and  Tunstall: now it was entrusted to the hands of Anne Boleyn's father, the Earl of Wiltshire.  Gardiner remained secretary for the time, but Du Bellay thought his power would have increased had  he abandoned his clerical vows, and he, too, was soon superseded

by Cromwell. Even the clerkship  of Parliament was now given up to a layman. During the first half of Henry's reign clerical  influence had been supreme in Henry's councils; during the second it was almost entirely  excluded. Like his Parliament, he was now impugning the jurisdiction of the clergy in the  matter of heresy; they were doctors, he said, of the soul, and had nothing to do with the body.  He was even inclining to the very modern theory that marriage is a civil contract, and that  ma

trimonial suits should therefore be removed from clerical cognisance. As early as 1529 he  ordered Wolsey to release the Prior of Reading, who had been imprisoned for Lutheranism,  "unless the matter is very heinous". In 1530 he was praising Latimer's sermons; and in  the same year the Bishop of Norwich complained of a general report in his diocese that Henry  favoured heretical books. "They say that, wherever they go, they hear that the King's  pleasure is that the New Testament in English shal

l go forth. " There seems little reason to  doubt Hall's statement that Henry now commanded the bishops, who, however, did nothing, to prepare  an English translation of the Bible to counteract the errors of Tyndale's version. He wrote to the  German princes extolling their efforts towards the reformation of the Church; and many advisers were  urging him to begin a similar movement in England. Anne Boleyn and her father were, said Chapuys,  more Lutheran than Luther himself; they were the true a

postles of the new sect in England.  But, however Lutheran Anne Boleyn may have been, Henry was still true to the orthodox faith.  If he dallied with German princes, and held out hopes to his heretic subjects, it was not  because he believed in the doctrines of either, but because both might be made to serve his  own ends. He rescued Crome from the flames, not because he doubted or favoured Crome's heresy,  but because Crome appealed from the Church to the King, and denied the papal supremacy; 

that, said Henry, is not heresy, but truth. When he sent to Oxford for the articles  on which Wycliffe had been condemned, it was not to study the great  Reformer's doctrine of the mass, but to discover Wycliffe's reasons for calling  upon the State to purify a corrupt Church, and to digest his arguments against the temporal  wealth of the clergy. When he lauded the reforms effected by the German princes he was thinking of  their secularisation of ecclesiastical revenues. The spoliation of the C

hurch was consistent  with the most fervent devotion to its tenets. In 1531 Henry warned the Pope that the  Emperor would probably allow the laity "to appropriate the possessions of the  Church, which is a matter which does not touch the foundations of the faith; and  what an example this will afford to others, it is easy to see". Henry managed to improve  upon Charles's example in this respect. "He meant," he told Chapuys in 1533, "to repair  the errors of Henry the Second and John, who, being

in difficulties, had made England  and Ireland tributary to the Pope; he was determined also to reunite to the  Crown the goods which churchmen held of it, which his predecessors could not alienate to his  prejudice; and he was bound to do this by the oath he had taken at his coronation. " Probably  it was about this time, or a little later, that he drew up his suggestions  for altering the coronation oath, and making the royal obligations binding only  so far as the royal conscience thought fit

. The German princes had a further claim to  his consideration beyond the example they set him in dealing with the temporalties of  the Church. They might be very useful if his difference with Charles over Catherine of Aragon  came to an open breach; and the English envoys, who congratulated them on their zeal for  reform, also endeavoured to persuade them that Henry's friendship might be no little  safeguard against a despotic Emperor. All these phenomena, the Reformation in Germany,  heresy at

home, and the anti-sacerdotal prejudices of his subjects, were regarded by Henry merely as  circumstances which might be made subservient to his own particular purpose; and the skill with  which he used them is a monument of farsighted statecraft. He did not act on the impulse  of rash caprice. His passions were strong, but his self-control was stronger; and the breach  with Rome was effected with a cold and calculated cunning, which the most adept disciple of  Machiavelli could not have excell

ed. He did not create the factors he used; hostility  to the Church had a real objective existence. Henry was a great man; but the burdens his  people felt were not the product of Henry's hypnotic suggestion. He could only divert those  grievances to his own use. He had no personal dislike to probate dues or annates; he did not  pay them, but the threat of their abolition might compel the Pope to grant his divorce. Heresy  in itself was abominable, but if heretics would maintain the royal agains

t the papal supremacy,  might not their sins be forgiven? The strength of Henry's position lay in the fact that he  stood between two evenly balanced parties. It is obvious that by favouring the anti-clericals  he could destroy the power of the Church. It is not so certain, but it is probable that, by  supporting the Church, he could have staved off its ruin so long as he lived. Parliament might  have been urgent, but there was no necessity to call it together. The Reformation Parliament,  which

sat for seven years, would probably have been dissolved after a few weeks had Clement  granted the divorce. It met session after session, to pass one measure after another, each of which  was designed to put fresh pressure on the Pope. It began with the outworks of the papal fortress;  as soon as one was dismantled, Henry cried "Halt," to see if the citadel would surrender.  When it refused, the attack recommenced. First one, then another of the Church's privileges  and the Pope's prerogatives

disappeared, till there remained not one stone upon another of  the imposing edifice of ecclesiastical liberty and papal authority in England. CHAPTER 11. "DOWN WITH THE CHURCH. " The Reformation Parliament met for its first session  on the 3rd of November, 1529, at the Black Friars' Hall in London. No careful observer was in any  doubt as to what its temper would be with regard to the Church. It was opened by the King in  person, and the new Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, delivered an addres

s in which he denounced  his predecessor, Wolsey, in scathing terms. Parliament had been summoned, he said,  to reform such things as had been used or permitted in England by inadvertence.  On the following day both Houses adjourned to Westminster on account of the plague,  and the Commons chose, as their Speaker, Sir Thomas Audley, the future Lord Chancellor.  One of their first duties was to consider a bill of attainder against Wolsey, and the fate  of that measure seems to be destructive of o

ne or the other of two favourite theories  respecting Henry the Eighth's Parliaments. The bill was opposed in the Commons by Cromwell  and thrown out; either it was not a mere expression of the royal will, or Parliament  was something more than the tool of the Court. For it is hardly credible that Henry  first caused the bill to be introduced, and then ordered its rejection. The next  business was Henry's request for release from the obligation to repay the loan which Wolsey  had raised; that, t

oo, the Commons refused, except on conditions. But no such opposition  greeted the measures for reforming the clergy. Bills were passed in the Commons putting a limit  on the fees exacted by bishops for probate, and for the performance of other duties  then regarded as spiritual functions. The clergy were prohibited from holding  pluralities, except in certain cases, but the act was drawn with astonishing moderation;  it did not apply to benefices acquired before 1530, unless they exceeded the n

umber of four.  Penalties against non-residents were enacted, and an attempt was made to check the addiction  of spiritual persons to commercial pursuits. These reforms seem reasonable enough, but  the idea of placing a bound to the spiritual exaction of probate seemed sacrilege to Bishop  Fisher. "My lords," he cried, "you see daily what bills come hither from the Common House,  and all is to the destruction of the Church. For God's sake, see what a realm the kingdom  of Bohemia was; and when t

he Church went down, then fell the glory of the kingdom. Now  with the Commons is nothing but 'Down with the Church! ' And all this, meseemeth, is for  lack of faith only. " The Commons thought a limitation of fees an insufficient ground for  a charge of heresy, and complained of Fisher to the King through the mouth of their Speaker.  The Bishop explained away the offensive phrase, but the spiritual peers succeeded in rejecting  the Commons' bills. The way out of the deadlock was suggested by th

e King; he proposed  a conference between eight members of either House. The Lords' delegates were  half spiritual, half temporal, peers. Henry knew well enough that the Commons  would vote solidly for the measures, and that the temporal peers would support  them. They did so; the bills were passed; and, on 17th December, Parliament was prorogued. We may  call it a trick or skilful parliamentary strategy; the same trick, played by the Tiers État in 1789,  ensured the success of the French Revolu

tion, and it was equally effective in England in  1529. These mutterings of the storm fell on deaf ears at Rome. Clement was deaf,  not because he had not ears to hear, but because the clash of imperial  arms drowned more distant sounds. "If any one," wrote the Bishop of Auxerre in  1531, "was ever in prison or in the power of his enemies, the Pope is now. " He was as anxious as  ever to escape responsibility. "He has told me," writes the Bishop of Tarbes to Francis the First  on the 27th of Mar

ch, 1530, "more than three times in secret that he would be glad if the marriage  was already made, either by a dispensation of the English legate or otherwise, provided it was not  by his authority, or in diminution of his power as to dispensation and limitation of Divine law.  " Later in the year he made his suggestion that Henry should have two wives without prejudice  to the legitimacy of the children of either. Henry, however, would listen to neither  suggestion. He would be satisfied with

nothing less than the sanction of the  highest authority recognised in England. When it became imperative that his marriage  with Anne should be legally sanctioned, and evident that no such sanction would be  forthcoming from Rome, he arranged that the highest ecclesiastical authority recognised by  law in England should be that of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Meanwhile, the exigencies of  the struggle drove Clement into assertions of papal prerogative which would at any time  have provoked an

outburst of national anger. On 7th March, 1530, he promulgated a bull  to be affixed to the church doors at Bruges, Tournay and Dunkirk, inhibiting Henry, under pain  of the greater excommunication, from proceeding to that second marriage, which he was telling the  Bishop of Tarbes he wished Henry would complete. A fortnight later he issued a second bull  forbidding all ecclesiastical judges, doctors, advocates and others to speak or write against  the validity of Henry's marriage with Catherine

. If he had merely desired to prohibit discussion of  a matter under judicial consideration, he should have imposed silence also on the advocates of the  marriage, and not left Fisher free to write books against the King and secretly send them to Spain  to be printed. On the 23rd of December following it was decreed in Consistory at Rome that briefs  should be granted prohibiting the Archbishop of Canterbury from taking cognisance of the suit,  and forbidding Henry to cohabit with any other woma

n than Catherine, and "all women in general  to contract marriage with the King of England". On the 5th of January, 1531, the Pope  inhibited laity as well as clergy, universities, parliaments and courts of law  from coming to any decision in the case. To these fulminations the ancient laws of  England provided Henry with sufficient means of reply. "Let not the Pope  suppose," wrote Henry to Clement, "that either the King or his nobles will allow  the fixed laws of his kingdom to be set aside. "

A proclamation, based on the Statutes of  Provisors, was issued on 12th September, 1530, forbidding the purchasing from  the Court of Rome or the publishing of any thing prejudicial to the realm,  or to the King's intended purposes; and Norfolk was sent to remind the papal nuncio  of the penalties attaching to the importation of bulls into England without the King's  consent. But the most notorious expedient of Henry's was the appeal to the universities of  Europe, first suggested by Cranmer. T

hroughout 1530 English agents were busy abroad obtaining  decisions from the universities on the question of the Pope's power to dispense with the law  against marrying a deceased brother's wife. Their success was considerable. Paris  and Orléans, Bourges and Toulouse, Bologna and Ferrara, Pavia and Padua, all  decided against the Pope. Similar verdicts, given by Oxford and Cambridge, may be as  naturally ascribed to intimidation by Henry, as may the decisions of Spanish universities  in the Pop

e's favour to pressure from Charles; but the theory that all the French and Italian  universities were bribed is not very credible. The cajolery, the threats and the bribes  were not all on one side; and in Italy at least the imperial agents would seem to  have enjoyed greater facilities than Henry's. In some individual cases there was, no  doubt, resort to improper inducements; but, if the majority in the most famous seats  of learning in Europe could be induced by filthy lucre to vote against

their conscience, it implies  a greater need for drastic reformation than the believers in the theory of corruption are usually  disposed to admit. Their decisions were, however, given on general grounds; the question of  the consummation of Catherine's marriage with Arthur seems to have been carefully  excluded. How far that consideration would have affected the votes of the universities  can only be assumed; but it does not appear to have materially influenced the  view taken by Catherine's ad

vocates. They allowed that Catherine's oath would not be  considered sufficient evidence in a court of law; they admitted the necessity of proving that urgent  reasons existed for the grant of the dispensation, and the only urgent reason they put  forward was an entirely imaginary imminence of war between Henry  the Seventh and Ferdinand in 1503. Cardinal Du Bellay, in 1534, asserted that no  one would be so bold as to maintain in Consistory that the dispensation ever was valid; and the  papalis

ts were driven to the extreme contention, which was certainly not then admitted by Catholic  Europe, that, whether the marriage with Arthur was merely a form or not, whether it was or  was not against Divine law, the Pope could, of his absolute power, dispense. Pending the  result of Henry's appeal to the universities, little was done in the matter in England. The  lords spiritual and temporal signed in June, 1530, a letter to the Pope urging him to comply  with their King's request for a divorc

e. Parliament did not meet until 16th January, 1531,  and even then Chapuys reports that it was employed on nothing more important than cross-bows  and hand-guns, the act against which was not, however, passed till 1534. The previous session  had shown that, although the Commons might demur to fiscal exactions, they were willing enough  to join Henry in any attack on the Church, and the question was how to bring the clergy to  a similar state of acquiescence. It was naturally a more difficult ta

sk, but Henry's ingenuity  provided a sufficient inducement. His use of the statutes of præmunire was very characteristic. It  was conservative, it was legal, and it was unjust. Those statutes were no innovation  designed to meet his particular case; they had been for centuries the law of  the land; and there was no denying the fact that the clergy had broken the  law by recognising Wolsey as legate. Henry, of course, had licensed Wolsey to act as  legate, and to punish the clergy for an offence

, at which he had connived, was scarcely consistent  with justice; but no King ever showed so clearly how the soundest constitutional maxims  could be used to defeat the pleas of equity; it was frequently laid down during his reign  that no licence from the King could be pleaded against penalties imposed by statute, and  not a few parliamentary privileges were first asserted by Henry the Eighth. So the clergy  were cunningly caught in the meshes of the law. Chapuys declares that no one could und

erstand the  mysteries of præmunire; "its interpretation lies solely in the King's head, who amplifies  it and declares it at his pleasure, making it apply to any case he pleases". He at  least saw how præmunire could be made to serve his purposes. These, at the moment, were two. He  wanted to extract from the clergy a recognition of his supremacy over the Church, and he wanted  money. He was always in need of supplies, but especially now, in case war should arise  from the Pope's refusal to gra

nt his divorce; and Henry made it a matter of principle that  the Church should pay for wars due to the Pope. The penalty for præmunire was forfeiture of goods  and imprisonment, and the King probably thought he was unduly lenient in granting a pardon for a  hundred thousand pounds, when he might have taken the whole of the clergy's goods and put them  in gaol as well. The clergy objected strongly; in the old days of the Church's influence  they would all have preferred to go to prison, and a un

animous refusal of the King's  demands would even now have baulked his purpose. But the spirit was gone  out of them. Chapuys instigated the papal nuncio to go down to Convocation  and stiffen the backs of the clergy. They were horrified at his appearance,  and besought him to depart in haste, fearing lest this fresh constitutional  breach should be visited on their heads. Warham frightened them with the terrors of royal  displeasure; and the clerics had to content their conscience with an Irish

bull and a subterfuge.  "Silence gives consent," said the Archbishop when putting the question; "Then are we all silent,"  cried the clergy. To their recognition of Henry as Supreme Head of the Church, they added the  salvo "so far as the law of Christ allows". It was an empty phrase, thought Chapuys, for no  one would venture to dispute with the King the point where his supremacy ended and that of Christ  began; there was in fact "a new Papacy made here". The clergy repented of the concession

as soon as  it was granted; they were "more conscious every day," wrote Chapuys, "of the great error they  committed in acknowledging the King as sovereign of the Church"; and they made a vain, and not very  creditable, effort to get rejected by spiritual votes in the House of Lords the measures to  which they had given their assent in Convocation. The Church had surrendered with scarcely a show  of fight; henceforth Henry might feel sure that, whatever opposition he might encounter in other  qu

arters, the Church in England would offer no real resistance. In Parliament, notwithstanding  Chapuys' remark on the triviality of its business, more than a score of acts were passed, some  limiting such abuses as the right of sanctuary, some dealing in the familiar way with social evils  like the increase of beggars and vagabonds. The act depriving sanctuary-men, who committed felony,  of any further protection from their sanctuary was recommended to Parliament by the King in person.  So was a

curious act making poisoning treason. There had recently been an attempt to poison  Fisher, which the King brought before the House of Lords. However familiar poisoning might  be at Rome, it was a novel method in England, and was considered so heinous a crime  that the ordinary penalties for murder were thought to be insufficient. Then the  King's pardon to the clergy was embodied in a parliamentary bill. The Commons  perceived that they were not included, took alarm, and refused to pass the bil

l.  Henry at first assumed a superior tone; he pointed out that the Commons could  not prevent his pardoning the clergy; he could do it as well under the Great Seal as by  statute. The Commons, however, were not satisfied. "There was great murmuring among them," says  Chapuys, "in the House of Commons, where it was publicly said in the presence of some of the Privy  Council that the King had burdened and oppressed his kingdom with more imposts and exactions  than any three or four of his predece

ssors, and that he ought to consider that the strength of  the King lay in the affections of his people. And many instances were alleged of the inconveniences  which had happened to princes through the ill-treatment of their subjects. " Henry was  too shrewd to attempt to punish this very plain speaking. He knew that his faithful Commons  were his one support, and he yielded at once. "On learning this," continues Chapuys,  "the King granted the exemption which was published in Parliament on Wedn

esday  last without any reservation. " The two acts for the pardon of the spiritualty and  temporalty were passed concurrently. But, whereas the clergy had paid for their pardon with  a heavy fine and the loss of their independence, the laity paid nothing at all. The last  business of the session was the reading of the sentences in Henry's favour obtained from  the universities. Parliament was then prorogued, and its members were enjoined to relate to their  constituents that which they had seen

and heard. Primed by communion with their neighbours, members  of Parliament assembled once more on 15th January, 1532, for more important business than they had  yet transacted. Every effort was made to secure a full attendance of Peers and Commons; almost  all the lords would be present, thought Chapuys, except Tunstall, who had not been summoned; Fisher  came without a summons, and apparently no effort was made to exclude him. The readiness of  the Commons to pass measures against the Church

, and their reluctance to consent to  taxation, were even more marked than before. Their critical spirit was shown by their  repeated rejection of the Statutes of Wills and Uses designed by Henry to protect from evasion  his feudal rights, such as reliefs and primer seisins. This demand, writes Chapuys, "has been  the occasion of strange words against the King and the Council, and in spite of all the efforts  of the King's friends, it was rejected". In the matter of supplies they were equally ou

tspoken;  they would only grant one-tenth and one-fifteenth, a trifling sum which Henry refused to accept.  It was during this debate on the question of supplies that two members moved that the King  be asked to take back Catherine as his wife. They would then, they urged, need no fresh  armaments and their words are reported to have been well received by the House. The  Commons were not more enthusiastic about the bill restraining the payment of annates  to the Court at Rome. They did not pay t

hem; their grievance was against bishops  in England, and they saw no particular reason for relieving those prelates of their  financial burdens. Cromwell wrote to Gardiner that he did not know how the annates  bill would succeed; and the King had apparently to use all his persuasion to get  the bill through the Lords and the Commons. Only temporal lords voted for it in  the Upper House, and, in the Lower, recourse was had to the rare expedient of  a division. In both Houses the votes were taken

in the King's presence. But it is almost  certain that his influence was brought to bear, not so much in favour of the principle of  the bill, as of the extremely ingenious clause which left the execution of the Act  in Henry's discretion, and provided him with a powerful means of putting pressure on the  Pope. That was Henry's statement of the matter. He told Chapuys, before the bill was passed, that  the attack on annates was being made without his consent; and after it had been passed he  in

structed his representatives at Rome to say that he had taken care to stop the mouth of  Parliament and to have the question of annates referred to his decision. "The King," writes  the French envoy in England at the end of March, "has been very cunning, for he has caused the  nobles and people to remit all to his will, so that the Pope may know that, if he does nothing  for him, the King has the means of punishing him. " The execution of the clauses providing for  the confirmation and consecrat

ion of bishops without recourse to Rome was also left at Henry's  option. But no pressure was needed to induce the Commons to attack abuses, the weight of which  they felt themselves. Early in the session they were discussing the famous petition against the  clergy, and, on 28th February, Norfolk referred to the "infinite clamours" in Parliament against  the Church. The fact that four corrected drafts of this petition are extant in the Record Office, is  taken as conclusive proof that it really

emanated from the Court. But the drafts do not appear to be  in the known hand of any of the Government clerks. The corrections in Cromwell's hand doubtless  represent the wishes of the King; but, even were the whole in Cromwell's hand, it would be  no bar to the hypothesis that Cromwell reduced to writing, for the King's consideration, complaints  which he heard from independent members in his place in Parliament. The fact that nine-tenths of  our modern legislation is drawn up by Government dr

aughtsmen, cannot be accepted as proof that  that legislation represents no popular feeling. On the face of them, these petitions  bear little evidence of Court dictation; the grievances are not such as were felt by Henry,  whose own demands of the clergy were laid directly before Convocation, without any pretence that they  really came from the Commons. Some are similar to those presented to the Parliament of 1515; others  are directed against abuses which recent statutes had sought, but failed

, to remedy. Such were  the citation of laymen out of their dioceses, the excessive fees taken in spiritual courts,  the delay and trouble in obtaining probates. Others complained that the clergy in  Convocation made laws inconsistent with the laws of the realm; that the ordinaries  delayed instituting parsons to their benefices; that benefices were given to minors; that the  number of holy-days, especially in harvest-time, was excessive; and that spiritual men occupied  temporal offices. The ch

ief grievance seems to have been that the ordinaries cited poor  men before the spiritual courts without any accuser being produced, and then  condemned them to abjure or be burnt. Henry, reported Chapuys, was "in a most gracious  manner" promising to support the Commons against the Church "and to mitigate the rigours  of the inquisition which they have here, and which is said to be more severe than in  Spain". After debating these points in Parliament, the Commons agreed that "all the griefs, w

hich  the temporal men should be grieved with, should be put in writing and delivered to the King"; hence  the drafts in the Record Office. The deputation, with the Speaker at its head, presented the  complaints to Henry on 18th March. Its reception is quite unintelligible on the theory that the  grievances existed only in the King's imagination. Henry was willing, he said, to  consider the Commons' petition. But, if they expected him to comply with their  wishes, they must make some concession

to his; and he recommended them to forgo their opposition  to the bills of Uses and Wills, to which the Lords had already agreed. After Easter he  sent the Commons' petition to Convocation; the clergy appealed to the King for protection.  Henry had thus manœuvred himself into the position of mediator, in which he hoped, but in vain,  to extract profit for himself from both sides. From Convocation he demanded submission to  three important claims; the clergy were to consent to a reform of ecclesi

astical law, to  abdicate their right of independent legislation, and to recognise the necessity of the King's  approval for existing canons. These demands were granted. As usual, Henry was able  to get what he wanted from the clergy; but from the Commons he could get no more than  they were willing to give. They again rejected the bills of Uses and Wills, and would  only concede the most paltry supplies. But they passed with alacrity the bills  embodying the submission of the clergy. These were

the Church's concessions to Henry,  but it must bend the knee to the Commons as well, and other measures were passed reforming some  of the points in their petition. Ordinaries were prohibited from citing men out of their  proper dioceses, and benefit of clergy was denied to clerks under the order of sub-deacon  who committed murder, felony, or petty treason; the latter was a slight extension of  a statute passed in 1512. The bishops, however, led by Gardiner and aided by More,  secured in the

House of Lords the rejection of the concessions made by the Church to the King,  though they passed those made to the Commons. Parliament, which had sat for the unusual space  of four months, was prorogued on the 14th of May; two days later, More resigned the chancellorship  and Gardiner retired in disfavour to Winchester. Meanwhile the divorce case at Rome made little  progress. In the highest court in Christendom the facilities afforded for the law's delays were  naturally more extended than b

efore inferior tribunals; and two years had been spent in  discussing whether Henry's "excusator," sent merely to maintain that the King of England could  not be cited to plead before the Papal Court, should be heard or not. Clement was in  suspense between two political forces. In December, 1532, Charles was again to  interview the Pope, and imperialists in Italy predicted that his presence would be as  decisive in Catherine's favour as it had been three years before. But Henry and Francis  had

, in October, exhibited to the world the closeness of their friendship by a personal  interview at Boulogne. No pomp or ceremony, like that of the Field of Cloth of Gold, dazzled  men's eyes; but the union between the two Kings was never more real. Neither Queen was present;  Henry would not take Catherine, and he objected so strongly to Spanish dress that he could not  endure the sight of Francis's Spanish Queen. Anne Boleyn, recently created Marquis  of Pembroke, took Catherine's place; and pl

ans for the promotion of the divorce  formed the staple of the royal discussions. Respect for the power of the two Kings  robbed the subsequent interview between Emperor and Pope of much of its effect;  and before Charles and Clement parted, the Pope had secretly agreed to accord a similar  favour to Francis; he was to meet him at Nice in the following summer. Long before then the divorce  had been brought to a crisis. By the end of January Henry knew that Anne Boleyn was pregnant.  Her issue mu

st at any cost be made legitimate. That could only be done by Henry's divorce  from Catherine, and by his marriage with Anne Boleyn. There was little hope of obtaining these  favours from Rome. Therefore it must be done by means of the Archbishop of Canterbury; and to  remove all chance of disputing his sentence, the Court of the Archbishop of Canterbury must,  before his decision was given, be recognised as the supreme tribunal for English ecclesiastical  cases. These circumstances, of which no

t a hint was suffered to transpire in public, dictated  Henry's policy during the early months of 1533. Never was his skill more clearly displayed;  he was, wrote Chapuys in December, 1532, practising more than ever with his Parliament,  though he received the Spanish ambassador "as courteously as ever". The difficulties with  which he was surrounded might have tried the nerve of any man, but they only seemed  to render Henry's course more daring and steady. The date of his marriage with Anne  B

oleyn is even now a matter of conjecture. Cranmer repudiated the report that he performed  the ceremony. He declares he did not know of it until a fortnight after the event, and  says it took place about St. Paul's Day . A more important question was the individuality  of the archbishop who was to pronounce the nullity of Henry's marriage with Catherine of Aragon. He  must obviously be one on whom the King could rely. Fortunately for Henry, Archbishop Warham had died  in August, 1532. His succes

sor was to be Thomas Cranmer, who had first suggested to Henry the  plan of seeking the opinions of the universities on the divorce, and was now on an embassy at the  Emperor's Court. No time was to be lost. Henry usually gathered a rich harvest during the vacancy  of great bishoprics, but now Canterbury was to be filled up without any delay, and the King even  lent Cranmer 1,000 marks to meet his expenses. But would the Pope be so accommodating  as to expedite the bulls, suspecting, as he must

have done, the object for which  they were wanted? For this contingency also Henry had provided; and he was actually using  the Pope as a means for securing the divorce. An appearance of friendship with Clement was the  weapon he now employed with the greatest effect. The Pope was discussing with the  French ambassadors a proposal to remit the divorce case to some neutral  spot, such as Cambrai, and delaying that definite sentence in Catherine's favour which  imperialists had hoped that his inte

rview with Charles would precipitate; the papal  nuncio was being feasted in England, and was having suspiciously amicable  conferences with members of Henry's council. Henry himself was writing to  Clement in the most cordial terms; he had instructed his ambassadors in  1531 to "use all gentleness towards him," and Clement was saying that Henry  was of a better nature and more wise than Francis the First Henry was now willing to  suspend his consent to the general council, where the Pope feared

that a scheme would be  mooted for restoring the papal States to the Emperor; and he told the papal nuncio in England  that, though he had studied the question of the Pope's authority and retracted his defence of  the Holy See, yet possibly Clement might give him occasion to probe the matter further still,  and to reconfirm what he had originally written. Was he not, moreover, withholding his assent from  the Act of Annates, which would deprive the Pope of large revenues? Backed by this gentle

hint,  Henry's request not merely for Cranmer's bulls, but for their expedition without the  payment of the usual 10,000 marks, reached Rome. The cardinals were loth to forgo  their perquisites for the bulls, but the annates of all England were more precious still, and,  on 22nd February, Consistory decided to do what Henry desired. The same deceptive appearance of  concord between King and Pope was employed to lull both Parliament and Convocation. The delays in the  divorce suit disheartened Ca

therine's adherents. The Pope, wrote Chapuys, would lose his authority  little by little, unless the case were decided at once; every one, he said, cried out "au murdre"  on Clement for his procrastination on the divorce, and for the speed with which he granted Cranmer's  bulls. There was a general impression that "he would betray the Emperor," and "many think that  there is a secret agreement between Henry and the Pope". That idea was sedulously fostered by  Henry. Twice he took the Pope's nunc

io down in state to Parliament to advertise the excellent  terms upon which he stood with the Holy See. In the face of such evidence, what motive was  there for prelates and others to reject the demands which Henry was pressing upon  them? The Convocations of Canterbury and York repeated the submission of 1532,  and approved, by overwhelming majorities, of two propositions: firstly, that, as a  matter of law, the Pope was not competent to dispense with the obstacle to a marriage  between a man a

nd his deceased brother's wife, when the previous marriage had been consummated;  and secondly, that, as a matter of fact, the marriage between Catherine and  Prince Arthur had been so consummated. In Parliament, the Act forbidding Appeals to  Rome, and providing for the confirmation and consecration of bishops without recourse  to the Papal Court, was discussed. It was, like the rest of Henry's measures, based on a  specious conservative plea. General councils had, the King said, decreed that s

uits should be  determined in the place in which they originated; so there was no need for appeals to go out of  England. Such opposition as it encountered was based on no religious principle. Commercial  interests were the most powerful impulse of the age, and the Commons were afraid that the Act  of Appeals might be followed by a papal interdict. They did not mind the interdict as depriving them  of religious consolations, but they dreaded lest it might ruin their trade with the Netherlands. 

Henry, however, persuaded them that the wool trade was as necessary to Flemings as it was to  Englishmen, and that an interdict would prove no more than an empty threat. He was careful  to make no other demands upon the Commons. No subsidies were required; no extension of royal  prerogative was sought; and eventually the Act of Appeals was passed with a facility that seems  to have created general surprise. Henry's path was now clear. Cranmer was archbishop and legatus  natus with a title which

none could dispute. By Act of Parliament his court was the final  resort for all ecclesiastical cases. No appeals from his decision could be lawfully made. So,  on 11th April, before he was yet consecrated, he besought the King's gracious permission  to determine his "great cause of matrimony, because much bruit exists among the common  people on the subject". No doubt there did; but that was not the cause for  the haste. Henry was pleased to accede to this request of the "principal  minister of

our spiritual jurisdiction"; and, on the 10th of May, the Archbishop opened  his Court at Dunstable. Catherine, of course, could recognise no authority in Cranmer to  try a cause that was before the papal curia. She was declared contumacious, and, on the 23rd,  the Archbishop gave his sentence. Following the line of Convocation, he pronounced that the Pope  had no power to license marriages such as Henry's, and that the King and Catherine had never  been husband and wife. Five days later, after

a secret investigation, he declared that  Henry and Anne Boleyn were lawfully married, and on Whitsunday, the 1st of June, he  crowned Anne as Queen in Westminster Abbey. Three months later, on  Sunday, the 7th of September, between three and four in the afternoon, Queen  Anne gave birth to a daughter at Greenwich. The child was christened on the following  Wednesday by Stokesley, Bishop of London, and Cranmer stood godfather. Chapuys scarcely  considered the matter worth mention. The King's am

ie had given birth to a bastard, a detail of  little importance to any one, and least of all to a monarch like Charles the Fifth Yet the  "bastard" was Queen Elizabeth, and the child, thus ushered into a contemptuous world, lived  to humble the pride of Spain, and to bear to a final triumph the banner which Henry had raised. CHAPTER 12. THE PREVAILING OF THE GATES OF HELL. That victorious issue of the Tudor struggle with  the power, against which Popes proclaimed that the gates of hell should no

t prevail, was distant  enough in 1533. Then the Tudor monarch seemed rushing headlong to irretrievable ruin. Sure of  himself and his people, and feeling no longer the need of Clement's favour, Henry threw off the  mask of friendship, and, on the 9th of July, confirmed, by letters patent, the Act of  Annates. Cranmer's proceedings at Dunstable, Henry's marriage, and Anne's coronation,  constituted a still more flagrant defiance of Catholic Europe. The Pope's authority was  challenged with every

parade of contempt. He could do no less than gather round him  the relics of his dignity and prepare to launch against Henry the final ban of  the Church. So, on the 11th of July, the sentence of the greater excommunication was  drawn up. Clement did not yet, nor did he ever, venture to assert his claims to temporal supremacy  in Christendom, by depriving the English King of his kingdom; he thought it prudent to  rely on his own undisputed prerogative. His spiritual powers seemed ample; and he

applied  to himself the words addressed to the Prophet Jeremiah, "Behold, I have set thee above nations  and kingdoms that thou mayest root up and destroy, build and plant, a lord over all kings of  the whole earth and over all peoples bearing rule". In virtue of this prerogative Henry  was cut off from the Church while he lived, removed from the pale of Christian society, and  deprived of the solace of the rites of religion; when he died, he must lie without burial, and  in hell suffer torment

for ever. What would be the effect of this terrific anathema?  The omens looked ill for the English King. If he had flouted the Holy See, he had also  offended the temporal head of Christendom. The Emperor's aunt had been divorced, his  cousin's legitimacy had been impugned, and the despatches of his envoy, Chapuys,  were filled with indignant lamentations over the treatment meted out to Catherine and to  her daughter. Both proud and stubborn women, they resolutely refused to admit in any way th

e  validity of Henry's acts and recent legislation. Catherine would rather starve as Queen, than be  sumptuously clothed and fed as Princess Dowager. Henry would give her anything she asked, if she  would acknowledge that she was not the Queen, nor her daughter the Princess; but  her bold resistance to his commands and wishes brought out all the worst  features of his character. His anger was not the worst the Queen and her daughter  had to fear; he still preserved a feeling of respect for Cathe

rine and of affection for  Mary. "The King himself," writes Chapuys, "is not ill-natured; it is this Anne who has  put him in this perverse and wicked temper, and alienates him from his former humanity. " The  new Queen's jealous malignity passed all bounds. She caused her aunt to be made governess to  Mary, and urged her to box her charge's ears; and she used every effort to force the Princess  to serve as a maid upon her little half-sister, Elizabeth. This humiliation was  deeply resented by t

he people, who, says Chapuys, though forbidden, on pain  of their lives, to call Catherine Queen, shouted it at the top of their voices. "You cannot  imagine," he writes a few weeks later to Charles, "the great desire of all this people that your  Majesty should send men. Every day I have been applied to about it by Englishmen of rank,  wit and learning, who give me to understand that the last King Richard was never so  much hated by his people as this King. " The Emperor, he went on, had a bett

er chance of  success than Henry the Seventh, and Ortiz at Rome was cherishing the belief that England would  rise against the King for his contumacy and schismatic disobedience. Fisher was urgent that  Charles should prepare an invasion of England; the young Marquis of Exeter, a possible claimant  to the throne, was giving the same advice. Abergavenny, Darcy and other peers brooded in  sullen discontent. They were all listening to the hysterical ravings of Elizabeth Barton, the  Nun of Kent, wh

o prophesied that Henry had not a year to live. Charles's emissaries were busy  in Ireland, where Kildare was about to revolt. James the Fifth of Scotland was hinting  at his claims to the English crown, should Henry be deprived by the  Pope; and Chapuys was divided in mind whether it would be better to make  James the executor of the papal sentence, or marry Mary to some great English noble, and  raise an internal rebellion. At Catherine's suggestion he recommended to the Emperor Reginald  Pole

, a grandson of George, Duke of Clarence, as a suitor for Mary's hand; and he urged, on his  own account, Pole's claims to the English throne. Catherine's scruples, not about deposing  her husband, or passing over the claims of Henry's sisters, but on the score of Edward  the Fourth's grandson, the Marquis of Exeter, might, thought Chapuys, be removed by appealing  to the notorious sentence of Bishop Stillington, who, on the demand of Richard the Third, had  pronounced Edward the Fourth's marria

ge void and his children illegitimate. Those who  had been the King's firm supporters when the divorce first came up were some of  them wavering, and others turning back. Archbishop Lee, Bishops Tunstall and Gardiner, and  Bennet, were now all in secret or open opposition, and even Longland was expressing to Chapuys  regrets that he had ever been Henry's confessor; like other half-hearted revolutionists, they  would never have started at all, had they known how far they would have to go, and now

they  were setting their sails for an adverse breeze. It was the King, and the King alone, who kept  England on the course which he had mapped out. Pope and Emperor were defied; Europe was  shocked; Francis himself disapproved of the breach with the Church; Ireland was  in revolt; Scotland, as ever, was hostile; legislation had been thrust down the throats of a  recalcitrant Church, and, we are asked to believe, of a no less unwilling House of Commons,  while the people at large were seething w

ith indignation at the insults heaped  upon the injured Queen and her daughter. By all the laws of nature,  of morals, and of politics, it would seem, Henry was doomed to the fate of  the monarch in the Book of Daniel the Prophet, who did according to his will and exalted  and magnified himself above every god; who divided the land for gain, and had  power over the treasures of gold and silver; who was troubled by tidings from the east and  from the north; who went forth with great fury to destr

oy and utterly make away many, and  yet came to his end, and none helped him. All these circumstances, real and alleged,  would be quite convincing as reasons for Henry's failure; but they are singularly  inconclusive as explanations of his success, of the facts that his people did not  rise and depose him, that no Spanish Armada disgorged its host on English shores,  and that, for all the papal thunderbolts, Henry died quietly in his bed fourteen years  later, and was buried with a pomp and res

pect to which Popes themselves were little accustomed. He  may have stood alone in his confidence of success, and in his penetration through these appearances  into the real truth of the situation behind. That, from a purely political or non-moral point  of view, is his chief title to greatness. He knew from the beginning what he could do; he had  counted the cost and calculated the risks; and, writes Russell in August, 1533, "I never saw the  King merrier than he is now". As early as March, 153

1, he told Chapuys that if the Pope  issued 10,000 excommunications he would not care a straw for them. When the papal  nuncio first hinted at excommunication and a papal appeal to the secular arm, Henry  declared that he cared nothing for either. He would open the eyes of princes, he said, and  show them how small was really the power of the Pope; and "when the Pope had done what he liked on  his side, Henry would do what he liked here". That threat, at least, he fulfilled with a vengeance.  He

did not fear the Spaniards; they might come, he said , but perhaps they might not return. England,  he told his subjects, was not conquerable, so long as she remained united; and the patriotic outburst  with which Shakespeare closes "King John" is but an echo and an expansion of the words of Henry  the Eighth. This England never did, nor never shall,Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,But  when it first did help to wound itself. .. . Come the three corners of the world in arms,And  we shall sh

ock them. Nought shall make us rue,If England to itself do rest but true. The  great fear of Englishmen was lest Charles should ruin them by prohibiting the trade with  Flanders. "Their only comfort," wrote Chapuys, "is that the King persuades the people that it is  not in your Majesty's power to do so. " Henry had put the matter to a practical test, in the autumn  of 1533, by closing the Staple at Calais. It is possible that the dispute between him and the  merchants, alleged as the cause for t

his step, was real; but the King could have provided his  subjects with no more forcible object-lesson. Distress was felt at once in Flanders; complaints  grew so clamorous that the Regent sent an embassy post-haste to Henry to remonstrate, and to  represent the closing of the Staple as an infraction of commercial treaties. Henry coldly  replied that he had broken no treaties at all; it was merely a private dispute between his  merchants and himself, in which foreign powers had no ground for int

ervention. The envoys  had to return, convinced against their will. The Staple at Calais was soon reopened, but  the English King was able to demonstrate to his people that the Flemings "could not do  without England's trade, considering the outcry they made when the Staple of Calais was  closed for only three months". Henry, indeed, might almost be credited with second-sight into  the Emperor's mind. On 31st May, 1533, Charles's council discussed the situation. After considering  Henry's enormi

ties, the councillors proceeded to deliberate on the possible remedies. There were  three: justice, force and a combination of both. The objections to relying on methods of justice,  that is, on the papal sentence, were, firstly, that Henry would not obey, and secondly,  that the Pope was not to be trusted. The objections to the employment of force were,  that war would imperil the whole of Europe, and especially the Emperor's dominions, and that  Henry had neither used violence towards Catherin

e nor given Charles any excuse for breaking the  Treaty of Cambrai. Eventually, it was decided to leave the matter to Clement. He was to be urged  to give sentence against Henry, but on no account to lay England under an interdict, as that "would  disturb her intercourse with Spain and Flanders. If, therefore, an interdict be resorted  to, it should be limited to one diocese, or to the place where Henry dwells. " Such an  interdict might put a premium on assassination, but otherwise neither Henr

y nor his people were  likely to care much about it. The Pope should, however, be exhorted to depose the English King;  that might pave the way for Mary's accession and for the predominance in England of the Emperor's  influence; but the execution of the sentence must not be entrusted to Charles. It would be excellent  if James the Fifth or the Irish would undertake to beard the lion in his den, but the Emperor did not  see his way clear to accepting the risk himself. Charles was, indeed, afraid

, not merely of Henry,  but of Francis, who was meditating fresh Italian schemes; and various expedients were suggested  to divert his attention in other directions. He might be assisted in an attack upon Calais.  "Calais," was Charles's cautious comment, "is better as it is, for the security of  Flanders. " The Pope hinted that the grant of Milan would win over Francis. It probably  would; but Charles would have abandoned half a dozen aunts rather than see Milan in  French possession. His real

concern in the matter was not the injustice to Catherine, but the  destruction of the prospect of Mary's succession. That was a tangible political interest, and  Charles was much less anxious to have Henry censured than to have Mary's legitimate claim to  the throne established. He was a great politician, absolutely impervious to personal wrong  when its remedy conflicted with political interests. "Though the Emperor," he said, "is  bound to the Queen, this is a private matter, and public consid

erations must be taken  into account. " And public considerations, as he admitted a year later,  "compelled him to conciliate Henry". So he refused Chapuys' request to be recalled  lest his presence in England should lead people to believe that Charles had condoned Henry's  marriage with Anne Boleyn, and dissuaded Catherine from leaving England. The least hint to  Francis of any hostile intent towards Henry would, thought Charles, be at once revealed to  the English King, and the two would join

in making war on himself. War he was determined  to avoid, for, apart from the ruin of Flanders, which it would involve, Henry and Francis had long  been intriguing with the Lutherans in Germany. A breach might easily precipitate civil strife  in the Empire; and, indeed, in June, 1534, Würtemberg was wrested from the Habsburgs  by Philip of Hesse with the connivance of France. Francis, too, was always believed  to have a working agreement with the Turk; Barbarossa was giving no little cause for

alarm  in the Mediterranean; while Henry on his part had established close relations with Lübeck and  Hamburg, and was fomenting dissensions in Denmark, the crown of which he was offered but cautiously  declined. This incurable jealousy between Francis and Charles made the French King loth  to weaken his friendship with Henry. The English King was careful to impress  upon the French ambassador that he could, in the last resort, make his peace with Charles  by taking back Catherine and by restori

ng Mary to her place in the line of succession. Francis  had too poignant a recollection of the results of the union between Henry and Charles from  1521 to 1525 ever to risk its renewal. The age of the crusades and chivalry was gone;  commercial and national rivalries were as potent in the sixteenth century as they  are to-day. Then, as in subsequent times, mutual suspicions made impossible an  effective concert of Europe against the Turk. The fall of Rhodes and the death of one of  Charles's b

rothers-in-law at Mohacz and the expulsion of another from the throne of Denmark  had never been avenged, and, in 1534, the Emperor was compelled to evacuate Coron. If Europe could  not combine against the common enemy of the Faith, was it likely to combine against one who, in  spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes  to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia,  served only to prob

e the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness  of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought  that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons from Charles on behalf of the  Spanish Queen. "Henry," wrote Chapuys, "has always fortified himself by the  consent of Parliament. " It would be well, he thought, if Charles would follow suit,  and induce the Cortes of Aragon and Castile, "or at least the grandees," to off

er their persons  and goods in Catherine's cause. Such an offer, if published in England, "will be of  inestimable service". But here comes the proof of Charles's pitiful impotence; in  order to obtain this public offer, the Emperor was "to give them privately an exemption from  such offer and promise of persons and goods". It was to be one more pretence like the others, and unfortunately for the Pope and for  the Emperor, Henry had an inconvenient habit of piercing disguises. The strength of  H

enry's position at home was due to a similar lack of unity among his domestic enemies. If  the English people had wished to depose him, they could have effected their object without  much difficulty. In estimating the chances of a possible invasion, it was pointed out how  entirely dependent Henry was upon his people: he had only one castle in London, and only  a hundred yeomen of the guard to defend him. He would, in fact, have been powerless against a  united people or even against a partial r

evolt, if well organised and really popular. There was  chronic discontent throughout the Tudor period, but it was sectional. The remnants of the old  nobility always hated Tudor methods of government, and the poorer commons were sullen at their  ill-treatment by the lords of the land; but there was no concerted basis of action between  the two. The dominant class was commercial, and it had no grievance against Henry, while  it feared alike the lords and the lower orders. In the spoliation of th

e Church temporal lords and  commercial men, both of whom could profit thereby, were agreed; and nowhere was there much sympathy  with the Church as an institution apart from its doctrine. Chapuys himself admits that the act,  depriving the clergy of their profits from leases, was passed "to please the people"; and  another conservative declared that, if the Church were deprived of all its temporal  goods, many would be glad and few would bemoan. Sympathy with Catherine and hatred of Anne  were

general, but people thought, like Charles, that these were private griefs, and that public  considerations must be taken into account. Englishmen are at all times reluctant to turn  out one Government until they see at least the possibility of another to take its place, and the  only alternative to Henry the Eighth was anarchy. The opposition could not agree on a policy, and  they could not agree on a leader. There were various grandchildren of Edward the Fourth and of  Clarence, who might put f

orward distant claims to the throne; and there were other candidates in  whose multitude lay Henry's safety. It was quite certain that the pushing of any one of these  claimants would throw the rest on Henry's side. James the Fifth , whom at one time Chapuys  favoured, knew that a Scots invasion would unite the whole of England against him; and Charles was  probably wise in rebuking his ambassador's zeal, and in thinking that any attempt on his own  part would be more disastrous to himself than

to Henry. For all this, the English King was,  as Chapuys remarks, keeping a very watchful eye on the countenance of his people, seeing  how far he could go and where he must stop, and neglecting no precaution for the peace  and security of himself and his kingdom. Acts were passed to strengthen the  navy, improvements in arms and armament were being continually tested, and the  fortifications at Calais, on the Scots Borders and elsewhere were strengthened.  Wales was reduced to law and order, a

nd, through the intermediation of  Francis, a satisfactory peace was made with Scotland. Convinced of his  security from attack at home and abroad, Henry proceeded to accomplish what remained for  the subjugation of the Church in England and the final breach with Rome. Clement had no sooner  excommunicated Henry than he began to repent; he was much more alarmed than the English  King at the probable effects of his sentence. Henry at once recalled his ambassadors from Rome,  and drew up an appeal

to a General Council. The Pope feared he would lose England for ever. Even  the Imperialists proved but Job's comforters, and told him that, after all, it was only "an  unprofitable island," the loss of which was not to be compared with the renewed devotion  of Spain and the Emperor's other dominions; possibly they assured him that  there would never again be a sack of Rome. Clement delayed for a time the  publication of the sentence against Henry, and in November he went to his interview  with

Francis the First at Marseilles. While he was there, Bonner intimated to  him Henry's appeal to a General Council. Clement angrily rejected the appeal as frivolous,  and Francis regarded this defiance of the Pope as an affront to himself in the person of his guest,  and as the ruin of his attempts to reconcile the two parties. "Ye have clearly marred all," he said  to Gardiner; "as fast as I study to win the Pope, you study to lose him," and he declared that,  had he known of the intimation bef

orehand, it should never have been made. Henry, however,  had no desire that the Pope should be won. He was, he told the French ambassador,  determined to separate from Rome; "he will not, in consequence of this, be less  Christian, but more so, for in everything and in every place he desires to cause Jesus Christ to be  recognised, who alone is the patron of Christians; and he will cause the Word to be preached, and not  the canons and decrees of the Pope. " Parliament was to meet to effect thi

s purpose in January,  1534, and during the previous autumn there are the first indications, traceable to  Cromwell's hand, of an attempt to pack it. He drew up a memorandum of such seats as  were vacant from death or from other causes; most of the new members appear  to have been freely elected, but four vacancies were filled by "the King's  pleasure. " More extensive and less doubtful was the royal interference in the election  of abbots. Many abbeys fell vacant in 1533, and in every case comm

issioners were sent down  to secure the election of the King's nominee; in many others, abbots were induced to  resign, and fresh ones put in their place. It is not clear that the main object was to pack  the clerical representation in the House of Lords, because only a few of these abbots had seats  there, the abbots gave much less trouble than the bishops in Parliament, and Convocation, where  they largely outnumbered the bishops, was much more amenable than the House of Peers, where the  bish

ops' votes preponderated. It is more probable that the end in view was already the dissolution  of the monasteries by means of surrender. Cromwell, who was now said to "rule everything,"  was boasting that he would make his King the richest monarch in Christendom, and his  methods may be guessed from his praise of the Sultan as a model to other princes for the  authority he wielded over his subjects. Henry, however, was fortunate in 1533, even in the  matter of episcopal representation. He had,

since the fall of Wolsey, had occasion  to fill up the Sees of York, Winchester, London, Durham and Canterbury; and in this  year five more became vacant: Bangor, Ely, Coventry and Lichfield by death, and  Salisbury and Worcester through the deprivation by Act of Parliament of their foreign  and absentee pastors, Campeggio and Ghinucci. Of the other bishops, Clerk of Bath and Wells,  and Longland of Lincoln, had been active in the divorce, which, indeed, Longland, the King's  confessor, was said

to have originally suggested about the year 1523; the Bishops of Norwich and  of Chichester were both over ninety years of age. Llandaff was Catherine's confessor, a Spaniard who  could not speak a word of English. On the whole bench there was no one but Fisher of Rochester who  had the will or the courage to make any effective stand on behalf of the Church's liberty. Before  Parliament met Francis sent Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, to London to make one last effort  to keep the peace between Eng

land and Rome. Du Bellay could get no concessions of any value  from Henry. All the King would promise was that, if Clement would before Easter declare his  marriage with Catherine null and that with Anne valid, he would not complete the  extirpation of the papal authority. Little enough of that remained, and Henry  himself had probably no expectation and no wish that his terms should be accepted.  Long before Du Bellay had reached Rome, Parliament was discussing measures designed  to effect the

final severance. Opposition was of the feeblest character alike in  Convocation and in both Houses of Parliament. Chapuys himself gloomily prophesied that there  would be no difficulty in getting the principal measures, abolishing the Pope's authority  and arranging for the election of bishops, through the House of Lords. The second Act  of Appeals embodied the concessions made by Convocation in 1532 and rejected that year in  the House of Lords. Convocation was neither to meet nor to legislate

without the King's assent;  Henry might appoint a royal commission to reform the canon law; appeals were to be permitted  to Chancery from the Archbishop's Court; abbeys and other religious houses, which  had been exempt from episcopal authority, were placed immediately under  the jurisdiction of Chancery. A fresh Act of Annates defined more precisely the  new method of electing bishops, and provided that, if the Chapter did not elect the  royal nominee within twelve days, the King might appoin

t him by letters patent.  A third act forbade the payment of Peter-pence and other impositions to the Court of  Rome, and handed over the business of dispensations and licences to the Archbishop  of Canterbury; at the same time it declared that neither King nor realm meant to vary  from the articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom. Another act provided that charges  of heresy must be supported by two lay witnesses, and that indictments for that offence  could only be made by lay authorities

. This, like the rest of Henry's  anti-ecclesiastical legislation, was based on popular clamour. On the  5th of March the whole House of Commons, with the Speaker at their head, had waited on the  King at York Place and expatiated for three hours on the oppressiveness of clerical jurisdiction.  At length it was agreed that eight temporal peers, eight representatives of the Lower House and  sixteen bishops "should discuss the matter and the King be umpire"—a repetition of the  plan of 1529 and a

very exact reflection of Henry's methods and of the Church-and-State  situation during the Reformation Parliament. The final act of the session, which ended on  30th March, was a constitutional innovation of the utmost importance. From the earliest ages  the succession to the crown had in theory been determined, first by election, and then by  hereditary right. In practice it had often been decided by the barbarous arbitrament of  war. For right is vague, it may be disputed, and there was endles

s variety of opinion  as to the proper claimant to the throne if Henry should die. So vague right  was to be replaced by definite law, which could not be disputed, but which,  unlike right, could easily be changed. The succession was no longer to be regulated by  an unalterable principle, but by the popular will expressed in Acts of Parliament. The first of a  long series of Acts of Succession was now passed to vest the succession to the crown in the heirs  of the King by Anne Boleyn; clauses we

re added declaring that persons who impugned that marriage  by writing, printing, or other deed were guilty of treason, and those who impugned it by words,  of misprision. The Government proposal that both classes of offenders should be held guilty of  treason was modified by the House of Commons. On 23rd March, a week before  the prorogation of Parliament, and seven years after the divorce case  had first begun, Clement gave sentence at Rome pronouncing valid the marriage  between Catherine and

Henry. The decision produced not a ripple on the surface of  English affairs; Henry, writes Chapuys, took no account of it and was making as good cheer  as ever. There was no reason why he should not. While the imperialist mob at Rome after  its kind paraded the streets in crowds, shouting "Imperio et Espagne," and firing  feux-de-joie over the news, the imperialist agent was writing to Charles that the judgment  would not be of much profit, except for the Emperor's honour and the Queen's justi

fication,  and was congratulating his master that he was not bound to execute the sentence. Flemings were  tearing down the papal censures from the doors of their churches, and Charles was as convinced  as ever of the necessity of Henry's friendship. He proposed to the Pope that some one should be  sent from Rome to join Chapuys in "trying to move the King from his error"; and Clement could only  reply that "he thought the embassy would have no effect on the King, but that nothing would be lost 

by it, and it would be a good compliment! " Henry, however was less likely to be influenced  by compliments, good or bad, than by the circumstance that neither Pope nor Emperor was  in a position to employ any ruder persuasive. There was none so poor as to reverence a  Pope, and, when Clement died six months later, the Roman populace broke into the chamber  where he lay and stabbed his corpse; they were with difficulty prevented from  dragging it in degradation through the streets. Such was the

respect paid to  the Supreme Pontiff in the Holy City, and deference to his sentence was not  to be expected in more distant parts. Henry's political education was now complete;  the events of the last five years had proved to him the truth of the assertion, with which  he had started, that the Pope might do what he liked at Rome, but that he also could do what  he liked in England, so long as he avoided the active hostility of the majority of his lay  subjects. The Church had, by its actions,

shown him that it was powerless; the Pope had  proved the impotence of his spiritual weapons; and the Emperor had admitted that he was both  unable and unwilling to interfere. Henry had realised the extent of his power, and the opening  of his eyes had an evil effect upon his character. Nothing makes men or Governments so careless  or so arbitrary as the knowledge that there will be no effective opposition to their  desires. Henry, at least, never grew careless; his watchful eye was always wide

open.  His ear was always strained to catch the faintest rumbling of a coming storm,  and his subtle intellect was ever on the alert to take advantage of every turn in  the diplomatic game. He was always efficient, and he took good care that his ministers should  be so as well. But he grew very arbitrary; the knowledge that he could do so much became  with him an irresistible reason for doing it. Despotic power is twice cursed; it debases  the ruler and degrades the subject; and Henry's progress

to despotism may be  connected with the rise of Thomas Cromwell, who looked to the Great Turk as a model for  Christian princes. Cromwell became secretary in May, 1534; in that month Henry's security was  enhanced by the definitive peace with Scotland, and he set to work to enforce his authority  with the weapons which Parliament had placed in his hands. Elizabeth Barton, and her  accomplices, two Friars Observants, two monks, and one secular priest, all attainted of treason  by Act of Parliame

nt, were sent to the block. Commissioners were sent round, as Parliament  had ordained, to enforce the oath of succession throughout the land. A general refusal  would have stopped Henry's career, but the general consent left Henry free to deal as  he liked with the exceptions. Fisher and More were sent to the Tower. They were willing to swear to  the succession, regarding that as a matter within the competence of Parliament, but they refused  to take the oath required by the commissioners; it c

ontained, they alleged, a repudiation of the  Pope not justified by the terms of the statute. Two cartloads of friars followed them to the  Tower in June, and the Order of Observants, in whose church at Greenwich Henry  had been baptised and married, and of whom in his earlier years he had  written in terms of warm admiration, was suppressed altogether. In November Parliament  reinforced the Act of Succession by laying down the precise terms of the oath, and providing  that a certificate of refu

sal signed by two commissioners was as effective as the indictment  of twelve jurors. Other acts empowered the King to repeal by royal proclamation certain  statutes regulating imports and exports. The first-fruits and tenths, of which  the Pope had been already deprived, were now conferred on the King as a fitting  ecclesiastical endowment for the Supreme Head of the Church. That title, granted him  four years before by both Convocations, was confirmed by Act of Parliament; its object was  to e

nable the King as Supreme Head to effect the "increase of virtue in Christ's Religion within  this Realm of England, and to repress and extirp all Errors, Heresies and other Enormities,  and Abuses heretofore used in the same". The Defender of the Faith was to be armed with  more than a delegate power; he was to be supreme in himself, the champion not of the Faith of  any one else, but of his own; and the qualifying clause, "as far as the law of Christ allows," was  omitted. His orthodoxy must b

e above suspicion, or at least beyond the reach of open cavil  in England. So new treasons were enacted, and any one who called the King a heretic,  schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper, was rendered liable to the heaviest  penalty which the law could inflict. As an earnest of the royal and parliamentary  desire for an increase of virtue in religion, an act was concurrently passed providing  for the creation of a number of suffragan bishops. Henry was now Pope in England with  powers no Pope

had possessed. The Reformation is variously regarded as the liberation of  the English Church from the Roman yoke it had long impatiently borne, as its subjection  to an Erastian yoke which it was henceforth, with more or less patience, long to bear,  or as a comparatively unimportant assertion of a supremacy which Kings of  England had always enjoyed. The Church is the same Church, we are told,  before and after the change; if anything, it was Protestant before the Reformation,  and Catholic af

ter. It is, of course, the same Church. A man may be described as the  same man before and after death, and the business of a coroner's jury is to establish the identity;  but it does not ignore the vital difference. Even Saul and Paul were the same man. And the identity  of the Church before and after the legislation of Henry the Eighth covers a considerable number of  not unimportant changes. It does not, however, seem strictly accurate to say that Henry  either liberated or enslaved the Churc

h. Rather, he substituted one form of despotism for  another, a sole for a dual control; the change, complained a reformer, was merely a translatio  imperii. The democratic movement within the Church had died away, like the democratic  movements in national and municipal politics, before the end of the fifteenth century.  It was never merry with the Church, complained a Catholic in 1533, since the  time when bishops were wont to be chosen by the Holy Ghost and by their Chapters.  Since then the

Church had been governed by a partnership between King and Pope, without  much regard for the votes of the shareholders. It was not Henry who first deprived them  of influence; neither did he restore it. What he did was to eject his foreign partner,  appropriate his share of the profits, and put his part of the business into the hands of  a manager. First-fruits and tenths were described as an intolerable burden; but they were not  abolished; they were merely transferred from the Pope to the Kin

g. Bishops became royal nominees,  pure and simple, instead of the joint nominees of King and Pope. The supreme appellate jurisdiction  in ecclesiastical causes was taken away from Rome, but it was not granted the English Church to  which in truth it had never belonged. Chancery, and not the Archbishop's Court, was made  the final resort for ecclesiastical appeals. The authority, divided erstwhile between two,  was concentrated in the hands of one; and that one was thus placed in a far different

position  from that which either had held before. The change was analogous to that in Republican Rome from  two consuls to one dictator. In both cases the dictatorship was due to exceptional circumstances.  There had long been a demand for reform in the Church in England as well as elsewhere, but the  Church was powerless to reform itself. The dual control was in effect, as dual controls often  are, a practical anarchy. The condition of the Church before the Reformation may be compared  with th

at of France before the Revolution. In purely spiritual matters the Pope  was supreme: the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century had failed. The  Pope had gathered all powers to himself, in much the same way as the French monarch  in the eighteenth century had done; and the result was the same, a formal despotism  and a real anarchy. Pope and Monarch were crushed by the weight of their own authority; they  could not reform, even when they wanted to. From 1500 to 1530 almost every  scheme,

peaceful or bellicose, started in Europe was based on the plea that  its ultimate aim was the reform of the Church; and so it would have continued, vox et  præterea nihil, had not the Church been galvanised into action by the loss of half  its inheritance. In England the change from a dual to a sole control at once made that  control effective, and reform became possible. But it was a reform imposed on the Church from  without and by means of the exceptional powers bestowed on the Supreme Head.

Hence the burden  of modern clerical criticism of the Reformation. Objection is raised not so much  to the things that were done, as to the means by which they were brought  to pass, to the fact that the Church was forcibly reformed by the State, and  not freed from the trammels of Rome, and then left to work out its own salvation. But  such a solution occurred to few at that time; the best and the worst of Henry's opponents  opposed him on the ground that he was divorcing the Church in England

from the Church universal.  Their objection was to what was done more than to the way in which it was done; and Sir Thomas  More would have fought the Reformation quite as strenuously had it been effected by  the Convocations of Canterbury and York. On the other side there was equally  little thought of a Reformation by clerical hands. Henry and Cromwell carried  on and developed the tradition of the Emperor Frederick the Second and Peter de Vinea,  of Philippe le Bel and Pierre Dubois, of Lewis

the Bavarian and Marsiglio of Padua  who maintained the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual power and asserted that the  clergy wielded no jurisdiction and only bore the keys of heaven in the capacity of turnkeys.  It was a question of the national State against the universal Church. The idea of a National  Church was a later development, the result and not the cause of the Reformation. Henry's  dictatorship was also temporary in character. His supremacy over the Church was royal, and

not  parliamentary. It was he, and not Parliament, who had been invested with a semi-ecclesiastical  nature. In one capacity he was head of the State, in another, head of the Church. Parliament and  Convocation were co-ordinate one with another, and subordinate both to the King.  The Tudors, and especially Elizabeth, vehemently denied to their Parliaments any  share in their ecclesiastical powers. Their supremacy over the Church was their own, and, as  a really effective control, it died with th

em. As the authority of the Crown declined, its  secular powers were seized by Parliament; its ecclesiastical powers fell into abeyance  between Parliament and Convocation. Neither has been able to vindicate an exclusive  claim to the inheritance; and the result of this dual claim to control has been a state  of helplessness, similar in some respects to that from which the Church was rescued by  the violent methods of Henry the Eighth. CHAPTER 13. THE CRISIS. Henry's title as Supreme Head of the

Church was incorporated in the royal  style by letters patent of 15th January, 1535, and that year was mainly employed in compelling its  recognition by all sorts and conditions of men. In April, Houghton, the Prior of  the Charterhouse, a monk of Sion, and the Vicar of Isleworth, were the first  victims offered to the Supreme Head. But the machinery supplied by Parliament was barely  sufficient to bring the penalties of the statute to bear on the two most illustrious  of Henry's opponents, Fis

her and More. Both had been attainted of misprision of treason  by Acts of Parliament in the previous autumn; but those penalties extended no further than to  lifelong imprisonment and forfeiture of goods. Their lives could only be exacted by proving  that they had maliciously attempted to deprive Henry of his title of Supreme Head; their  opportunities in the Tower for compassing that end were limited; and it is possible that  they would not have been further molested, but for the thoughtlessne

ss of Clement's  successor, Paul the Third Impotent to effect anything against the King, the  Pope did his best to sting Henry to fury by creating Fisher a cardinal on 20th May. He  afterwards explained that he meant no harm, but the harm was done, and it involved  Fisher's friend and ally, Sir Thomas More. Henry declared that he would send the  new cardinal's head to Rome for the hat; and he immediately despatched commissioners  to the Tower to inform Fisher and More that, unless they acknowled

ged the royal supremacy,  they would be put to death as traitors. Fisher apparently denied the King's supremacy,  More refused to answer; he was, however, entrapped during a conversation  with the Solicitor-General, Rich, into an admission that Englishmen could  not be bound to acknowledge a supremacy over the Church in which other countries did not  concur. In neither case was it clear that they came within the clutches of the law. Fisher,  indeed, had really been guilty of treason. More than o

nce he had urged Chapuys to press upon  Charles the invasion of England, a fact unknown, perhaps, to the English Government.  The evidence it had collected was, however, considered sufficient by  the juries which tried the prisoners; Fisher went to the scaffold on 22nd June, and More  on 6th July. Condemned justly or not by the law, both sought their death in a quarrel which  is as old as the hills and will last till the crack of doom. Where shall we place the  limits of conscience, and where th

ose of the national will? Is conscience a luxury  which only a king may enjoy in peace? Fisher and More refused to accommodate theirs  to Acts of Parliament, but neither believed conscience to be the supreme tribunal. More  admitted that in temporal matters his conscience was bound by the laws of England; in spiritual  matters the conscience of all was bound by the will of Christendom; and on that ground both  Fisher and he rejected the plea of conscience when urged by heretics condemned to the

flames. The  dispute, indeed, passes the wit of man to decide. If conscience must reign supreme, all government  is a pis aller, and in anarchy the true millennium must be found. If conscience is deposed, man  sinks to the level of the lower creation. Human society can only be based on compromise,  and compromise itself is a matter of conscience. Fisher and More protested by their death against  a principle which they had practised in life; both they and the heretics whom they persecuted  procla

imed, as Antigone had done thousands of years before, that they could not obey laws  which they could not believe God had made. It was the personal eminence of the victims  rather than the merits of their case that made Europe thrill with horror at the news  of their death; for thousands of others were sacrificing their lives in a similar cause  in most of the countries of Christendom. For the first and last time in English  history a cardinal's head had rolled from an English scaffold; and Paul

the Third made  an effort to bring into play the artillery of his temporal powers. As supreme lord  over all the princes of the earth, he arrogated to himself the right to  deprive Henry the Eighth of his kingdom; and he sent couriers to the various courts to seek  their co-operation in executing his judgment. But the weapons of Innocent the Third were rusty  with age. Francis denounced the Pope's claim as a most impudent attack on monarchical dignity;  and Charles was engaged in the conquest o

f Tunis. Thus Henry was able to take a high tone in  reply to the remonstrances addressed to him, and to proceed undisturbed with the work of  enforcing his royal supremacy. The autumn was occupied mainly by a visitation of the monasteries  and of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and  others were deposed from the seat of authority they had held for so many centuries, and  efforts were made to substitute studies like that of the civil law, more

in harmony  with the King's doctrine and with his views of royal authority. The more boldly Henry defied  the Fates, the more he was favoured by Fortune. "Besides his trust in his subjects," wrote Chapuys  in 1534, "he has great hope in the Queen's death;" and the year 1536 was but eight days old when the  unhappy Catherine was released from her trials, resolutely refusing to the last to acknowledge  in any way the invalidity of her marriage with Henry. She had derived some comfort from the  pap

al sentence in her favour, but that was not calculated to soften the harshness with which she  was treated. Her pious soul, too, was troubled with the thought that she had been the occasion,  innocent though she was, of the heresies that had arisen in England, and of the enormities  which had been practised against the Church. Her last days were cheered by a visit from  Chapuys, who went down to Kimbolton on New Year's Day and stayed until the 5th of  January, when the Queen seemed well on the r

oad to recovery. Three days later she passed  away, and on the 29th she was buried with the state of a princess dowager in the church  of the Benedictine abbey at Peterborough. Her physician told Chapuys that he suspected  poison, but the symptoms are now declared, on high medical authority, to have been those of  cancer of the heart. The suspicion was the natural result of the circumstance that her death relieved  the King of a pressing anxiety. "God be praised! " he exclaimed, "we are free fro

m all suspicion  of war;" and on the following day he proclaimed his joy by appearing at a ball, clad in  yellow from head to foot. Every inch a King, Henry the Eighth never attained to the stature  of a gentleman, but even Bishop Gardiner wrote that by Queen Catherine's death "God had given  sentence" in the divorce suit between her and the King. A week later, the Reformation Parliament  met for its seventh and last session. It sat from 4th February to 14th April, and in those ten weeks  succee

ded in passing no fewer than sixty-two Acts. Some were local and some were private, but the  residue contained not a few of public importance. The fact that the King obtained at  last his Statute of Uses may indicate that Henry's skill and success had so  impressed Parliament, that it was more willing to acquiesce in his demands than  it had been in its earlier sessions. But, if the drafts in the Record Office are to be taken  as indicating the proposals of Government, and the Acts themselves ar

e those proposals as modified in  one or other House, Parliament must have been able to enforce views of its own to a certain extent;  for those drafts differ materially from the Acts as finally passed. Not a few of the bills were  welcome, if unusual, concessions to the clergy. They were relieved from paying tenths in the  year they paid their first-fruits. The payment of tithes, possibly rendered doubtful in the  wreck of canon law, was enjoined by Act of Parliament. An attempt was made to dea

l with the  poor, and another, if not to check enclosures, at least to extract some profit for the King  from the process. It was made high treason to counterfeit the King's sign-manual, privy  signet, or privy seal; and Henry was empowered by Parliament, as he had before been by Convocation,  to appoint a commission to reform the canon law. But the chief acts of the session were for the  dissolution of the lesser monasteries and for the erection of a Court of Augmentations in  order to deal wit

h the revenues which were thus to accrue to the King. The way for this  great revolution had been carefully prepared during the previous autumn and winter. In  virtue of his new and effective supremacy, Henry had ordered a general visitation of the  monasteries throughout the greater part of the kingdom; and the reports of these visitors  were made the basis of parliamentary action. On the face of them they represent a condition of  human depravity which has rarely been equalled; and the extent

to which those reports are  worthy of credit will always remain a point of contention. The visitors themselves were men  of doubtful character; indeed, respectable men could hardly have been persuaded to do the  work. Their methods were certainly harsh; the object of their mission was to get up  a case for the Crown, and they probably used every means in their power to induce the  monks and the nuns to incriminate themselves. Perhaps, too, an entirely false impression  may be created by the fact

that in most cases only the guilty are mentioned; the innocent are  often passed over in silence, and the proportion between the two is not recorded. Some of the terms  employed in the reports are also open to dispute; it is possible that in many instances the stigma  of unchastity attached to a nun merely meant that she had been unchaste before entering  religion, and it is known that nunneries were considered the proper resort for ladies who  had not been careful enough of their honour. On th

e other hand, the lax state of monastic  morality does not depend only upon the visitors' reports; apart from satires like those  of Skelton, from ballads and from other mirrors of popular opinion or prejudice, the  correspondence of Henry the Eighth's reign is, from its commencement, full of references,  by bishops and other unimpeachable witnesses, to the necessity of drastic reform. In 1516, for  instance, Bishop West of Ely visited that house, and found such disorder that he declared  its co

ntinuance would have been impossible but for his visitation. In 1518 the  Italian Bishop of Worcester writes from Rome that he had often been struck by  the necessity of reforming the monasteries. In 1521 Henry the Eighth, then at the height  of his zeal for the Church, thanks the Bishop of Salisbury for dissolving the nunnery of  Bromehall because of the "enormities" practised there. Wolsey felt that the time for reform had  passed, and began the process of suppression, with a view to increasin

g the number of cathedrals and  devoting other proceeds to educational endowments. Friar Peto, afterwards a cardinal, who had  fled abroad to escape Henry's anger for his bold denunciation of the divorce, and who had no  possible motive for cloaking his conscientious opinion, admitted that there were grave abuses,  and approved of the dissolution of monasteries, if their endowments were used for proper ends.  There is no need to multiply instances, because a commission of cardinals, appointed by

Paul the  Third himself, reported in 1537 that scandals were frequent in religious houses. The reports of  the visitors, too, can hardly be entirely false, though they may not be entirely true. The charges  they make are not vague, but very precise. They specify names of the offenders, and  the nature of their offences; and an air of verisimilitude, if nothing more, is imparted to  the condemnations they pronounce against the many, by the commendations they bestow on the  few. Probably the stau

nchest champion of monasticism would acknowledge that in  the reign of Henry the Eighth there was at least a plausible case for mending  monastic morals. But that was not then the desire of the Government of Henry  the Eighth; and the case for mending their morals was tacitly assumed to be the  same as a case for ending the monasteries. It would be unjust to Henry to deny that he had  always shown himself careful of the appearance, at least, of morality in the Church; but it requires  a robust f

aith in the King's disinterestedness to believe that dissolution was not the real object  of the visitation, and that it was merely forced upon him by the reports of the visitors. The  moral question afforded a good excuse, but the monasteries fell, not so much because their morals  were lax, as because their position was weak. Moral laxity contributed no doubt to the general  result, but there were other causes at work. The monasteries themselves had long been  conscious that their possession o

f wealth was not, in the eyes of the middle-class laity,  justified by the use to which it was put; and, for some generations at least, they had  been seeking to make friends with Mammon by giving up part of their revenues, in the  form of pensions and corrodies to courtiers, in the hope of being allowed to retain the  remainder. It had also become the custom to entrust the stewardship of their possessions  to secular hands; and, possibly as a result, the monasteries were soon so deeply in debt 

to the neighbouring gentry that their lay creditors saw no hope of recovering their  claims except by extensive foreclosures. There had certainly been a good deal of  private spoliation before the King gave the practice a national character. The very  privileges of the monasteries were now turned to their ruin. Their immunity from episcopal  jurisdiction deprived them of episcopal aid; their exemption from all authority, save that  of the Pope, left them without support when the papal jurisdict

ion was abolished. Monastic  orders knew no distinction of nationality. The national character claimed for the mediæval Church  in England could scarcely cover the monasteries, and no place was found for them in the Church  when it was given a really national garb. Their dissolution is probably to be  connected with Cromwell's boast that he would make his king the richest prince  in Christendom. That was not its effect, because Henry was compelled to distribute the  greater part of the spoils am

ong his nobles and gentry. One rash reformer suggested that monastic  lands should be devoted to educational purposes; had that plan been followed, education in  England would have been more magnificently endowed than in any other country of the world,  and England might have become a democracy in the seventeenth century. From this point  of view Henry spoilt one of the greatest opportunities in English history; from another,  he saved England from a most serious danger. Had the Crown retained t

he wealth of the  monasteries, the Stuarts might have made themselves independent of Parliament. But this  service to liberty was not voluntary on Henry's part. The dissolution of the monasteries  was in effect, and probably in intention, a gigantic bribe to the laity to induce  them to acquiesce in the revolution effected by Henry the Eighth. When he was gone, his  successors might desire, or fail to prevent, a reaction; something more permanent than  Henry's iron hand was required to support t

he fabric he had raised. That support  was sought in the wealth of the Church. The prospect had, from the very opening of the  Reformation Parliament, been dangled before the eyes of the new nobles, the members of  Parliament, the justices of the peace, the rich merchants who thirsted for  lands wherewith to make themselves gentlemen. Chapuys again and again mentions  a scheme for distributing the lands of the Church among the laity as a project for the  ensuing session; but their time was not y

et; not until their work was done were the labourers  to reap their reward. The dissolution of the monasteries harmonised well with the secular  principles of these predominant classes. The monastic ideal of going out of the world to  seek something, which cannot be valued in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, is abhorrent  to a busy, industrial age; and every principle is hated most at the time when it most is needed.  Intimately associated as they were in their lives, Catherine of Aragon an

d Anne Boleyn were not long  divided by death; and, piteous as is the story of the last years of Catherine, it pales before the  hideous tragedy of the ruin of Anne Boleyn. "If I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will  become of her," wrote Anne of the Princess Mary. On 29th January, 1536, the day of her rival's  funeral, Anne Boleyn was prematurely delivered of a dead child, and the result was fatal to Anne  herself. This was not her first miscarriage, and Henry's old conscience began

to  work again. In Catherine's case the path of his conscience was that of a slow and  laborious pioneer; now it moved easily on its royal road to divorce. On 29th January,  Chapuys, ignorant of Anne's miscarriage, was retailing to his master a court  rumour that Henry intended to marry again. The King was reported to have said that he had  been seduced by witchcraft when he married his second queen, and that the marriage was null for  this reason, and because God would not permit them to have m

ale issue. There was no peace for her  who supplanted her mistress. Within six months of her marriage Henry's roving fancy had given  her cause for jealousy, and, when she complained, he is said to have brutally told her she must  put up with it as her betters had done before. These disagreements, however, were described  by Chapuys as mere lovers' quarrels, and they were generally followed by reconciliations, after  which Anne's influence seemed as secure as ever. But by January, 1536, the impe

rial ambassador  and others were counting on a fresh divorce. The rumour grew as spring advanced, when suddenly,  on 2nd May, Anne was arrested and sent to the Tower. She was accused of incest with her brother,  Lord Rochford, and of less criminal intercourse with Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris, William  Brereton, and Mark Smeaton. All were condemned by juries to death for high treason on 12th  May. Three days later Anne herself was put on her trial by a panel of twenty-six peers, over  which

her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, presided. They returned a unanimous verdict of guilty,  and, on the 19th, the Queen's head was struck off with the sword of an executioner brought  for the purpose from St. Omer. Two days before Anne's death her marriage with Henry had been  declared invalid by a court of ecclesiastical lawyers with Cranmer at its head. The  grounds of the sentence are not stated, but there may have been two—the alleged  precontract with the Earl of Northumberland, which the Earl

denied on oath and on the  sacrament, and the previous affinity between Anne and Henry arising from the King's relations with  Mary Boleyn. The latter seems the more probable. Henry had obtained of Clement the Seventh  a dispensation from this disability; but the Pope's power to dispense had since  been repudiated, while the canonical objection remained and was given statutory authority  in this very year. The effects of this piece of wanton injustice were among the troubles  which Henry bequeat

hed to Queen Elizabeth; the sole advantage to Henry was that  his infidelities to Anne ceased to be breaches of the seventh commandment. The  justice of her sentence to death is also open to doubt. Anne herself went to the  block boldly proclaiming her innocence. Death she regarded as a relief  from an intolerable situation, and she "laughed heartily," writes the  Lieutenant of the Tower as she put her hands round her "little neck," and thought  how easy the executioner's task would be. She comp

lained when the day of her release from  this world was deferred, and regretted that so many innocent persons should suffer through her.  Of her accomplices, none confessed but Smeaton, though Henry is said, before Anne's arrest, to  have offered Norris a pardon if he would admit his crime. On the other hand, her conduct  must have made the charges plausible. Even in those days, when justice to individuals  was regarded as dust if weighed in the balance against the real or supposed interests of 

the State, it is not credible that the juries should have found her accomplices guilty,  that twenty-six peers, including her uncle, should have condemned Anne herself, without  some colourable justification. If the charges were merely invented to ruin the Queen,  one culprit besides herself would have been enough. To assume that Henry sent four needless  victims to the block is to accuse him of a lust for superfluous butchery, of which even he, in  his most bloodthirsty moments, was not capabl

e. On the day that his second queen was beheaded,  Henry obtained from Cranmer a special licence to marry a third. He was betrothed on  the morrow and privately married "in the Queen's closet at York Place" on the 30th  of May. The lady of his choice was Jane, daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall in  Wiltshire. She was descended on her mother's side from Edward the Third , and Cranmer  had to dispense with a canonical bar to the marriage arising from her consanguinity to  the King in the th

ird and fourth degrees. She had been lady-in-waiting to the two previous  queens, and her brother, Sir Edward Seymour, the future Protector, had for years  been steadily rising in Henry's favour. In October, 1535, the King had paid a visit to  Wolf Hall, and from that time his attentions to Jane became marked. She seems to have received  them with real reluctance; she refused a purse of gold and returned the King's letters unopened.  She even obtained a promise from Henry that he would not speak

with her except in the presence  of others, and the King ejected Cromwell from his rooms in the Palace in order to bestow them  on Sir Edward Seymour, and thus to provide a place where he and Jane could converse without  scandal. All this modesty has, of course, been attributed to prudential and ambitious motives,  which were as wise as they were successful. But Jane seems to have had no enemies, except  Alexander Aless, who denounced her to Luther as an enemy to the Gospel, probably because  s

he extinguished the shining light of Anne Boleyn. Cardinal Pole described her as "full  of goodness," and she certainly did her best to reconcile Henry with his daughter the Princess  Mary, whose treatment began to improve from the fall of Anne Boleyn. "She is," writes Chapuys, "of  middle stature, and no great beauty; so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise.  " But all agreed in praising her intelligence. She had neither Catherine's force of character  nor the temper of Anne

Boleyn; she was a woman of gentle spirit, striving always to mitigate  the rigour of others; her brief married life was probably happier than that of any other of Henry's  Queens; and her importance is mainly due to the fact that she bore to Henry his only legitimate  son. The disgrace of Anne Boleyn necessitated the summons of a fresh Parliament to put the  succession to the crown on yet another basis. The Long Parliament had been dissolved on 14th April;  another was called to meet on the 8th

of June. The eighteen acts passed during its six weeks'  session illustrate the parallel development of the Reformation and of the royal autocracy.  The Act of Succession made Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, a bastard, without declaring  Catherine's daughter, Mary, legitimate, and settled the crown on Henry's prospective  issue by Jane. A unique clause empowered the King to dispose of the crown at will, should he  have no issue by his present Queen. Probably he intended it, in that case, for the Duk

e of  Richmond; but the Duke's days were numbered, and four days after the dissolution  of Parliament he breathed his last. The royal prerogative was extended by a statute  enabling a king, when he reached the age of twenty-four, to repeal by proclamation any act  passed during his minority; and the royal caste was further exalted by a statute making it high  treason for any one to marry a king's daughter, legitimate or not, his sister, his niece, or  his aunt on the father's side, without royal

licence. The reform of clerical abuses was  advanced by an act to prevent non-residence, and by another to obviate the delay in  instituting to benefices practised by bishops with a view to keeping the tithes  of the vacant benefice in their own hands. The breach with Rome was widened still further  by a statute, declaring all who extolled the Pope's authority to be guilty of præmunire,  imposing an oath of renunciation on all lay and clerical officers, and making the refusal  of that oath high

treason. Thus the hopes of a reaction built on the fall of those "apostles  of the new sect," Anne Boleyn and her relatives, were promptly and roughly destroyed. Henry's  position had been immensely strengthened alike by the death of Catherine of Aragon and by the  fall of Anne Boleyn; and on both occasions he had expressed his appreciation of the fact  in the most indecent and heartless manner. He was now free to marry whom he liked, and no  objection based on canon or on any other law could b

e raised to the legitimacy of his future  issue; whether the Pope could dispense or not, it made no difference to Edward the Sixth's  claim to the throne. The fall of Anne Boleyn, in spite of some few rumours that she might  have been condemned on insufficient evidence, was generally popular; for her arrogance  and that of her family made them hated, and they were regarded as the cause of the  King's persecution of Catherine, of Mary, and of those who maintained their cause.  Abroad the effect w

as still more striking. The moment Henry heard of Catherine's death,  he added a postscript to Cromwell's despatch to the English ambassadors in France, bidding  them to take a higher tone with Francis, for all cause of difference had been removed  between him and Charles the Fifth The Emperor secretly believed that his aunt had been  poisoned, but that private grief was not to affect his public policy; and Charles,  Francis, and even the Pope, became more or less eager competitors for Henry's f

avour. The  bull of deprivation, which had been drawn up and signed, became a dead letter, and every one was  anxious to disavow his share in its promotion. Charles obtained the suspension of its  publication, made a merit of that service to Henry, and tried to represent that it was  Francis who, with his eyes on the English crown, had extorted the bull from the Pope.  Paul the Third himself used words to the English envoy at Rome, which might  be interpreted as an apology for having made Fisher

a cardinal and having  denounced his and More's execution. Henry had been driven by fear of Charles in  the previous year to make further advances than he relished towards union with the  German princes; but the Lutherans could not be persuaded to adopt Henry's views of  the mass and of his marriage with Catherine; and now he was glad to substitute an  understanding with the Emperor for intrigues with the Emperor's subjects. Cromwell  and the council were, indeed, a little too eager to welcome

Chapuys' professions of friendship  and to entertain his demands for help against Francis. Henry allowed them to go on for a time;  but Cromwell was never in Wolsey's position, and the King was not inclined to repeat  his own and the Cardinal's errors of 1521. He had suffered enough from the prostration  of France and the predominance of Charles; and he was anxious now that neither should  be supreme. So, when the imperial ambassador came expecting Henry's assent, he, Cromwell and  the rest of t

he council were amazed to hear the King break out into an uncompromising defence of  the French King's conduct in invading Savoy and Piedmont. That invasion was the third stroke  of good fortune which befel Henry in 1536. As Henry and Ferdinand had, in 1512, diverted  their arms from the Moors in order to make war on the Most Christian King, so, in 1536,  the Most Christian King and the sovereign, who was at once King Catholic and the temporal  head of Christendom, instead of turning their arms

against the monarch who had outraged and  defied the Church, turned them against one another. Francis had never lost sight of Milan;  he had now recovered from the effects of Pavia; and in the spring of 1536 he overran Savoy  and Piedmont. In April the Emperor once more visited Rome, and on the 17th he delivered  a famous oration in the papal Consistory. In that speech he denounced neither  Luther nor Henry the Eighth; he reserved his invectives for Francis the First  Unconsciously he demonstrat

ed once and for all that unity of faith was impotent against  diversity of national interests, and that, whatever deference princes might profess  to the counsels of the Vicar of Christ, the counsels they would follow would be those  of secular impulse. Henry was thus left to deal with the great domestic crisis of his reign  without intervention from abroad. The dissolution of the monasteries inevitably inflicted  considerable hardship on a numerous body of men. It had been arranged that the inm

ates of the  dissolved religious houses should either be pensioned or transferred to other monasteries;  but, although the pensions were adequate and sometimes even generous in scale, and  although the commissioners themselves showed a desire to prevent unnecessary  trouble by obtaining licences for many houses to continue for a time, the monks found  some difficulty in obtaining their pensions, and Chapuys draws a moving picture of their  sufferings as they wandered about the country, seeking e

mployment in a market that  was already overstocked with labour, and endeavouring to earn a livelihood by  means to which they had never been accustomed. They met with no little sympathy from the commons,  who were oppressed with a like scarcity of work, and who had looked to the monasteries for such  relief as charity could afford. Nowhere were these feelings so strong as in the north  of England, and there the commissioners for dissolving the monasteries were often met  with open resistance. R

eligious discontent was one of the motives for revolt, but probably the  rebels were drawn mainly from evicted tenants, deprived of their holdings by enclosures or  by the conversion of land from tillage to pasture, men who had nothing to lose and  everything to gain by a general turmoil. In these men the wandering monks found  ready listeners to their complaints, and there were others, besides the monks,  who eagerly turned to account the prevailing dissatisfaction. The northern lords, Darcy  a

nd Hussey, had for years been representing to Chapuys the certainty of success if the Emperor  invaded England, and promising to do their part when he came. Darcy had, at Christmas 1534, sent  the imperial ambassador a sword as an intimation that the time had come for an appeal to its  arbitrament; and he was seeking Henry's licence to return to his house in Yorkshire in order to  raise "the crucifix" as the standard of revolt. The King, however, was doubtful  of Darcy's loyalty, and kept him in

London till early in 1536. It would  have been well had he kept him longer. Towards the end of the summer rumours were  spread among the commons of the North that heavy taxes would be levied on every burial,  wedding and christening, that all cattle would be marked and pay a fine to the King, and  that all unmarked beasts would be forfeit; churches within five miles of each other  were to be taken down as superfluous, jewels and church plate confiscated; taxes  were to be paid for eating white

bread, goose, or capon; there was to be a rigid  inquisition into every man's property; and a score of other absurdities gained currency,  obviously invented by malicious and lying tongues. The outbreak began at Caistor, in  Lincolnshire, on the 3rd of October, with resistance, not to the commissioners  for dissolving the monasteries, but to those appointed to collect the subsidy granted by  Parliament. The rebels entered Lincoln on the 6th; they could, they said, pay no more money;  they demand

ed the repeal of religious changes, the restoration of the monasteries, the  banishment of heretics like Cranmer and Latimer, and the removal of low-born advisers such  as Cromwell and Rich from the council. The mustering of an army under Suffolk  and the denial by heralds and others that the King had any such intentions as  were imputed to him, induced the commons to go home; the reserves which Henry was  collecting at Ampthill were disbanded; and the commotion was over in less than a  fortnigh

t. The Lincolnshire rebels, however, had not dispersed when news arrived of a much  more serious rising which affected nearly the whole of Yorkshire. It was here that Darcy and  his friends were most powerful; but, though there is little doubt that they were the movers,  the ostensible leader was Robert Aske, a lawyer. Even here the rebellion was little more than  a magnified riot, which a few regiments of soldiers could soon have suppressed. The rebels  professed complete loyalty to Henry's per

son; they suggested no rival candidate for the  throne; they merely demanded a change of policy, which they could not enforce without a change of  government. They had no means of effecting that change without deposing Henry, which they never  proposed to do, and which, had they done it, could only have resulted in anarchy. The rebellion was  formidable mainly because Henry had no standing army; he had to rely almost entirely on the  goodwill or at least acquiescence of his people. Outside Yorks

hire the gentry were willing enough;  possibly they had their eyes on monastic rewards; and they sent to Cambridge double  or treble the forces Henry demanded, which they could hardly have done  had their tenants shown any great sympathy with the rebellion. But transport in  those days was more difficult even than now; and before the musters could reach the Trent,  Darcy, after a show of reluctance, yielded Pomfret Castle to the rebels and swore to maintain their  cause. Henry was forced, much a

gainst his will, to temporise. To pardon or parley with rebels he  thought would distain his honour. If Norfolk was driven to offer a pardon, he must on no  account involve the King in his promise. Norfolk apparently had no option. An armistice was  accordingly arranged on the 27th of October, and a deputation came up to lay the rebels' grievances  before the King. It was received graciously, and Henry's reply was a masterly piece of statecraft.  He drew it up "with his own hand, and made no cre

ature privy thereto until it was finished".  Their complaints about the Faith were, he said, "so general that hard they be to be answered," but  he intended always to live and to die in the faith of Christ. They must specify what they meant  by the liberties of the Church, whether they were lawful or unlawful liberties; but he had done  nothing inconsistent with the laws of God and man. With regard to the Commonwealth, what King had  kept his subjects so long in wealth and peace, ministering ind

ifferent justice, and  defending them from outward enemies? There were more low-born councillors when he  came to the throne than now; then there were "but two worth calling noble. Others, as the Lords  Marny and Darcy, were scant well-born gentlemen, and yet of no great lands till they were  promoted by us. The rest were lawyers and priests. .. .How came you to think that there were  more noble men in our Privy Council then than now? " It did not become them to dictate to their  sovereign whom

he should call to his Council; yet, if they could prove, as they alleged,  that certain of the Council were subverters of God's law and the laws of the realm,  he would proceed against them. Then, after denouncing their rebellion and  referring to their request for pardon, he says: "To show our pity, we are content, if  we find you penitent, to grant you all letters of pardon on your delivering to us ten such  ringleaders of this rebellion as we shall assign to you. Now note the benignity of you

r Prince,  and how easily bloodshed may be eschewed. Thus I, as your head, pray for you, my members,  that God may enlighten you for your benefit. " A conference was held at Doncaster in December,  and towards the end of the year Aske came at Henry's invitation to discuss the complaints with  him. No one could be more gracious than the King, when he chose; no one could mask his resentment  more completely, when he had an object to gain. It was important to win over Aske, and convince  him that H

enry had the interests of the rebels at heart. So on Aske were lavished all the royal  arts. They were amply rewarded. In January, 1537, the rebel leader went down to Yorkshire  fully convinced of the King's goodwill, and anxious only that the commons  should observe his conditions. But there were wilder spirits at work  over which he had little control. They declared that they were betrayed. Plots  were formed to seize Hull and Scarborough; both were discovered. Aske, Constable, and  other lead

ers of the original Pilgrimage of Grace exerted themselves to stay this  outbreak of their more violent followers; and between moderates and extremists the  whole movement quickly collapsed. The second revolt gave Henry an excuse for  recalling his pardon, and for exacting revenge from all who had been implicated in  either movement. Darcy deserved little pity; the earliest in his treason, he continued the  game to the end; but Aske was an honest man, and his execution, condemned though he was 

by a jury, was a violent act of injustice. Norfolk was sent to the North on a Bloody Assize,  and if neither he nor the King was a Jeffreys, the rebellion was stamped out with a good deal of  superfluous cruelty. Henry was resolved to do the work once and for all, and he based his system on  terror. His measures for the future government of the North, now threatened by James the Fifth,  were, however, wise on the whole. He would put no more nobles in places of trust; the office of  Warden of the

Marches he took into his own hands, appointing three deputies of somewhat humble  rank for the east, middle and west marches. A strong Council of the North was appointed to  sit at York, under the presidency of Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, and with powers almost as  extensive as those of the Privy Council at London; and henceforth Henry had little trouble  from disaffection in England. With one aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace he  had yet to deal. The opportunity had been too good for Paul t

he Third to neglect; and  early in 1537 he had sent a legate a latere to Flanders to do what he could to abet the  rebellion. His choice fell on Reginald Pole, the son of the Countess of Salisbury and  grandson of George, Duke of Clarence. Pole had been one of Henry's great favourites;  the King had paid for his education, given him, while yet a layman, rich church preferments,  and contributed the equivalent of about twelve hundred pounds a year to enable him to  complete his studies in Italy.

In 1530 Pole was employed to obtain opinions at Paris favourable to  Henry's divorce, and was offered the Archbishopric of York. He refused from conscientious scruples,  sought in vain to turn the King from his evil ways, and, in 1532, left England; they parted  friends, and Henry continued Pole's pensions. While Pole was regarding with increasing  disgust the King's actions, Henry still hoped that Pole was on his side, and, in 1536,  in answer to Henry's request for his views, Pole sent his fam

ous treatise De Unitate  Ecclesiæ. His heart was better than his head; he thought Henry had been treated too gently, and  that the fulmination of a bull of excommunication earlier in his course would have stopped his  headlong career. To repair the Pope's omissions, Pole now proceeded to administer the  necessary castigation; "flattery," he said, "had been the cause of all the evil".  Even his friend, Cardinal Contarini, thought the book too bitter, and among his  family in England it produced c

onsternation. Some of them were hand in glove with Chapuys,  who had suggested Pole to Charles as a candidate for the throne; and his book might well have  broken the thin ice on which they stood. Henry, however, suppressed his anger and invited  Pole to England; he, perhaps wisely, refused, but immediately afterwards he accepted the Pope's  call to Rome, where he was made cardinal, and sent to Flanders as legate to foment the northern  rebellion. He came too late to do anything except exhibit h

is own and the papal impotence. The  rebellion was crushed before his commission was signed. As Pole journeyed through France, Henry  sent to demand his extradition as a traitor. With that request Francis could hardly comply,  but he ordered the legate to quit his dominions. Pole sought refuge in Flanders, but was  stopped on the frontier. Charles could no more than Francis afford to offend the  English King, and the cardinal-legate was informed that he might visit the Bishop of  Liège, but only

if he went in disguise. Never, wrote Pole to the Regent, had a papal legate been  so treated before. Truly Henry had fulfilled his boast that he would show the princes of  Europe how small was the power of a Pope. He had obliterated every vestige of papal  authority in England and defied the Pope to do his worst; and now, when the Pope attempted  to do it, his legate was chased out of the dominions of the faithful sons of the Church at  the demand of the excommunicate King. Henry had come trium

phant out of perils which every one  else believed would destroy him. He had carried England through the greatest revolution in  her history. He had crushed the only revolt which that revolution evoked at home; and  abroad the greatest princes of Europe had shown that they valued as nothing the goodwill  of the Pope against that of Henry the Eighth. The culminating point in his good fortune was  reached in the following autumn. On the 12th of October, 1537, Queen Jane gave birth to a  son. Henry

had determined that, had he a son by Anne Boleyn, the child should be named Henry  after himself, or Edward after his grandfather, Edward the Fourth. Queen Jane's son was  born on the eve of the feast of St. Edward, and that fact decided the choice of  his name. Twelve days later the mother, who had never been crowned, passed away. She,  alone of Henry's wives, was buried with royal pomp in St. George's Chapel at Windsor; and to her  alone the King paid the compliment of mourning. His grief was

sincere, and for the unusual space  of more than two years he remained without a wife. But Queen Jane's death was not to be compared in  importance with the birth of Edward the Sixth The legitimate male heir, the object of so many  desires and the cause of so many tragedies, had come at last to fill to the brim the cup of  Henry's triumph. The greatest storm and stress of his reign was passed. There were crises to  come, which might have been deemed serious in a less troubled reign, and they st

ill  needed all Henry's wary cunning to meet; Francis and Charles were even now preparing to  end a struggle from which only Henry drew profit; and Paul was hoping to join  them in war upon England. Yet Henry had weathered the worst of the gale,  and he now felt free to devote his energies to the extension abroad of the authority  which he had established so firmly at home. CHAPTER 14. REX ET IMPERATOR. Notwithstanding  the absence of "Empire" and "Emperor" from the various titles which Henry th

e Eighth possessed  or assumed, he has more than one claim to be reputed the father of modern imperialism. It  is not till a year after his death that we have any documentary evidence of an intention on the  part of the English Government to unite England and Scotland into one Empire, and to proclaim  their sovereign the Emperor of Great Britain. But a marriage between Edward the Sixth and Mary,  Queen of Scots, by which it was sought to effect that union, had been the main object of Henry's  ef

forts during the closing years of his reign, and the imperial idea was a dominant note in  Henry's mind. No king was more fond of protesting that he wore an imperial crown and ruled an  imperial realm. When, in 1536, Convocation declared England to be "an imperial See of  itself," it only clothed in decent and formal language Henry's own boast that he was not merely  King, but Pope and Emperor, in his own domains. The rest of Western Europe was  under the temporal sway of Cæsar, as it was under

the spiritual sway of the Pope;  but neither to one nor to the other did Henry owe any allegiance. For the word "imperial" itself he  had shown a marked predilection from his earliest days. Henry Imperial was the name of the ship  in which his admiral hoisted his flag in 1513, and "Imperial" was the name given to one of  his favourite games. But, as his reign wore on, the word was translated into action,  and received a more definite meaning. To mark his claim to supreme dignity,  he assumed the

style of "His Majesty" instead of that of "His Grace," which he had  hitherto shared with mere dukes and archbishops; and possibly "His Majesty" banished "His  Grace" from Henry's mind no less than it did from his title. The story of his life is  one of consistent, and more or less orderly, evolution. For many years he had been kept in  leading-strings by Wolsey's and other clerical influences. The first step in his self-assertion  was to emancipate himself from this control, and to vindicate h

is authority  within the precincts of his Court. His next was to establish his personal supremacy  over Church and State in England; this was the work of the Reformation Parliament between 1529  and 1536. The final stage in the evolution was to make his rule more effective in the outlying  parts of England, on the borders of Scotland, in Wales and its Marches, and then to extend it over  the rest of the British Isles. The initial steps in the process of expanding the sphere of royal  authority h

ad already been taken. The condition of Wales exercised the mind of King and Parliament,  even in the throes of the struggle with Rome. The "manifold robberies, murders, thefts,  trespasses, riots, routs, embraceries, maintenances, oppressions, ruptures of  the peace, and many other malefacts, which be there daily practised, perpetrated,  committed and done," obviously demanded prompt and swift redress, unless the redundant eloquence  of parliamentary statutes protested too much; and, in 1534, s

everal acts were passed  restraining local jurisdictions, and extending the authority of the  President and Council of the Marches. Chapuys declared that the effect of these  acts was to rob the Welsh of their freedom, and he thought that the probable discontent  might be turned to account by stirring an insurrection in favour of Catherine of  Aragon and of the Catholic faith. If, however, there was discontent, it did  not make itself effectively felt, and, in 1536, Henry proceeded to complete 

the union of England and Wales. First, he adapted to Wales the institution of justices  of the peace, which had proved the most efficient instrument for the maintenance of his authority  in England. A more important statute followed. Recalling the facts that "the rights, usages, laws  and customs" in Wales "be far discrepant from the laws and customs of this realm," that its people  "do daily use a speech nothing like, nor consonant to, the natural mother-tongue used within this  realm," and tha

t "some rude and ignorant people have made distinction and diversity between the  King's subjects of this realm" and those of Wales, "His Highness, of a singular zeal, love and  favour" which he bore to the Welsh, minded to reduce them "to the perfect order, notice and  knowledge of his laws of this realm, and utterly to extirp, all and singular, the sinister  usages and customs differing from the same". The Principality was divided into  shires, and the shires into hundreds; justice in every co

urt, from the highest to  the lowest, was to be administered in English, and in no other tongue; and no one who spoke  Welsh was to "have or enjoy any manner of Office or Fees" whatsoever. On the other  hand, a royal commission was appointed to inquire into Welsh laws, and such as the King  thought necessary might still be observed; while the Welsh shires and boroughs were to  send members to the English Parliament. This statute was, to all effects and purposes,  the first Act of Union in Englis

h history. Six years later a further act reorganised and  developed the jurisdiction of the Council of Wales and the Marches. Its functions were to be  similar to those of the Privy Council in London, of which the Council of Wales, like that of  the already established Council of the North, was an offshoot. Its object was to  maintain peace with a firm hand in a specially disorderly district; and the  powers, with which it was furnished, often conflicted with the common law of England,  and rend

ered the Council's jurisdiction, like that of other Tudor courts,  a grievance to Stuart Parliaments. But Ireland demanded even more than Wales the  application of Henry's doctrines of union and empire; for if Wales was thought by Chapuys to  be receptive soil for the seeds of rebellion, sedition across St. George's Channel was  ripe unto the harvest. Irish affairs, among other domestic problems, had been sacrificed  to Wolsey's passion for playing a part in Europe, and on the eve of his fall En

glish rule in  Ireland was reported to be weaker than it had been since the Conquest. The outbreak  of war with Charles the Fifth , in 1528, was followed by the first appearance of Spanish  emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs, and from Spanish intrigue in Ireland Tudor  monarchs were never again to be free. In the autumn of 1534 the whole of Ireland  outside the pale blazed up in revolt. Sir William Skeffington succeeded in crushing the rebellion;  but Skeffington died in the following year

, and his successor, Lord Leonard Grey, failed  to overcome the difficulties caused by Irish disaffection and by jealousies in his council.  His sister was wife of Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare, and the revolt of the Geraldines  brought Grey himself under suspicion. He was accused by his council of treason; he returned to  England in 1540, declaring the country at peace. But, before he had audience with  Henry, a fresh insurrection broke out, and Grey was sent to the Tower; thence,  having ple

aded guilty to charges of treason, he trod the usual path to the block.  Henry now adopted fresh methods; he determined to treat Ireland in much the same  way as Wales. A commission, appointed in 1537, had made a thorough survey of the land, and  supplied him with the outlines of his policy. As in Wales, the English system of land tenure, of  justice and the English language were to supersede indigenous growths; the King's supremacy in  temporal and ecclesiastical affairs was to be enforced, and

the whole of the land was to be  gradually won by a judicious admixture of force and conciliation. The new deputy, Sir Anthony  St. Leger, was an able man, who had presided over the commission of 1537. He landed at Dublin  in 1541, and his work was thoroughly done. Henry, no longer so lavish with his money as in  Wolsey's days, did not stint for this purpose. The Irish Parliament passed an act that Henry  should be henceforth styled King, instead of Lord, of Ireland; and many of the chiefs were

induced to  relinquish their tribal independence in return for glittering coronets. By 1542 Ireland had  not merely peace within her own borders, but was able to send two thousand kernes to  assist the English on the borders of Scotland; and English rule in Ireland was more widely  and more firmly established than it had ever been before. Besides Ireland and Wales,  there were other spheres in which Henry sought to consolidate and extend  the Tudor methods of government. The erection, in 1542,

of the Courts of Wards  and Liveries, of First-fruits and Tenths, and the development of the jurisdiction of  the Star Chamber and of the Court of Requests, were all designed to further two  objects dear to Henry's heart, the efficiency of his administration and  the exaltation of his prerogative. It was thoroughly in keeping with his policy that the  parliamentary system expanded concurrently with the sphere of the King's activity. Berwick had  first been represented in the Parliament of 1529,

and a step, which would have led to momentous  consequences, had the idea, on which it was based, been carried out, was taken in 1536, when  two members were summoned from Calais. There was now only one district under English  rule which was not represented in Parliament, and that was the county of Durham, known as the  bishopric, which still remained detached from the national system. It was left for Oliver Cromwell  to complete England's parliamentary representation by summoning members to sit

for that palatine  county. This was not the only respect in which the Commonwealth followed in the footsteps of  Henry the Eighth, for the Parliament of 1542, in which members from Wales and from  Calais are first recorded as sitting, passed an "Act for the Navy," which provided that  goods could only be imported in English ships. It was, however, in his dealings with Scotland  that Henry's schemes for the expansion of England became most marked; but, before he  could develop his plans in that

direction, he had to ward off a recrudescence of the  danger from a coalition of Catholic Europe. In spite of Henry's efforts to fan the flames of  strife between the Emperor and the King of France, the war, which had prevented either monarch  from countenancing the mission of Cardinal Pole or from profiting by the Pilgrimage of Grace,  was gradually dying down in the autumn of 1537; and, in order to check the growing and  dangerous intimacy between the two rivals, Henry was secretly hinting to

both that  the death of his Queen had left him free to contract a marriage which might bind him for ever  to one or the other. To Francis he sent a request for the hand of Mary of Guise, who had already  been promised to James the Fifth of Scotland. He refused to believe that the Scots negotiations  had proceeded so far that they could not be set aside for so great a king as himself, and he  succeeded in convincing the lady's relatives that the position of a Queen of England provided  greater at

tractions than any James could hold out. Francis, however, took matters into his own hands,  and compelled the Guises to fulfil their compact with the Scottish King. Nothing daunted, Henry  asked for a list of other French ladies eligible for the matrimonial prize. He even suggested  that the handsomest of them might be sent, in the train of Margaret of Navarre, to  Calais, where he could inspect them in person. "I trust to no one," he told Castillon, the French  ambassador, "but myself. The thi

ng touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time  before deciding. " This idea of "trotting out the young ladies like hackneys" was not much  relished at the French Court; and Castillon, to shame Henry out of the indelicacy of his  proposal, made an ironical suggestion for testing the ladies' charms, the grossness of which  brought the only recorded blush to Henry's cheeks. No more was said of the beauty-show; and  Henry declared that he did not intend to marry in France or in

Spain at all, unless  his marriage brought him a closer alliance with Francis or Charles than the rivals  had formed with each other. While these negotiations for obtaining the hand of a French  princess were in progress, Henry set on foot a similar quest in the Netherlands. Before  the end of 1537 he had instructed Hutton, his agent, to report on the ladies of the  Regent Mary's Court; and Hutton replied that Christina of Milan was said to be "a  goodly personage and of excellent beauty". She w

as daughter of the deposed King of Denmark  and of his wife, Isabella, sister of Charles the Fifth ; at the age of thirteen she had been  married to the Duke of Milan, but she was now a virgin widow of sixteen, "very tall and competent  of beauty, of favour excellent and very gentle in countenance". On 10th March, 1538, Holbein arrived  at Brussels for the purpose of painting the lady's portrait, which he finished in a three hours'  sitting. Christina's fascinations do not seem to have made much

impression on Henry; indeed,  his taste in feminine beauty cannot be commended. There is no good authority for the alleged  reply of the young duchess herself, that, if she had two heads, she would willingly place  one of them at His Majesty's disposal. Henry had, as yet, beheaded only one of his wives, and even  if the precedent had been more firmly established, Christina was too wary and too polite to refer  to it in such uncourtly terms. She knew that the disposal of her hand did not rest wi

th  herself, and though the Emperor sent powers for the conclusion of the match, neither he  nor Henry had any desire to see it concluded. The cementing of his friendship with Francis  freed Charles from the need of Henry's goodwill, and impelled the English King to seek  elsewhere for means to counter-balance the hostile alliance. The Emperor and the French  King had not been deluded by English intrigues, nor prevented from coming together by Henry's  desire to keep them apart. Charles, Francis

, and Paul the Third met at Nice in June, 1538,  and there the Pope negotiated a ten years' truce. Henceforth they were to consider their  interests identical, and their ambassadors in England compared notes in order to defeat  more effectively Henry's skilful diplomacy. The moment seemed ripe for the execution of  the long-cherished project for a descent upon England. Its King had just added to his  long list of offences against the Church by despoiling the shrine of St. Thomas at  Canterbury a

nd burning the bones of the saint. The saint was even said to have been put  on his trial in mockery, declared contumacious, and condemned as a traitor. If the canonised  bones of martyrs could be treated thus, who would, for the future, pay respect  to the Church or tribute at its shrines? At Rome a party, of which Pole was the most  zealous, proclaimed that the real Turk was Henry, and that all Christian princes should unite  to sweep him from the face of God's earth, which his presence had to

o long defiled.  Considering the effect of Christian leagues against the Ottoman, the English Turk was  probably not dismayed. But Paul the Third and Pole were determined to do their worst. The  Pope resolved to publish the bull of deprivation, which had been drawn up in August, 1535, though  its execution had hitherto been suspended owing to papal hopes of Henry's amendment and  to the request of various princes. Now the bull was to be published in France,  in Flanders, in Scotland and in Irela

nd. Beton was made a cardinal and sent home to exhort  James the Fifth to invade his uncle's kingdom, while Pole again set out on his travels to  promote the conquest of his native land. It was on Pole's unfortunate relatives that the effects  of the threatened bull were to fall. Besides the Cardinal's treason, there was another motive for  proscribing his family. He and his brothers were grandchildren of George, Duke of Clarence; years  before, Chapuys had urged Charles the Fifth to put forward

Pole as a candidate for the throne;  and Henry was as convinced as his father had been that the real way to render his Government secure  was to put away all the possible alternatives. Now that he was threatened with deprivation by  papal sentence, the need became more urgent than ever. But, while the proscription of the Poles was  undoubtedly dictated by political reasons, their conduct enabled Henry to effect it by legal means.  There was no doubt of the Cardinal's treason; his brother, Sir G

eoffrey, had often taken counsel  with Charles's ambassador, and discussed plans for the invasion of England; and even their mother,  the aged Countess of Salisbury, although she had denounced the Cardinal as a traitor and had  lamented the fact that she had given him birth, had brought herself within the toils by receiving  papal bulls and corresponding with traitors. The least guilty of the family appears to have  been the Countess's eldest son, Lord Montague; but he, too, was involved in the

common ruin.  Plots were hatched for kidnapping the Cardinal and bringing him home to stand his trial for  treason. Sir Geoffrey was arrested in August, 1538, was induced, or forced, to turn King's  evidence, and as a reward was granted his miserable, conscience-struck life. The Countess  was spared for a while, but Montague mounted the scaffold in December. With Montague perished  his cousin, the Marquis of Exeter, whose descent from Edward the Fourth was as fatal to him as  their descent from

Clarence was to the Poles. The Marquis was the White Rose, the  next heir to the throne if the line of the Tudors failed. His father, the Earl  of Devonshire, had been attainted in the reign of Henry the Seventh; but Henry  the Eighth had reversed the attainder, had treated the young Earl with kindness, had made  him Knight of the Garter and Marquis of Exeter, and had sought in various ways to win  his support. But his dynastic position and dislike of Henry's policy drove the  Marquis into the r

anks of the discontented. He had been put in the Tower, in  1531, on suspicion of treason; after his release he listened to the hysterics  of Elizabeth Barton, intrigued with Chapuys, and corresponded with Reginald Pole; and in  Cornwall, in 1538, men conspired to make him King. Less evidence than this would have  convinced a jury of peers in Tudor times of the expediency of Exeter's death; and, on the  9th of December, his head paid the price of his royal descent. These executions do not seem t

o  have produced the faintest symptoms of disgust in the popular mind. The threat of invasion  evoked a national enthusiasm for defence. In August, 1538, Henry went down to inspect the  fortifications he had been for years erecting at Dover; masonry from the demolished monasteries  was employed in dotting the coast with castles, such as Calshot and Hurst, which were built with  materials from the neighbouring abbey of Beaulieu. Commissioners were sent to repair the defences  at Calais and Guisne

s, on the Scottish Borders, along the coasts from Berwick to the mouth of  the Thames, and from the Thames to Lizard Point. Beacons were repaired, ordnance was supplied  wherever it was needed, lists of ships and of mariners were drawn up in every port, and  musters were taken throughout the kingdom. Everywhere the people pressed forward to help;  in the Isle of Wight they were lining the shores with palisades, and taking every precaution  to render a landing of the enemy a perilous enterprise.

In Essex they anticipated the  coming of the commissioners by digging dykes and throwing up ramparts; at Harwich the  Lord Chancellor saw "women and children working with shovels at the trenches and bulwarks".  Whatever we may think of the roughness and rigour of Henry's rule, his methods were  not resented by the mass of his people. He had not lost his hold on the  nation; whenever he appealed to his subjects in a time of national  danger, he met with an eager response; and, had the schemers ab

road, who idly  dreamt of his expulsion from the throne, succeeded in composing their mutual quarrels  and launching their bolt against England, there is no reason to suppose that its fate would  have differed from that of the Spanish Armada. In spite of the fears of invasion  which prevailed in the spring of 1539, Pole's second mission had no more success  than the first; and the hostile fleet, for the sight of which the Warden of the Cinque  Ports was straining his eyes from Dover Castle, neve

r came from the mouths of the  Scheldt and the Rhine; or rather, the supposed Armada proved to be a harmless convoy  of traders. The Pope himself, on second thoughts, withheld his promised bull. He distrusted its  reception at the hands of his secular allies, and dreaded the contempt and ridicule  which would follow an open failure. Moreover, at the height of his fervour against  Henry, he could not refrain from attempts to extend his temporal power, and his seizure of  Urbino alienated Francis

and afforded Henry some prospect of creating an anti-papal party in  Italy. Francis would gladly join in a prohibition of English commerce, if Charles would only  begin; but without Charles he could do nothing, and, even when his amity with the Emperor was  closest, he was compelled, at Henry's demand, to punish the French priests who  inveighed against English enormities. To Charles, however, English trade was worth more  than to Francis, and the Emperor's subjects would tolerate no interruptio

n of their lucrative  intercourse with England. With the consummate skill which he almost invariably displayed  in political matters, Henry had, in 1539, when the danger seemed greatest, provided the  Flemings with an additional motive for peace. He issued a proclamation that, for seven years,  their goods should pay no more duty than those of the English themselves; and the thrifty  Dutch were little inclined to stop, by a war, the fresh stream of gold. The Emperor,  too, had more urgent matter

s in hand. Henry might be more of a Turk than the Sultan  himself, and the Pope might regard the sack of St. Thomas's shrine with more horror than  the Turkish defeat of a Christian fleet; but Henry was not harrying the Emperor's  coasts, nor threatening to deprive the Emperor's brother of his Hungarian kingdom;  and Turkish victories on land and on sea gave the imperial family much more concern than all  Henry's onslaughts on the saints and their relics. And, besides the Ottoman peril, Charles

had  reason to fear the political effects of the union between England and the Protestant princes  of Germany, for which the religious development in England was paving the way, and which an attack  on Henry would at once have cemented. The powers conferred upon Henry as Supreme Head of the Church  were not long suffered to remain in abeyance. Whatever the theory may have been, in  practice Henry's supremacy over the Church was very different from that which  Kings of England had hitherto wielde

d; and from the moment he entered upon his new  ecclesiastical kingdom, he set himself not merely to reform practical abuses, such  as the excessive wealth of the clergy, but to define the standard of orthodox faith,  and to force his subjects to embrace the royal theology. The Catholic faith was to hold  good only so far as the Supreme Head willed; the "King's doctrine" became the rule to which  "our Church of England," as Henry styled it, was henceforth to conform; and "unity and concord in  o

pinion" were to be established by royal decree. The first royal definition of the faith  was embodied in ten articles submitted to Convocation in 1536. The King was, he  said, constrained by diversity of opinions "to put his own pen to the book and conceive  certain articles. .. thinking that no person, having authority from him, would presume  to say a word against their meaning, or be remiss in setting them forth". His  people, he maintained, whether peer or prelate, had no right to resist his

temporal or spiritual  commands, whatever they might be. Episcopal authority had indeed sunk low. When Convocation  was opened, in 1536, a layman, Dr. William Petre, appeared, and demanded the place of honour above  all bishops and archbishops in their assembly. Pre-eminence belonged, he said, to the King as  Supreme Head of the Church; the King had appointed Cromwell his Vicar-general; and Cromwell had named  him, Petre, his proctor. The claim was allowed, and the submissive clergy found littl

e fault with  the royal articles of faith, though they mentioned only three sacraments, baptism, penance and the  sacrament of the altar, denounced the abuse of images, warned men against excessive devotion to  the saints, and against believing that "ceremonies have power to remit sin," or that masses can  deliver souls from purgatory. Finally, Convocation transferred from the Pope to the Christian  princes the right to summon a General Council. With the Institution of a Christian Man, issued  i

n the following year, and commonly called The Bishops' Book, Henry had little to do. The bishops  debated the doctrinal questions from February to July, 1537, but the King wrote, in August, that  he had had no time to examine their conclusions. He trusted, however, to their wisdom, and agreed  that the book should be published and read to the people on Sundays and holy-days for three years  to come. In the same year he permitted a change, which inevitably gave fresh impulse to the  reforming mov

ement in England and destroyed every prospect of that "union and concord  in opinions," on which he set so much store. Miles Coverdale was licensed to print an edition  of his Bible in England, with a dedication to Queen Jane Seymour; and, in 1538, a second  English version was prepared by John Rogers, under Cranmer's authority, and published  as Matthew's Bible. This was the Bible "of the largest volume" which Cromwell, as Henry's  Vicegerent, ordered to be set up in all churches. Every incumbe

nt was to encourage his parishioners  to read it; he was to recite the Paternoster, the Creed and the Ten Commandments in English,  that his flock might learn them by degrees; he was to require some acquaintance with  the rudiments of the faith, as a necessary condition from all before they could receive the  Sacrament of the Altar; he was to preach at least once a quarter; and to institute a register  of births, marriages and deaths. Meanwhile, a vigorous assault was made on the strongholds  of

superstition; pilgrimages were suppressed, and many wonder-working images  were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a figure whose  contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to the market-place at Maidstone, and the ingenious mechanism, whereby the  eyes and lips miraculously opened and shut, was exhibited to the vulgar gaze. Probably these  little devices had already sunk in popular esteem, for the Blood of St. Januarius could not  be treated at Naples to-day in t

he same cavalier fashion as the Blood of Hailes was  in England in 1538, without a riot. But the exposure was a useful method of exciting popular  indignation against the monks, and it filled reformers with a holy joy. "Dagon," wrote one  to Bullinger, "is everywhere falling in England. Bel of Babylon has been broken to  pieces. " The destruction of the images was a preliminary skirmish in  the final campaign against the monks. The Act of 1536 had only granted to the  King religious houses which

possessed an endowment of less than two hundred pounds  a year; the dissolution of the greater monasteries was now gradually effected by a  process of more or less voluntary surrender. In some cases the monks may have been willing  enough to go; they were loaded with debt, and harassed by rules imposed by Cromwell, which  would have been difficult to keep in the palmiest days of monastic enthusiasm; and they may well  have thought that freedom from monastic restraint, coupled with a pension, wa

s a welcome relief,  especially when resistance involved the anger of the prince and liability to the penalties of  elastic treasons and of a præmunire which no one could understand. So, one after another, the great  abbeys yielded to the persuasions and threats of the royal commissioners. The dissolution of  the Mendicant Orders and of the Knights of St. John dispersed the last remnants of the  papal army as an organised force in England, though warfare of a kind continued for many  years. Thes

e proceedings created as much satisfaction among the Lutherans of Germany  as they did disgust at Rome, and an alliance between Henry and the Protestant princes seemed  to be dictated by a community of religious, as well as of political, interests. The friendship  between Francis and Charles threatened both English and German liberties, and it behoved the  two countries to combine against their common foe. Henry's manifesto against the authority of  the Pope to summon a General Council had been

received with rapture in Germany; at  least three German editions were printed, and the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave  of Hesse urged on him the adoption of a common policy. English envoys were sent to Germany  with this purpose in the spring of 1538, and German divines journeyed to England  to lay the foundation of a theological union. They remained five months,  but failed to effect an agreement. To the three points on which they desired further  reform in England, the Communion in both

kinds, the abolition of private masses and of  the enforced celibacy of the clergy, Henry himself wrote a long reply, maintaining in  each case the Catholic faith. But the conference showed that Henry was for the time anxious  to be conciliatory in religious matters, while from a political point of view the need  for an alliance grew more urgent than ever. All Henry's efforts to break the amity  between Francis and Charles had failed; his proposals of marriage to imperial and French  princesses

had come to nothing; and, in the spring of 1539, it was rumoured that the Emperor would  further demonstrate the indissolubility of his intimacy with the French King by passing through  France from Spain to Germany, instead of going, as he had always hitherto done, by sea, or  through Italy and Austria. Cromwell seized the opportunity and persuaded Henry to strengthen  his union with the Protestant princes by seeking a wife from a German house. This policy once  adopted, the task of selecting a

bride was easy. As early as 1530 the old Duke of Cleves had  suggested some marriage alliance between his own and the royal family of England. He  was closely allied to the Elector of Saxony, who had married Sibylla, the Duke of  Cleves' daughter; and the young Duke, who was soon to succeed his father, had also  claims to the Duchy of Guelders. Guelders was a thorn in the side of the Emperor; it stood  to the Netherlands in much the same relation as Scotland stood to England, and when  there was

war between Charles and Francis Guelders had always been one of the most  useful pawns in the French King's hands. Hence an alliance between the German princes,  the King of Denmark, who had joined their political and religious union, Guelders and  England would have seriously threatened the Emperor's hold on his Dutch dominions. This  was the step which Henry was induced to take, when he realised that Charles's friendship with  France remained unbroken, and that the Emperor had made up his min

d to visit Paris. Hints of a  marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves were thrown out early in 1539; the only difficulty,  which subsequently proved very convenient, was that the lady had been promised  to the son of the Duke of Lorraine. The objection was waived on the ground that  Anne herself had not given her consent; in view of the advantages of the match  and of the Duke's financial straits, Henry agreed to forgo a dowry; and, on the 6th  of October, the treaty of marriage was signed. An

ne of Cleves had already been described  to Henry by his ambassador, Dr. Wotton, and Holbein had been sent to paint her portrait  , which Wotton pronounced "a very lively image". She had an oval face, long nose, chestnut  eyes, a light complexion, and very pale lips. She was thirty-four years old, and  in France was reported to be ugly; but Cromwell told the King that "every one  praised her beauty, both of face and body, and one said she excelled the Duchess of Milan  as the golden sun did the

silver moon". Wotton's account of her accomplishments was pitched in  a minor key. Her gentleness was universally commended, but she spent her time chiefly in  needlework. She knew no language but her own; she could neither sing nor play upon any  instrument, accomplishments which were then considered by Germans to be unbecoming  in a lady. On the 12th of December, 1539, she arrived at Calais; but boisterous weather  and bad tides delayed her there till the 27th. She landed at Deal and rode to C

anterbury. On the  30th she proceeded to Sittingbourne, and thence, on the 31st, to Rochester, where the King met  her in disguise. If he was disappointed with her appearance, he concealed the fact from  the public eye. Nothing marred her public reception at Greenwich on the 3rd, or was  suffered to hinder the wedding, which was solemnised three days later. Henry "lovingly  embraced and kissed" his bride in public, and allowed no hint to reach the ears of any  one but his most intimate counsello

rs of the fact that he had been led willingly or unwillingly  into the most humiliating situation of his reign. Such was, in reality, the result of  his failure to act on the principle laid down by himself to the French  ambassador two years before. He had then declared that the choice of a wife was  too delicate a matter to be left to a deputy, and that he must see and know a lady some  time before he made up his mind to marry her. Anne of Cleves had been selected by  Cromwell, and the lady, wh

ose beauty was, according to Cromwell, in every one's mouth,  seemed to Henry no better than "a Flanders mare". The day after the interview at Rochester  he told Cromwell that Anne was "nothing so well as she was spoken of," and that, "if  he had known before as much as he knew then, she should not have come within his realm". He  demanded of his Vicegerent what remedy he had to suggest, and Cromwell had none. Next day  Cranmer, Norfolk, Suffolk, Southampton and Tunstall were called in with no b

etter result.  "Is there none other remedy," repeated Henry, "but that I must needs, against my will, put my  neck in the yoke? " Apparently there was none. The Emperor was being fêted in Paris; to  repudiate the marriage would throw the Duke of Cleves into the arms of the allied  sovereigns, alienate the German princes, and leave Henry without a friend among  the powers of Christendom. So he made up his mind to put his neck in the yoke and to  marry "the Flanders mare". Henry, however, was neve

r patient of matrimonial or other yokes,  and it was quite certain that, as soon as he could do so without serious risk, he would repudiate  his unattractive wife, and probably other things besides. For Anne's defects were only the last  straw added to the burden which Henry bore. He had not only been forced by circumstances into  marriage with a wife who was repugnant to him, but into a religious and secular policy which  he and the mass of his subjects disliked. The alliance with the Protestan

t princes might be  a useful weapon if things came to the worst, and if there were a joint attack on England by  Francis and Charles; but, on its merits, it was not to be compared to a good understanding with  the Emperor; and Henry would have no hesitation in throwing over the German princes when once he saw  his way to a renewal of friendship with Charles. He would welcome, even more, a relief from the  necessity of paying attention to German divines. He had never wavered in his adhesion to th

e  cardinal points of the Catholic faith. He had no enmity to Catholicism, provided it  did not stand in his way. The spiritual jurisdiction of Rome had been abolished  in England because it imposed limits on Henry's own authority. Some of the powers  of the English clergy had been destroyed, partly for a similar reason, and partly as  a concession to the laity. But the purely spiritual claims of the Church remained  unimpaired; the clergy were still a caste, separate from other men, and divinel

y endowed  with the power of performing a daily miracle in the conversion of the bread and wine  into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Even when the Protestant alliance seemed  most indispensable, Henry endeavoured to convince Lutherans of the truth of the Catholic  doctrine of the mass, and could not refrain from persecuting heretics with a zeal that shook the  confidence of his reforming allies. His honour, he thought, was involved in his success in  proving that he, with his royal supremac

y, could defend the faith more effectively than  the Pope, with all his pretended powers; and he took a personal interest in the  conversion and burning of heretics. Several instances are recorded of his  arguing a whole day with Sacramentaries, exercises which exhibited to advantage  at once the royal authority and the royal learning in spiritual matters. His beliefs  were not due to caprice or to ignorance; probably no bishop in his realm was more deeply  read in heterodox theology. He was con

stantly on the look-out for books by Luther and other  heresiarchs, and he kept quite a respectable theological library at hand for private use. The  tenacity with which he clung to orthodox creeds and Catholic forms was not only strengthened by  study but rooted in the depths of his character. To devout but fundamentally irreligious men, like  Henry the Eighth and Louis the Fourteenth. , rites and ceremonies are a great consolation; and  Henry seldom neglected to creep to the Cross on Good Frid

ay, to serve the priest at mass, to  receive holy bread and holy water every Sunday, and daily to use "all other laudable  ceremonies". With such feelings at heart, a union with Protestants could never for  Henry be more than a mariage de convenance; and in this, as in other things, he carried  with him the bulk of popular sympathy. In 1539 it was said that no man in London  durst speak against Catholic usages, and, in Lent of that year, a man was hanged, apparently  at the instance of the Recor

der of London, for eating flesh on a Friday. The attack on the  Church had been limited to its privileges and to its property; its doctrine had scarcely  been touched. The upper classes among the laity had been gorged with monastic spoils;  they were disposed to rest and be thankful. The middle classes had been satisfied to some  extent by the restriction of clerical fees, and by the prohibition of the clergy from  competing with laymen in profitable trades, such as brewing, tanning, and  specul

ating in land and houses. There was also the general reaction which  always follows a period of change. How far that reaction had gone, Henry first learnt from  the Parliament which met on the 28th of April, 1539. The elections were characterised by more  court interference than is traceable at any other period during the reign, though even on  this occasion the evidence is fragmentary and affects comparatively few constituencies.  It was, moreover, Cromwell and not the King who sought to pack t

he House of Commons  in favour of his own particular policy; and the attempt produced discontent in various  constituencies and a riot in one at least. The Earl of Southampton was required to use his  influence on behalf of Cromwell's nominees at Farnham, although that borough was within  the Bishop of Winchester's preserves. So, too, Cromwell's henchman, Wriothesley, was  returned for the county of Southampton in spite of Gardiner's opposition. Never,  till the days of the Stuarts, was there a

more striking instance of the futility of  these tactics; for the House of Commons, which Cromwell took so much pains to  secure, passed, without a dissentient, the Bill of Attainder against him; and before it  was dissolved, the bishop, against whose influence Cromwell had especially exerted himself, had  taken Cromwell's place in the royal favour. There was, indeed, no possibility of  stemming the tide which was flowing against the Vicegerent and in favour  of the King; and Cromwell was forced

to swim with the stream in the vain hope of  saving himself from disaster. The principal measure passed in this Parliament was the Act  of Six Articles, and it was designed to secure that unity and concord in opinions which had  not been effected by the King's injunctions. The Act affirmed the doctrine of  Transubstantiation, declared that the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds  was not necessary, that priests might not marry, that vows of chastity were perpetual, that  private masse

s were meet and necessary, and auricular confession was expedient and necessary.  Burning was the penalty for once denying the first article, and a felon's death for twice denying  any of the others. This was practically the first Act of Uniformity, the earliest definition  by Parliament of the faith of the Church. It showed that the mass of the laity  were still orthodox to the core, that they could persecute as ruthlessly  as the Church itself, and that their only desire was to do the persecut

ion themselves.  The bill was carried through Parliament by means of a coalition of King and laity against  Cromwell and a minority of reforming bishops, who are said only to have relinquished their  opposition at Henry's personal intervention; and the royal wishes were communicated, when the  King was not present in person, through Norfolk and not through the royal Vicegerent. It was  clear that Cromwell was trembling to his fall. The enmity shown in Parliament to his doctrinal  tendencies was

not the result of royal dictation; for even this Parliament, which gave  royal proclamations the force of law, could be independent when it chose.  The draft of the Act of Proclamations, as originally submitted to the House  of Commons, provoked a hot debate, was thrown out, and another was substituted  more in accord with the sense of the House. Parliament could have rejected the second as  easily as it did the first, had it wished. Willingly and wittingly it placed  this weapon in the royal ha

nds, and the chief motive for its action was that  overwhelming desire for "union and concord in opinion" which lay at the root of the Six  Articles. Only one class of offences against royal proclamations could be punished with death,  and those were offences "against any proclamation to be made by the King's Highness, his heirs  or successors, for or concerning any kind of heresies against Christian doctrine". The  King might define the faith by proclamations, and the standard of orthodoxy thus

set up was  to be enforced by the heaviest legal penalties. England, thought Parliament, could only be  kept united against her foreign foes by a rigid uniformity of opinion; and that  uniformity could only be enforced by the royal authority based on lay support, for  the Church was now deeply divided in doctrine against itself. Such was the temper of England  at the end of 1539. Cromwell and his policy, the union with the German princes and  the marriage with Anne of Cleves were merely makeshi

fts. They stood on no surer  foundation than the passing political need of some counterpoise to the alliance of Francis  and Charles. So long as that need remained, the marriage would hold good, and Henry would  strive to dissemble; but not a moment longer. The revolution came with startling rapidity; in  April, 1540, Marillac, the French ambassador, reported that Cromwell was tottering. The  reason was not far to seek. No sooner had the Emperor passed out of France, than he began  to excuse him

self from fulfilling his engagements to Francis. He was resolute never to yield Milan,  for which Francis never ceased to yearn. Charles would have found Francis a useful ally for the  conquest of England, but his own possessions were now threatened in more than one quarter, and  especially by the English and German alliance. Henry skilfully widened the breach between the  two friends, and, while professing the utmost regard for Francis, gave Charles to understand  that he vastly preferred the E

mperor's alliance to that of the Protestant princes. Before April  he had convinced himself that Charles was more bent on reducing Germany and the Netherlands  to order than on any attempt against England, and that the abandonment of the Lutheran princes  would not lead to their combination with the Emperor and Francis. Accordingly he returned  a very cold answer when the Duke of Cleves's ambassadors came, in May, to demand his assistance  in securing for the Duke the Duchy of Guelders. Cromwell

's fall was not, however, effected  without some violent oscillations, strikingly like the quick changes which preceded  the ruin of Robespierre during the Reign of Terror in France. The Vicegerent had filled the  Court and the Government with his own nominees; at least half a dozen bishops, with Cranmer  at their head, inclined to his theological and political views; Lord Chancellor Audley and the  Earl of Southamton were of the same persuasion; and a small but zealous band of reformers  did th

eir best, by ballads and sermons, to prove that the people were thirsting  for further religious change. The Council, said Marillac, was divided, each  party seeking to destroy the other. Henry let the factions fight till he thought the  time was come for him to intervene. In February, 1540, there was a theological encounter between  Gardiner and Barnes, the principal agent in Henry's dealings with the Lutherans, and Barnes  was forced to recant; in April Gardiner and one or two conservatives, w

ho had long been excluded  from the Council, were believed to have been readmitted; and it was reported that Tunstall  would succeed Cromwell as the King's Vicegerent. But a few days later two of Cromwell's satellites,  Wriothesley and Sadleir, were made Secretaries of State; Cromwell himself was created Earl of  Essex; and, in May, the Bishop of Chichester and two other opponents of reform were sent to the  Tower. At last Henry struck. On the 10th of June Cromwell was arrested; he had, wrote th

e Council,  "not only been counterworking the King's aims for the settlement of religion, but had said that, if  the King and the realm varied from his opinions, he would withstand them, and that he hoped in  another year or two to bring things to that frame that the King could not resist it". His cries for  mercy evoked no response in that hardened age. Parliament condemned him unheard, and, on the  28th of July, he was beheaded. Henry had in reality come to the conclusion that it was safe  to

dispense with Anne of Cleves and her relatives; and with his will there was easily found a way.  His case, as stated by himself, was, as usual, a most ingenious mixture of fact and fiction,  reason and sophistry. His "intention" had been defective, and therefore his administration  of the sacrament of marriage had been invalid. He was not a free agent because fear of  being left defenceless against Francis and Charles had driven him under the yoke. His  marriage had only been a conditional form.

Anne had never received a release from her  contract with the son of the Duke of Lorraine; Henry had only gone through the  ceremony on the assumption that that release would be forthcoming; and  actuated by this conscientious scruple, he had refrained from consummating the match.  To give verisimilitude to this last statement, he added the further detail that he found his  bride personally repugnant. He therefore sought from "our" Church a declaration of nullity. Anne  was prudently ready to s

ubmit to its decision; and, through Convocation, Henry's Church, which  in his view existed mainly to transact his ecclesiastical business, declared, on the 7th  of July, that the marriage was null and void. Anne received a handsome endowment of four  thousand pounds a year in lands, was given two country residences, and lived on amicable  terms with Henry and his successors till 1558, when she died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.  Henry's neck was freed from the matrimonial yoke and the Ge

rman entanglement. The news was  promptly sent to Charles, who remarked that Henry would always find him his loving brother  and most cordial friend. At Antwerp it was said that the King had alienated the Germans, but  gained the Emperor and France in their stead. Luther declared that "Junker Harry meant  to be God and to do as pleased himself"; and Melancthon, previously so ready to find  excuses, now denounced the English King as a Nero, and expressed a wish that God would put it  into the min

d of some bold man to assassinate him. Francis sighed when he heard the news,  foreseeing a future alliance against him, but the Emperor's secretary believed that  God was bringing good out of all these things. CHAPTER 15. THE FINAL STRUGGLE. The  first of the "good things" brought out of the divorce of Anne of Cleves was  a fifth wife for the much-married monarch. Parliament, which had petitioned Henry to  solve the doubts troubling his subjects as to the validity of his union  with Anne, now b

esought him, "for the good of his people," to enter  once more the holy state of matrimony, in the hope of more numerous issue. The lady had  been already selected by the predominant party, and used as an instrument in procuring the divorce  of her predecessor and the fall of Cromwell; for, if her morals were something lax, Catherine  Howard's orthodoxy was beyond dispute. She was niece of Cromwell's great enemy, the  Duke of Norfolk; and it was at the house of Bishop Gardiner that she was first

given the  opportunity of subduing the King to her charms. She was to play the part in the Catholic  reaction that Anne Boleyn had done in the Protestant revolution. Both religious parties  were unfortunate in the choice of their lady protagonists. Catherine Howard's father,  in spite of his rank, was very penurious, and his daughter's education had been neglected,  while her character had been left at the mercy of any chance tempter. She had already formed  compromising relations with three su

ccessive suitors. Her music master, Mannock, boasted that  she had promised to be his mistress; a kinsman, named Dereham, called her his wife; and she was  reported to be engaged to her cousin, Culpepper. Marillac thought her beauty was commonplace;  but that, to judge by her portraits, seems a disparaging verdict. Her eyes were hazel, her hair  was auburn, and Nature had been at least as kind to her as to any of Henry's wives. Even Marillac  admitted that she had a very winning countenance. Her

age is uncertain, but she had almost certainly  seen more than the twenty-one years politely put down to her account. Her marriage, like that  of Anne Boleyn, was private. Marillac thought she was already wedded to Henry by the 21st of  July, and the Venetian ambassador at the Court of Charles the Fifth said that the ceremony took  place two days after the sentence of Convocation . That may be the date of the betrothal, but the  marriage itself was privately celebrated at Oatlands on the 28th o

f July, and Catherine was  publicly recognised as Queen at Hampton Court on the 8th of August, and prayed for as such  in the churches on the following Sunday. The King was thoroughly satisfied with his  new marriage from every point of view. The reversal of the policy of the last  few years, which he had always disliked and for which he avoided responsibility as  well as he could, relieved him at once from the necessity of playing a part and from  the pressing anxiety of foreign dangers. These

troubles had preyed upon his mind and  impaired his health; but now, for a time, his spirits revived and his health returned. He began  to rise every morning, even in the winter, between five and six, and rode for four or five hours. He  was enamoured of his bride; her views and those of her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and of her patron,  Bishop Gardiner, were in much closer accord with his own than Anne Boleyn's or Cromwell's had been.  Until almost the close of his reign Norfolk was the chief

instrument of his secular policy, while  Gardiner represented his ecclesiastical views; but neither succeeded to the place which Wolsey  had held and Cromwell had tried to secure. Henceforth the King had no Prime  Minister; there was no second Vicegerent, and the praise or the blame for his policy can  be given to no one but Henry. That policy was, in foreign affairs, a close adherence to  the Emperor, partly because it was almost universally held to be the safest course for  England to pursue,

and partly because it gave Henry a free hand for the development of his  imperialist designs on Scotland. In domestic affairs the predominant note was the extreme  rigour with which the King's secular autocracy, his supremacy over the Church, and the Church's  orthodox doctrine were imposed on his subjects. Although the Act of Six Articles had been passed  in 1539, Cromwell appears to have prevented the issue of commissions for its execution. This  culpable negligence did not please Parliament,

and, just before his fall, another  Act was passed for the more effective enforcement of the Six Articles.  One relaxation was found necessary; it was impossible to inflict the death penalty  on "incontinent" priests, because there were so many. But that was the only indulgence  granted. Two days after Cromwell's death, a vivid illustration was given of the spirit  which was henceforth to dominate the Government. Six men were executed at the  same time; three were priests, condemned to be hanged

as traitors for denying  the royal supremacy; three were heretics, condemned to be burnt for impugning the Catholic  faith. And yet there was no peace. Henry, who had succeeded in so much, had, with the  full concurrence of the majority of his people, entered upon a task in which he was foredoomed  to failure. Not all the whips with six strings, not all the fires at Smithfield, could  compel that unity and concord in opinion which Henry so much desired, but which he  had unwittingly done so muc

h to destroy. He might denounce the diversities of belief  to which his opening of the Bible in English churches had given rise; but men, who  had caught a glimpse of hidden verities, could not all be forced to deny the things  which they had seen. The most lasting result of Henry's repressive tyranny was the stimulus  it gave to reform in the reign of his son, even as the persecutions of Mary finally  ruined in England the cause of the Roman Church. Henry's bishops themselves  could scarcely be

brought to agreement. Latimer and Shaxton lost their sees; but  the submission of the rest did not extend to complete recantation, and the endeavour to  stretch all his subjects on the Procrustean bed of Six Articles was one of Henry's least  successful enterprises. It was easier to sacrifice a portion of his monastic spoils  to found new bishoprics. This had been a project of Wolsey's, interrupted by the  Cardinal's fall. Parliament subsequently authorised Henry to erect twenty-six  sees; he a

ctually established six, the Bishoprics of Peterborough, Oxford,  Chester, Gloucester, Bristol and Westminster. Funds were also provided for the endowment, in  both universities, of Regius professorships of Divinity, Hebrew, Greek, Civil Law and Medicine;  and the royal interest in the advancement of science was further evinced by the grant  of a charter to the College of Surgeons, similar to that accorded early in the reign  to the Physicians. Disloyalty, meanwhile, was no more extinct than div

ersity in religious  opinion. Early in 1541 there was a conspiracy under Sir John Neville, in Lincolnshire, and about  the same time there were signs that the Council itself could not be immediately steadied after  the violent disturbances of the previous year. Pate, the ambassador at the Emperor's  Court, absconded to Rome in fear of arrest, and his uncle, Longland, Bishop of Lincoln,  was for a time in confinement; Sir John Wallop, Sir Thomas Wyatt, diplomatist and poet, and his  secretary, th

e witty and cautious Sir John Mason, were sent to the Tower; both Cromwell's  henchmen, Wriothesley and Sadleir, seem to have incurred suspicion. Wyatt,  Wallop and Mason were soon released, while Wriothesley and Sadleir regained favour  by abjuring their former opinions; but it was evident that the realisation of arbitrary power  was gradually destroying Henry's better nature. His suspicion was aroused on the slightest  pretext, and his temper was getting worse. Ill-health contributed not a lit

tle to this  frame of mind. The ulcer on his leg caused him such agony that he sometimes went almost  black in the face and speechless from pain. He was beginning to look grey and old, and was  growing daily more corpulent and unwieldy. He had, he said, on hearing of Neville's rebellion,  an evil people to rule; he would, he vowed, make them so poor that it would be out of their  power to rebel; and, before he set out for the North to extinguish the discontent and to arrange  a meeting with Jame

s the Fifth, he cleared the Tower by sending all its prisoners, including  the aged Countess of Salisbury, to the block. A greater trial than the failure of James to  accept his invitation to York awaited Henry on his return from the North. Rumours of Catherine  Howard's past indiscretions had at length reached the ears of the Privy Council. On All Saints' Day,  1541, Henry directed his confessor, the Bishop of Lincoln, to give thanks to God with him for the  good life he was leading and hoped t

o lead with his present Queen, "after sundry troubles of mind  which had happened to him by marriages". At last he thought he had reached the haven of domestic  peace, whence no roving fancy should tempt him to stray. Twenty-four hours later Cranmer put  in his hand proofs of the Queen's misconduct. Henry refused to believe in this rude awakening  from his dreams; he ordered a strict investigation into the charges. Its results left no room  for doubt. Dereham confessed his intercourse; Mannock a

dmitted that he had taken liberties;  and, presently, the Queen herself acknowledged her guilt. The King was overwhelmed with shame  and vexation; he shed bitter tears, a thing, said the Council, "strange in his courage". He "has  wonderfully felt the case of the Queen," wrote Chapuys; "he took such grief," added Marillac,  "that of late it was thought he had gone mad". He seems to have promised his wife a pardon, and  she might have escaped with nothing worse than a divorce, had not proofs come

to light of her  misconduct with Culpepper after her marriage with Henry, and even during their recent progress  in the North. This offence was high treason, and could not be covered by the King's pardon  for Catherine's pre-nuptial immorality. Henry, however, was not at ease until  Parliament, in January, 1542, considerately relieved him of all responsibility. The faithful Lords and Commons begged  him not to take the matter too heavily, but to permit them freely to proceed with an Act  of Att

ainder, and to give his assent thereto by commission under the great seal without any words  or ceremony, which might cause him pain. Thus originated the practice of giving the royal  assent to Acts of Parliament by commission. Another innovation was introduced into the Act  of Attainder, whereby it was declared treason for any woman to marry the King if her previous  life had been unchaste; "few, if any, ladies now at Court," commented the cynical Chapuys,  "would henceforth aspire to such an h

onour". The bill received the royal  assent on the 11th of February, Catherine having declined Henry's permission  to go down to Parliament and defend herself in person. On the 10th she was removed to  the Tower, being dressed in black velvet and treated with "as much honour as when she was  reigning". Three days later she was beheaded on the same spot where the sword had severed  the fair neck of Anne Boleyn. Thus ended one of the "good things" which had come out of  the repudiation of Anne of

Cleves. Other advantages were more permanent. The breach  between Francis and Charles grew ever wider. In 1541 the French King's ambassadors to the  Turk were seized and executed by the order of the imperial governor of Milan. The outrage  brought Francis's irritation to a head. He was still pursuing the shadow of a departed glory and  the vain hope of dominion beyond the Alps. He had secured none of the benefits he anticipated from  the imperial alliance; his interviews with Charles and profess

ions of friendship were lost on that  heartless schemer, and he realised the force of Henry's gibe at his expectations from Charles.  "I have myself," said Henry, "held interviews for three weeks together with the Emperor. " Both  sovereigns began to compete for England's favour. The French, said Chapuys, "now almost offer  the English carte blanche for an alliance"; and he told Charles that England must, at any  price, be secured in the imperial interest. In June, 1542, Francis declared war on

the  Emperor, and, by the end of July, four French armies were invading or threatening Charles's  dominions. Henry, in spite of all temptations, was not to be the tool of either; he had designs  of his own; and the breach between Francis and Charles gave him a unique opportunity  for completing his imperialist projects, by extending his sway over the one portion of  the British Isles which yet remained independent. As in the case of similar enterprises, Henry  could easily find colourable pretex

ts for his attack on Scots independence. Beton had  been made cardinal with the express objects of publishing in Scotland the Pope's  Bull against Henry, and of instigating James the Fifth to undertake its execution;  and the Cardinal held a high place in the Scots King's confidence. James had intrigued  against England with both Charles the Fifth and Francis the First , and hopes had been  instilled into his mind that he had only to cross the Border to be welcomed, at least in the  North, as a

deliverer from Henry's oppression. Refugees from the Pilgrimage of Grace found  shelter in Scotland, and the ceaseless Border warfare might, at any time, have provided either  King with a case for war, if war he desired. The desire varied, of course, with the prospects of  success. James the Fifth would, without doubt, have invaded England if Francis and Charles had  begun an attack, and if a general crusade had been proclaimed against Henry. So, too, war between the  two European rivals afforde

d Henry some chance of success, and placed in his way an irresistible  temptation to settle his account with Scotland. He revived the obsolete claim to suzerainty,  and pretended that the Scots were rebels. Had not James the Fifth, moreover, refused to  meet him at York to discuss the questions at issue between them? Henry might well have maintained  that he sought no extension of territory, but was actuated solely by the desire to remove  the perpetual menace to England involved in the presence

of a foe on his northern Borders,  in close alliance with his inveterate enemy across the Channel. He seems, indeed,  to have been willing to conclude peace, if the Scots would repudiate their  ancient connection with France; but this they considered the sheet-anchor of  their safety, and they declined to destroy it. They gave Henry greater offence by defeating  an English raid at Halidon Rig, and the desire to avenge a trifling reverse became a point  of honour in the English mind and a powerf

ul factor in English policy. The negotiations lasted  throughout the summer of 1542. In October Norfolk crossed the Borders. The transport broke  down; the commissariat was most imperfect; and Sir George Lawson of Cumberland was unable to  supply the army with sufficient beer. Norfolk had to turn back at Kelso, having accomplished nothing  beyond devastation. James now sought his revenge. He replied to Norfolk's invasion on the East by  throwing the Scots across the Borders on the West. The Ward

en was warned by his spies, but he  had only a few hundreds to meet the thousands of Scots. But, if Norfolk's invasion was an  empty parade, the Scots attempt was a fearful rout. Under their incompetent leader, Oliver  Sinclair, they got entangled in Solway Moss; enormous numbers were slain or taken prisoners,  and among them were some of the greatest men in Scotland. James died broken-hearted at the news,  leaving his kingdom to the week-old infant, Mary, Queen of Scots. The triumph of Flodden

Field was  repeated; a second Scots King had fallen; and, for a second time in Henry's reign, Scotland  was a prey to the woes of a royal minority. Within a few days of the Scots disaster,  Lord Lisle expressed a wish that the infant Queen were in Henry's hands  and betrothed to Prince Edward, and a fear that the French would seek to  remove her beyond the seas. To realise the hope and to prevent the fear were the main  objects of Henry's foreign policy for the rest of his reign. Could he but ha

ve secured the  marriage of Mary to Edward, he would have carried both England and Scotland many a weary stage  along the path to Union and to Empire. But, unfortunately, he was not content with this  brilliant prospect for his son. He grasped himself at the Scottish crown; he must be not  merely a suzerain shadow, but a real sovereign. The Scottish peers, who had been taken at  Solway Moss, were sworn to Henry the Eighth, "to set forth his Majesty's title that  he had to the realm of Scotland".

Early in 1543 an official declaration was  issued, "containing the just causes and considerations of this present war with  the Scots, wherein also appeareth the true and right title that the King's most royal  Majesty hath to the sovereignty of Scotland"; while Parliament affirmed that "the late  pretensed King of Scots was but an usurper of the crown and realm of Scotland," and that  Henry had "now at this present , a time apt and propice for the recovery of his said right and  title to the s

aid crown and realm of Scotland". The promulgation of these high-sounding  pretensions was fatal to the cause which Henry had at heart. Henry the Seventh  had pursued the earlier and wiser part of the Scottish policy of Edward  the First, namely, union by marriage; Henry the Eighth resorted to his later policy  and strove to change a vague suzerainty into a defined and galling sovereignty. Seeing no  means of resisting the victorious English arms, the Scots in March, 1543, agreed to the marriage

  between Henry's son and their infant Queen. But to admit Henry's extravagant claims to Scottish  sovereignty was quite a different matter. The mere mention of them was sufficient to  excite distrust and patriotic resentment. The French Catholic party led by  Cardinal Beton was strengthened, and, when Francis declared that he  would never desert his ancient ally, and gave an earnest of his intentions by  sending ships and money and men to their aid, the Scots repudiated their compact with Engla

nd,  and entered into negotiations for marrying their Queen to a prince in France. Such a danger to  England must at all costs be averted. Marriages between Scots kings and French princesses  had never boded good to England; but the marriage of the Queen of Scotland to a French  prince, and possibly to one who might succeed to the French throne, transcended all the other  perils with which England could be threatened. The union of the Scots and French crowns  would have destroyed the possibility

of a British Empire. Henry had sadly mismanaged the  business through vaulting ambition, but there was little fault to be found with his efforts  to prevent the union of France and Scotland; and that was the real objective of his last war  with France. His aim was not mere military glory or the conquest of France, as it had been in  his earlier years under the guidance of Wolsey; it was to weaken or destroy a support  which enabled Scotland to resist the union with England, and portended a  uni

on between Scotland and France. The Emperor's efforts to draw England into his war  with France thus met with a comparatively ready response. In May, 1543, a secret treaty  between Henry and Charles was ratified; on the 22nd of June a joint intimation of  war was notified to the French ambassador; and a detachment of English troops, under Sir John  Wallop and Sir Thomas Seymour, was sent to aid the imperialists in their campaign in the north of  France. Before hostilities actually broke out, Hen

ry wedded his sixth and last wife.  Catherine Parr was almost as much married as Henry himself. Thirty-one years of age in  1543, she had already been twice made a widow; her first husband was one Edward  Borough, her second, Lord Latimer. Latimer had died at the end of 1542, and  Catherine's hand was immediately sought by Sir Thomas Seymour, Henry's younger brother-in-law.  Seymour was handsome and won her heart, but he was to be her fourth, and not her third, husband;  her will "was overruled

by a higher power," and, on the 12th of July, she was married to Henry at  Hampton Court. Catherine was small in stature, and appears to have made little impression by her  beauty; but her character was beyond reproach, and she exercised a wholesome influence  on Henry during his closing years. Her task can have been no light one, but  her tact overcame all difficulties. She nursed the King with great devotion, and  succeeded to some extent in mitigating the violence of his temper. She intervene

d to  save victims from the penalties of the Act of Six Articles; reconciled Elizabeth with  her father; and was regarded with affection by both Henry's daughters. Suspicions of her  orthodoxy and a theological dispute she once had with the King are said to have given  rise to a reactionary plot against her. "A good hearing it is," Henry is reported  as saying, "when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort to come  in mine old days to be taught by my wife! " Catherine explained

that her remarks were only  intended to "minister talk," and that it would be unbecoming in her to assert opinions  contrary to those of her lord. "Is it so, sweetheart? " said Henry; "then are we perfect  friends;" and when Lord Chancellor Wriothesley came to arrest her, he was, we are told, abused  by the King as a knave, a beast and a fool. The winter of 1543-44 and the following spring were  spent in preparations for war on two fronts. The punishment of the Scots for repudiating  their engag

ements to England was entrusted to the skilful hands of Henry's brother-in-law, the Earl  of Hertford; while the King himself was to renew the martial exploits of his youth by crossing the  Channel and leading an army in person against the French King. The Emperor was to invade France  from the north-east; the two monarchs were then to effect a junction and march on Paris. There  is, however, no instance in the first half of the sixteenth century of two sovereigns heartily  combining to secure a

ny one object whatever. Charles and Henry both wanted to  extract concessions from Francis, but the concessions were very different, and  neither monarch cared much for those which the other demanded. Henry's ultimate end related to  Scotland, Charles's to Milan and the Lutherans. The Emperor sought to make Francis relinquish  his claim to Milan and his support of the German princes; Henry was bent on compelling him to  abandon the cause of Scottish independence. If Charles could secure his own

terms, he would,  without the least hesitation, leave Henry to get what he could by himself; and Henry was  equally ready to do Charles a similar turn. His suspicions of the Emperor determined  his course; he was resolved to obtain some tangible result; and, before he  would advance any farther, he sat down to besiege Boulogne. Its capture had been one  of the objects of Suffolk's invasion of 1523, when Wolsey and his imperialist allies had  induced Henry to forgo the design. The result of that

folly was not forgotten. Suffolk, his  ablest general, now well stricken in years, was there to recall it; and, under Suffolk's  directions, the siege of Boulogne was vigorously pressed. It fell on the 14th of September.  Charles, meanwhile, was convinced that Boulogne was all Henry wanted, and that the  English would never advance to support him. So, five days after the fall of Boulogne, he  made his peace with Francis. Henry, of course, was loud in his indignation; the Emperor had made  no eff

ort to include him in the settlement, and repeated embassies were sent in the autumn to keep  Charles to the terms of his treaty with England, and to persuade him to renew the war in the  following spring. His labours were all in vain, and Henry, for the first time in his life  was left to face an actual French invasion of England. The horizon seemed clouded at every  point. Hertford, indeed, had carried out his instructions in Scotland with signal success.  Leith had been burnt and Edinburgh sa

cked. But, as soon as he left for Boulogne, things  went wrong in the North, and, in February, 1545, Evers suffered defeat from the Scots at Ancrum  Moor. Now, when Henry was left without an ally, when the Scots were victorious in the North, when  France was ready to launch an Armada against the southern coasts of England, now, surely, was  the time for a national uprising to depose the bloodthirsty tyrant, the enemy of the Church,  the persecutor of his people. Strangely enough his people did,

and even desired, nothing of  the sort. Popular discontent existed only in the imagination of his enemies; Henry retained  to the last his hold over the mind of his people. Never had they been called to pay such a series  of loans, subsidies and benevolences; never did they pay them so cheerfully. The King set a royal  example by coining his plate and mortgaging his estates at the call of national defence; and, in  the summer, he went down in person to Portsmouth to meet the threatened invasion.

The French  attack had begun on Boulogne, where Norfolk's carelessness had put into their hands some  initial advantages. But, before dawn, on the 6th of February, Hertford sallied out of Boulogne  with four thousand foot and seven hundred horse. The French commander, Maréchal du Biez, and  his fourteen thousand men were surprised, and they left their stores, their ammunition and  their artillery in the hands of their English foes. Boulogne was safe for the time,  but a French fleet entered the

Solent, and effected a landing at Bembridge.  Skirmishing took place in the wooded, undulating country between the shore  and the slopes of Bembridge Down; the English retreated and broke the bridge  over the Yar. This checked the French advance, though a force which was stopped by that puny  stream could not have been very determined. A day or two later the French sent round  a party to fill their water-casks at the brook which trickles down Shanklin Chine; it was  attacked and cut to pieces.

They then proposed forcing their way into Portsmouth Harbour,  but the mill-race of the tide at its mouth, and the mysteries of the sandbanks  of Spithead deterred them; and, as a westerly breeze sprang up, they dropped  down before it along the Sussex coast. The English had suffered a disaster by the sinking  of the Mary Rose with all hands on board, an accident repeated on the same spot two  centuries later, in the loss of the Royal George. But the Admiral, Lisle, followed the French,  and a s

light action was fought off Shoreham; the fleets anchored for the night almost  within gunshot, but, when dawn broke, the last French ship was hull-down on the horizon.  Disease had done more than the English arms, and the French troops landed at the mouth  of the Seine were the pitiful wreck of an army. France could hope for little  profit from a continuance of the war, and England had everything to gain by its  conclusion. The terms of peace were finally settled in June, 1546. Boulogne was to

remain  eight years in English hands, and France was then to pay heavily for its restitution.  Scotland was not included in the peace. In September, 1545, Hertford had revenged the  English defeat at Ancrum Moor by a desolating raid on the Borders; early in 1546 Cardinal Beton,  the soul of the French party, was assassinated, not without Henry's connivance; and St. Andrews  was seized by a body of Scots Protestants in alliance with England. Throughout the  autumn preparation was being made for a

fresh attempt to enforce the marriage between  Edward and Mary; but the further prosecution of that enterprise was reserved for other hands  than those of Henry the Eighth. He left the relations between England and Scotland  in no better state than he found them. His aggressive imperialism paid little heed to  the susceptibilities of a stubborn, if weaker, foe; and he did not, like Cromwell, possess the  military force to crush out resistance. He would not conciliate and he could not coerce. Me

anwhile,  amid the distractions of his Scottish intrigues, of his campaign in France, and of his defence  of England, the King was engaged in his last hopeless endeavour to secure unity and concord  in religious opinion. The ferocious Act of Six Articles had never been more than fitfully  executed; and Henry refrained from using to the full the powers with which he  had been entrusted by Parliament. The fall of Catherine Howard may have  impaired the influence of her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk,

who had always expressed  his zeal for the burning of heretics; and the reforming party was rapidly growing in  the nation at large, and even within the guarded precincts of the King's Privy Council. Cranmer  retained his curious hold over Henry's mind; Hertford was steadily rising in favour;  Queen Catherine Parr, so far as she dared, supported the New Learning; the majority  of the Council were prepared to accept the authorised form of religion, whatever it  might happen to be, and, besides th

e Howards, Gardiner was the only convinced and  determined champion of the Catholic faith. Even at the moment of Cromwell's fall, there  was no intention of undoing anything that had already been done; Henry only determined  that things should not go so fast, especially in the way of doctrinal  change, as the Vicegerent wished, for he knew that unity was not to be sought  or found in that direction. But, between the extremes of Lutheranism and the status quo in  the Church, there was a good deal

to be done, in the way of reform, which was still consistent  with the maintenance of the Catholic faith. In May, 1541, a fresh proclamation  was issued for the use of the Bible. He had, said the King, intended his subjects to  read the Bible humbly and reverently for their instruction, not reading aloud in time of Holy  Mass or other divine service, nor, being laymen, arguing thereon; but, at the same time, he ordered  all curates and parishioners who had failed to obey his former injunctions

to provide an English  Bible for their Church without delay. Two months later another proclamation followed, regulating  the number of saints' days; it was characteristic of the age that various saints' days were  abolished, not so much for the purpose of checking superstition, as because they interfered  with the harvest and other secular business. Other proclamations came forth in the same  year for the destruction of shrines and the removal of relics. In 1543 a general  revision of service-bo

oks was ordered, with a view to eradicating "false legends" and  references to saints not mentioned in the Bible, or in the "authentical doctors". The Sarum Use  was adopted as the standard for the clergy of the province of Canterbury, and things were  steadily tending towards that ideal uniformity of service as well as of doctrine, which was  ultimately embodied in various Acts of Uniformity. Homilies, "made by certain prelates,"  were submitted to Convocation, but the publication of them, and

of  the rationale of rites and ceremonies, was deferred to the reign of Edward the Sixth The  greatest of all these compositions, the Litany, was, however, sanctioned in 1545. The King  had more to do with the Necessary Doctrine, commonly called the "King's Book" to distinguish  it from the Bishops' Book of 1537, for which Henry had declined all responsibility.  Henry, indeed, had urged on its revision, he had fully discussed with Cranmer the amendments  he thought the book needed, and he had br

ought the bishops to an agreement, which they had  vainly sought for three years by themselves. It was the King who now "set forth a true and  perfect doctrine for all his people". So it was fondly styled by his Council. A modern  high-churchman asserts that the King's Book taught higher doctrine than the book which  the bishops had drafted six years before, but that "it was far more liberal and better  composed". Whether its excellences amounted to "a true and perfect doctrine" or not, it  fail

ed of its purpose. The efforts of the old and the new parties were perpetually  driving the Church from the Via Media, which Henry marked out. On the one hand, we  have an act limiting the use of the Bible to gentlemen and their families, and plots to  catch Cranmer in the meshes of the Six Articles. On the other, there were schemes on the part  of some of the Council to entrap Gardiner, and we have Cranmer's assertion that,  in the last months of his reign, the King commanded him to pen a form

for  the alteration of the Mass into a Communion, a design obviously to be connected  with the fact that, in his irritation at Charles's desertion in 1544, and fear that  his neutrality might become active hostility, Henry had once more entered into communication  with the Lutheran princes of Germany. The only ecclesiastical change that went on  without shadow of turning was the seizure of Church property by the King; and it  is a matter of curious speculation as to where he would have stayed hi

s hand had  he lived much longer. The debasement of the coinage had proceeded apace during his later  years to supply the King's necessities, and, for the same purpose, Parliament, in 1545,  granted him all chantries, hospitals and free chapels. That session ended with Henry's last  appearance before his faithful Lords and Commons, and the speech he then delivered may be regarded  as his last political will and testament. He spoke, he said, instead of the Lord Chancellor,  "because he is not so

able to open and set forth my mind and meaning, and the secrets of  my heart, in so plain and ample manner, as I myself am and can do". He thanked  his subjects for their commendation, protested that he was "both bare and barren"  of the virtues a prince ought to have, but rendered to God "most humble thanks" for "such  small qualities as He hath indued me withal. .. . Now, since I find such kindness in your part  towards me, I cannot choose but love and favour you; affirming that no prince in t

he world  more favoureth his subjects than I do you, nor no subjects or Commons more love and obey  their Sovereign Lord, than I perceive you do; for whose defence my treasure shall not  be hidden, nor my person shall not be unadventured. Yet, although I wish you, and you  wish me, to be in this perfect love and concord, this friendly amity cannot continue, except both  you, my Lords Temporal and my Lords Spiritual, and you, my loving subjects, study  and take pains to amend one thing, which sur

ely is amiss and far out of order;  to the which I most heartily require you. Which is, that Charity and Concord is not  amongst you, but Discord and Dissension beareth rule in every place. Saint Paul saith  to the Corinthians, the thirteenth chapter, Charity is gentle, Charity is not envious,  Charity is not proud, and so forth. Behold then, what love and charity is amongst you, when  one calleth another heretic and anabaptist, and he calleth him again papist,  hypocrite and Pharisee? Be these

tokens of Charity amongst you? Are these  signs of fraternal love amongst you? No, no, I assure you that this lack of charity among  yourselves will be the hindrance and assuaging of the perfect love betwixt us, except this  wound be salved and clearly made whole. .. . I hear daily that you of the Clergy preach one  against another, without charity or discretion; some be too stiff in their old  Mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their new Sumpsimus. Thus  all men almost be in variety a

nd discord, and few or none preach truly and sincerely  the Word of God. .. .Yet the Temporalty be not clear and unspotted of malice and envy. For you  rail on Bishops, speak slanderously of Priests, and rebuke and taunt preachers, both contrary  to good order and Christian fraternity. If you know surely that a Bishop or Preacher  erreth, or teacheth perverse doctrine, come and declare it to some of our Council,  or to us, to whom is committed by God the high authority to reform such causes  and

behaviours. And be not judges of yourselves of your fantastical opinions and  vain expositions. .. .I am very sorry to know and to hear how unreverently that most precious  jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every Ale-house and  Tavern. .. .And yet I am even as much sorry that the readers of the same follow  it in doing so faintly and so coldly. For of this I am sure, that charity was never  so faint amongst you, and virtuous and godly living was never less used,

nor God Himself among  Christians was never less reverenced, honoured, or served. Therefore, as I said before, be in  charity one with another like brother and brother; love, dread, and serve God; to which I,as  your Supreme Head and Sovereign Lord, exhort and require you; and then I  doubt not but that love and league, that I spake of in the beginning, shall  never be dissolved or broke betwixt us. " The bond betwixt Henry and his subjects,  which had lasted thirty-eight years, and had survived

such strain as has rarely been  put on the loyalty of any people, was now to be broken by death. The King was able to make his  usual progress in August and September, 1546; from Westminster he went to Hampton Court,  thence to Oatlands, Woking and Guildford, and from Guildford to Chobham and Windsor,  where he spent the month of October. Early in November he came up to London, staying first  at Whitehall and then at Ely Place. From Ely Place he returned, on the 3rd of January, 1547,  to Whiteh

all, which he was never to leave alive. He is said to have become so unwieldy  that he could neither walk nor stand, and mechanical contrivances were used at  Windsor and his other palaces for moving the royal person from room to room.  His days were numbered and finished, and every one thought of the morrow. A child of  nine would reign, but who should rule? Hertford or Norfolk? The party of reform or that  of reaction? Henry had apparently decided that neither should dominate the other, and  d

esigned a balance of parties in the council he named for his child-successor. Suddenly the  balance upset. On the 12th of December, 1546, Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were  arrested for treason and sent to the Tower. Endowed with great poetic gifts, Surrey had even  greater defects of character. Nine years before he had been known as "the most foolish proud boy  in England". Twice he had been committed to prison by the Council for roaming the streets of the  city at night and breakin

g the citizens' windows, offences venial in the exuberance of youth, but  highly unbecoming in a man who was nearly thirty, who aspired to high place in the councils of the  realm, and who despised most of his colleagues as upstarts. His enmity was specially  directed against the Prince's uncles, the Seymours. Hertford had twice been called  in to retrieve Surrey's military blunders. Surrey made improper advances to Hertford's  wife, but repudiated with scorn his father's suggestion for a marria

ge alliance between the two  families. His sister testified that he had advised her to become the King's mistress, with a view  to advancing the Howard interests. Who, he asked, should be Protector, in case the King died, but  his father? He quartered the royal arms with his own, in spite of the heralds' prohibition.  This at once roused Henry's suspicions; he knew that, years before, Norfolk had been  suggested as a possible claimant to the throne, and that a marriage had been proposed  between

Surrey and the Princess Mary. The original charge against Surrey was prompted  by personal and local jealousy, not on the part of the Seymours, but on that of a member of Surrey's  own party. It came from Sir Richard Southwell, a Catholic and a man of weight and leading  in Norfolk, like the Howards themselves; he even appears to have been brought up with  Surrey, and for many years had been intimate with the Howard family. When Surrey was called  before the Council to answer Southwell's charge

s, he wished to fight his accuser, but both  were committed to custody. The case was investigated by the King himself, with the help  of another Catholic, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. The Duke of Norfolk confessed to technical treason  in concealing his son's offences, and was sent to the Tower. On the 13th of January, 1547, Surrey  was found guilty by a special commission sitting at the Guildhall; a week later he was beheaded.  On the 18th Parliament met to deal with the Duke; by the 24th a bil

l of attainder had passed all  its stages and awaited only the King's assent. On Thursday, the 27th, that assent was given  by royal commission. Orders are said to have been issued for the Duke's execution the  following morning. That night Norfolk lay doomed in his cell in the Tower, and Henry  the Eighth in his palace at Westminster. The Angel of Death hovered over the twain,  doubting which to take. Eighteen years before, the King had said that, were his will opposed,  there was never so nobl

e a head in his kingdom but he would make it fly. Now his own  hour was come, and he was loth to hear of death. His physicians dared not breathe  the word, for to prophesy the King's decease was treason by Act of Parliament. As that long  Thursday evening wore on, Sir Anthony Denny, chief gentleman of the chamber, "boldly coming  to the King, told him what case he was in, to man's judgment not like to live; and therefore  exhorted him to prepare himself to death". Sensible of his weakness, Henry

"disposed  himself more quietly to hearken to the words of his exhortation, and to consider his  life past; which although he much abused, 'yet,' said he, 'is the mercy of  Christ able to pardon me all my sins, though they were greater than they be'".  Denny then asked if he should send for "any learned man to confer withal and to open his mind  unto". The King replied that if he had any one, it should be Cranmer; but first he would "take a  little sleep; and then, as I feel myself, I will advi

se upon the matter". And while he slept,  Hertford and Paget paced the gallery outside, contriving to grasp the reins of power  as they fell from their master's hands. When the King woke he felt his  feebleness growing upon him, and told Denny to send for Cranmer. The Archbishop  came about midnight: Henry was speechless, and almost unconscious. He stretched out  his hand to Cranmer, and held him fast, while the Archbishop exhorted him to give some  token that he put his trust in Christ. The Kin

g wrung Cranmer's hand with his fast-ebbing  strength, and so passed away about two in the morning, on Friday, the 28th of January,  1547. He was exactly fifty-five years and seven months old, and his reign had lasted  for thirty-seven years and three-quarters. "And for my body," wrote Henry in his  will, "which when the soul is departed, shall then remain but as a cadaver, and so  return to the vile matter it was made of, were it not for the crown and dignity which God  hath called us unto, and

that We would not be counted an infringer of honest worldly policies  and customs, when they be not contrary to God's laws, We would be content to have it buried  in any place accustomed to Christian folks, were it never so vile, for it is but  ashes, and to ashes it shall return. Nevertheless, because We would be loth, in the  reputation of the people, to do injury to the Dignity, which We are unworthily called unto, We  are content to will and order that Our body be buried and interred in the

choir of Our college of  Windsor. " On the 8th of February, in every parish church in the realm, there was sung a solemn  dirge by night, with all the bells ringing, and on the morrow a Requiem mass for the soul of  the King. Six days later his body "was solemnly with great honour conveyed in a chariot towards  Windsor," and the funeral procession stretched four miles along the roads. That night the body  lay at Sion under a hearse, nine storeys high. On the 15th it was taken to Windsor, where 

it was met by the Dean and choristers of the Chapel Royal, and by the members of Eton  College. There in the castle it rested under a hearse of thirteen storeys; and on the morrow  it was buried, after mass, in the choir of St. George's Chapel. Midway between the stalls and  the Altar the tomb of Queen Jane Seymour was opened to receive the bones of her lord.  Hard by stood that mausoleum "more costly than any royal or papal monument in the world,"  which Henry the Seventh had commenced as a la

st resting-place for himself and his successors, but  had abandoned for his chapel in Westminster Abbey. His son bestowed the building on Wolsey, who  prepared for his own remains a splendid cenotaph of black and white marble. On the Cardinal's fall  Henry the Eighth designed both tomb and chapel for himself post multos et felices annos. But  King and Cardinal reaped little honour by these strivings after posthumous glory. The dying  commands of the monarch, whose will had been omnipotent during

his life, remained unfulfilled;  the memorial chapel was left incomplete; and the monument of marble was taken down, despoiled of  its ornaments and sold in the Great Rebellion. At length, in a happier age, after  more than three centuries of neglect, the magnificent building was finished, but not  in Henry's honour; it was adorned and dedicated to the memory of a prince in whose veins  there flowed not a drop of Henry's blood. CHAPTER 16. CONCLUSION. So died and so  was buried the most remarka

ble man who ever sat on the English throne. His reign,  like his character, seems to be divided into two inconsistent halves. In 1519 his rule  is pronounced more suave and gentle than the greatest liberty anywhere else; twenty  years later terror is said to reign supreme. It is tempting to sum up his life in one sweeping  generalisation, and to say that it exhibits a continuous development of Henry's intellect  and deterioration of his character. Yet it is difficult to read the King's speech in

Parliament  at the close of 1545, without crediting him with some sort of ethical ideas and aims; his life  was at least as free from vice during the last, as during the first, seven years of his reign;  in seriousness of purpose and steadfastness of aim it was immeasurably superior; and  at no time did Henry's moral standard vary greatly from that of many whom the  world is content to regard as its heroes. His besetting sin was egotism, a sin which  princes can hardly, and Tudors could nowise,

avoid. Of egotism Henry had his full share from  the beginning; at first it moved in a limited, personal sphere, but gradually it extended  its scope till it comprised the whole realm of national religion and policy. The  obstacles which he encountered in prosecuting his suit for a divorce from  Catherine of Aragon were the first check he experienced in the gratification  of a personal whim, and the effort to remove those impediments drew him on to the  world-wide stage of the conflict with Rom

e. He was ever proceeding from  the particular to the general, from an attack on a special dispensation to  an attack on the dispensing power of the Pope, and thence to an assault on the whole edifice  of papal claims. He started with no desire to separate England from Rome, or to reform  the Anglican Church; those aims he adopted, little by little, as subsidiary to the attainment  of his one great personal purpose. He arrived at his principles by a process of deduction from  his own particular

case. As Henry went on, his "quick and penetrable eyes," as More  described them, were more and more opened to the extent of what he could do; and he realised,  as he said, how small was the power of the Pope. Papal authority had always depended on moral  influence and not on material resources. That moral influence had long been impaired; the sack  of Rome in 1527 afforded further demonstration of its impotence; and, when Clement condoned that  outrage, and formed a close alliance with the chie

f offender, the Papacy suffered a blow from  which it never recovered. Temporal princes might continue to recognise the Pope's authority, but  it was only because they chose, and not because they were compelled so to do; they supported him,  not as the divinely commissioned Vicar of Christ, but as a useful instrument in the prosecution  of their own and their people's desires. It is called a theological age, but it was  also irreligious, and its principal feature was secularisation. National int

erests had already  become the dominant factor in European politics; they were no longer to be made subservient  to the behests of the universal Church. The change was tacitly or explicitly recognised  everywhere; and cujus regio, ejus religio was the principle upon which German ecclesiastical  politics were based at the Peace of Augsburg. It was assumed that each prince could  do what he liked in his own country; they might combine to make war on an excommunicate  king, but only if war suited t

heir secular policy; and the rivalry between Francis and Charles was  so keen, that each set greater store upon Henry's help than upon his destruction. Thus the breach  with Rome was made a possible, though not an easy, task; and Henry was left to settle the matter  at home with little to fear from abroad, except threats which he knew to be empty.  England was the key of the situation, and in England must be sought the  chief causes of Henry's success. If we are to believe that Henry's policy  w

as at variance with the national will, his reign must remain a political mystery, and we can offer no explanation of the facts  that Henry was permitted to do his work at all, and that it has stood so long the test of  time. He had, no doubt, exceptional facilities for getting his way. His dictatorship was the  child of the Wars of the Roses, and his people, conscious of the fact that Henry was their only  bulwark against the recurrence of civil strife, and bound up as they were in commercial an

d  industrial pursuits, were willing to bear with a much more arbitrary government than  they would have been in less perilous times. The alternatives may have been evil, but  the choice was freely made. No government, whatever its form, whatever its resources,  can permanently resist the national will; every nation has, roughly speaking, the government  it deserves and desires, and a popular vote would never in Henry's reign have decreed his  deposition. The popular mind may be ill-informed, di

storted by passion and prejudice, and formed  on selfish motives. Temporarily, too, the popular will may be neutralised by skilful management  on the part of the government, by dividing its enemies and counterworking their plans; and  of all those arts Henry was a past master. But such expedients cannot prevail in the  end; in 1553 the Duke of Northumberland had a subtle intellect and all the machinery  of Tudor government at his disposal; Queen Mary had not a man, nor a  shilling. Yet Mary, by

popular favour, prevailed without shedding a drop of blood.  Henry himself was often compelled to yield to his people. Abject self-abasement on their  part and stupendous power of will on Henry's, together provide no adequate solution for the  history of his reign. With all his self-will, Henry was never blind to the distinction  between what he could and what he could not do. Strictly speaking, he was a constitutional king;  he neither attempted to break up Parliament, nor to evade the law. He

combined in his royal  person the parts of despot and demagogue, and both he clothed in Tudor grace and majesty.  He led his people in the way they wanted to go, he tempted them with the baits they coveted most, he humoured their prejudices against the  clergy and against the pretensions of Rome, and he used every concession to extract some  fresh material for building up his own authority. He owed his strength to the skill with which  he appealed to the weaknesses of a people, whose prevailing

characteristics were a  passion for material prosperity and an absolute indifference to human suffering. "We,"  wrote one of Henry's Secretaries of State, "we, which talk much of Christ and His Holy Word,  have, I fear me, used a much contrary way; for we leave fishing of men, and fish  again in the tempestuous seas of this world for gain and wicked Mammon. " A few  noble examples, Catholic and Protestant, redeemed, by their blood, the age  from complete condemnation, but, in the mass of his sub

jects, the finer feelings  seem to have been lost in the pursuit of wealth. There is no sign that the hideous tortures  inflicted on men condemned for treason, or the equally horrible sufferings of heretics  burnt at the stake, excited the least qualm of compassion in the breast of the multitude; the  Act of Six Articles seems to have been rather a popular measure, and the multiplication of  treasons evoked no national protest. Henry, indeed, was the typical embodiment of an age that  was at onc

e callous and full of national vigour, and his failings were as much a  source of strength as his virtues. His defiance of the conscience of  Europe did him no harm in England, where the splendid isolation of Athanasius  contra mundum is always a popular attitude; and even his bitterest foes could scarce forbear  to admire the dauntless front he presented to every peril. National pride was the highest  motive to which he appealed. For the rest, he based his power on his people's material  intere

sts, and not on their moral instincts. He took no such hold of the ethical nature of men  as did Oliver Cromwell, but he was liked none the less for that; for the nation regarded Cromwell,  the man of God, with much less favour than Charles the Second , the man of sin; and statesmen who  try to rule on exclusively moral principles are seldom successful and seldom beloved. Henry's  successor, Protector Somerset, made a fine effort to introduce some elements of humanity  into the spirit of governm

ent; but he perished on the scaffold, while his colleagues denounced  his gentleness and love of liberty, and declared that his repeal of Henry's savage treason-laws  was the worst deed done in their generation. The King avoided the error of the Protector;  he was neither behind nor before the average man of the time; he appealed to the mob, and the  mob applauded. Salus populi, he said in effect, suprema lex, and the people agreed; for that  is a principle which suits demagogues no less than de

spots, though they rarely possess  Henry's skill in working it out. Henry, it is true, modified the maxim slightly  by substituting prince for people, and by practising, before it was preached, Louis  the Fourteenth's doctrine that L'État, c'est moi. But the assumption that the welfare of the people  was bound up with that of their King was no idle pretence; it was based on solid facts, the force  of which the people themselves admitted. They endorsed the tyrant's plea of necessity. The  pressur

e of foreign rivalries, and the fear of domestic disruption, convinced Englishmen of  the need for despotic rule, and no consideration whatever was allowed to interfere with the  stability of government; individual rights and even the laws themselves must be overridden, if  they conflicted with the interests of the State. Torture was illegal in England, and men were  proud of the fact, yet, in cases of treason, when the national security was thought to  be involved, torture was freely used, and

it was used by the very men who boasted of England's  immunity. They were conscious of no inconsistency; the common law was very well as a general rule,  but the highest law of all was the welfare of the State. This was the real tyranny of Tudor times;  men were dominated by the idea that the State was the be-all and end-all of human existence.  In its early days the State is a child; it has no will and no ideas of its own, and its first  utterances are merely imitation and repetition. But by He

nry the Eighth's reign the State  in England had grown to lusty manhood; it dismissed its governess, the Church, and  laid claim to that omnipotence and absolute sovereignty which Hobbes regretfully expounded  in his Leviathan. The idea supplied an excuse to despots and an inspiration to noble minds.  "Surely," wrote a genuine patriot in 1548, "every honest man ought to  refuse no pains, no travail, no study, he ought to care for no reports, no  slanders, no displeasure, no envy, no malice, so t

hat he might profit the commonwealth of his  country, for whom next after God he is created. " The service of the State tended, indeed,  to encroach on the service of God, and to obliterate altogether respect for individual  liberty. Wolsey on his death-bed was visited by qualms of conscience, but, as a rule, victims  to the principle afford, by their dying words, the most striking illustrations of the omnipotence  of the idea. Condemned traitors are concerned on the scaffold, not to assert thei

r innocence, but  to proclaim their readiness to die as an example of obedience to the law. However unfair the  judicial methods of Tudor times may seem to us, the sufferers always thank the  King for granting them free trial. Their guilt or innocence is a matter of little  moment; the one thing needful is that no doubt should be thrown on the inviolability of the  will of the State; and the audience commend them. They are not expected to confess or to express  contrition, but merely to submit t

o the decrees of the nation; if they do that, they are said to  make a charitable and godly end, and they deserve the respect and sympathy of men; if not, they  die uncharitably, and are held up to reprobation. To an age like that there was nothing strange in  the union of State and Church and the supremacy of the King over both; men professed Christianity  in various forms, but to all men alike the State was their real religion, and the King was  their great High Priest. The sixteenth century,

and especially the reign of Henry the Eighth,  supplies the most vivid illustration of the working, both for good and for evil, of  the theory that the individual should be subordinate in goods, in life and in conscience  to the supreme dictates of the national will. This theory was put into practice by Henry  the Eighth long before it was made the basis of any political philosophy, just as he  practised Erastianism before Erastus gave it a name. The devotion paid to the State  in Tudor times in

evitably made expediency, and not justice or morality, the supreme test  of public acts. The dictates of expediency were, indeed, clothed in legal forms, but laws  are primarily intended to secure neither justice nor morality, but the interests  of the State; and the highest penalty known to the law is inflicted for high  treason, a legal and political crime which does not necessarily involve any  breach whatever of the code of morals. Traitors are not executed because they are  immoral, but bec

ause they are dangerous. Never did a more innocent head fall on the scaffold than  that of Lady Jane Grey; never was an execution more fully justified by the law. The contrast  was almost as flagrant in many a State trial in the reign of Henry the Eighth; no king was  so careful of law, but he was not so careful of justice. Therein lay his safety, for the law takes  no cognisance of injustice, unless the injustice is also a breach of the law, and Henry rarely, if  ever, broke the law. Not only d

id he keep the law, but he contrived that the nation should  always proclaim the legality of his conduct. Acts of attainder, his favourite weapon, are  erroneously supposed to have been the method to which he resorted for removing opponents  whose conviction he could not obtain by a legal trial. But acts of attainder were, as  a rule, supplements to, not substitutes for, trials by jury; many were passed against the dead,  whose goods had already been forfeited to the King as the result of judici

al verdicts. Moreover,  convictions were always easier to obtain from juries than acts of attainder from Parliament. It  was simplicity itself to pack a jury of twelve, and even a jury of peers; but it was a much more  serious matter to pack both Houses of Parliament. What then was the meaning and use of acts of  attainder? They were acts of indemnity for the King. People might cavil at the verdict of juries;  for they were only the decisions of a handful of men; but who should impugn the voice

of the  whole body politic expressed in its most solemn, complete and legal form? There is no  way, said Francis to Henry in 1532, so safe as by Parliament, and one of Henry's  invariable methods was to make the whole nation, so far as he could, his accomplice. For  pardons and acts of grace the King was ready to assume the responsibility; but the  nation itself must answer for rigorous deeds. And acts of attainder were neither more  nor less than deliberate pronouncements, on the part of the pe

ople, that it was expedient  that one man should die rather than that the whole nation should perish or run any risk of danger.  History, in a democratic age, tends to become a series of popular apologies, and is inclined to  assume that the people can do no wrong; some one must be the scapegoat for the people's sins,  and the national sins of Henry's reign are all laid on Henry's shoulders. But the nation in the  sixteenth century deliberately condoned injustice, when injustice made for its pea

ce. It has done so  before and after, and may possibly do so again. It is easy in England to-day to denounce the  cruel sacrifices imposed on individuals in the time of Henry the Eighth by their subordination  in everything to the interests of the State; but, whenever and wherever  like dangers have threatened, recourse has been had to similar methods, to  government by proclamation, to martial law, and to verdicts based on political expediency.  The contrast between morals and politics, which c

omes out in Henry's reign as a terrible  contradiction, is inherent in all forms of human society. Politics, the action of men in the mass,  are akin to the operation of natural forces; and, as such, they are neither moral nor  immoral; they are simply non-moral. Political movements are often as resistless as  the tides of the ocean; they carry to fortune, and they bear to ruin, the just and the  unjust with heedless impartiality. Cato and Brutus striving against the torrent of  Roman imperialis

m, Fisher and More seeking to stem the secularisation of the Church, are  like those who would save men's lives from the avalanche by preaching to the mountain  on the text of the sixth commandment. The efforts of good men to avert a sure but cruel  fate are the truest theme of the Tragic Muse; and it is possible to represent Henry's reign  as one long nightmare of "truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne"; for  Henry the Eighth embodied an inevitable movement of politics, w

hile Fisher and More stood only  for individual conscience. That is the secret of Henry's success. He directed the storm  of a revolution which was doomed to come, which was certain to break  those who refused to bend, and which may be explained by natural causes,  but cannot be judged by moral considerations. The storm cleared the air and dissipated many a  pestilent vapour, but it left a trail of wreck and ruin over the land. The nation purchased political  salvation at the price of moral deba

sement; the individual was sacrificed on the altar of  the State; and popular subservience proved the impossibility of saving a people from itself.  Constitutional guarantees are worthless without the national will to maintain them; men lightly  abandon what they lightly hold; and, in Henry's reign, the English spirit of independence burned  low in its socket, and love of freedom grew cold. The indifference of his subjects to political  issues tempted Henry along the path to tyranny, and despoti

c power developed in him features,  the repulsiveness of which cannot be concealed by the most exquisite art, appealing to the  most deep-rooted prejudice. He turned to his own profit the needs and the faults of his  people, as well as their national spirit. He sought the greatness of England,  and he spared no toil in the quest; but his labours were spent for no ethical purpose.  His aims were selfish; his realm must be strong, because he must be great. He had the strength  of a lion, and like

a lion he used it. Yet it is probable that Henry's personal influence  and personal action averted greater evils than those they provoked. Without him, the storm of the  Reformation would still have burst over England; without him, it might have been far more terrible.  Every drop of blood shed under Henry the Eighth might have been a river under a feebler king.  Instead of a stray execution here and there, conducted always with a scrupulous regard for  legal forms, wars of religion might have d

esolated the land and swept away thousands of lives. London  saw many a hideous sight in Henry's reign, but it had no cause to envy the Catholic capitals which  witnessed the sack of Rome and the massacre of St. Bartholomew; for all Henry's iniquities,  multiplied manifold, would not equal the volume of murder and sacrilege wrought at  Rome in May, 1527, or at Paris in August, 1572. From such orgies of violence and  crime, England was saved by the strong right arm and the iron will of her Tudor 

king. "He is," said Wolsey after his fall, "a prince of royal courage, and he hath  a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want part of his appetite he will  hazard the loss of one-half of his kingdom. " But Henry discerned more clearly than Wolsey  the nature of the ground on which he stood; by accident, or by design, his appetite  conformed to potent and permanent forces; and, wherein it did not, he was,  in spite of Wolsey's remark, content to forgo its gratification. It was  not

he, but the Reformation, which put the kingdoms of Europe to the hazard. The Sphinx  propounded her riddle to all nations alike, and all were required to answer. Should they  cleave to the old, or should they embrace the new? Some pressed forward, others held back, and some,  to their own confusion, replied in dubious tones. Surrounded by faint hearts and fearful minds,  Henry the Eighth neither faltered nor failed. He ruled in a ruthless age with a ruthless hand,  he dealt with a violent crisis

by methods of blood and iron, and his measures were crowned with  whatever sanction worldly success can give. He is Machiavelli's Prince in action. He took  his stand on efficiency rather than principle, and symbolised the prevailing of the gates  of Hell. The spiritual welfare of England entered into his thoughts, if at all, as a  minor consideration; but, for her peace and material comfort it was well that she had as her  King, in her hour of need, a man, and a man who counted the cost, who f

aced the risk, and who did  with his might whatsoever his hand found to do.