When in the year 1509 a handsome youth of eighteen came to the throne,
the hopes of England ran high. His intelligence, his frank, genial
manners, his sympathy with the "new learning," won all classes.
Erasmus in his hopes of purifying the Church, and Sir Thomas More in
his "Utopian" dreams for politics and society, felt that a friend had
come to the throne in the young Henry VIII.
Spain had become great through a union of the rival Kingdoms Castile
and Aragon; so a marriage with the Princess Katharine, daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella, had been arranged for the young Prince Henry,
who had quietly accepted for his Queen his brother's widow, six years
his senior.
France under Francis I. had risen into a state no less imposing than
Spain, and {74} Henry began to be stirred with an ambition, to take
part in the drama of events going on upon the greater stage, across the
Channel. The old dream of French conquest returned. Francis I. and
Charles V. of Germany had commenced their struggle for supremacy in
Europe. Henry's ambition was fostered by their vying with each other
to secure his friendship. He was soon launched in a deep game of
diplomacy, in which three intriguing Sovereigns were striving each to
outwit the others.
What Henry lacked in experience and craft was supplied by his
Chancellor Wolsey, whose private and personal ambition to reach the
Papal Chair was dexterously mingled with the royal game. The game was
dazzling and absorbing, but it was unexpectedly interrupted; and the
golden dreams of Erasmus and More, of a slow and orderly development in
England through an expanding intelligence, were rudely shaken.
Martin Luther audaciously nailed on the door of the Church at
Wittenberg a protest against the selling of papal indulgences, and the
pent-up hopes, griefs and despair of {75} centuries burst into a storm
which shook Europe to its centre.
Since England had joined in the great game of European politics, she
had advanced from being a third-rate power to the front rank among
nations; so it was with great satisfaction that Catholic Europe heard
Henry VIII. denounce the new Reformation, which had swiftly assumed
alarming proportions.
But a woman's eyes were to change all this. As Henry looked into the
fair face of Anne Boleyn, his conscience began to be stirred over his
marriage with his brother's widow, Katharine. He confided his scruples
to Wolsey, who promised to use his efforts with the Pope to secure a
divorce from Katharine. But this lady was aunt to Charles V., the
great Champion of the Church in its fight with Protestantism. It would
never do to alienate him. So the divorce was refused.
Henry VIII. was not as flexible and amiable now as the youth of
eighteen had been. He defied the Pope, married Anne (1533), and sent
his Minister into disgrace {76} for not serving him more effectually.
"There was the weight which pulled me down," said Wolsey of Anne, and
death from a broken heart mercifully saved the old man from the
scaffold he would certainly have reached.
The legion of demons which had been slumbering in the King were
awakened. He would break no law, but he would bend the law to his
will. He commanded a trembling Parliament to pass an act sustaining
his marriage with Anne. Another permitting him to name his successor,
and then another--making him _supreme head of the Church in England_.
The Pope was forever dethroned in his Kingdom, and Protestantism had
achieved a bloodstained victory.
Henry alone could judge what was orthodoxy and what heresy; but to
disagree with _him_, was death. Traitor and heretic went to the
scaffold in the same hurdle; the Catholic who denied the King's
supremacy riding side by side with the Protestant who denied
transubstantiation. The Protestantism of this great convert was
political, not {77} religious; he despised the doctrines of
Lutheranism, and it was dangerous to believe too much and equally
dangerous to believe too little. Heads dropped like leaves in the
forest, and in three years the Queen who had overturned England and
almost Europe, was herself carried to the scaffold (1536).
It was in truth a "Reign of Terror" by an absolutism standing upon the
ruin of every rival. The power of the Barons had gone; the Clergy were
panic-stricken, and Parliament was a servant, which arose and bowed
humbly to his vacant throne at mention of his name! A member for whom
he had sent knelt trembling one day before him. "Get my bill passed
to-morrow, my little man," said the King, "or to-morrow, this head of
yours will be off." The next day the bill passed, and millions of
Church property was confiscated, to be thrown away in gambling, or to
enrich the adherents of the King.
Thomas Cromwell, who had succeeded to Wolsey's vacant place, was his
efficient instrument. This student of Machiavelli's "Prince," without
passion or hate, pity or {78} regret, marked men for destruction, as a
woodman does tall trees, the highest and proudest names in the Kingdom
being set down in his little notebook under the head of either "Heresy"
or "Treason." Sir Thomas More, one of the wisest and best of men,
would not say he thought the marriage with Katharine had been unlawful,
and paid his head as the price of his fearless honesty.
Jane Seymour, whom Henry married the day after Anne Boleyn's execution,
died within a year at the birth of a son (Edward VI.). In 1540
Cromwell arranged another union with the plainest woman in Europe, Anne
of Cleves; which proved so distasteful to Henry that he speedily
divorced her, and in resentment at Cromwell's having entrapped him, by
a flattering portrait drawn by Holbein, the Minister came under his
displeasure, which at that time meant death. He was beheaded in 1540,
and in that same year occurred the King's marriage with Katharine
Howard, who one year later met the same fate as Anne Boleyn.
Katharine Parr, the sixth and last wife, {79} and an ardent Protestant
and reformer, also narrowly escaped, and would undoubtedly at last have
gone to the block. But Henry, who at fifty-six was infirm and wrecked
in health, died in the year 1547, the signing of death-warrants being
his occupation to the very end.
Whatever his motive, Henry VIII. had in making her Protestant, placed
England firmly in the line of the world's highest progress; and strange
to say, that Kingdom is most indebted to two of her worst Kings.
The crown passed to the son of Jane Seymour, Edward VI., a feeble boy
of ten. In view of the doubtful validity of his father's divorce, and
the consequent doubt cast upon the legitimacy of Edward's two sisters,
Mary and Elizabeth, the young king was persuaded to name his cousin
Lady Jane Grey as his heir and successor. This gentle girl of
seventeen, sensitive and thoughtful, a devout reformer, who read Greek
and Hebrew and wrote Latin poetry, is a pathetic figure in history,
where we see her, the unwilling wearer of a crown for ten days, and
{80} then with her young husband hurried to that fatal Tower, and to
death. Upon the death of Edward this unhappy child was proclaimed
Queen of England. But the change in the succession produced an
unexpected uprising, in which even Protestants joined. Lady Jane Grey
was hurried to the block, and the Catholic Mary to the throne. Henry's
divorce was declared void, and his first marriage valid. Elizabeth was
thus set aside by Act of Parliament; and as she waited in the Tower,
while her remorseless sister vainly sought for proofs of her complicity
with the recent rebellion, she was seemingly nearer to a scaffold than
to a throne.
[Illustration: Queen Elizabeth going on board the "Golden Hind." From
the painting by Frank Brangwyn.]
When we remember that there coursed in the veins of Mary Tudor the
blood of cruel Spanish kings, mingled with that of Henry VIII., can we
wonder that she was cruel and remorseless? Her marriage with Philip
II. of Spain quickly overthrew the work of her father. Unlike Henry
VIII., Mary was impelled by deep convictions; and like her grandmother,
Isabella I. of Spain, she persecuted to save from what she believed was
death eternal; and her cruelty, although {81} untempered by one humane
impulse, was still prompted by a sincere fanaticism, with which was
mingled an intense desire to please the Catholic Philip. But Philip
remained obdurately in Spain; and while she was lighting up all England
with a blaze of martyrs, Calais,--over which the English standard
planted by Edward III. had waved for more than 200 years,--Calais, the
last English possession in France, was lost. Amid these crushing
disappointments, public and personal, Mary died (1558), after a reign
of only five years.
Elizabeth with her legitimacy questioned was still under the shadow of
the scaffold upon which her mother had perished. There is reason to
believe that Philip II. turned the delicately balanced scale. It
better suited him to have Elizabeth occupy the throne of England, than
that Mary Stuart, the next nearest heir, should do so. Mary had
married the Dauphin of France; and France was Philip's enemy and rival.
Better far that England should become Protestant, than that France
should hold the balance of power in Europe!
{82}