spite of the protest which he had been made to register against the
marriage, and of the doubts expressed by Julius II. and Archbishop
Warham as to its validity, it was completed in the first few months of
his reign. This step was largely due to the pressure brought to bear by
Catherine's father Ferdinand upon Henry's council; he regarded England
as a tool in his hands and Catherine as his resident ambassador. The
young king himself at first took little interest in politics, and for
two years affairs were managed by the pacific Richard Fox (q.v.) and
Warham. Then Wolsey became supreme, while Henry was immersed in the
pursuit of sport and other amusements. He took, however, the keenest
interest from the first in learning and in the navy, and his inborn
pride easily led him to support Wolsey's and Ferdinand's warlike designs
on France. He followed an English army across the Channel in 1513, and
personally took part in the successful sieges of Therouanne and Tournay
and the battle of Guinegate which led to the peace of 1514. Ferdinand,
however, deserted the English alliance, and amid the consequent
irritation against everything Spanish, there was talk of a divorce
between Henry and Catherine (1514), whose issue had hitherto been
attended with fatal misfortune. But the renewed antagonism between
England and France which followed the accession of Francis I. (1515) led
to a rapprochement with Ferdinand; the birth of the lady Mary (1516)
held out hopes of the male issue which Henry so much desired; and the
question of a divorce was postponed. Ferdinand died in that year (1516)
and the emperor Maximilian in 1519. Their grandson Charles V. succeeded
them both in all their realms and dignities in spite of Henry's hardly
serious candidature for the empire; and a lifelong rivalry broke out
between him and Francis I. Wolsey used this antagonism to make England
arbiter between them; and both monarchs sought England's favour in 1520,
Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold and Charles V. more quietly in
Kent. At the conference of Calais in 1521 English influence reached its
zenith; but the alliance with Charles destroyed the balance on which
that influence depended. Francis was overweighted, and his defeat at
Pavia in 1525 made the emperor supreme. Feeble efforts to challenge his
power in Italy provoked the sack of Rome in 1527; and the peace of
Cambrai in 1529 was made without any reference to Wolsey or England's
interests.
Meanwhile Henry had been developing a serious interest in politics, and
he could brook no superior in whatever sphere he wished to shine. He
began to adopt a more critical attitude towards Wolsey's policy, foreign
and domestic; and to give ear to the murmurs against the cardinal and
his ecclesiastical rule. Parliament had been kept at arm's length since
1515 lest it should attack the church; but Wolsey's expensive foreign
policy rendered recourse to parliamentary subsidies indispensable. When
it met in 1523 it refused Wolsey's demands, and forced loans were the
result which increased the cardinal's unpopularity. Nor did success
abroad now blunt the edge of domestic discontent. His fate, however, was
sealed by his failure to obtain a divorce for Henry from the papal
court. The king's hopes of male issue had been disappointed, and by 1526
it was fairly certain that Henry could have no male heir to the throne
while Catherine remained his wife. There was Mary, but no queen regnant
had yet ruled in England; Margaret Beaufort had been passed over in
favour of her son in 1485, and there was a popular impression that women
were excluded from the throne. No candidate living could have secured
the succession without a recurrence of civil war. Moreover the
unexampled fatality which had attended Henry's issue revived the
theological scruples which had always existed about the marriage; and
the breach with Charles V. in 1527 provoked a renewal of the design of
1514. All these considerations were magnified by Henry's passion for
Anne Boleyn, though she certainly was not the sole or the main cause of
the divorce. That the succession was the main point is proved by the
fact that Henry's efforts were all directed to securing a wife and not a
mistress. Wolsey persuaded him that the necessary divorce could be
obtained from Rome, as it had been in the case of Louis XII. of France
and Margaret of Scotland. For a time Clement VII. was inclined to
concede the demand, and Campeggio in 1528 was given ample powers. But
the prospect of French success in Italy which had encouraged the pope
proved delusive, and in 1529 he had to submit to the yoke of Charles V.
This involved a rejection of Henry's suit, not because Charles cared
anything for his aunt, but because a divorce would mean disinheriting
Charles's cousin Mary, and perhaps the eventual succession of the son of
a French princess to the English throne.
Wolsey fell when Campeggio was recalled, and his fall involved the
triumph of the anti-ecclesiastical party in England. Laymen who had
resented their exclusion from power were now promoted to offices such as
those of lord chancellor and lord privy seal which they had rarely held
before; and parliament was encouraged to propound lay grievances against
the church. On the support of the laity Henry relied to abolish papal
jurisdiction and reduce clerical privilege and property in England; and
by a close alliance with Francis I. he insured himself against the
enmity of Charles V. But it was only gradually that the breach was
completed with Rome. Henry had defended the papacy against Luther in
1521 and had received in return the title "defender of the faith." He
never liked Protestantism, and he was prepared for peace with Rome on
his own terms. Those terms were impossible of acceptance by a pope in
Clement VII.'s position; but before Clement had made up his mind to
reject them, Henry had discovered that the papacy was hardly worth
conciliating. His eyes were opened to the extent of his own power as the
exponent of national antipathy to papal jurisdiction and ecclesiastical
privilege; and his appetite for power grew. With Cromwell's help he
secured parliamentary support, and its usefulness led him to extend
parliamentary representation to Wales and Calais, to defend the
privileges of Parliament, and to yield rather than forfeit its
confidence. He had little difficulty in securing the Acts of Annates,
Appeals and Supremacy which completed the separation from Rome, or the
dissolution of the monasteries which, by transferring enormous wealth
from the church to the crown, really, in Cecil's opinion, ensured the
reformation.
The abolition of the papal jurisdiction removed all obstacles to the
divorce from Catherine and to the legalization of Henry's marriage with
Anne Boleyn (1533). But the recognition of the royal supremacy could
only be enforced at the cost of the heads of Sir Thomas More, Bishop
Fisher and a number of monks and others among whom the Carthusians
signalized themselves by their devotion (1535-1536). Anne Boleyn fared
no better than the Catholic martyrs; she failed to produce a male heir
to the throne, and her conduct afforded a jury of peers, over which her
uncle, the duke of Norfolk, presided, sufficient excuse for condemning
her to death on a charge of adultery (1536). Henry then married Jane
Seymour, who was obnoxious to no one, gave birth to Edward VI., and then
died (1537). The dissolution of the monasteries had meanwhile evoked a
popular protest in the north, and it was only by skilful and
unscrupulous diplomacy that Henry was enabled to suppress so easily the
Pilgrimage of Grace. Foreign intervention was avoided through the
renewal of war between Francis and Charles; and the insurgents were
hampered by having no rival candidate for the throne and no means of
securing the execution of their programme.
Nevertheless their rising warned Henry against further doctrinal change.
He had authorized the English Bible and some approach towards Protestant
doctrine in the Ten Articles. He also considered the possibility of a
political and theological alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany.
But in 1538 he definitely rejected their theological terms, while in
1539-1540 they rejected his political proposals. By the statute of Six
Articles (1539) he took his stand on Catholic doctrine; and when the
Lutherans had rejected his alliance, and Cromwell's nominee, Anne of
Cleves, had proved both distasteful on personal grounds and unnecessary
because Charles and Francis were not really projecting a Catholic
crusade against England, Anne was divorced and Cromwell beheaded. The
new queen Catherine Howard represented the triumph of the reactionary
party under Gardiner and Norfolk; but there was no idea of returning to
the papal obedience, and even Catholic orthodoxy as represented by the
Six Articles was only enforced by spasmodic outbursts of persecution and
vain attempts to get rid of Cranmer.
The secular importance of Henry's activity has been somewhat obscured by
his achievements in the sphere of ecclesiastical politics; but no small
part of his energies was devoted to the task of expanding the royal
authority at the expense of temporal competitors. Feudalism was not yet
dead, and in the north and west there were medieval franchises in which
the royal writ and common law hardly ran at all. Wales and its marches
were brought into legal union with the rest of England by the statutes
of Wales (1534-1536); and after the Pilgrimage of Grace the Council of
the North was set up to bring into subjection the extensive
jurisdictions of the northern earls. Neither they nor the lesser chiefs
who flourished on the lack of common law and order could be reduced by
ordinary methods, and the Councils of Wales and of the North were given
summary powers derived from the Roman civil law similar to those
exercised by the Star Chamber at Westminster and the court of Castle
Chamber at Dublin. Ireland had been left by Wolsey to wallow in its own
disorder; but disorder was anathema to Henry's mind, and in 1535 Sir
William Skeffington was sent to apply English methods and artillery to
the government of Ireland. Sir Anthony St Leger continued his policy
from 1540; Henry, instead of being merely lord of Ireland dependent on
the pope, was made by an Irish act of parliament king, and supreme head
of the Irish church. Conciliation was also tried with some success;
plantation schemes were rejected in favour of an attempt to Anglicize
the Irish; their chieftains were created earls and endowed with monastic
lands; and so peaceful was Ireland in 1542 that the lord-deputy could
send Irish kernes and gallowglasses to fight against the Scots.
Henry, however, seems to have believed as much in the coercion of
Scotland as in the conciliation of Ireland. Margaret Tudor's marriage
had not reconciled the realms; and as soon as James V. became a possible
pawn in the hands of Charles V., Henry bethought himself of his old
claims to suzerainty over Scotland. At first he was willing to
subordinate them to an attempt to win over Scotland to his anti-papal
policy, and he made various efforts to bring about an interview with his
nephew. But James V. was held aloof by Beaton and two French marriages;
and France was alarmed by Henry's growing friendliness with Charles V.,
who was mollified by his cousin Mary's restoration to her place in the
succession to the throne. In 1542 James madly sent a Scottish army to
ruin at Solway Moss; his death a few weeks later left the Scottish
throne to his infant daughter Mary Stuart, and Henry set to work to
secure her hand for his son Edward and the recognition of his own
suzerainty. A treaty was signed with the Scottish estates; but it was
torn up a few months later under the influence of Beaton and the
queen-dowager Mary of Guise, and Hertford was sent in 1544 to punish
this breach of promise by sacking Edinburgh.
Perhaps to prevent French intervention in Scotland Henry joined Charles
V. in invading France, and captured Boulogne (Sept. 1544). But Charles
left his ally in the lurch and concluded the peace of Crepy that same
month; and in 1545 Henry had to face alone a French invasion of the Isle
of Wight. This attack proved abortive, and peace between England and
France was made in 1546. Charles V.'s desertion inclined Henry to listen
to the proposals of the threatened Lutheran princes, and the last two
years of his reign were marked by a renewed tendency to advance in a
Protestant direction. Catherine Howard had been brought to the block
(1542) on charges in which there was probably a good deal of truth, and
her successor, Catherine Parr, was a patroness of the new learning. An
act of 1545 dissolved chantries, colleges and other religious
foundations; and in the autumn of 1546 the Spanish ambassador was
anticipating further anti-ecclesiastical measures. Gardiner had almost
been sent to the Tower, and Norfolk and Surrey were condemned to death,
while Cranmer asserted that it was Henry's intention to convert the mass
into a communion service. An opportunist to the last, he would readily
have sacrificed any theological convictions he may have had in the
interests of national uniformity. He died on the 28th of January 1547,
and was buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor.
The atrocity of many of Henry's acts, the novelty and success of his
religious policy, the apparent despotism of his methods, or all
combined, have made it difficult to estimate calmly the importance of
Henry's work or the conditions which made it possible. Henry's egotism
was profound, and personal motives underlay his public action. While
political and ecclesiastical conditions made the breach with Rome
possible--and in the view of most Englishmen desirable--Henry VIII. was
led to adopt the policy by private considerations. He worked for the
good of the state because he thought his interests were bound up with
those of the nation; and it was the real coincidence of this private and
public point of view that made it possible for so selfish a man to
achieve so much for his country. The royal supremacy over the church and
the means by which it was enforced were harsh and violent expedients;
but it was of the highest importance that England should be saved from
religious civil war, and it could only be saved by a despotic
government. It was necessary for the future development of England that
its governmental system should be centralized and unified, that the
authority of the monarchy should be more firmly extended over Wales and
the western and northern borders, and that the still existing feudal
franchises should be crushed; and these objects were worth the price
paid in the methods of the Star Chamber and of the Councils of the North
and of Wales. Henry's work on the navy requires no apology; without it
Elizabeth's victory over the Spanish Armada, the liberation of the
Netherlands and the development of English colonies would have been
impossible; and "of all others the year 1545 best marks the birth of the
English naval power" (Corbett, _Drake_, i. 59). His judgment was more at
fault when he conquered Boulogne and sought by violence to bring
Scotland into union with England. But at least Henry appreciated the
necessity of union within the British Isles; and his work in Ireland
relaid the foundations of English rule. No less important was his
development of the parliamentary system. Representation was extended to
Wales, Cheshire, Berwick and Calais; and parliamentary authority was
enhanced, largely that it might deal with the church, until men began to
complain of this new parliamentary infallibility. The privileges of the
two Houses were encouraged and expanded, and parliament was led to
exercise ever wider powers. This policy was not due to any belief on
Henry's part in parliamentary government, but to opportunism, to the
circumstance that parliament was willing to do most of the things which
Henry desired, while competing authorities, the church and the old
nobility, were not. Nevertheless, to the encouragement given by Henry
VIII. parliament owed not a little of its future growth, and to the aid
rendered by parliament Henry owed his success.
He has been described as a "despot under the forms of law"; and it is
apparently true that he committed no illegal act. His despotism consists
not in any attempt to rule unconstitutionally, but in the extraordinary
degree to which he was able to use constitutional means in the
furtherance of his own personal ends. His industry, his remarkable
political insight, his lack of scruple, and his combined strength of
will and subtlety of intellect enabled him to utilize all the forces
which tended at that time towards strong government throughout western
Europe. In Michelet's words, "le nouveau Messie est le roi"; and the
monarchy alone seemed capable of guiding the state through the social
and political anarchy which threatened all nations in their transition
from medieval to modern organization. The king was the emblem, the focus
and the bond of national unity; and to preserve it men were ready to put
up with vagaries which to other ages seem intolerable. Henry could thus
behead ministers and divorce wives with comparative impunity, because
the individual appeared to be of little importance compared with the
state. This impunity provoked a licence which is responsible for the
unlovely features of Henry's reign and character. The elevation and the
isolation of his position fostered a detachment from ordinary virtues
and compassion, and he was a remorseless incarnation of Machiavelli's
_Prince_. He had an elastic conscience which was always at the beck and
call of his desire, and he cared little for principle. But he had a
passion for efficiency, and for the greatness of England and himself.
His mind, in spite of its clinging to the outward forms of the old
faith, was intensely secular; and he was as devoid of a moral sense as
he was of a genuine religious temperament. His greatness consists in his
practical aptitude, in his political perception, and in the
self-restraint which enabled him to confine within limits tolerable to
his people an insatiable appetite for power.
The original materials for Henry VIII.'s biography are practically all
incorporated in the monumental _Letters and Papers of the Reign of
Henry VIII._ (21 vols.), edited by Brewer and Gairdner and completed
after fifty years' labour in 1910. A few further details may be
gleaned from such contemporary sources as Hall's _Chronicle_,
Cavendish's _Life of Wolsey_, W. Thomas's _The Pilgrim_ and others;
and some additions have been made to the documentary sources contained
in the _Letters and Papers_ by recent works, such as Ehses' _Romische
Dokumente_, and Merriman's _Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell_. Lord
Herbert of Cherbury's _Life and Reign of Henry VIII._ (1649), while
good for its time, is based upon a very partial knowledge of the
sources and somewhat antiquated principles of historical scholarship.
Froude's famous portraiture of Henry is coloured by the ideas of
hero-worship and history which the author imbibed from Carlyle, and
the rival portraits in Lingard, R. W. Dixon's _Church History_ and
Gasquet's _Henry VIII. and the Monasteries_ by strong religious
feeling. A more discriminating estimate is attempted by H. A. L.
Fisher in Messrs Longmans' _Political History of England_, vol. v.
(1906). Of the numerous paintings of Henry none is by Holbein, who,
however, executed the striking chalk-drawing of Henry's head, now at
Munich, and the famous but decaying cartoon at Devonshire House. The
well-known three-quarter length at Windsor, usually attributed to
Holbein, is by an inferior artist. The best collection of Henry's
portraits was exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1909, and
the catalogue of that exhibition contains the best description of
them; several are reproduced in Pollard's _Henry VIII._ (Goupil)
(1902), the letterpress of which was published by Longmans in a
cheaper edition (1905). Henry composed numerous state papers still
extant; his only book was his _Assertio septem sacramentorum contra M.
Lutherum_ (1521), a copy of which, signed by Henry himself, is at
Windsor. Several anthems composed by him are extant; and one at least,
_O Lord, the Maker of all Things_, is still occasionally rendered in
English cathedrals. (A. F. P.)
HENRY I. (1214-1217), king of Castile, son of Alphonso VIII. of Castile,
and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, daughter of Henry II. of England,
after whom he was named, was born about 1207. He was killed, while still
a boy, by the fall of a tile from a roof.
HENRY II. of Trastamara (1369-1379), king of Castile, founder of the
dynasty known as "the new kings," was the eldest son of Alphonso XI. and
of his mistress Leonora de Guzman. He was born in 1333. His father
endowed him with great lordships in northern Spain, and made him count
of Trastamara. After the death of Alphonso XI. in 1350, Leonora was
murdered to satisfy the revenge of the king's neglected wife. Several of
the numerous children she had borne to Alphonso were slain at different
times by Peter the Cruel, the king's legitimate son and successor. Henry
preserved his life by submissions and by keeping out of the king's way.
At last, after taking part in several internal commotions, he fled to
France in 1356. In 1366 he persuaded the mercenary soldiers paid off by
the kings of England and France to accompany him on an expedition to
upset Peter, who was driven out. The Black Prince having intervened on
behalf of Peter, Henry was defeated at Najera (3rd of April 1367) and
had again to flee to Aragon. When the Black Prince was told that "the
Bastard" had neither been slain nor taken, he said that nothing had been
done. And so it turned out; for, when the Black Prince had left Spain,
Henry came back with a body of French soldiers of fortune under du
Guesclin, and drove his brother into the castle of Montiel in La Mancha.
Peter was tempted out by du Guesclin, and the half brothers met in the
Frenchman's tent. They rushed at one another, and Peter, the stronger
man, threw Henry down, and fell on him. One of Henry's pages seized the
king by the leg and threw him on his back. Henry then pulled up Peter's
hauberk and stabbed him mortally in the stomach, on the 23rd of March
1369. He reigned for ten years, with some success both in pacifying the
kingdom and in war with Portugal. But as his title was disputed he was
compelled to purchase support by vast grants to the nobles and
concessions to the cities, by which he gained the title of _El de las
Mercedes_--he of the largesse. Henry was a strong ally of the French
king in his wars with the English, who supported the claims of Peter's
natural daughters. He died on the 30th of May 1379.
HENRY III. (1390-1406) king of Castile, called _El Doliente_, the
Sufferer, was the son of John I. of Castile and Leon, and of his wife
Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand of Portugal. He was born in 1379. The
period of minority was exceptionally anarchical, even for Castile, but
as the cities, always the best supporters of the royal authority, were
growing in strength, Henry was able to reduce his kingdom to obedience,
and, when he took the government into his own hands after 1393, to
compel his nobles with comparative ease to surrender the crown lands
they had seized. The meeting of the Cortes summoned by him at Madrid in
1394 marked a great epoch in the establishment of a practically despotic
royal authority, based on the consent of the commons, who looked to the
crown to protect them against the excesses of the nobles. Henry
strengthened his position still further by his marriage with Catherine,
daughter of John of Gaunt and of Constance, elder daughter of Peter the
Cruel and Maria de Padilla. This union combined the rival claims of the
descendants of Peter and of Henry of Trastamara. The king's bodily
weakness limited his real capacity, and his early death on the 25th of
December 1406 cut short the promise of his reign.
HENRY IV. (1453-1474), king of Castile, surnamed the Impotent, or the
Spendthrift, was the son of John II. of Castile and Leon, and of his
wife, Mary, daughter of Ferdinand I. of Aragon and Sicily. He was born
at Valladolid on the 6th of January 1425. The surnames given to this
king by his subjects are of much more than usual accuracy. His personal
character was one of mere weakness, bodily and mental. Henry was an
undutiful son, and his reign was one long period of confusion, marked by
incidents of the most ignominious kind. He divorced his first wife
Blanche of Navarre in 1453 on the ground of "mutual impotence." Yet in
1468 he married Joan of Portugal, and when she bore a daughter, first
repudiated her as adulterine, and then claimed her for his own. In 1468
he was solemnly deposed in favour of his brother Alphonso, on whose
death in the same year his authority was again recognized. The last
years of his life were spent in vain endeavours, first to force his
half-sister Isabella, afterwards queen, to marry his favourite, the
Master of Santiago, and then to exclude her from the throne. Henry died
at Madrid on the 12th of December 1474.