Influence of the Italian Renaissance.
The moral faults of the church only reflected those of the nation. It
was a hard and selfish generation which witnessed the Wars of the Roses
and the dictatorship of Edward IV. The iniquitous French war, thirty
years of plunder and demoralization, had corrupted the minds of the
governing classes before the civil strife began. Afterwards the constant
and easy changes of allegiance, as one faction or the other was in the
ascendant, the wholesale confiscations and attainders, the never-ending
executions, the sudden prosperity of adventurers, the premium on
time-serving and intrigue, sufficed to make the whole nation cynical and
sordid. The claim of the Yorkists to represent constitutional opposition
to misgovernment became a mere hypocrisy. The claim of the Lancastrians
to represent loyalty soon grew almost as hollow. Edward IV. with his
combination of vicious self-indulgence and spasmodic cruelty was no
unfit representative of his age. The _Paston Letters_, that unique
collection of the private correspondence of a typical family of
_nouveaux riches_, thriftless, pushing, unscrupulous, give us the true
picture of the time. All that can be said in favour of the Yorkists is
that they restored a certain measure of national prosperity, and that
their leaders had one redeeming virtue in their addiction to literature.
The learning which had died out in monasteries began to flourish again
in the corrupt soil of the court. Most of Edward's favourites had
literary tastes. His constable Tiptoft, the "butcher earl" of Worcester,
was a figure who might have stepped out of the Italian Renaissance. A
graduate of Pavia, a learned lawyer, who translated Caesar and Cicero,
composed works both in Latin and English, and habitually impaled his
victims, he was a man of a type hitherto unknown in England. Antony,
Lord Rivers, the queen's brother, was a mere adventurer, but a poet of
some merit, and a great patron of Caxton. Hastings, the Bourchiers, and
other of the king's friends were minor patrons of literature. It is
curious to find that Caxton, an honest man, and an enthusiast as to the
future of the art of printing, which he had introduced into England,
waxes enthusiastic as to the merits of the intelligent but unscrupulous
peers who took an interest in his endeavours. Of the detestable Tiptoft
he writes that "there flowered in virtue and cunning none like him among
the lords of the temporalty in science and moral virtue"! And this is no
time-serving praise of a patron, but disinterested tribute to a man who
had perished long before on the scaffold.
Death of Edward IV.
Richard, duke of Gloucester.
The uneventful latter half of the reign of Edward IV. ended with his
death at the age of forty-one on the 9th of April 1483. He had ruined a
splendid constitution by the combination of sloth and evil living, and
during his last years had been sinking slowly into his grave, unable to
take the field or to discharge the more laborious duties of royalty.
Since Clarence's death he had been gradually falling into the habit of
transferring the conduct of great matters of state to his active and
hard-working youngest brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who had
served him well and faithfully ever since he first took the field at
Barnet. Gloucester passed as a staid and religious prince, and if there
was blood on his hands, the same could be said of every statesman of his
time. His sudden plunge into crime and usurpation after his brother's
death was wholly unexpected by the nation. Indeed it was his previous
reputation for loyalty and moderation which made his scandalous _coup
d'etat_ of 1483 possible. No prince with a sinister reputation would
have had the chance of executing the series of crimes which placed him
on the throne. But when Richard declared that he was the victim of
plots and intrigues, and was striking down his enemies only to defend
his own life and honour, he was for some time believed.
Gloucester proclaims himself protector.
At the moment of King Edward's death his elder son by Elizabeth
Woodville, Edward, prince of Wales, was twelve; his younger son Richard,
duke of York, was nine. It was clear that there would be a long
minority, and that the only possible claimants for the regency were the
queen and Richard of Gloucester. Elizabeth was personally unpopular, and
the rapacity and insolence of her family was well known. Hence when
Richard of Gloucester seized on the person of the young king, and
imprisoned Lord Rivers and Sir Richard Grey, the queen's brother and
son, on the pretence that they were conspiring against him, his action
was regarded with equanimity by the people. Nor did the fact that the
duke took the title of "protector and defender of the realm" cause any
surprise. Suspicions only became rife after Richard had seized and
beheaded without any trial, Lord Hastings, the late king's most familiar
friend, and had arrested at the same moment the archbishop of York,
Morton, bishop of Ely, and Lord Stanley, all persons of unimpeachable
loyalty to the house of Edward IV. It was not plausible to accuse such
persons of plotting with the queen to overthrow the protector, and
public opinion began to turn against Gloucester. Nevertheless he went on
recklessly with his design, having already enlisted the support of a
party of the greater peers, who were ready to follow him to any length
of treason. These confidants, the duke of Buckingham, the lords Howard
and Lovel, and a few more, must have known from an early date that he
was aiming at the crown, though it is improbable that they suspected
that his plan involved the murder of the rightful heirs as well as mere
usurpation.
Richard III. crowned.
On the 16th of June, Richard, using the aged archbishop Bourchier as his
tool, got the little duke of York out of his mother's hands, and sent
him to join his brother in the Tower. A few days later, having packed
London with his own armed retainers and those of Buckingham and his
other confidants, he openly put forward his pretensions to the throne.
Edward IV., as he asserted, had been privately contracted to Lady
Eleanor Talbot before he ever met Queen Elizabeth. His children
therefore were bastards, the offspring of a bigamous union. As to the
son and daughter of the duke of Clarence, their blood had been corrupted
by their father's attainder, and they could not be reckoned as heirs to
the crown. He himself, therefore, was the legitimate successor of Edward
IV. This preposterous theory was set forth by Buckingham, first to the
mayor and corporation of London, and next day to an assembly of the
estates of the realm held in St Paul's. Cowed by the show of armed
force, and remembering the fate of Hastings, the two assemblies received
the claim with silence which gave consent. Richard, after a hypocritical
show of reluctance, allowed himself to be saluted as king, and was
crowned on the 6th of July 1483. Before the coronation ceremony he had
issued orders for the execution of the queen's relatives, who had been
in prison since the beginning of May. He paid his adherents lavishly for
their support, making Lord Howard duke of Norfolk, and giving Buckingham
enormous grants of estates and offices.
Murder of the princes.
Having accomplished his _coup d'etat_ Richard started for a royal
progress through the Midlands, and a few days after his departure sent
back secret orders to London for the murder of his two nephews in the
Tower. There is no reason to doubt that they were secretly smothered on
or about the 15th of July by his agent Sir James Tyrrell, or that the
bones found buried under a staircase in the fortress two hundred years
after belonged to the two unhappy lads. But the business was kept dark
at the time, and it was long before any one could assert with certainty
that they were dead or alive. Richard never published any statement as
to their end, though some easy tale of a fever, a conflagration, or an
accident might have served him better than the mere silence that he
employed. For while many persons believed that the princes still
existed there was room for all manner of impostures and false rumours.
Buckingham's rebellion.
The usurper's reign was from the first a troubled one. Less than three
months after his coronation the first insurrection broke out; it was
headed--strangely enough--by the duke of Buckingham, who seems to have
been shocked by the murder of the princes; he must have been one of the
few who had certain information of the crime. He did not take arms in
his own cause, though after the house of York the house of Buckingham
had the best claim to the throne, as representing Thomas of Woodstock,
the youngest son of Edward III. His plan was to unite the causes of York
and Lancaster by wedding the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the
murdered princes, to Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, a young exile who
represented the very doubtful claim of the Beauforts to the Lancastrian
heritage. Henry was the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John,
first duke of Somerset, and the niece of Edmund, second duke, who fell
at St Albans. All her male kinsmen had been exterminated in the Wars of
the Roses.
Execution of Buckingham.
This promising scheme was to be supported by a rising of those Yorkists
who rejected the usurpation of Richard III., and by the landing on the
south coast of Henry of Richmond with a body of Lancastrian exiles and
foreign mercenaries. But good organization was wanting, and chance
fought for the king. A number of scattered risings in the south were put
down by Richard's troops, while Buckingham, who had raised his banner in
Wales, was prevented from bringing aid by a week of extraordinary rains
which made the Severn impassable. Finding that the rest of the plan had
miscarried, Buckingham's retainers melted away from him, and he was
forced to fly. A few days later he was betrayed, handed over to the
king, and beheaded (Nov. 2, 1483). Meanwhile Richmond's little fleet was
dispersed by the same storms that scattered Buckingham's army, and he
was forced to return to Brittany without having landed in England.
Here King Richard's luck ended. Though he called a parliament early in
1484, and made all manner of gracious promises of good governance, he
felt that his position was insecure. The nation was profoundly disgusted
with his unscrupulous policy, and the greater part of the leaders of the
late insurrection had escaped abroad and were weaving new plots. Early
in the spring he lost his only son and heir, Edward, prince of Wales,
and the question of the succession to the crown was opened from a new
point of view. After some hesitation Richard named his nephew John de la
Pole, earl of Lincoln, a son of his sister, as his heir. But he also
bethought him of another and a most repulsive plan for strengthening his
position. His queen, Anne Neville, the daughter of the kingmaker, was on
her death-bed. With indecent haste he began to devise a scheme for
marrying his niece Elizabeth, whose brothers he had murdered but a year
before. Knowledge of this scheme is said to have shortened the life of
the unfortunate Anne, and many did not scruple to say that her husband
had made away with her.
Henry of Richmond lands at Milford.
Battle of Bosworth.
When the queen was dead, and some rumours of the king's intentions got
abroad, the public indignation was so great that Richard's councillors
had to warn him to disavow the projected marriage, if he wished to
retain a single adherent. He yielded, and made public complaint that he
had been slandered--which few believed. Meanwhile the conspirators of
1483 were busy in organizing another plan of invasion. This time it was
successfully carried out, and the earl of Richmond landed at Milford
Haven with many exiles, both Yorkists and Lancastrians, and 1000
mercenaries lent him by the princess regent of France. The Welsh joined
him in great numbers, not forgetting that by his Tudor descent he was
their own kinsman, and when he reached Shrewsbury English adherents also
began to flock in to his banner, for the whole country was seething with
discontent, and Richard III. had but few loyal adherents. When the
rivals met at Bosworth Field (Aug. 22, 1485) the king's army was far the
larger, but the greater part of it was determined not to fight. When
battle was joined some left the field and many joined the pretender.
Richard, however, refused to fly, and was slain, fighting to the last,
along with the duke of Norfolk and a few other of his more desperate
partisans. The slaughter was small, for treason, not the sword, had
settled the day. The battered crown which had fallen from Richard's
helmet was set on the victor's head by Lord Stanley, the chief of the
Yorkist peers who had joined his standard, and his army hailed him by
the new title of Henry VII.
Henry VII.
No monarch of England since William the Conqueror, not excluding Stephen
and Henry IV., could show such a poor title to the throne as the first
of the Tudor kings. His claim to represent the house of Lancaster was of
the weakest--when Henry IV. had assented to the legitimating of his
brothers the Beauforts, he had attached a clause to the act, to provide
that they were given every right save that of counting in the line of
succession to the throne. The true heir to the house of John of Gaunt
should have been sought among the descendants of his eldest legitimate
daughter, not among those of his base-born sons. The earl of Richmond
had been selected by the conspirators as their figure-head mainly
because he was known as a young man of ability, and because he was
unmarried and could therefore take to wife the princess Elizabeth, and
so absorb the Yorkist claim in his own. This had been the essential part
of the bargain, and Henry was ready to carry it out, but he insisted
that he should first be recognized as king in his own right, lest it
might be held that he ruled merely as his destined wife's consort. He
was careful to hold his first parliament and get his title acknowledged
before he married the princess. When he had done so, he had the triple
claim by conquest, by election and by inheritance, safely united. Yet
his position was even then insecure; the vicissitudes of the last thirty
years had shaken the old prestige of the name of king, and a weaker and
less capable man than Henry Tudor might have failed to retain the crown
that he had won. There were plenty of possible pretenders in existence;
the earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had recognized as his heir, was
still alive; the two children of the duke of Clarence might be made the
tools of conspirators; and there was a widespread doubt as to whether
the sons of Edward IV. had actually died in the Tower. The secrecy with
which their uncle had carried out their murder was destined to be a sore
hindrance to his successor.
Early years of the reign.
Insurrections and plots.
Bosworth Field is often treated as the last act of the Wars of the
Roses. This is an error; they were protracted for twelve years after the
accession of Henry VII., and did not really end till the time of
Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter (1497). The position of the
first Tudor king is misconceived if his early years are regarded as a
time of strong governance and well-established order. On the contrary he
was in continual danger, and was striving with all the resources of a
ready and untiring mind to rebuild foundations that were absolutely
rotten. Phenomena like the Cornish revolt (which recalls Cade's
insurrection) and the Yorkshire rising of 1489, which began with the
death of the earl of Northumberland, show that at any moment whole
counties might take arms in sheer lawlessness, or for some local
grievance. Loyalty was such an uncertain thing that the king might call
out great levies yet be forced to doubt whether they would fight for
him--at Stoke Field it seems that a large part of Henry's army
misbehaved, much as that of Richard III. had done at Bosworth. The
demoralization brought about by the evil years between 1453 and 1483
could not be lived down in a day--any sort of treason was possible to
the generation that had seen the career of Warwick and the usurpation of
Gloucester. The survivors of that time were capable of taking arms for
any cause that offered a chance of unreasonable profit, and no one's
loyalty could be trusted. Did not Sir William Stanley, the best paid of
those who betrayed Richard III., afterwards lose his head for a
deliberate plot to betray Henry VII.? The various attempts that were
made to overturn the new dynasty seem contemptible to the historian of
the 20th century. They were not so contemptible at the time, because
England and Ireland were full of adventurers who were ready to back any
cause, and who looked on the king of the moment as no more than a
successful member of their own class--a base-born Welshman who had been
lucky enough to become the figurehead of the movement that had
overturned an unpopular usurper. The organizing spirits of the early
troubles of the reign of Henry VII. were irreconcilable Yorkists who had
suffered by the change of dynasty; but their hopes of success rested
less on their own strength than on the not ill-founded notion that
England would tire of any ruler who had to raise taxes and reward his
partisans. The position bore a curious resemblance to that of the early
years of Henry IV., a king who, like Henry VII., had to vindicate a
doubtful elective title to the throne by miracles of cunning and
activity. The later representative of the house of Lancaster was
fortunate, however, in having less formidable enemies than the earlier;
the power of the baronage had been shaken by the Wars of the Roses no
less than the power of the crown; so many old estates had passed rapidly
from hand to hand, so many old titles were represented by upstarts
destitute of local influence, that the feudal danger had become far
less. Risings like that of the Percies in 1403 were not the things which
the seventh Henry had to fear. He was lucky too in having no adversary
of genius of the type of Owen Glendower. Welsh national spirit indeed
was enlisted on his own side. Yet leaderless seditions and the plots of
obvious impostors sufficed to make his throne tremble, and a ruler less
resolute, less wary, and less unscrupulous might have been overthrown.
Lambert Simnel.
The first of the king's troubles was an abortive rising in the north
riding of Yorkshire, the only district where Richard III. seems to have
enjoyed personal popularity. It was led by Lord Lovel, Richard's
chamberlain and admiral; but the insurgents dispersed when Henry marched
against them with a large force (1486), and Lovel took refuge in
Flanders with Margaret of York, the widow of Charles the Bold of
Burgundy, whose dower towns were the refuge of all English exiles, and
whose coffers were always open to subsidize plots against her niece's
husband. Under the auspices of this rancorous princess the second
conspiracy was hatched in the following year (1487). Its leaders were
Lovel and John, earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had designated as his
heir. But the Yorkist banner was to be raised, not in the name of
Lincoln, but in that of the boy Edward of Clarence, then a prisoner in
the Tower. His absence and captivity might seem a fatal hindrance, but
the conspirators had prepared a "double" who was to take his name till
he could be released. This was a lad named Lambert Simnel, the son of an
Oxford organ-maker, who bore a personal resemblance to the young
captive. The conspirators seem to have argued that Henry VII. would not
proceed to murder the real Edward, but would rather exhibit him to prove
the imposition; if he took the more drastic alternative Lincoln could
fall back on his own claim to the crown.
Battle of Stoke.
In May 1487 Lincoln and Lovel landed in Ireland accompanied by other
exiles and 2000 German mercenaries. The cause of York was popular in the
Pale, and the Anglo-Irish barons seem to have conceived the notion that
Henry VII. was likely to prove too strong and capable a king to suit
their convenience. The invading army was welcomed by almost all the
lords, and the spurious Clarence was crowned at Dublin by the name of
Edward VI. A few weeks later Lincoln had recruited his army with 4000 or
5000 Irish adventurers under Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the earl of
Kildare, and had taken ship for England. He landed in Lancashire, and
pushed forward, hoping to gather the English Yorkists to his aid. But
few had joined him when King Henry brought him to action at Stoke, near
Newark, on the 17th of July. Despite the doubtful conduct of part of the
royal army, and the fierce resistance of the Germans and Irish, the
rebel army was routed. Lincoln and Fitzgerald were slain; Lovel
disappeared in the rout; the young impostor Simnel was taken prisoner.
Henry treated him with politic contempt, and made him a cook boy in his
kitchen. He lived for many years after in the royal household. The Irish
lords were pardoned on renewing their oaths of fealty; the king did not
wish to entangle himself in costly campaigns beyond St George's Channel
till he had made his position in England more stable.
Foreign alliances.
Treaty of Etaples.
The Yorkist cause was crushed for four years, till it was raised again
by Margaret of Burgundy, with an imposture even more preposterous than
that of Lambert Simnel. In the intervening space, however, while Henry
VII. was comparatively undisturbed by domestic rebellion, he found
opportunity for a first tentative experiment at interfering in European
politics. He allied himself with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and
with Maximilian of Austria, who was ruling the Netherlands in behalf of
his young son, Philip, the heir of the Burgundian inheritance, for the
purpose of preventing France from annexing Brittany, the last great fief
of the crown which had not yet been absorbed into the Valois royal
domain. This struggle, the only continental war in which the first of
the Tudors risked his fortunes, was not prosecuted with any great
energy, and came to a necessary end when Anne, duchess of Brittany, in
whose behalf it was being waged, disappointed her allies by marrying
Charles VIII. of her own free will (Dec. 1491). Henry very wisely
proceeded to get out of the war on the best terms possible, and, to the
disgust of Maximilian, sold peace to the French king for 600,000 crowns,
as well as an additional sum representing arrears of the pension which
Louis XI. had been bound to pay to Edward IV. This treaty of Etaples
was, in short, a repetition of Edward's treaty of Picquigny, equally
profitable and less disgraceful, for Maximilian of Austria, whom Henry
thus abandoned, had given more cause of offence than had Charles of
Burgundy in 1475. Domestic malcontents did not scruple to hint that the
king, like his father-in-law before him, had made war on France, not
with any hope of renewing the glories of Crecy or Agincourt, still less
with any design of helping his allies, but purely to get first grants
from his parliament, and then a war indemnity from his enemies. In any
case he was wise to make peace. France was now too strong for England,
and both Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain were selfish and shifty
allies. Moreover, it was known that the one dominating desire of Charles
VIII. was to conquer Italy, and it was clear that his ambitions in that
direction were not likely to prove dangerous to England.
Yorkist plots. Perkin Warbeck.
Cornish rebellion.
In the year of the treaty of Etaples the Yorkist conspiracies began once
more to thicken, and Henry was fortunate to escape with profit from the
French war before his domestic troubles recommenced. Ever since 1483 it
had been rumoured that one or both of the sons of Edward IV. had
escaped, not having been murdered in the Tower. Of this widespread
belief the plotters now took advantage; they held that much more could
be accomplished with such a claim than by using that of the unfortunate
Edward of Clarence, whose chances were so severely handicapped by his
being still the prisoner of Henry VII. The scheme for producing a false
Plantagenet was first renewed in Ireland, where Simnel's imposture had
been so easily taken up a few years before. The tool selected was one
Perkin Warbeck, a handsome youth of seventeen or eighteen, the son of a
citizen of Tournai, who had lived for some time in London, where Perkin
had actually been born. There is a bare possibility that the young
adventurer may have been an illegitimate son of Edward IV.; his likeness
to the late king was much noticed. When he declared himself to be
Richard of York, he obtained some support in Ireland from the earl of
Desmond and other lords; but he did not risk open rebellion till he had
visited Flanders, and had been acknowledged as her undoubted nephew by
Duchess Margaret. Maximilian of Austria also took up his cause, as a
happy means of revenging himself on Henry VII. for the treaty of
Etaples. There can be small doubt that both the duchess and the German
King (Maximilian had succeeded to his father's crown in 1493) were
perfectly well aware that they were aiding a manifest fraud. But they
made much of Perkin, who followed the imperial court for two years,
while his patron was intriguing with English malcontents. The emissaries
from Flanders got many promises of assistance, and a formidable rising
might have taken place had not Henry VII. been well served by his
spies. But in the winter of 1494-1495 the traitors were themselves
betrayed, and a large number of arrests were made, including not only
Lord Fitzwalter and a number of well-known knights of Yorkist families,
but Sir William Stanley, the king's chamberlain, who had been rewarded
with enormous gifts for his good service at Bosworth, and was reckoned
one of the chief supports of the throne. Stanley and several others were
beheaded, the rest hanged or imprisoned. This vigorous action on the
part of the king seems to have cowed all Warbeck's supporters on English
soil. But the pretender nevertheless sailed from Flanders in July 1495
with a following of 2000 exiles and German mercenaries. He attempted to
land at Deal, but his vanguard was destroyed by Kentish levies, and he
drew off and made for Ireland. Suspecting that this would be his goal,
King Henry had been doing his best to strengthen his hold on the Pale,
whither he had sent his capable servant Sir Edward Poynings as lord
deputy. Already before Warbeck's arrival Poynings had arrested the earl
of Kildare, Simnel's old supporter, cowed some of the Irish by military
force, and bought over others by promises of subsidies and pensions. But
his best-remembered achievement was that he had induced the Irish
parliament to pass the ordinances known as "Poynings' Law," by which it
acknowledged that it could pass no legislation which had not been
approved by the king and his council, and agreed that all statutes
passed by the English parliament should be in force in Ireland. That
such terms could be imposed shows the strength of Poynings' arm, and his
vigour was equally evident when Warbeck came ashore in Munster in July
1495. Few joined the impostor save the earl of Desmond, and he was
repulsed from Waterford, and dared not face the army which the lord
deputy put into the field against him. Thereupon, abandoning his Irish
schemes, Warbeck sailed to Scotland, whose young king James IV. had just
been seduced by the emperor Maximilian into declaring war on England. He
promised the Scottish king Berwick and 50,000 crowns in return for the
aid of an army. James took the offer, gave him the hand of his kinswoman
Catherine Gordon, daughter of the earl of Huntly, and took him forth for
a raid into Northumberland (1496). But a pretender backed by Scottish
spears did not appeal to the sympathies of the English borderers. The
expedition fell flat; not a man joined the banner of the white rose, and
James became aware that he had set forth on a fool's errand. But Warbeck
soon found other allies of a most unexpected sort. The heavy taxation
granted by the English parliament for the Scottish war had provoked
discontent and rioting in the south-western counties. In Cornwall
especially the disorders grew to such a pitch that local demagogues
called out several thousand men to resist the tax-collectors, and
finally raised open rebellion, proposing to march on London and compel
the king to dismiss his ministers. These spiritual heirs of Jack Cade
were Flammock, a lawyer of Bodmin, and a farrier named Michael Joseph.
Whether they had any communication with Warbeck it is impossible to say;
there is no proof of such a connexion, but their acts served him well. A
Cornish army marched straight on London, picking up some supporters in
Devon and Somerset on their way, including a discontented baron, Lord
Audley, whom they made their captain.
Battle of Blackheath.
Execution of Warbeck and Edward of Clarence.
So precarious was the hold of Henry VII. on the throne that he was in
great danger from this outbreak of mere local turbulence. The rebels
swept over five counties unopposed, and were only stopped and beaten in
a hard fight on Blackheath, when they had reached the gates of London.
Audley, the farrier and the lawyer were all captured and executed (June
18, 1497). But the crisis was not yet at an end. Warbeck, hearing of the
rising, but not of its suppression, had left Scotland, and appeared in
Devonshire in August. He rallied the wrecks of the west country rebels,
and presently appeared before the gates of Exeter with nearly 8000 men.
But the citizens held out against him, and presently the approach of the
royal army was reported. The pretender led off his horde to meet the
relieving force, but when he reached Taunton he found that his
followers were so dispirited that disaster was certain. Thereupon he
absconded by night, and took sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu. He
offered to confess his imposture if he were promised his life, and the
king accepted the terms. First at Taunton and again at Westminster,
Perkin publicly recited a long narrative of his real parentage, his
frauds and his adventures. He was then consigned to not over strict
confinement in the Tower, and might have fared no worse than Lambert
Simnel if he had possessed his soul in patience. But in the next year he
corrupted his warders, broke out from his prison, and tried to escape
beyond seas. He was captured, but the king again spared his life, though
he was placed for the future in a dungeon "where he could see neither
moon nor sun." Even this did not tame the impostor's mercurial
temperament. In 1499 he again planned an escape, which was to be shared
by another prisoner, the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, earl of
Warwick, whose cell was in the storey above his own. But there were
traitors among the Tower officials whom they suborned to help them, and
the king was warned of the plot. He allowed it to proceed to the verge
of execution, and then arrested both the false and the true Plantagenet.
Evidence of a suspicious character was produced to show that they had
planned rebellion as well as mere escape, and both were put to death
with some of their accomplices. Warbeck deserved all that he reaped, but
the unlucky Clarence's fate estranged many hearts from the king. The
simple and weakly young man, who had spent fifteen of his twenty-five
years in confinement, had, in all probability, done no more than scheme
for an escape from his dungeon. But as the true male heir of the house
of Plantagenet he was too dangerous to be allowed to survive.
Establishment of the Tudor dynasty.
The turbulent portion of the reign of Henry VII. came to an end with
Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter. From that time forward the
Tudor dynasty was no longer in serious danger; there were still some
abortive plots, but none that had any prospect of winning popular
support. The chances of Warbeck and Clarence had vanished long before
they went to the scaffold. The Yorkist claim, after Clarence's death,
might be supposed to have passed to his cousin Edmund, earl of Suffolk,
the younger brother of that John, earl of Lincoln, who had been declared
heir to the crown by Richard III., and had fallen at Stoke field. Fully
conscious of the danger of his position, Suffolk fled to the continent,
and lived for many years as a pensioner of the emperor Maximilian.
Apparently he dabbled in treason; it is at any rate certain that in 1501
King Henry executed some, and imprisoned others, of his relatives and
retainers. But his plots, such as they were, seem to have been futile.
There was no substratum of popular discontent left in England on which a
dangerous insurrection might be built up. It was to be forty years
before another outbreak of turbulence against the crown was to break
forth.
VI. THE TUDOR DESPOTISM AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE REFORMATION
(1497-1528)
Commercial treaties.
The last twelve years of the reign of Henry VII. present in most
respects a complete contrast to the earlier period, 1485-1497. There
were no more rebellions, and--as we have already seen--no more plots
that caused any serious danger. Nor did the king indulge his unruly
subjects in foreign wars, though he was constantly engaged in
negotiations with France, Scotland, Spain and the emperor, which from
time to time took awkward turns. But Henry was determined to win all
that he could by diplomacy, and not by force of arms. His cautious, but
often unscrupulous, dealings with the rival continental powers had two
main ends: the first was to keep his own position safe by playing off
France against the Empire and Spain; the second was to get commercial
advantages by dangling his alliance before each power in turn. Flanders
was still the greatest customer of England, and it was therefore
necessary above all things to keep on good terms with the archduke
Philip, the son of Maximilian, who on coming of age had taken over the
rule of the Netherlands from his father. The king's great triumphs were
the conclusion of the _Intercursus Magnus_ of 1496 and the _Intercursus
Malus_ (so called by the Flemings, not by the English) of 1506. The
former provided for a renewal of the old commercial alliance with the
house of Burgundy, on the same terms under which it had existed in the
time of Edward IV.; the rupture which had taken place during the years
when Maximilian was backing Perkin Warbeck had been equally injurious to
both parties. The _Malus Intercursus_ on the other hand gave England
some privileges which she had not before enjoyed--exemption from local
tolls in Antwerp and Holland, and a licence for English merchants to
sell cloth retail as well as wholesale--a concession which hit the
Netherland small traders and middlemen very hard. Another great
commercial advantage secured by Henry VII. for his subjects was an
increased share of the trade to the Scandinavian countries. The old
treaties of Edward IV. with the Hanseatic League had left the Germans
still in control of the northern seas. Nearly all the Baltic goods, and
most of those from Denmark and Norway, had been reaching London or Hull
in foreign bottoms. Henry allied himself with John of Denmark, who was
chafing under the monopoly of the Hansa, and obtained the most ample
grants of free trade in his realms. The Germans murmured, but the
English shipping in eastern and northern waters continued to multiply.
Much the same policy was pursued in the Mediterranean. Southern goods
hitherto had come to Southampton or Sandwich invariably in Venetian
carracks, which took back in return English wool and metals. Henry
concluded a treaty with Florence, by which that republic undertook to
receive his ships in its harbours and to allow them to purchase all
eastern goods that they might require. From this time forward the
Venetian monopoly ceased, and the visits of English merchant vessels to
the Mediterranean became frequent and regular.
English navigators.
Nor was it in dealing with old lines of trade alone that Henry Tudor
showed himself the watchful guardian of the interests of his subjects.
He must take his share of credit for the encouragement of the
exploration of the seas of the Far West. The British traders had already
pushed far into the Atlantic before Columbus discovered America; fired
by the success of the great navigator they continued their adventures,
hoping like him to discover a short "north-west passage" to Cathay and
Japan. With a charter from the king giving him leave to set up the
English banner on all the lands he might discover, the Bristol Genoese
trader John Cabot successfully passed the great sea in 1497, and
discovered Newfoundland and its rich fishing stations. Henry rewarded
him with a pension of L20 a year, and encouraged him to further
exploration, in which he discovered all the American coastline from
Labrador to the mouth of the Delaware--a great heritage for England, but
one not destined to be taken up for colonization till more than a
century had passed.
Foreign policy of Henry VII.
Henry's services to English commerce were undoubtedly of far more
importance to the nation than all the tortuous details of his foreign
policy. His chicanery need not, however, be censured over much, for the
princes with whom he had to deal, and notably Ferdinand and Maximilian,
were as insincere and selfish as himself. Few diplomatic hagglings have
been so long and so sordid as that between England and Spain over the
marriage treaty which gave the hand of Catherine of Aragon first to
Henry's eldest son Arthur, and then, on his premature death in 1502, to
his second son Henry. The English king no doubt imagined that he had
secured a good bargain, as he had kept the princess's dowry, and yet
never gave Ferdinand any practical assistance in war or peace. It is
interesting to find that he had for some time at the end of his reign a
second Spanish marriage in view; his wife Elizabeth of York having died
in 1503, he seriously proposed himself as a suitor for Joanna of
Castile, the elder sister of Catherine, and the widow of the archduke
Philip, though she was known to be insane. Apparently he hoped thereby
to gain vantage ground for an interference in Spanish politics, which
would have been most offensive to Ferdinand. Nothing came of the
project, which contrasts strangely with the greater part of Henry's
sober and cautious schemes.
Marriage of James IV. of Scotland and Margaret Tudor.
On the other hand a third project of marriage alliance which Henry
carried out in 1503 was destined to be consummated, and to have
momentous, though long-deferred, results. This was the giving of the
hand of his daughter Margaret to James IV. of Scotland. Thereby he
bought quiet on the Border and alliance with Scotland for no more than
some ten years. But--as it chanced--the issue of this alliance was
destined to unite the English and the Scottish crowns, when the male
line of the Tudors died out, and Henry, quite unintentionally, had his
share in bringing about the consummation, by peaceful means, of that end
which Edward I. had sought for so long to win by the strong hand.
Character of Henry's internal rule.
All the foreign politics of the reign of Henry VII. have small
importance compared with his work within the realm. The true monument of
his ability was that he left England tamed and orderly, with an obedient
people and a full exchequer, though he had taken it over wellnigh in a
state of anarchy. The mere suppression of insurrections like those of
Simnel and Warbeck was a small part of his task. The harder part was to
recreate a spirit of order and subordination among a nation accustomed
to long civil strife. His instruments were ministers of ability chosen
from the clergy and the gentry--he seems to have been equally averse to
trusting the baronage at the one end of the social scale, or mere
upstarts at the other, and it is notable that no one during his reign
can be called a court favourite. The best-known names among his servants
were his great chancellor, Archbishop Morton, Foxe, bishop of
Winchester, Sir Reginald Bray, and the lawyers Empson and Dudley. These
two last bore the brunt of the unpopularity of the financial policy of
the king during the latter half of his reign, when the vice of avarice
seems to have grown upon him beyond all reason. But Henry was such a
hard-working monarch, and so familiar with all the details of
administration, that his ministers cannot be said to have had any
independent authority, or to have directed their master's course of
action.
The Star Chamber.
The machinery employed by the first of the Tudors for the suppression of
domestic disorder is well known. The most important item added by him to
the administrative machinery of the realm was the famous Star Chamber,
which was licensed by the parliament of 1487. It consisted of a small
committee of ministers, privy councillors and judges, which sat to deal
with offences that seemed to lie outside the scope of the common law, or
more frequently with the misdoings of men who were so powerful that the
local courts could not be trusted to execute justice upon them, such as
great landowners, sheriffs and other royal officials, or turbulent
individuals who were the terror of their native districts. The need for
a strong central court directly inspired by the king, which could
administer justice without respect of persons, was so great, that the
constitutional danger of establishing an autocratic judicial committee,
untrammelled by the ordinary rules of law, escaped notice at the time.
It was not till much later that the nation came to look upon the Star
Chamber as the special engine of royal tyranny and to loathe its name.
In 1500 it was for the common profit of the realm that there should
exist such a court, which could reduce even the most powerful offender
to order.
Suppression of livery and maintenance.
One of the most notable parts of the king's policy was his
long-continued and successful assault on the abuse of "livery and
maintenance," which had been at its height during the Wars of the Roses.
We have seen the part which it had taken in strengthening the influence
of those who were already too powerful, and weakening the ordinary
operation of the law. Henry put it down with a strong hand, forbidding
all liveries entirely, save for the mere domestic retainers of each
magnate. His determination to end the system was well shown by the fact
that he heavily fined even the earl of Oxford, the companion of his
exile, the victor of Bosworth, and the most notoriously loyal peer in
the realm, for an ostentatious violation of the statute. Where Oxford
was punished, no less favoured person could hope to escape. By the end
of the reign the little hosts of badged adherents which had formed the
nucleus for the armies of the Wars of the Roses had ceased to exist.
Personal rule.
Edward IV., as has been already remarked, had many of the opportunities
of the autocrat, if only he had cared to use them; but his sloth and
self-indulgence stood in the way. Henry VII., the most laborious and
systematic of men, turned them to account. He formed his personal
opinion on every problem of administration and intervened himself in
every detail. In many respects he was his own prime minister, and
nothing was done without his knowledge and consent. A consistent policy
may be detected in all his acts--that of gathering all the machinery of
government into his own hands. Under the later Plantagenets and the
Lancastrian kings the great check on the power of the crown had been
that financial difficulties were continually compelling the sovereign to
summon parliaments. The estates had interfered perpetually in all the
details of governance, by means of the power of the purse. Edward IV.,
first among English sovereigns, had been able to dispense with
parliaments for periods of many years, because he did not need their
grants save at long intervals. Henry was in the same position; by strict
economy, by the use of foreign subsidies, by the automatic growth of his
revenues during a time of peace and returning prosperity, by
confiscation and forfeitures, he built himself up a financial position
which rendered it unnecessary for him to make frequent appeals to
parliament. Not the least fertile of his expedients was that regular
exploitation of the law as a source of revenue, which had already been
seen in the time of his father-in-law. This part of Henry's policy is
connected with the name of his two extortionate "fiscal judges" Empson
and Dudley, who "turned law and justice into rapine" by their minute
inquisition into all technical breaches of legality, and the nice
fashion in which they adapted the fine to the wealth of the
misdemeanant, without any reference to his moral guilt or any regard for
extenuating circumstances. The king must take the responsibility for
their unjust doings; it was his coffers which mainly profited by their
chicane. In his later years he fell into the vice of hoarding money for
its own sake; so necessary was it to his policy that he should be free,
as far as possible, from the need for applying to parliament for money,
that he became morbidly anxious to have great hoards in readiness for
any possible day of financial stress. At his death he is said to have
had L1,800,000 in hard cash laid by. Hence it is not strange to find
that he was able to dispense with parliaments in a fashion that would
have seemed incredible to a 14th-century king. In his whole reign he
only asked them five times for grants of taxation, and three of the five
requests were made during the first seven years of his reign. In the
eyes of many men parliament lost the main reason for its existence when
it ceased to be the habitual provider of funds for the ordinary expenses
of the realm. Those who had a better conception of its proper functions
could see that it had at any rate been stripped of its chief power when
the king no longer required its subsidies. There are traces of a want of
public interest in its proceedings, very different from the anxiety with
which they used to be followed in Plantagenet and Lancastrian times.
Legislation, which only incidentally affects him, is very much less
exciting to the ordinary citizen than taxation, which aims directly at
his pocket. It is at any rate clear that during the latter years of his
reign, when the time of impostures and rebellions had ended, Henry was
able to dispense with parliaments to a great extent, and incurred no
unpopularity by doing so. Indeed he was accepted by the English people
as the benefactor who had delivered them from anarchy; and if they
murmured at his love of hoarding, and cursed his inquisitors Empson and
Dudley, they had no wish to change the Tudor rule, and were far from
regarding the times of the "Lancastrian experiment" as a lost golden
age. The present king might be unscrupulous and avaricious, but he was
cautious, intelligent and economical; no one would have wished to
recall the regime of that "crowned saint" Henry VI.
Henry VIII.
Nevertheless when the first of the Tudors died, on the 21st of April
1509, there were few who regretted him. He was not a monarch to rouse
enthusiasm, while much was expected from his brilliant, clever and
handsome son Henry VIII., whose magnificent presence and manly vigour
recalled the early prime of Edward IV. Some years later England realized
that its new king had inherited not only the physical beauty and
strength of his grandfather, but also every one of his faults, with the
sole exception of his tendency to sloth. Henry VIII. indeed may be said,
to sum up his character in brief, to have combined his father's brains
with his grandfather's passions. Edward IV. was selfish and cruel, but
failed to become a tyrant because he lacked the energy for continuous
work. Henry VII. was unscrupulous and untiring, but so cautious and wary
that he avoided violent action and dangerous risks. Their descendant had
neither Edward's sloth nor Henry's moderation; he was capable of going
to almost any lengths in pursuit of the gratification of his ambition,
his passions, his resentment or his simple love of self-assertion. Yet,
however far he might go on the road to tyranny, Henry had sufficient
cunning, versatility and power of cool reflection, to know precisely
when he had reached the edge of the impossible. He had his father's
faculty for gauging public opinion, and estimating dangers, and though
his more venturous temperament led him to press on far beyond the point
at which the seventh Henry would have halted, he always stopped short on
the hither side of the gulf. It was the most marvellous proof of his
ability that he died on his throne after nearly forty years of
autocratic rule, during which he had roused more enmities and done more
to change the face of the realm than any of the kings that were before
him.
But it was long before the nation could estimate all the features of the
magnificent but sinister figure which was to dominate England from 1509
to 1547. At his accession Henry VIII. was only eighteen years of age,
and, if his character was already formed, it was only the attractive
side of it that was yet visible. His personal beauty, his keen
intelligence, his scholarship, his love of music and the arts, his
kingly ambition, were all obvious enough. His selfishness, his cruelty,
his ingratitude, his fierce hatred of criticism and opposition, his
sensuality, had yet to be discovered by his subjects. A suspicious
observer might have detected something ominous in the first act of his
reign--the arrest and attainder of his father's unpopular ministers,
Empson and Dudley, whose heads he flung to the people in order to win a
moment's applause. Whatever their faults, they had served the house of
Tudor well, and it was a grotesque perversion of justice to send them to
the scaffold on a charge of high treason. A similar piece of cruelty was
the execution, some time later, of the earl of Suffolk, who had been
languishing long years in the Tower; he was destroyed not for any new
plots, but simply for his Yorkist descent. But in Henry's earlier years
such acts were still unusual; it was not till he had grown older, and
had learnt how much the nation would endure, that judicial murder became
part of his established policy.
Continental projects of Henry VIII.
Treaty of Etaples.
Henry's first outburst of self-assertion took the form of reversing his
father's thrifty and peaceful policy, by plunging into the midst of the
continental wars from which England had been held back by his cautious
parent. The adventure was wholly unnecessary, and also unprofitable. But
while France was engaged in the "Holy War" against the pope, Venice, the
emperor, and Ferdinand of Spain, Henry renewed the old claims of the
Plantagenets, and hoped, if not to win back the position of Edward III.,
at least to recover the duchy of Aquitaine, or some parts of it. He lent
an army to Ferdinand for the invasion of Gascony, and landed himself at
Calais with 25,000 men, to beat up the northern border of France. Little
good came of his efforts. The Spanish king gave no assistance, and the
northern campaign, though it included the brilliant battle of the Spurs
(August 16th, 1513), accomplished nothing more than the capture of
Tournai and Therouanne. It was soon borne in upon King Henry that
France, even when engaged with other enemies, was too strong to be
overrun in the old style. Moreover, his allies were giving him no aid,
though they had eagerly accepted his great subsidies. With a sudden
revulsion of feeling Henry offered peace to France, which King Louis
XII. gladly bought, agreeing to renew the old pension or tribute that
Henry VII. had received by the treaty of Etaples. Their reconciliation
and alliance were sealed by the marriage of the French king to Henry's
favourite sister Mary, who was the bridegroom's junior by more than
thirty years. Their wedlock and the Anglo-French alliance lasted only
till the next year, when Louis died, and Mary secretly espoused an old
admirer, Charles Brandon, afterwards duke of Suffolk, King Henry's
greatest friend and confidant.
War with Scotland. Battle of Flodden.
While the French war was still in progress there had been heavy fighting
on the Scottish border. James IV., reverting to the traditionary policy
of his ancestors, had taken the opportunity of attacking England while
her king and his army were overseas. He suffered a disaster which
recalls that of David II. at Neville's Cross--a fight which had taken
place under precisely similar political conditions. After taking a few
Northumbrian castles, James was brought to action at Flodden Field by
the earl of Surrey (September 9th, 1513). After a desperate fight
lasting the greater part of a day, the Scots were outmanoeuvred and
surrounded. James IV.--who had refused to quit the field--was slain in
the forefront of the battle, with the greater part of his nobles; with
him fell also some 10,000 or 12,000 of his men. Scotland, with her
military power brought low, and an infant king on the throne, was a
negligible quantity in international politics for some years. The queen
dowager, Margaret Tudor, aided by a party that favoured peace and
alliance with England, was strong enough to balance the faction under
the duke of Albany which wished for perpetual war and asked for aid from
France.
Thomas Wolsey.
With the peace of 1514 ended the first period of King Henry's reign. He
was now no longer a boy, but a man of twenty-three, with his character
fully developed; he had gradually got rid of his father's old
councillors, and had chosen for himself a minister as ambitious and
energetic as himself, the celebrated Thomas Wolsey, whom he had just
made archbishop of York, and who obtained the rank of cardinal from the
pope in the succeeding year. Wolsey was the last of the great clerical
ministers of the middle ages, and by no means the worst. Like so many of
his predecessors he had risen from the lower middle classes, through the
royal road of the church; he had served Henry VII.'s old councillor
Foxe, bishop of Winchester, as secretary, and from his household had
passed into that of his master. He had been an admirable servant to
both, full of zeal, intelligence and energy, and not too much burdened
with scruples. The young king found in him an instrument well fitted to
his hand, a man fearless, ingenious, and devoted to the furtherance of
the power of the crown, by which alone he had reached his present
position of authority. For fourteen years he was his master's chief
minister--the person responsible in the nation's eyes for all the more
unpopular assertions of the royal prerogative, and for all the heavy
taxation and despotic acts which Henry's policy required. It mattered
little to Henry that the cardinal was arrogant, tactless and
ostentatious; indeed it suited his purpose that Wolsey should be saddled
by public opinion with all the blame that ought to have been laid on his
own shoulders. It was convenient that the old nobility should detest the
upstart, and that the commons should imagine him to be the person
responsible for the demands for money required for the royal wars. As
long as his minister served his purposes and could execute his behests
Henry gave him a free hand, and supported him against all his enemies.
It was believed at the time, and is still sometimes maintained by
historians, that Wolsey laid down schemes of policy and persuaded his
master to adopt them; but the truth would appear to be that Henry was in
no wise dominated by the cardinal, but imposed on him his own wishes,
merely leaving matters of detail to be settled by his minister. Things
indifferent might be trusted to him, but the main lines of English
diplomacy and foreign policy show rather the influence of the king's
personal desires of the moment than that of a statesman seeking national
ends.
It has often been alleged that Henry, under the guidance of Wolsey,
followed a consistent scheme for aggrandizing England, by making her the
state which kept the balance of power of Europe in her hands. And it is
pointed out that during the years of the cardinal's ascendancy the
alliance of England was sought in turn by the great princes of the
continent, and proved the make-weight in the scales. This is but a
superficial view of the situation. Henry, if much courted, was much
deceived by his contemporaries. They borrowed his money and his armies,
but fed him with vain promises and illusory treaties. He and his
minister were alternately gulled by France and by the emperor, and the
net result of all their activity was bankruptcy and discontent at home
and ever-frustrated hopes abroad. It is hard to build up a reputation
for statecraft for either Henry or Wolsey on the sum total of English
political achievement during their collaboration.
Henry VIII. and the rivalry of Francis I. and Charles V.
Failure of Henry's diplomacy.
During the first few years of the cardinal's ascendancy the elder race
of European sovereigns, the kings with whom Henry VII. had been wont to
haggle, disappeared one after the other. Louis of France died in 1515,
Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the emperor Maximilian--the last survivor
of his generation--in 1519. Louis was succeeded by the active, warlike
and shifty Francis I.; the heritage of both Ferdinand and
Maximilian--his maternal and paternal grandfathers--fell to Charles of
Habsburg, who already possessed the Netherlands in his father's right
and Castile in that of his mother. The enmity of the house of Valois and
the house of Habsburg, which had first appeared in the wars of Charles
VIII. and Maximilian, took a far more bitter shape under Francis I. and
Charles V., two young princes who were rivals from their youth. Their
wars were almost perpetual, their peaces never honestly carried out.
Their powers were very equally balanced; if Charles owned broader lands
than Francis, they were more scattered and in some cases less loyal. The
solid and wealthy realm of France proved able to make head against Spain
and the Netherlands, even when they were backed by the emperor's German
vassals. Charles was also distracted by many stabs in the back from the
Ottoman Turks, who were just beginning their attack on Christendom along
the line of the Danube. To each of the combatants it seemed that the
English alliance would turn the scale in his own favour. Henry was much
courted, and wooed with promises of lands to be won from the other side
by his ally of the moment. But neither Charles nor Francis wished him to
be a real gainer, and he himself was a most untrustworthy friend, for he
was quite ready to turn against his ally if he seemed to be growing too
powerful, and threatened to dominate all Europe; the complete success of
either party would mean that England would sink once more into a
second-rate power. How faithless and insincere was Henry's policy may be
gauged from the fact that in 1520, after all the pageantry of the "Field
of the Cloth of Gold" and his vows of undying friendship for Francis, he
met Charles a few weeks later at Gravelines, and concluded with him a
treaty which pledged England to a defensive alliance against the king's
"good brother" of France. Such things happened not once nor twice during
the years of Wolsey's ministry. It was hardly to be wondered at,
therefore, if Henry's allies regularly endeavoured to cheat him out of
his share of their joint profits. What use was there in rewarding a
friend who might become an enemy to-morrow? The greatest deception of
all was in 1522, when Charles V., who had made the extraordinary promise
that he would get Wolsey made pope, and lend Henry an army to conquer
northern France, failed to redeem his word in both respects. He caused
his own old tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, to be crowned with the papal
tiara, and left the English to invade Picardy entirely unassisted. But
this was only one of many such disappointments.
Beginnings of parliamentary resistance.
Execution of the duke of Buckingham.
The result of some twelve years of abortive alliances and ill-kept
treaties was that Henry had obtained no single one of the advantages
which he had coveted, and that he had lavished untold wealth and many
English lives upon phantom schemes which crumbled between his fingers.
His subjects had already begun to murmur; the early parliaments of his
reign had been passive and complaisant; but by 1523 the Commons had been
goaded into resistance. They granted only half the subsidies asked from
them, pleading that three summers more of such taxation as the cardinal
demanded for his master would leave the realm drained of its last penny,
and reduced to fall back on primitive forms of barter, "clothes for
victuals and bread for cheese," out of mere want of coin. Fortunately
for the king his subjects laid all the blame upon his mouthpiece the
cardinal, instead of placing it where it was due. On Wolsey's back also
was saddled the most iniquitous of Henry's acts of tyranny against
individuals--the judicial murder of the duke of Buckingham, the highest
head among the English nobility. For some hasty words, amplified by the
doubtful evidence of treacherous retainers, together with a foolish
charge of dabbling with astrologers, the heir of the royal line of
Thomas of Woodstock had been tried and executed with scandalous haste.
His only real crime was that, commenting on the lack of male heirs to
the crown--for after many years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon
Henry's sole issue was one sickly daughter--he had been foolish enough
to remark that if anything should happen to the king he himself was
close in succession to the crown. The cardinal bore the blame, because
he and Buckingham had notoriously disliked each other; but the deed had
really been of the king's own contriving. He was roused to implacable
wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the
succession question.
Question of the king's divorce.
In the later years of Wolsey's ascendancy, nevertheless, that same
question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry's own mind
it was never long absent; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing
tired of his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had
few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid.
Somewhere about the end of 1526 those who were in the king's intimate
confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce--a thing
not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the
emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But
Henry's doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had
become enamoured of another lady--the beautiful, ambitious and cunning
Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of
becoming merely the king's mistress, but aspired to be his consort.
England and the Reformation.
The question of the king's divorce soon became inextricably confused
with another problem, whose first beginnings go back to a slightly
earlier date. What was to be the attitude of England towards the
Reformation? It was now nearly ten years since Martin Luther had posted
up his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and since he had
testified to his faith before the diet of Worms. All Germany was now
convulsed with the first throes of the revolt against the papacy, and
the echoes of the new theological disputes were being heard in England.
King Henry himself in 1521 had deigned to write an abusive pamphlet
against Luther, for which he had been awarded the magnificent title of
_Fidei Defensor_ by that cultured sceptic Pope Leo X. About the same
time we begin to read of orders issued by the bishops for the discovery
and burning of all Lutheran books--a clear sign that they were reaching
England in appreciable quantities. Hitherto it had been only the works
of Wycliffe that had merited this attention on the part of inquisitors.
In the Wycliffite remnant, often persecuted but never exterminated,
there already existed in England the nucleus of a Protestant party. All
through the reign of Henry VII. and the early years of Henry VIII. the
intermittent burning of "heretics," and their far more frequent
recantations, had borne witness to the fact that the sect still
lingered on. The Wycliffites were a feeble folk, compelled to
subterraneous ways, and destitute of learned leaders or powerful
supporters. But they survived to see Luther's day, and to merge
themselves in one body with the first English travelling scholars and
merchants who brought back from the continent the doctrines of the
German Reformation. The origins of a Protestant party, who were not mere
Wycliffites, but had been first interested in dogmatic controversy by
coming upon the works of Luther, can be traced back to the year 1521 and
to the university of Cambridge. There a knot of scholars, some of whom
were to perish early at the stake, while others were destined to become
the leaders of the English Reformation, came together and encouraged
each other to test the received doctrines of contemporary orthodoxy by
searching the Scriptures and the works of the Fathers. The sect spread
in a few years to London, Oxford and other centres of intellectual life,
but for many years its followers were not numerous; like the old
Lollardy, Protestantism took root only in certain places and among
certain classes--notably the lesser clergy and the merchants of the
great towns.
King Henry and those who wished to please him professed as great a
hatred and contempt for the new purveyors of German doctrines as for the
belated disciples of Wycliffe. But there was another movement, whose
origins went back for many centuries, which they were far from
discouraging, and were prepared to utilize when it suited their
convenience. This was the purely political feeling against the tyranny
of the papacy, and the abuses of the national church, which in early
ages had given supporters to William the Conqueror and Henry II., which
had dictated the statutes of Mortmain and of Praemunire. Little had been
heard of the old anti-clerical party in England since the time of Henry
IV.; it had apparently been identified in the eyes of the orthodox with
that Lollardy with which it had for a time allied itself, and had shared
in its discredit. But it had always continued to exist, and in the early
years of Henry VIII. had been showing unmistakable signs of vitality.
The papacy of the Renaissance was a fair mark for criticism. It was not
hard to attack the system under which Rodrigo Borgia wore the tiara,
while Girolamo Savonarola went to the stake; or in which Julius II.
exploited the name of Christianity to serve his territorial policy in
Italy, and Leo X. hawked his indulgences round Europe to raise funds
which would enable him to gratify his artistic tastes. At no period had
the official hierarchy of the Western Church been more out of touch with
common righteousness and piety. Moreover, they were sinning under the
eyes of a laity which was far more intelligent and educated, more able
to think and judge for itself, less the slave of immemorial tradition,
than the old public of the middle ages. In Italy the Renaissance might
be purely concerned with things intellectual or artistic, and seem to
have little or no touch with things moral. Beyond the Alps it was
otherwise; among the Teutonic nations at least the revolt against the
scholastic philosophy, the rout of the obscurantists, the eager pursuit
of Hellenic culture, had a religious aspect. The same generation which
refused to take thrice-translated and thrice-garbled screeds from
Aristotle as the sum of human knowledge, and went back to the original
Greek, was also studying the Old and New Testaments in their original
tongues, and drawing from them conclusions as unfavourable to the
intelligence as to the scholarship of the orthodox medieval divines.
Such a discovery as that which showed that the "False Decretals," on
which so much of the power of the papacy rested, were mere 9th-century
forgeries struck deep at the roots of the whole traditional relation
between church and state.
The first English scholars of the Renaissance, like Erasmus on the
continent, did not see the logical outcome of their own discoveries, nor
realize that the campaign against obscurantism would develop into a
campaign against Roman orthodoxy. Sir Thomas More, the greatest of them,
was actually driven into reaction by the violence of Protestant
controversialists, and the fear that the new doctrines would rend the
church in twain. He became himself a persecutor, and a writer of abusive
pamphlets unworthy of the author of the _Utopia_. But to the younger
generation the irreconcilability of modern scholarship and medieval
formulae of faith became more and more evident. One after another all
the cardinal doctrines were challenged by writers who were generally
acute, and almost invariably vituperative. For the controversies of the
Reformation were conducted by both sides, from kings and prelates down
to gutter pamphleteers, in language of the most unseemly violence.
But, as has been already said, the scholars and theologians had less
influence in the beginning of the English Reformation than the mere lay
politicians, whose anti-clerical tendencies chanced to fit in with King
Henry's convenience when he quarrelled with the papacy. It is well to
note that the first attacks of parliament on the church date back to two
years before Luther published his famous theses. The contention began in
1515 with the fierce assault by the Commons on the old abuse of benefit
of clergy, and the immunity of clerical criminals from due punishment
for secular crimes--a question as old as the times of Henry II. and
Becket. But the discussion spread in later years from this particular
point into a general criticism of the church and its relations to the
state, embracing local grievances as well as the questions which turned
on the dealings of the papacy with the crown. The old complaints which
had been raised against the Church of England in the days of Edward I.
or Richard II. had lost none of their force in 1526. The higher clergy
were more than ever immersed in affairs of state, "Caesarean" as
Wycliffe would have called them. It was only necessary to point to the
great cardinal himself, and to ask how far his spiritual duties at York
were properly discharged while he was acting as the king's prime
minister. The cases of Foxe and Morton were much the same; the former
passed for a well-meaning man, yet had been practically absent from his
diocese for twenty years. Pluralism, nepotism, simony and all the other
ancient abuses were more rampant than ever. The monasteries had ceased
to be even the nurseries of literature; their chronicles had run dry,
and secular priests or laymen had taken up the pens that the monks had
dropped. They were wealthier than ever, yet did little to justify their
existence; indeed the spirit of the age was so much set against them
that they found it hard to keep up the numbers of their inmates.
Truculent pamphleteers like Simon Fish, who wrote _Beggars'
Supplication_, were already demanding "that these sturdy boobies should
be set abroad into the world, to get wives of their own, and earn their
living by the sweat of their brows, according to the commandment of God;
so might the king be better obeyed, matrimony be better kept, the gospel
better preached, and none should rob the poor of his alms." It must be
added that monastic scandals were not rare; though the majority of the
houses were decently ordered, yet the unexceptionable testimony of
archiepiscopal and episcopal visitations shows that in the years just
before the Reformation there was a certain number of them where chastity
of life and honesty of administration were equally unknown. But above
all things the church was being criticized as an _imperium in imperio_,
a privileged body not amenable to ordinary jurisdiction, and subservient
to a foreign lord--the pope. And it was true that, much as English
churchmen might grumble at papal exactions, they were generally ready as
a body to support the pope against the crown; the traditions of the
medieval church made it impossible for them to do otherwise. That there
would in any case have been a new outbreak of anti-clerical and
anti-papal agitation in England, under the influence of the Protestant
impulse started by Luther in Germany, is certain. But two special causes
gave its particular colour to the opening of the English Reformation;
the one was that the king fell out with the papacy on the question of
his divorce. The other was that the nation at this moment was chafing
bitterly against a clerical minister, whom it (very unjustly) made
responsible for the exorbitant taxation which it was enduring, in
consequence of the king's useless and unsuccessful foreign wars. The
irony of the situation lay in the facts that Henry was, so far as
dogmatic views were concerned, a perfectly orthodox prince; he had a
considerable knowledge of the old theological literature, as he had
shown in his pamphlet against Luther, and though he was ready to repress
clerical immunities and privileges that were inconvenient to the crown,
he had no sympathy whatever with the doctrinal side of the new revolt
against the system of the medieval church. Moreover, Wolsey, whose fall
was to synchronize with the commencement of the reforming movement, was
if anything more in sympathy with change than was his master. He was an
enlightened patron of the new learning, and was inclined to take
vigorous measures in hand for the pruning away of the abuses of the
church. It is significant that his great college at Oxford--"Cardinal's
College" as he designed to call it, "Christ Church" as it is named
to-day--was endowed with the revenues of some score of small monasteries
which he had suppressed on the ground that they were useless or
ill-conducted. His master turned the lesson to account a few years
later; but Henry's wholesale destruction of religious houses was carried
out not in the interests of learning, but mainly in those of the royal
exchequer. (C. W. C. O.)