Fall of Wolsey.
Wolsey did not fall through any opposition to reform; nor was he opposed
to the idea of a divorce. Indeed, both in France and Spain he was
credited with the authorship of the project. But he differed from Henry
on the question of Catherine's successor. Wolsey desired a French
marriage to consummate the breach upon which he was now bent with the
emperor; and war, in fact, was precipitated with Spain in 1528. This is
said to have been done without Henry's consent; he certainly wished to
avoid war with Charles V., and peace was made after six months of
passive hostility. Nor did Henry want a French princess; his affections
were fixed for the time on Anne Boleyn, and she was the hope of the
anti-clerical party. The crisis was brought to a head by the failure of
Wolsey's plan to obtain a divorce. Originally it had been suggested that
the ecclesiastical courts in England were competent without recourse to
Rome. Wolsey deprecated this procedure, and application was made to
Clement VII. Wolsey relied upon his French and Italian allies to exert
the necessary powers of persuasion; and in 1528 a French army crossed
the Alps, marched through Italy and threatened to drive Charles V. out
of Naples. Clement was in a position to listen to Henry's prayer; and
Campeggio was commissioned with Wolsey to hear the suit and grant the
divorce.
Question of the divorce.
No sooner had Campeggio started than the fortunes of war changed. The
French were driven out of Naples, and the Imperialists again dominated
Rome; the Church, wrote Clement to Campeggio, was completely in the
power of Charles V. The cardinal, therefore, must on no account
pronounce against Charles's aunt; if he could not persuade Henry and
Catherine to agree on a mutual separation, he must simply pass the time
and come to no conclusion. Hence it was June 1529 before the court got
to work at all, and then its proceedings were only preparatory to an
adjournment and revocation of the suit to Rome in August. Clement VII.
had, in his own words, made up his mind to live and die an imperialist;
the last remnants of the French army in Italy had been routed, and the
pope had perforce concluded the treaty of Barcelona, a sort of family
compact between himself and Charles, whereby he undertook to protect
Charles's aunt, and the emperor to support the Medici dynasty in
Florence. This peace was amplified at the treaty of Cambrai (August
1529) into a general European pacification in which England had no
voice. So far had it fallen since 1521.
In every direction Wolsey had failed, and his failure involved the
triumph of the forces which he had opposed. The fate of the papal system
in England was bound up with his personal fortunes. It was he and he
alone who had kept parliament at arm's length and the enemies of the
church at bay. He had interested the king, and to some extent the
nation, in a spirited foreign policy, had diverted their attention from
domestic questions, and had staved off that parliamentary attack on the
church which had been threatened fifteen years before. Now he was
doomed, and both Campeggio and Cardinal du Bellay were able to send
their governments accurate outlines of the future policy of Henry VIII.
The church was to be robbed of its wealth, its power and its privileges,
and the papal jurisdiction was to be abolished. In October Wolsey was
deprived of the great seal, and surrendered many of his ecclesiastical
preferments, though he was allowed to retain his archbishopric of York
which he now visited for the first time. The first lay ministry since
Edward the Confessor's time came into office; Sir Thomas More became
lord chancellor, and Anne Boleyn's father lord privy seal; the only
prominent cleric who remained in office was Stephen Gardiner, who
succeeded Wolsey as bishop of Winchester.
Attack on the church in parliament.
Henry VIII. marries Anne Boleyn.
The Act of Supremacy.
Parliament met in November 1529 and passed many acts against clerical
exactions, mortuaries, probate dues and pluralities, which evoked a
passionate protest from Bishop Fisher: "Now, with the Commons," he cried
in the House of Lords, "is nothing but 'Down with the Church.'" During
1530 Henry's agents were busy abroad making that appeal on the divorce
to the universities which Cranmer had suggested. In 1531 the clergy in
convocation, terrified by the charge of _praemunire_ brought against
them for recognizing Wolsey's legatine authority, paid Henry a hundred
and eighteen thousand pounds and recognized him as supreme head of the
church so far as the law of Christ would allow. The details of this
surrender were worked out by king and Commons in 1532; but Gardiner and
More secured the rejection by the Lords of the bill in which they were
embodied, and it was not till 1533, when More had ceased to be
chancellor and Gardiner to be secretary, that a parliamentary statute
annihilated the independent legislative authority of the church. An act
was, however, passed in 1532 empowering the king, if he thought fit, to
stop the payment of annates to Rome. Henry suspended his consent in
order to induce the pope to grant Cranmer his bulls as archbishop of
Canterbury where he succeeded Warham late in 1532. The stratagem was
successful, and Henry cast off all disguise. The act of annates was
confirmed; another prohibiting appeals to Rome and providing for the
appointment of bishops without recourse to the papacy was passed; and
Cranmer declared Henry's marriage with Catherine null and void and that
with Anne Boleyn, which had taken place about January 25, 1533, valid.
Anne was crowned in June, and on the 7th of September the future Queen
Elizabeth was born. At length in 1534 Clement VII. concluded the case at
Rome, pronouncing in favour of Catherine's marriage, and drawing up a
bull of excommunication against Henry and his abettors. But he did not
venture to publish it; public opinion in England, while hostile to the
divorce, was not in favour of the clergy or the pope, and the rivalry
between Charles V. and Francis I. was too bitter to permit of joint, or
even isolated, action against Henry. Charles was only too anxious to
avoid the duty of carrying out the pope's commands, and a year later he
was once more involved in war with France. Henry was able to deal
roughly with such manifestations as Elizabeth Barton's visions, and in
the autumn of 1534 to obtain from parliament the Act of Supremacy which
transferred to him the juridical, though not the spiritual, powers of
the pope. No penalties were attached to this act, but another passed in
the same session made it treason to attempt to deprive the king of any
of his titles, of which supreme head of the church was one, being
incorporated in the royal style by letters patent of January 1535.
Fisher and More were executed on this charge; they had been imprisoned
in the previous year for objecting to take the form of oath to the
succession as vested in Anne Boleyn's children which the commissioners
prescribed. But their lives could only be forfeit on the supposition
that they sought to deprive the king of his royal supremacy. Many of the
friars observant of Greenwich and monks of the Charterhouse were
involved in a similar fate, but there was no general resistance, and
Henry, now inspired or helped by Thomas Cromwell, was able to proceed
with the next step in the Reformation, the dissolution of the
monasteries.
Dissolution of the monasteries.
It was Cecil's opinion twenty-five years later that, but for the
dissolution, the cause of the Reformation could not have succeeded. Such
a reason could hardly be avowed, and justification had to be sought in
the condition of the monasteries themselves. The action of Wolsey and
other bishops before 1529, the report of a commission of cardinals
appointed by Paul III. in 1535, the subsequent experience of other, even
Catholic, countries give collateral support to the conclusions of the
visitors appointed by Cromwell, although they were dictated by a desire
not to deal out impartial justice, but to find reasons for a policy
already adopted in principle. That they exaggerated the evils of
monastic life hardly admits of doubt; but even a Henry VIII. and a
Thomas Cromwell would not have dared to attack, or succeeded in
destroying, the monasteries had they retained their original purity and
influence. As it was their doubtful reputation and financial
embarrassments enabled Henry to offer them as a gigantic bribe to the
upper classes of the laity, and the Reformation parliament met for its
last session early in 1536 to give effect to the reports of the visitors
and to the king's and their own desires.
Execution of Queen Anne Boleyn.
But it had barely been dissolved in April when it became necessary to
call another. In January the death of Catherine had rejoiced the hearts
of Henry and Anne Boleyn, but Anne's happiness was short-lived. Two
miscarriages and the failure to produce the requisite male heir linked
her in Henry's mind and in misfortune to Catherine; unlike Catherine she
was unpopular and not above suspicion. The story of her tragedy is still
one of the most horrible and mysterious pages in English history. It is
certain that Henry was tired and wanted to get rid of her; but if she
were innocent, why were charges brought against her which were not
brought against Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves? and why were
four other victims sacrificed when one would have been enough? The peers
a year before could acquit Lord Dacre; would they have condemned the
queen without some show of evidence? and unless there was suspicious
evidence, her daughter was inhuman in making no effort subsequently to
clear her mother's character. However that may be, Anne was not only
condemned and executed, but her marriage was declared invalid and her
daughter a bastard. Parliament was required to establish the succession
on the new basis of Henry's new queen, Jane Seymour. It also empowered
the king to leave the crown by will if he had no legitimate issue; but
the illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, in whose favour this
provision is said to have been conceived, died shortly afterwards.
The Pilgrimage of Grace.
Fortunately for Henry, Queen Jane roused no domestic or foreign
animosities; Charles V. and Francis I. were at war; and the pope's and
Pole's attempt to profit by the Pilgrimage of Grace came too late to
produce any effect except the ruin of Pole's family. The two risings of
1536 in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were provoked partly by the
dissolution of the monasteries, partly by the collection of a subsidy
and fears of fresh taxation on births, marriages and burials, and partly
by the protestantizing Ten Articles of 1536 and Cromwell's
_Injunctions_. They were conservative demonstrations in favour of a
restoration of the old order by means of a change of ministry, but not a
change of dynasty. The Lincolnshire rising was over before the middle of
October, the more serious revolt in Yorkshire under Aske lasted through
the winter. Henry's lieutenants were compelled to temporize and make
concessions. Aske was invited to come to London and hoodwinked by Henry
into believing that the king was really bent on restoration and reform.
But an impatient outburst of the insurgents and a foolish attempt to
seize Hull and Scarborough gave Henry an excuse for repudiating the
concessions made in his name. He could afford to do so because England
south of the Trent remained stauncher to him than England north of it
did to the Pilgrimage. Aske and other leaders were tried and executed,
and summary vengeance was wreaked on the northern counties, especially
on the monasteries. The one satisfactory outcome was the establishment
of the Council of the North, which gave the shires between the Border
and the Trent a stronger and more efficient government than they had
ever had before.