ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE EIGHTH
PART THE SECOND
The Pope was thrown into a very angry state of mind when he heard of
the King’s marriage, and fumed exceedingly. Many of the English monks
and friars, seeing that their order was in danger, did the same; some
even declaimed against the King in church before his face, and were not
to be stopped until he himself roared out ‘Silence!’ The King, not much
the worse for this, took it pretty quietly; and was very glad when his
Queen gave birth to a daughter, who was christened Elizabeth, and
declared Princess of Wales as her sister Mary had already been.
One of the most atrocious features of this reign was that Henry the
Eighth was always trimming between the reformed religion and the
unreformed one; so that the more he quarrelled with the Pope, the more
of his own subjects he roasted alive for not holding the Pope’s
opinions. Thus, an unfortunate student named John Frith, and a poor
simple tailor named Andrew Hewet who loved him very much, and said that
whatever John Frith believed _he_ believed, were burnt in Smithfield—to
show what a capital Christian the King was.
But, these were speedily followed by two much greater victims, Sir
Thomas More, and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester. The latter, who
was a good and amiable old man, had committed no greater offence than
believing in Elizabeth Barton, called the Maid of Kent—another of those
ridiculous women who pretended to be inspired, and to make all sorts of
heavenly revelations, though they indeed uttered nothing but evil
nonsense. For this offence—as it was pretended, but really for denying
the King to be the supreme Head of the Church—he got into trouble, and
was put in prison; but, even then, he might have been suffered to die
naturally (short work having been made of executing the Kentish Maid
and her principal followers), but that the Pope, to spite the King,
resolved to make him a cardinal. Upon that the King made a ferocious
joke to the effect that the Pope might send Fisher a red hat—which is
the way they make a cardinal—but he should have no head on which to
wear it; and he was tried with all unfairness and injustice, and
sentenced to death. He died like a noble and virtuous old man, and left
a worthy name behind him. The King supposed, I dare say, that Sir
Thomas More would be frightened by this example; but, as he was not to
be easily terrified, and, thoroughly believing in the Pope, had made up
his mind that the King was not the rightful Head of the Church, he
positively refused to say that he was. For this crime he too was tried
and sentenced, after having been in prison a whole year. When he was
doomed to death, and came away from his trial with the edge of the
executioner’s axe turned towards him—as was always done in those times
when a state prisoner came to that hopeless pass—he bore it quite
serenely, and gave his blessing to his son, who pressed through the
crowd in Westminster Hall and kneeled down to receive it. But, when he
got to the Tower Wharf on his way back to his prison, and his favourite
daughter, Margaret Roper, a very good woman, rushed through the guards
again and again, to kiss him and to weep upon his neck, he was overcome
at last. He soon recovered, and never more showed any feeling but
cheerfulness and courage. When he was going up the steps of the
scaffold to his death, he said jokingly to the Lieutenant of the Tower,
observing that they were weak and shook beneath his tread, ‘I pray you,
master Lieutenant, see me safe up; and, for my coming down, I can shift
for myself.’ Also he said to the executioner, after he had laid his
head upon the block, ‘Let me put my beard out of the way; for that, at
least, has never committed any treason.’ Then his head was struck off
at a blow. These two executions were worthy of King Henry the Eighth.
Sir Thomas More was one of the most virtuous men in his dominions, and
the Bishop was one of his oldest and truest friends. But to be a friend
of that fellow was almost as dangerous as to be his wife.
When the news of these two murders got to Rome, the Pope raged against
the murderer more than ever Pope raged since the world began, and
prepared a Bull, ordering his subjects to take arms against him and
dethrone him. The King took all possible precautions to keep that
document out of his dominions, and set to work in return to suppress a
great number of the English monasteries and abbeys.
This destruction was begun by a body of commissioners, of whom Cromwell
(whom the King had taken into great favour) was the head; and was
carried on through some few years to its entire completion. There is no
doubt that many of these religious establishments were religious in
nothing but in name, and were crammed with lazy, indolent, and sensual
monks. There is no doubt that they imposed upon the people in every
possible way; that they had images moved by wires, which they pretended
were miraculously moved by Heaven; that they had among them a whole tun
measure full of teeth, all purporting to have come out of the head of
one saint, who must indeed have been a very extraordinary person with
that enormous allowance of grinders; that they had bits of coal which
they said had fried Saint Lawrence, and bits of toe-nails which they
said belonged to other famous saints; penknives, and boots, and
girdles, which they said belonged to others; and that all these bits of
rubbish were called Relics, and adored by the ignorant people. But, on
the other hand, there is no doubt either, that the King’s officers and
men punished the good monks with the bad; did great injustice;
demolished many beautiful things and many valuable libraries; destroyed
numbers of paintings, stained glass windows, fine pavements, and
carvings; and that the whole court were ravenously greedy and rapacious
for the division of this great spoil among them. The King seems to have
grown almost mad in the ardour of this pursuit; for he declared Thomas
à Becket a traitor, though he had been dead so many years, and had his
body dug up out of his grave. He must have been as miraculous as the
monks pretended, if they had told the truth, for he was found with one
head on his shoulders, and they had shown another as his undoubted and
genuine head ever since his death; it had brought them vast sums of
money, too. The gold and jewels on his shrine filled two great chests,
and eight men tottered as they carried them away. How rich the
monasteries were you may infer from the fact that, when they were all
suppressed, one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year—in those days
an immense sum—came to the Crown.
These things were not done without causing great discontent among the
people. The monks had been good landlords and hospitable entertainers
of all travellers, and had been accustomed to give away a great deal of
corn, and fruit, and meat, and other things. In those days it was
difficult to change goods into money, in consequence of the roads being
very few and very bad, and the carts, and waggons of the worst
description; and they must either have given away some of the good
things they possessed in enormous quantities, or have suffered them to
spoil and moulder. So, many of the people missed what it was more
agreeable to get idly than to work for; and the monks who were driven
out of their homes and wandered about encouraged their discontent; and
there were, consequently, great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.
These were put down by terrific executions, from which the monks
themselves did not escape, and the King went on grunting and growling
in his own fat way, like a Royal pig.
I have told all this story of the religious houses at one time, to make
it plainer, and to get back to the King’s domestic affairs.
The unfortunate Queen Catherine was by this time dead; and the King was
by this time as tired of his second Queen as he had been of his first.
As he had fallen in love with Anne when she was in the service of
Catherine, so he now fell in love with another lady in the service of
Anne. See how wicked deeds are punished, and how bitterly and
self-reproachfully the Queen must now have thought of her own rise to
the throne! The new fancy was a Lady Jane Seymour; and the King no
sooner set his mind on her, than he resolved to have Anne Boleyn’s
head. So, he brought a number of charges against Anne, accusing her of
dreadful crimes which she had never committed, and implicating in them
her own brother and certain gentlemen in her service: among whom one
Norris, and Mark Smeaton a musician, are best remembered. As the lords
and councillors were as afraid of the King and as subservient to him as
the meanest peasant in England was, they brought in Anne Boleyn guilty,
and the other unfortunate persons accused with her, guilty too. Those
gentlemen died like men, with the exception of Smeaton, who had been
tempted by the King into telling lies, which he called confessions, and
who had expected to be pardoned; but who, I am very glad to say, was
not. There was then only the Queen to dispose of. She had been
surrounded in the Tower with women spies; had been monstrously
persecuted and foully slandered; and had received no justice. But her
spirit rose with her afflictions; and, after having in vain tried to
soften the King by writing an affecting letter to him which still
exists, ‘from her doleful prison in the Tower,’ she resigned herself to
death. She said to those about her, very cheerfully, that she had heard
say the executioner was a good one, and that she had a little neck (she
laughed and clasped it with her hands as she said that), and would soon
be out of her pain. And she _was_ soon out of her pain, poor creature,
on the Green inside the Tower, and her body was flung into an old box
and put away in the ground under the chapel.
There is a story that the King sat in his palace listening very
anxiously for the sound of the cannon which was to announce this new
murder; and that, when he heard it come booming on the air, he rose up
in great spirits and ordered out his dogs to go a-hunting. He was bad
enough to do it; but whether he did it or not, it is certain that he
married Jane Seymour the very next day.
I have not much pleasure in recording that she lived just long enough
to give birth to a son who was christened Edward, and then to die of a
fever: for, I cannot but think that any woman who married such a
ruffian, and knew what innocent blood was on his hands, deserved the
axe that would assuredly have fallen on the neck of Jane Seymour, if
she had lived much longer.
Cranmer had done what he could to save some of the Church property for
purposes of religion and education; but, the great families had been so
hungry to get hold of it, that very little could be rescued for such
objects. Even Miles Coverdale, who did the people the inestimable
service of translating the Bible into English (which the unreformed
religion never permitted to be done), was left in poverty while the
great families clutched the Church lands and money. The people had been
told that when the Crown came into possession of these funds, it would
not be necessary to tax them; but they were taxed afresh directly
afterwards. It was fortunate for them, indeed, that so many nobles were
so greedy for this wealth; since, if it had remained with the Crown,
there might have been no end to tyranny for hundreds of years. One of
the most active writers on the Church’s side against the King was a
member of his own family—a sort of distant cousin, Reginald Pole by
name—who attacked him in the most violent manner (though he received a
pension from him all the time), and fought for the Church with his pen,
day and night. As he was beyond the King’s reach—being in Italy—the
King politely invited him over to discuss the subject; but he, knowing
better than to come, and wisely staying where he was, the King’s rage
fell upon his brother Lord Montague, the Marquis of Exeter, and some
other gentlemen: who were tried for high treason in corresponding with
him and aiding him—which they probably did—and were all executed. The
Pope made Reginald Pole a cardinal; but, so much against his will, that
it is thought he even aspired in his own mind to the vacant throne of
England, and had hopes of marrying the Princess Mary. His being made a
high priest, however, put an end to all that. His mother, the venerable
Countess of Salisbury—who was, unfortunately for herself, within the
tyrant’s reach—was the last of his relatives on whom his wrath fell.
When she was told to lay her grey head upon the block, she answered the
executioner, ‘No! My head never committed treason, and if you want it,
you shall seize it.’ So, she ran round and round the scaffold with the
executioner striking at her, and her grey hair bedabbled with blood;
and even when they held her down upon the block she moved her head
about to the last, resolved to be no party to her own barbarous murder.
All this the people bore, as they had borne everything else.
Indeed they bore much more; for the slow fires of Smithfield were
continually burning, and people were constantly being roasted to
death—still to show what a good Christian the King was. He defied the
Pope and his Bull, which was now issued, and had come into England; but
he burned innumerable people whose only offence was that they differed
from the Pope’s religious opinions. There was a wretched man named
Lambert, among others, who was tried for this before the King, and with
whom six bishops argued one after another. When he was quite exhausted
(as well he might be, after six bishops), he threw himself on the
King’s mercy; but the King blustered out that he had no mercy for
heretics. So, _he_ too fed the fire.
All this the people bore, and more than all this yet. The national
spirit seems to have been banished from the kingdom at this time. The
very people who were executed for treason, the very wives and friends
of the ‘bluff’ King, spoke of him on the scaffold as a good prince, and
a gentle prince—just as serfs in similar circumstances have been known
to do, under the Sultan and Bashaws of the East, or under the fierce
old tyrants of Russia, who poured boiling and freezing water on them
alternately, until they died. The Parliament were as bad as the rest,
and gave the King whatever he wanted; among other vile accommodations,
they gave him new powers of murdering, at his will and pleasure, any
one whom he might choose to call a traitor. But the worst measure they
passed was an Act of Six Articles, commonly called at the time ‘the
whip with six strings;’ which punished offences against the Pope’s
opinions, without mercy, and enforced the very worst parts of the
monkish religion. Cranmer would have modified it, if he could; but,
being overborne by the Romish party, had not the power. As one of the
articles declared that priests should not marry, and as he was married
himself, he sent his wife and children into Germany, and began to
tremble at his danger; none the less because he was, and had long been,
the King’s friend. This whip of six strings was made under the King’s
own eye. It should never be forgotten of him how cruelly he supported
the worst of the Popish doctrines when there was nothing to be got by
opposing them.
This amiable monarch now thought of taking another wife. He proposed to
the French King to have some of the ladies of the French Court
exhibited before him, that he might make his Royal choice; but the
French King answered that he would rather not have his ladies trotted
out to be shown like horses at a fair. He proposed to the Dowager
Duchess of Milan, who replied that she might have thought of such a
match if she had had two heads; but, that only owning one, she must beg
to keep it safe. At last Cromwell represented that there was a
Protestant Princess in Germany—those who held the reformed religion
were called Protestants, because their leaders had Protested against
the abuses and impositions of the unreformed Church—named Anne of
Cleves, who was beautiful, and would answer the purpose admirably. The
King said was she a large woman, because he must have a fat wife? ‘O
yes,’ said Cromwell; ‘she was very large, just the thing.’ On hearing
this the King sent over his famous painter, Hans Holbein, to take her
portrait. Hans made her out to be so good-looking that the King was
satisfied, and the marriage was arranged. But, whether anybody had paid
Hans to touch up the picture; or whether Hans, like one or two other
painters, flattered a princess in the ordinary way of business, I
cannot say: all I know is, that when Anne came over and the King went
to Rochester to meet her, and first saw her without her seeing him, he
swore she was ‘a great Flanders mare,’ and said he would never marry
her. Being obliged to do it now matters had gone so far, he would not
give her the presents he had prepared, and would never notice her. He
never forgave Cromwell his part in the affair. His downfall dates from
that time.
It was quickened by his enemies, in the interests of the unreformed
religion, putting in the King’s way, at a state dinner, a niece of the
Duke of Norfolk, Catherine Howard, a young lady of fascinating manners,
though small in stature and not particularly beautiful. Falling in love
with her on the spot, the King soon divorced Anne of Cleves after
making her the subject of much brutal talk, on pretence that she had
been previously betrothed to some one else—which would never do for one
of his dignity—and married Catherine. It is probable that on his
wedding day, of all days in the year, he sent his faithful Cromwell to
the scaffold, and had his head struck off. He further celebrated the
occasion by burning at one time, and causing to be drawn to the fire on
the same hurdles, some Protestant prisoners for denying the Pope’s
doctrines, and some Roman Catholic prisoners for denying his own
supremacy. Still the people bore it, and not a gentleman in England
raised his hand.
But, by a just retribution, it soon came out that Catherine Howard,
before her marriage, had been really guilty of such crimes as the King
had falsely attributed to his second wife Anne Boleyn; so, again the
dreadful axe made the King a widower, and this Queen passed away as so
many in that reign had passed away before her. As an appropriate
pursuit under the circumstances, Henry then applied himself to
superintending the composition of a religious book called ‘A necessary
doctrine for any Christian Man.’ He must have been a little confused in
his mind, I think, at about this period; for he was so false to himself
as to be true to some one: that some one being Cranmer, whom the Duke
of Norfolk and others of his enemies tried to ruin; but to whom the
King was steadfast, and to whom he one night gave his ring, charging
him when he should find himself, next day, accused of treason, to show
it to the council board. This Cranmer did to the confusion of his
enemies. I suppose the King thought he might want him a little longer.
He married yet once more. Yes, strange to say, he found in England
another woman who would become his wife, and she was Catherine Parr,
widow of Lord Latimer. She leaned towards the reformed religion; and it
is some comfort to know, that she tormented the King considerably by
arguing a variety of doctrinal points with him on all possible
occasions. She had very nearly done this to her own destruction. After
one of these conversations the King in a very black mood actually
instructed Gardiner, one of his Bishops who favoured the Popish
opinions, to draw a bill of accusation against her, which would have
inevitably brought her to the scaffold where her predecessors had died,
but that one of her friends picked up the paper of instructions which
had been dropped in the palace, and gave her timely notice. She fell
ill with terror; but managed the King so well when he came to entrap
her into further statements—by saying that she had only spoken on such
points to divert his mind and to get some information from his
extraordinary wisdom—that he gave her a kiss and called her his
sweetheart. And, when the Chancellor came next day actually to take her
to the Tower, the King sent him about his business, and honoured him
with the epithets of a beast, a knave, and a fool. So near was
Catherine Parr to the block, and so narrow was her escape!
There was war with Scotland in this reign, and a short clumsy war with
France for favouring Scotland; but, the events at home were so
dreadful, and leave such an enduring stain on the country, that I need
say no more of what happened abroad.
A few more horrors, and this reign is over. There was a lady, Anne
Askew, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the Protestant opinions, and
whose husband being a fierce Catholic, turned her out of his house. She
came to London, and was considered as offending against the six
articles, and was taken to the Tower, and put upon the rack—probably
because it was hoped that she might, in her agony, criminate some
obnoxious persons; if falsely, so much the better. She was tortured
without uttering a cry, until the Lieutenant of the Tower would suffer
his men to torture her no more; and then two priests who were present
actually pulled off their robes, and turned the wheels of the rack with
their own hands, so rending and twisting and breaking her that she was
afterwards carried to the fire in a chair. She was burned with three
others, a gentleman, a clergyman, and a tailor; and so the world went
on.
Either the King became afraid of the power of the Duke of Norfolk, and
his son the Earl of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, but he
resolved to pull _them_ down, to follow all the rest who were gone. The
son was tried first—of course for nothing—and defended himself bravely;
but of course he was found guilty, and of course he was executed. Then
his father was laid hold of, and left for death too.
But the King himself was left for death by a Greater King, and the
earth was to be rid of him at last. He was now a swollen, hideous
spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every sense
that it was dreadful to approach him. When he was found to be dying,
Cranmer was sent for from his palace at Croydon, and came with all
speed, but found him speechless. Happily, in that hour he perished. He
was in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and the thirty-eighth of his
reign.
Henry the Eighth has been favoured by some Protestant writers, because
the Reformation was achieved in his time. But the mighty merit of it
lies with other men and not with him; and it can be rendered none the
worse by this monster’s crimes, and none the better by any defence of
them. The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a
disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the
History of England.