treasurer and high in the King's confidence, that Boleyn was employed
throughout Henry's reign in state business, and his diplomatic abilities
had secured his appointment as envoy both to France and to the Emperor.
His son, George Boleyn, a man of culture and a poet, was among the group
of young courtiers in whose society Henry took most pleasure. Anne was
his youngest daughter; born in 1507, she was still but a girl of sixteen
when the outbreak of war drew her from a stay in France to the English
court. Her beauty was small, but her bright eyes, her flowing hair, her
gayety and wit soon won favor with the King, and only a month after her
return in 1522 the grant of honors to her father marked her influence
over Henry.
Fresh gifts in the following years showed that the favor continued; but
in 1524 a new color was given to this intimacy by a resolve on the
King's part to break his marriage with the Queen. Catharine had now
reached middle age; her personal charms had departed. The death of every
child save Mary may have woke scruples as to the lawfulness of a
marriage on which a curse seemed to rest; the need of a male heir for
public security may have deepened this impression. But whatever were the
grounds of his action we find Henry from this moment pressing the Roman
see to grant him a divorce.
It is probable that the matter was already mooted in 1525, a year which
saw new proof of Anne's influence in the elevation of Sir Thomas Boleyn
to the baronage as Lord Rochford. It is certain that it was the object
of secret negotiation with the Pope in 1526. No sovereign stood higher
in the favor of Rome than Henry, whose alliance had ever been ready in
its distress and who was even now prompt with aid in money. But
Clement's consent to his wish meant a break with the Emperor,
Catharine's nephew; and the exhaustion of France, the weakness of the
league in which the lesser Italian states strove to maintain their
independence against Charles after the battle of Pavia, left the Pope at
the Emperor's mercy. While the English envoy was mooting the question of
divorce in 1526 the surprise of Rome by an imperial force brought home
to Clement his utter helplessness.
It is hard to discover what part Wolsey had as yet taken in the matter,
or whether as in other cases Henry had till now been acting alone,
though the Cardinal himself tells us that on Catharine's first discovery
of the intrigue she attributed the proposal of divorce to "my
procurement and setting forth." But from this point his intervention is
clear. As legate he took cognizance of all matrimonial causes, and in
May, 1527, a collusive action was brought in his court against Henry for
cohabiting with his brother's wife. The King appeared by proctor; but
the suit was suddenly dropped. Secret as were the proceedings, they had
now reached Catharine's ear; and as she refused to admit the facts on
which Henry rested his case her appeal would have carried the matter to
the tribunal of the Pope, and Clement's decision could hardly be a
favorable one.
The Pope was now in fact a prisoner in the Emperor's hands. At the very
moment of the suit Rome was stormed and sacked by the army of the Duke
of Bourbon. "If the Pope's holiness fortune either to be slain or
taken," Wolsey wrote to the King when the news of this event reached
England, "it shall not a little hinder your grace's affairs." But it was
needful for the Cardinal to find some expedient to carry out the King's
will, for the group around Anne were using her skilfully for their
purposes. A great party had now gathered to her support. Her uncle, the
Duke of Norfolk, an able and ambitious man, counted on her rise to set
him at the head of the council board; the brilliant group of young
courtiers to which her brother belonged saw in her success their own
elevation; and the Duke of Suffolk with the bulk of the nobles hoped
through her means to bring about the ruin of the statesman before whom
they trembled.
What most served their plans was the growth of Henry's passion. "If it
please you," the King wrote at this time to Anne Boleyn, "to do the
office of a true, loyal mistress, and give yourself body and heart to
me, who have been and mean to be your loyal servant, I promise you not
only the name but that I shall make you my sole mistress, remove all
others from my affection, and serve you only." What stirred Henry's
wrath most was Catharine's "stiff and obstinate" refusal to bow to his
will. Wolsey's advice that "your Grace should handle her both gently and
doulcely" only goaded Henry's impatience. He lent an ear to the rivals
who charged his minister with slackness in the cause, and danger drove
the Cardinal to a bolder and yet more unscrupulous device.
The entire subjection of Italy to the Emperor was drawing closer the
French alliance, and a new treaty had been concluded in April. But this
had hardly been signed when the sack of Rome and the danger of the Pope
called for bolder measures. Wolsey was despatched on a solemn embassy to
Francis to promise an English subsidy on the despatch of a French army
across the Alps. But he aimed at turning the Pope's situation to the
profit of the divorce. Clement was virtually a prisoner in the castle of
St. Angelo; and as it was impossible for him to fulfil freely the
function of a Pope, Wolsey proposed, in conjunction with Francis, to
call a meeting of the college of cardinals at Avignon which should
exercise the papal powers till Clement's liberation. As Wolsey was to
preside over this assembly, it would be easy to win from it a favorable
answer to Henry's request.
But Clement had no mind to surrender his power, and secret orders from
the Pope prevented the Italian cardinals from attending such an
assembly. Nor was Wolsey more fortunate in another plan for bringing
about the same end by inducing Clement to delegate to him his full
powers westward of the Alps. Henry's trust in him was fast waning before
these failures and the steady pressure of his rivals at court, and the
coldness of the King on his return in September was an omen of his
minister's fall. Henry was in fact resolved to take his own course; and
while Wolsey sought from the Pope a commission enabling him to try the
case in his legatine court and pronounce the marriage null and void by
sentence of law, Henry had determined at the suggestion of the Boleyns
and apparently of Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge scholar who was serving as
their chaplain, to seek, without Wolsey's knowledge, from Clement either
his approval of a divorce or, if a divorce could not be obtained, a
dispensation to remarry without any divorce at all.
For some months his envoys could find no admission to the Pope; and
though in December Clement succeeded in escaping to Orvieto and drew
some courage from the entry of the French army into Italy, his temper
was still too timid to venture on any decided course. He refused the
dispensation altogether. Wolsey's proposal for leaving the matter to a
legatine court found better favor; but when the commission reached
England it was found to be "of no effect or authority." What Henry
wanted was not merely a divorce but the express sanction of the Pope to
his divorce, and this Clement steadily evaded. A fresh embassy, with
Wolsey's favorite and secretary, Stephen Gardiner, at its head, reached
Orvieto in March, 1528, to find, in spite of Gardiner's threats, hardly
better success; but Clement at last consented to a legatine commission
for the trial of the case in England. In this commission Cardinal
Campeggio, who was looked upon as a partisan of the English King, was
joined with Wolsey.
Great as the concession seemed, this gleam of success failed to hide
from the minister the dangers which gathered round him. The great nobles
whom he had practically shut out from the King's counsels were longing
for his fall. The Boleyns and the young courtiers looked on him as cool
in Anne's cause. He was hated alike by men of the old doctrine and men
of the new. The clergy had never forgotten his extortions, the monks saw
him suppressing small monasteries. The foundation of Cardinal College
failed to reconcile to him the scholars of the New Learning; their poet,
Skelton, was among his bitterest assailants.
The Protestants, goaded by the persecution of this very year, hated him
with a deadly hatred. His French alliances, his declaration of war with
the Emperor, hindered the trade with Flanders and secured the hostility
of the merchant class. The country at large, galled with murrain and
famine and panic-struck by an outbreak of the sweating sickness which
carried off two thousand in London alone, laid all its suffering at the
door of the Cardinal. And now that Henry's mood itself became uncertain
Wolsey knew his hour was come. Were the marriage once made, he told the
French ambassador, and a male heir born to the realm, he would withdraw
from state affairs and serve God for the rest of his life. But the
divorce had still to be brought about ere marriage could be made or heir
be born. Henry indeed had seized on the grant of a commission as if the
matter were at an end. Anne Boleyn was installed in the royal palace and
honored with the state of a wife. The new legate, Campeggio, held the
bishopric of Salisbury, and had been asked for as judge from the belief
that he would favor the King's cause. But he bore secret instructions
from the Pope to bring about if possible a reconciliation between Henry
and the Queen, and in no case to pronounce sentence without reference to
Rome. The slowness of his journey presaged ill; he did not reach England
till the end of September, and a month was wasted in vain efforts to
bring Henry to a reconciliation or Catharine to retirement into a
monastery.
A new difficulty disclosed itself in the supposed existence of a brief
issued by Pope Julius and now in the possession of the Emperor, which
overruled all the objections to the earlier dispensation on which Henry
relied. The hearing of the cause was delayed through the winter, while
new embassies strove to induce Clement to declare this brief also
invalid. Not only was such a demand glaringly unjust, but the progress
of the imperial arms brought vividly home to the Pope its injustice. The
danger which he feared was not merely a danger to his temporal domain in
Italy--it was a danger to the papacy itself. It was in vain that new
embassies threatened Clement with the loss of his spiritual power over
England. To break with the Emperor was to risk the loss of his spiritual
power over a far larger world.
Charles had already consented to the suspension of the judgment of his
diet at Worms, a consent which gave security to the new Protestantism in
North Germany. If he burned heretics in the Netherlands, he employed
them in his armies. Lutheran soldiers had played their part in the sack
of Rome. Lutheranism had spread from North Germany along the Rhine, it
was now pushing fast into the hereditary possessions of the Austrian
house, it had all but mastered the Low Countries. France itself was
mined with heresy; and were Charles once to give way, the whole
Continent would be lost to Rome.
Amid difficulties such as these the papal court saw no course open save
one of delay. But the long delay told fatally for Wolsey's fortunes.
Even Clement blamed him for having hindered Henry from judging the
matter in his own realm and marrying on the sentence of his own courts,
and the Boleyns naturally looked upon his policy as dictated by hatred
to Anne. Norfolk and the great peers took courage from the bitter tone
of the girl; and Henry himself charged the Cardinal with a failure in
fulfilling the promises he had made him. King and minister still clung
indeed passionately to their hopes from Rome. But in 1529 Charles met
their pressure with a pressure of his own; and the progress of his arms
decided Clement to avoke the cause to Rome. Wolsey could only hope to
anticipate this decision by pushing the trial hastily forward, and at
the end of May the two legates opened their court in the great hall of
the Blackfriars.
King and Queen were cited to appear before them when the court again met
on June 18th. Henry briefly announced his resolve to live no longer in
mortal sin. The Queen offered an appeal to Clement, and on the refusal
of the legates to admit it flung herself at Henry's feet. "Sire," said
Catharine, "I beseech you to pity me, a woman and a stranger, without an
assured friend and without an indifferent counsellor. I take God to
witness that I have always been to you a true and loyal wife, that I
have made it my constant duty to seek your pleasure, that I have loved
all whom you loved, whether I have reason or not, whether they are
friends to me or foes. I have been your wife for years; I have brought
you many children. God knows that when I came to your bed I was a
virgin, and I put it to your own conscience to say whether it was not
so. If there be any offence which can be alleged against me I consent to
depart with infamy; if not, then I pray you to do me justice."
The piteous appeal was wasted on a king who was already entertaining
Anne Boleyn with royal state in his own palace; the trial proceeded, and
on July 23d the court assembled to pronounce sentence. Henry's hopes
were at their highest when they were suddenly dashed to the ground. At
the opening of the proceedings Campeggio rose to declare the court
adjourned to the following October. The adjournment was a mere evasion.
The pressure of the imperialists had at last forced Clement to summon
the cause to his own tribunal at Rome, and the jurisdiction of the
legates was at an end.
"Now see I," cried the Duke of Suffolk as he dashed his hand on the
table, "that the old saw is true, that there was never legate or
cardinal that did good to England!" The Duke only echoed his master's
wrath. Through the twenty years of his reign Henry had known nothing of
opposition to his will. His imperious temper had chafed at the weary
negotiations, the subterfuges and perfidies of the Pope. Though the
commission was his own device, his pride must have been sorely galled by
the summons to the legates' court. The warmest adherents of the older
faith revolted against the degradation of the Crown. "It was the
strangest and newest sight and device," says Cavendish, "that ever we
read or heard of in any history or chronicle in any region that a king
and queen should be convented and constrained by process compellatory to
appear in any court as common persons, within their own realm and
dominion, to abide the judgment and decree of their own subjects, having
the royal diadem and prerogative thereof."
Even this degradation had been borne in vain. Foreign and papal tribunal
as that of the legates really was, it lay within Henry's kingdom and had
the air of an English court. But the citation to Rome was a summons to
the King to plead in a court without his realm. Wolsey had himself
warned Clement of the hopelessness of expecting Henry to submit to such
humiliation as this. "If the King be cited to appear in person or by
proxy and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will
tolerate the insult. To cite the King to Rome, to threaten him with
excommunication, is no more tolerable than to deprive him of his royal
dignity. If he were to appear in Italy it would be at the head of a
formidable army." But Clement had been deaf to the warning, and the case
had been avoked out of the realm.
Henry's wrath fell at once on Wolsey. Whatever furtherance or hinderance
the Cardinal had given to his remarriage, it was Wolsey who had
dissuaded him from acting, at the first, independently; from conducting
the cause in his own courts and acting on the sentence of his own
judges. Whether to secure the succession by a more indisputable decision
or to preserve uninjured the prerogatives of the papal see, it was
Wolsey who had counselled him to seek a divorce from Rome and promised
him success in his suit. And in this counsel Wolsey stood alone. Even
Clement had urged the King to carry out his original purpose when it was
too late. All that the Pope sought was to be freed from the necessity of
meddling in the matter at all. It was Wolsey who had forced papal
intervention on him, as he had forced it on Henry, and the failure of
his plans was fatal to him. From the close of the legatine court Henry
would see him no more, and his favorite, Stephen Gardiner, who had
become chief secretary of state, succeeded him in the King's confidence.
If Wolsey still remained minister for a while, it was because the thread
of the complex foreign negotiations which he was conducting could not be
roughly broken. Here too, however, failure awaited him. His diplomacy
sought to bring fresh pressure on the Pope and to provide a fresh check
on the Emperor by a closer alliance with France. But Francis was anxious
to recover his children who had remained as hostages for his return; he
was weary of the long struggle, and hopeless of aid from his Italian
allies. At this crisis of his fate therefore Wolsey saw himself deceived
and outwitted by the conclusion of peace between France and the Emperor
in a new treaty at Cambray. Not only was his French policy no longer
possible, but a reconciliation with Charles was absolutely needful, and
such a reconciliation could only be brought about by Wolsey's fall. In
October, on the very day that the Cardinal took his place with a haughty
countenance and all his former pomp in the court of chancery an
indictment was preferred against him by the King's attorney for
receiving bulls from Rome in violation of the Statute of Provisors.
A few days later he was deprived of the seals. Wolsey was prostrated by
the blow. In a series of abject appeals he offered to give up everything
that he possessed if the King would but cease from his displeasure. "His
face," wrote the French ambassador, "is dwindled to half its natural
size. In truth his misery is such that his enemies, Englishmen as they
are, cannot help pitying him." For the moment Henry seemed contented
with his disgrace. A thousand boats full of Londoners covered the Thames
to see the Cardinal's barge pass to the Tower, but he was permitted to
retire to Esher.
Although judgment of forfeiture and imprisonment was given against him
in the king's bench at the close of October, in the following February
he received a pardon on surrender of his vast possessions to the crown
and was permitted to withdraw to his diocese of York, the one dignity he
had been suffered to retain.
Not less significant was the attitude of the New Learning. On Wolsey's
fall the seals had been offered to Warham, and it was probably at his
counsel that they were finally given to Sir Thomas More. The
Chancellor's dream, if we may judge it from the acts of his brief
ministry, seems to have been that of carrying out the religious
reformation which had been demanded by Colet and Erasmus while checking
the spirit of revolt against the unity of the Church. His severities
against the Protestants, exaggerated as they have been by polemic
rancor, remain the one stain on a memory that knows no other. But it was
only by a rigid severance of the cause of reform from what seemed to him
the cause of revolution that More could hope for a successful issue to
the projects of reform which the council laid before parliament.
The "Petition of the Commons" sounded like an echo of Colet's famous
address to the convocation. It attributed the growth of heresy not more
to "frantic and seditious books published in the English tongue contrary
to the very true Catholic and Christian faith" than to "the extreme and
uncharitable behavior of divers ordinaries." It remonstrated against the
legislation of the clergy in convocation without the King's assent or
that of his subjects, the oppressive procedure of the church courts, the
abuses of ecclesiastical patronage, and the excessive number of holy
days. Henry referred the petition to the bishops, but they could devise
no means of redress, and the ministry persisted in pushing through the
houses their bills for ecclesiastical reform. The importance of the new
measures lay really in the action of parliament. They were an explicit
announcement that church reform was now to be undertaken, not by the
clergy, but by the people at large. On the other hand it was clear that
it would be carried out in a spirit of loyalty to the Church. The
commons forced from Bishop Fisher an apology for words which were taken
as a doubt thrown on their orthodoxy.
Henry forbade the circulation of Tyndale's translation of the Bible as
executed in a Protestant spirit. The reforming measures, however, were
pushed resolutely on. Though the questions of convocation and the
bishops' courts were adjourned for further consideration, the fees of
the courts were curtailed, the clergy restricted from lay employments,
pluralities restrained, and residence enforced. In spite of a dogged
opposition from the bishops the bills received the assent of the House
of Lords, "to the great rejoicing of lay people, and the great
displeasure of spiritual persons."
Not less characteristic of the New Learning was the intellectual
pressure it strove to bring to bear on the wavering Pope. Cranmer was
still active in the cause of Anne Boleyn; he had just published a book
in favor of the divorce; and he now urged on the ministry an appeal to
the learned opinion of Christendom by calling for the judgment of the
chief universities of Europe. His counsel was adopted; but Norfolk
trusted to coarser means of attaining his end. Like most of the English
nobles and the whole of the merchant class, his sympathies were with the
house of Burgundy. He looked upon Wolsey as the real hinderance to the
divorce through the French policy which had driven Charles into a
hostile attitude; and he counted on the Cardinal's fall to bring about a
renewal of friendship with the Emperor and to insure his support.
The father of Anne Boleyn, now created Earl of Wiltshire, was sent in
1530 on this errand to the imperial court. But Charles remained firm to
Catharine's cause, and Clement would do nothing in defiance of the
Emperor. Nor was the appeal to the learned world more successful. In
France the profuse bribery of the English agents would have failed with
the University of Paris but for the interference of Francis himself,
eager to regain Henry's good-will by this office of friendship. As
shameless an exercise of the King's own authority was needed to wring an
approval of his cause from Oxford and Cambridge. In Germany the very
Protestants, then in the fervor of their moral revival and hoping little
from a proclaimed opponent of Luther, were dead against the King. So far
as could be seen from Cranmer's test every learned man in Christendom,
but for bribery and threats, would have condemned the royal cause.
Henry was embittered by failures which he attributed to the unskilful
diplomacy of his new counsellors; and it was rumored that he had been
heard to regret the loss of the more dexterous statesman whom they had
overthrown. Wolsey, who since the beginning of the year had remained at
York, though busy in appearance with the duties of his see, was hoping
more and more as the months passed by for his recall. But the jealousy
of his political enemies was roused by the King's regrets, and the
pitiless hand of Norfolk was seen in the quick and deadly blow which he
dealt at his fallen rival.
On November 4th, the eve of his installation feast, the Cardinal was
arrested on a charge of high treason and conducted by the lieutenant of
the Tower toward London. Already broken by his enormous labors, by
internal disease, and the sense of his fall, Wolsey accepted the arrest
as a sentence of death. An attack of dysentery forced him to rest at the
Abbey of Leicester, and as he reached the gate he said feebly to the
brethren who met him, "I am come to lay my bones among you."
On his death-bed his thoughts still clung to the Prince whom he had
served. "Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the King,"
murmured the dying man, "he would not have given me over in my gray
hairs. But this is my due reward for my pains and study, not regarding
my service to God, but only my duty to my Prince."
PIZARRO CONQUERS PERU
A.D. 1532
HERNANDO PIZARRO WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT