Protestants and Catholics united to condemn a government under which
both had suffered; and a point on which enemies were agreed was
assumed to be proved. When I commenced the examination of the records,
I brought with me the inherited impression, from which I had neither
any thought nor any expectation that I should be disabused. I found
that it melted between my hands, and with it disappeared that other
fact, so difficult to credit, yet as it had appeared so impossible to
deny, that English Parliaments, English judges, English clergy,
statesmen whose beneficent legislature survives among the most valued
of our institutions, prelates who were the founders and martyrs of the
English Church, were the cowardly accomplices of abominable
atrocities, and had disgraced themselves with a sycophancy which the
Roman Senate imperfectly approached when it fawned on Nero.
Henry had many faults. They have been exhibited in the progress of the
narrative: I need not return to them. But his position was one of
unexampled difficulty; and by the work which he accomplished, and the
conditions, internal and external, under which his task was allotted
to him, he, like every other man, ought to be judged. He was
inconsistent: he can bear the reproach of it. He ended by accepting
and approving what he had commenced with persecuting; yet it was with
the honest inconsistency which distinguishes the conduct of most men
of practical ability in times of change, and even by virtue of which
they obtain their success. If at the commencement of the movement he
had regarded the eucharist as a "remembrance," he must either have
concealed his convictions or he would have forfeited his throne; if he
had been a stationary bigot, the Reformation might have waited for a
century, and would have been conquered only by an internecine war.
But as the nation moved the King moved, leading it, but not outrunning
it; checking those who went too fast, dragging forward those who
lagged behind. The conservatives, all that was sound and good among
them, trusted him because he so long continued to share their
conservatism; when he threw it aside he was not reproached with breach
of confidence, because his own advance had accompanied theirs.
Protestants have exclaimed against the Six Articles Bill; Romanists
against the Act of Supremacy. Philosophers complain that the
prejudices of the people were needlessly violated, that opinions
should have been allowed to be free, and the reform of religion have
been left to be accomplished by reason. Yet, however cruel was the Six
Articles Bill, the governing classes even among the laity were
unanimous in its favor. The King was not converted by a sudden
miracle; he believed the traditions in which he had been trained; his
eyes, like the eyes of others, opened but slowly; and unquestionably,
had he conquered for himself in their fullness the modern principles
of toleration, he could not have governed by them a nation which was
itself intolerant. Perhaps, of all living Englishmen who shared
Henry's faith, there was not one so little desirous in himself of
enforcing it by violence. His personal exertions were ever to mitigate
the action of the law, while its letter was sustained; and England at
its worst was a harbor of refuge to the Protestants, compared to the
Netherlands, to France, to Spain, or even to Scotland.
That the Romanists should have regarded him as a tyrant is natural;
and were it true that English subjects owed fealty to the Pope, their
feeling was just. But however desirable it may be to leave religious
opinion unfettered, it is certain that if England was legitimately
free, she could tolerate no difference of opinion on a question of
allegiance, so long as Europe was conspiring to bring her back into
slavery. So long as the English Romanists refused to admit without
mental reservation that, if foreign enemies invaded this country in
the Pope's name, their place must be at the side of their own
sovereign, "religion" might palliate the moral guilt of their treason,
but it could not exempt them from its punishment.
But these matters have been discussed in the details of this history,
where alone they can be understood.
Beyond and besides the Reformation, the constitution of these islands
now rests in large measure on foundations laid in this reign. Henry
brought Ireland within the reach of English civilization. He absorbed
Wales and the Palatinates into the general English system. He it was
who raised the House of Commons from the narrow duty of voting
supplies, and of passing without discussion the measures of the Privy
Council, and converted them into the first power in the State under
the Crown. When he ascended the throne, so little did the Commons care
for their privileges that their attendance at the sessions of
Parliament was enforced by a law. They woke into life in 1529, and
they became the right hand of the King to subdue the resistance of the
House of Lords, and to force upon them a course of legislation which
from their hearts they detested. Other kings in times of difficulty
summoned their "great councils," composed of peers, or prelates, or
municipal officials, or any persons whom they pleased to nominate.
Henry VIII. broke through the ancient practice, and ever threw himself
on the representatives of the people. By the Reformation and by the
power which he forced upon them, he had so interwoven the House of
Commons with the highest business of the State that the peers
thenceforward sunk to be their shadow.
Something, too, ought to be said of his individual exertions in the
details of State administration. In his earlier life, though active
and assiduous, he found leisure for elegant accomplishments, for
splendid amusements, for relaxations careless, extravagant, sometimes
questionable. As his life drew onwards, his lighter tastes
disappeared, and the whole energy of his intellect was pressed into
the business of the commonwealth. Those who have examined the printed
State papers may form some impression of his industry from the
documents which are his own composition, and the letters which he
wrote and received: but only persons who have seen the original
manuscripts, who have observed the traces of his pen in side-notes and
corrections, and the handwritings of his secretaries in diplomatic
commissions, in drafts of Acts of Parliament, in expositions and
formularies, in articles of faith, in proclamations, in the countless
multitude of documents of all sorts, secular or ecclesiastical, which
contain the real history of this extraordinary reign,--only they can
realize the extent of labor to which he sacrificed himself, and which
brought his life to a premature close. His personal faults were great,
and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far deeper
blemishes would be but as scars upon the features of a sovereign who
in trying times sustained nobly the honor of the English name, and
carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its
history.