WOLSEY
1514-1529
[Sidenote: Wolsey's rise]
"There are many things in the Commonwealth of Nowhere that I rather wish
than hope to see embodied in our own." It was with these words of
characteristic irony that More closed the first work which embodied the
dreams of the New Learning. Destined as they were to fulfilment in the
course of ages, its schemes of social, religious, and political reform
broke in fact helplessly against the temper of the time. At the moment
when More was pleading the cause of justice between rich and poor social
discontent was being fanned by new exactions and sterner laws into a
fiercer flame. While he was advocating toleration and Christian
comprehension Christendom stood on the verge of a religious strife which
was to rend it for ever in pieces. While he aimed sarcasm after sarcasm at
king-worship the new despotism of the Monarchy was being organised into a
vast and all-embracing system by the genius of Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey was
the son of a wealthy townsman of Ipswich whose ability had raised him into
notice at the close of the preceding reign, and who had been taken by
Bishop Fox into the service of the Crown. The activity which he showed in
organizing and equipping the royal army for the campaign of 1513 won for
him a foremost place in the confidence of Henry the Eighth. The young king
lavished dignities on him with a profusion that marked the completeness of
his trust. From the post of royal almoner he was advanced in 1513 to the
see of Tournay. At the opening of 1514 he became bishop of Lincoln; at its
close he was translated to the archbishoprick of York. In 1515 Henry
procured from Rome his elevation to the office of cardinal and raised him
to the post of chancellor. So quick a rise stirred envy in the men about
him; and his rivals noted bitterly the songs, the dances, and carousals
which had won, as they believed, the favour of the king. But sensuous and
worldly as was Wolsey's temper, his powers lifted him high above the level
of a court favourite. His noble bearing, his varied ability, his enormous
capacity for toil, the natural breadth and grandeur of his mind, marked
him naturally out as the minister of a king who showed throughout his
reign a keen eye for greatness in the men about him.
[Sidenote: Wolsey's policy]
Wolsey's mind was European rather than English; it dwelt little on home
affairs but turned almost exclusively to the general politics of the
European powers and of England as one of them. Whatever might be Henry's
disappointment in the issue of his French campaigns the young king might
dwell with justifiable pride on the general result of his foreign policy.
If his direct gains from the Holy League had been little, he had at any
rate won security on the side of France. The loss of Navarre and of the
Milanese left Lewis a far less dangerous neighbour than he had seemed at
Henry's accession, while the appearance of the Swiss soldiery during the
war of the League destroyed the military supremacy which France had
enjoyed from the days of Charles the Eighth. But if the war had freed
England from the fear of French pressure Wolsey was as resolute to free
her from the dictation of Ferdinand, and this the resentment of Henry at
his unscrupulous desertion enabled him to bring about. Crippled as she
was, France was no longer formidable as a foe; and her alliance would not
only break the supremacy of Ferdinand over English policy but secure Henry
on his northern border. Her husband's death at Flodden and the infancy of
their son raised Margaret Tudor to the Scotch regency, and seemed to
promise Henry a hold on his troublesome neighbours. But her marriage a
year later with the Earl of Angus, Archibald Douglas, soon left the Regent
powerless among the factions of warring nobles. She appealed to her
brother for aid, while her opponents called on the Duke of Albany, the son
of the Albany who had been driven to France in 1484 and heir to the crown
after the infant king, to return and take the regency. Albany held broad
lands in France; he had won fame as a French general; and Scotland in his
hands would be simply a means of French attack. A French alliance not only
freed Henry from dependence on Ferdinand but would meet this danger from
the north; and in the summer of 1514 a treaty was concluded with the
French king and ratified by his marriage with Henry's youngest sister,
Mary Tudor.
[Sidenote: Francis the First]
The treaty was hardly signed when the death of Lewis in January 1515 undid
this marriage and placed his young cousin, Francis the First, upon the
throne. But the old king's death brought no change of policy. Francis at
once prepared to renew the war in Italy, and for this purpose he needed
the friendship of his two neighbours in the west and the north, Henry and
the ruler of the Netherlands, the young Charles of Austria. Both were
willing to give their friendship. Charles, jealous of Maximilian's desire
to bring him into tutelage, looked to a French alliance as a security
against the pressure of the Emperor, while Henry and Wolsey were eager to
despatch Francis on a campaign across the Alps, which would at any rate
while it lasted remove all fear of an attack on England. A yet stronger
ground in the minds of both Charles and Henry for facilitating the French
king's march was their secret belief that his invasion of the Milanese
would bring the young king to inevitable ruin, for the Emperor and
Ferdinand of Aragon were leagued with every Italian state against Francis,
and a Swiss army prepared to dispute with him the possession of the
Milanese. Charles therefore betrothed himself to the French king's sister,
and Henry concluded a fresh treaty with him in the spring of 1515. But the
dreams of both rulers were roughly broken. Francis succeeded both in
crossing the Alps and in beating the Swiss army. His victory in the
greatest battle of the age, the battle of Marignano, at once gave him the
Milanese and laid the rest of Italy at his feet. The work of the Holy
Alliance was undone, and the dominion which England had dreaded in the
hands of Lewis the Twelfth was restored in the younger and more vigorous
hands of his successor. Neither the king nor the Cardinal could hide their
chagrin when the French minister announced his master's victory, but it
was no time for an open breach. All Wolsey could do was to set himself
secretly to hamper the French king's work. English gold hindered any
reconciliation between France and the Swiss, and enabled Maximilian to
lead a joint army of Swiss and Imperial soldiers in the following year
over the Alps.
[Sidenote: Charles the Fifth]
But the campaign broke down. At this juncture indeed the death of
Ferdinand in January 1516 changed the whole aspect of European politics.
It at once opened to Charles of Austria his Spanish and Neapolitan
heritage. The presence of the young king was urgently called for by the
troubles that followed in Castile, and Charles saw that peace was needed
for the gathering into his hands of realms so widely scattered as his own.
Maximilian too was ready to set aside all other aims to secure the
aggrandizement of his house. After an inactive campaign therefore the
Emperor negotiated secretly with France, and the treaty of Noyon which
Charles concluded with Francis in August 1516 was completed in March 1517
by the accession of Maximilian to their alliance in the Treaty of Cambray.
To all outer seeming the Treaty of Cambray left Francis supreme in the
west, unequalled in military repute, a soldier who at twenty had withstood
and broken the league of all Europe in arms, master of the Milanese, and
through his alliances with Venice, Florence, and the Pope virtually master
of all Italy save the Neapolitan realm. On the other hand the treaty left
England exposed and alone, should France choose this moment for attack.
Francis was well aware of Wolsey's efforts against him, and the state of
Scotland offered the ready means of bringing about a quarrel. While Henry,
anxious as he was to aid his sister, was fettered by the fear that English
intervention would bring French intervention in its train and endanger the
newly concluded alliance, Albany succeeded in evading the English cruisers
and landing in the May of 1515. He was at once declared Protector of the
realm by the Parliament at Edinburgh. Margaret on the other hand was
driven into Stirling, and after a short siege forced to take refuge in
England. The influence of Albany and the French party whom he headed
secured for Francis in any struggle the aid of Scotland. But neither Henry
nor his minister really dreaded danger from the Treaty of Cambray; on the
contrary it solved all their difficulties. So well did they understand the
aim of Charles in concluding it that they gave him the gold which enabled
him to reach Spain. Master of Castile and Aragon, of Naples and the
Netherlands, the Spanish king rose into a check on the French monarchy
such as the policy of Henry or Wolsey had never been able to construct
before. Instead of towering over Europe, Francis found himself confronted
in the hour of his pride by a rival whom he was never to overcome; while
England, deserted and isolated as she seemed for the moment, was eagerly
sought in alliance by both princes. In October 1518 Francis strove to bind
her to his cause by a new treaty of peace, in which England sold Tournay
to France and the hand of the French dauphin was promised to Henry's
daughter Mary, now a child of two years old.
[Sidenote: Wolsey's greatness]
At the close of 1518 therefore the policy of Wolsey seemed justified by
success. He had found England a power of the second order, overawed by
France and dictated to by Ferdinand of Spain. She now stood in the
forefront of European affairs, a state whose alliance was desired alike by
French king and Spanish king, and which dealt on equal terms with Pope or
Emperor. In European cabinets Wolsey was regarded as hardly less a power
to be conciliated than his royal master. Both Charles and Francis sought
his friendship; and in the years which followed his official emoluments
were swelled by pensions from both princes. At home the king loaded him
with new proofs of favour. The revenues of two sees whose tenants were
foreigners fell into his hands; he held the bishoprick of Winchester and
the abbacy of St. Albans. He spent this vast wealth with princely
ostentation. His pomp was almost royal. A train of prelates and nobles
followed him as he moved; his household was composed of five hundred
persons of noble birth, and its chief posts were occupied by knights and
barons of the realm. Two of the houses he built, Hampton Court and York
House, the later Whitehall, were splendid enough to serve at his fall as
royal palaces. Nor was this magnificence a mere show of power. The whole
direction of home and foreign affairs rested with Wolsey alone. His toil
was ceaseless. The morning was for the most part given to his business as
chancellor in Westminster Hall and at the Star-Chamber; but nightfall
still found him labouring at exchequer business or home administration,
managing Church affairs, unravelling the complexities of Irish
misgovernment, planning schools and colleges, above all drawing and
studying despatches and transacting the whole diplomatic correspondence of
the state. Greedy as was his passion for toil, Wolsey felt the pressure of
this enormous mass of business, and his imperious tones, his angry
outbursts of impatience, showed him to be overworked. Even his vigorous
frame gave way. Still a strong and handsome man in 1518 at the age of
forty-seven, Wolsey was already an old man, broken by disease, when he
fell from power at fifty-eight. But enormous as was the mass of work which
he undertook, it was thoroughly done. His administration of the royal
treasury was rigidly economical. The number of his despatches is hardly
less remarkable than the care he bestowed on each. Even More, an avowed
enemy, owns that as Chancellor he surpassed all men's expectations. The
court of Chancery indeed became so crowded through the character for
expedition and justice which it gained under his rule that subordinate
courts had to be created for its relief.
[Sidenote: Concentration of secular and ecclesiastical power]
But not even with this concentration of authority in a single hand was
Henry content. At the close of 1517 he procured from the Pope the
Cardinal's appointment as Legate _a latere_ in the realm. Such a Legate
was entrusted with powers almost as full as those of the Pope himself; his
jurisdiction extended over every bishop and priest, it overrode every
privilege or exemption of abbey or cell, while his court superseded that
of Rome as the final court of ecclesiastical appeal for the realm. Already
wielding the full powers of secular justice in his capacity of Chancellor
and of president of the royal Council, Wolsey wielded the full power of
spiritual justice in his capacity of Legate. His elevation was no mere
freak of royal favour; it was the result of a distinct policy. The moment
had come when the Monarchy was to gather up all government into the
personal grasp of the king. The checks which had been imposed on the
action of the sovereign by the presence of great prelates and lords at his
council were practically removed. His fellow-councillors learned to hold
their peace when the haughty minister "clapped his rod on the board." The
restraints of public justice were equally done away. Even the distant
check of Rome was gone. All secular, all ecclesiastical power was summed
up in a single hand. It was this concentration of authority in Wolsey
which accustomed England to a system of personal government under Henry
and his successors. It was the Cardinal's long tenure of the whole Papal
authority within the realm, and the consequent suspension of appeals to
Rome, that led men to acquiesce at a later time in Henry's own claim of
religious supremacy. For proud as was Wolsey's bearing and high as were
his natural powers he stood before England as the mere creature of the
king. Greatness, wealth, authority he held, and owned he held, simply at
the royal will. In raising his low-born favourite to the head of church
and state Henry was gathering all religious as well as all civil authority
into his personal grasp. The nation which trembled before Wolsey learned
to tremble before the master who could destroy Wolsey with a breath.
[Sidenote: Rivalry of Charles and Francis]
The rise of Charles of Austria gave a new turn to Wolsey's policy. Till
now France had been a pressing danger, and the political scheme both of
Henry and his minister lay in organizing leagues to check her greatness or
in diverting her activity to the fields of Lombardy. But from the moment
of Ferdinand's death this power of Francis was balanced by the power of
Charles. Possessor of the Netherlands, of Franche Comte, of Spain, Charles
already pressed France on its northern, eastern, and southern borders when
the death of his grandfather Maximilian in the spring of 1519 added to his
dominions the heritage of the House of Austria in Swabia and on the
Danube. It did yet more for him in opening to him the Empire. The
intrigues of Maximilian had secured for Charles promises of support from a
majority of the Electors, and though Francis redoubled his efforts and
Henry the Eighth sent an envoy to push his own succession, the cry of
Germany for a German head carried all before it. In June 1519 Charles was
elected Emperor; and France saw herself girt in on every side by a power
whose greed was even greater than her own. For, boy of nineteen as he was,
Charles from the first moment of his rule meant to make himself master of
the world; and France, thrown suddenly on the defensive, nerved herself
for the coming struggle. Both needed the gold and friendship of England.
Convinced as he was of Henry's treachery in the Imperial election, where
the English sovereign had promised Francis his support, the French king
clung to the alliance which Wolsey in his uncertainty as to the actual
drift of Charles had concluded in 1518, and pressed for an interview with
Henry himself. But the need of France had woke dreams of more than mere
safety or a balanced neutrality in Wolsey and his master. The time seemed
come at last for a bolder game. The claim on the French crown had never
been waived; the dream of recovering at least Guienne and Normandy still
lived on in the hearts of English statesmen; and the subtle, unscrupulous
youth who was now planning his blow for the mastery of the world knew well
how to seize upon dreams such as these. Nor was Wolsey forgotten. If Henry
coveted France, his minister coveted no less a prize than the Papacy; and
the young Emperor was lavish of promises of support in any coming
election. The result of his seductions was quickly seen. While Henry
deferred the interview with Francis till the summer of 1520, Charles had
already planned a meeting with his uncle in the opening of the year.
[Sidenote: League with Charles]
What importance Charles attached to this meeting was seen in his leaving
Spain ablaze with revolt behind him to keep his engagement. He landed at
Dover in the end of May, and King and Emperor rode alone to Canterbury,
but of the promises or pledges which passed we know little save from the
after-course of English politics. Nothing could have differed more vividly
from this simple ride than the interview with Francis which followed in
June. A camp of three hundred white tents surrounded a faery palace with
gilded posterns and brightly-coloured oriels which rose like a dream from
the barren plain of Guisnes, its walls hung with tapestry, its roof
embossed with roses, its golden fountain spouting wine over the
greensward. But all this pomp and splendour, the chivalrous embraces and
tourneys of the kings, the gorgeous entry of Wolsey in his crimson robe on
a mule trapped with gold, the fresh treaty which ratified the alliance,
hardly veiled the new English purpose. A second interview between Charles
and his uncle as he returned from the meeting with Francis ended in a
secret confederacy of the two sovereigns and the promise of the Emperor to
marry his cousin, Henry's one child, Mary Tudor. With her hand passed the
heritage of the English Crown. Henry had now ceased to hope for a son from
Catharine, and Mary was his destined successor. Her right to the throne
was asserted by a deed which proved how utterly the baronage now lay at
the mercy of the king. The Duke of Buckingham stood first in blood as in
power among the English nobles; he was the descendant of Edward the
Third's youngest son, and if Mary's succession were denied he stood heir
to the throne. His hopes had been fanned by prophets and astrologers, and
wild words told his purpose to seize the crown on Henry's death in
defiance of every opponent. But word and act had for two years been
watched by the king; and in 1521 the Duke was arrested, condemned as a
traitor by his peers, and beheaded on Tower Hill. His blood was a pledge
of Henry's sincerity which Charles could not mistake. Francis on the other
hand had never for a moment been deceived by the profuse assurances of
friendship which the king and Wolsey lavished on him. A revolt of the
Spanish towns offered a favourable opportunity for an attack on his rival,
and a French army passed over the Pyrenees into Navarre while Francis
himself prepared to invade the Netherlands. Both princes appealed for aid
under their separate treaties to Henry; and the English sovereign, whom
the quick stroke of the French had taken by surprise, could only gain time
by a feigned mediation in which Wolsey visited both Emperor and King. But
at the close of the year England was at last ready for action, and
Wolsey's solemn decision that Francis was the aggressor was followed in
November by a secret league which was concluded at Calais between the
Pope, the Emperor, and Henry.
[Sidenote: Benevolences]
The conquest of the Milanese by the imperial generals turned at this
moment the balance of the war, and as the struggle went on the accession
of Venice and the lesser Italian republics, of the king of Hungary and
Ferdinand of Austria, to whom Charles had ceded his share in the
hereditary duchy of their house, to the alliance for the recovery of Italy
from the French, threatened ruin to the cause of Francis. In real power
however the two combatants were still fairly matched. If she stood alone,
France was rich and compact, while her opponents were scattered,
distracted by warring aims, and all equally poor. The wealth which had
given Henry his weight in the counsels of Europe at the opening of his
reign had been exhausted by his earlier wars, and Wolsey's economy had
done nothing more than tide the crown through the past years of peace. But
now that Henry had promised to raise forty thousand men for the coming
campaign the ordinary resources of the treasury were utterly insufficient.
With the instinct of despotism Wolsey shrank from reviving the tradition
of the Parliament. Though Henry had thrice called the Houses together to
supply the expenses of his earlier struggle with France his minister had
governed through seven years of peace without once assembling them. War
made a Parliament inevitable, but for a while Wolsey strove to delay its
summons by a wide extension of the practice which Edward the Fourth had
invented of raising money by gifts called "Benevolences," or by forced
loans nominally to be repaid by a coming Parliament. Large sums were
assessed upon every county. Twenty thousand pounds were exacted from
London, and its wealthier citizens were summoned before the Cardinal and
required to give an account of the value of their estates. Commissioners
were sent into each shire for the purposes of assessment, and precepts
were issued on their information, requiring in some cases supplies of
soldiers, in others a tenth of a man's income, for the king's service. So
poor however was the return that the Earl of Surrey, who was sent as
general to Calais, could muster only a force of seventeen thousand men;
and while Charles succeeded in driving the French from Milan, the English
campaign dwindled into a mere raid upon Picardy, from which the army fell
back, broken with want and disease.
[Sidenote: Wolsey and the Parliament]
The Cardinal was driven to call the Estates together in April 1523; and
the conduct of the Commons showed how little the new policy of the
Monarchy had as yet done to change the temper of the nation or to break
its loyalty to the tradition of constitutional freedom. Wolsey needed the
sum of eight hundred thousand pounds, and proposed to raise it by a
property tax of twenty per cent. Such a demand was unprecedented, but the
Cardinal counted on his presence to bear down all opposition, and made the
demand in person. He was received with obstinate silence. It was in vain
that he called on member after member to answer; and his appeal to More,
who had been elected to fill the chair of the House of Commons, was met by
the Speaker's falling on his knees and representing his powerlessness to
reply till he had received instructions from the House itself. The effort
to overawe the Commons had in fact failed, and Wolsey was forced to
retire. He had no sooner withdrawn than an angry debate began, and the
Cardinal returned to answer the objections which were raised to the
subsidy. But the Commons again foiled the minister's attempt to influence
their deliberations by refusing to discuss the matter in his presence. The
struggle continued for a fortnight; and though successful in procuring a
grant the court party were forced to content themselves with less than
half of Wolsey's original demand. The Church displayed as independent a
spirit. Wolsey's aim of breaking down constitutional traditions was shown,
as in the case of the Commons, by his setting aside the old assembly of
the provincial convocations, and as Legate summoning the clergy to meet in
a national synod. But the clergy held as stubbornly to constitutional
usage as the laity, and the Cardinal was forced to lay his demand before
them in their separate convocations. Even here however the enormous grant
he asked was disputed for four months, and the matter had at last to be
settled by a compromise.
[Sidenote: War with France]
It was plain that England was far from having sunk to a slavish submission
to the monarchy. But galled as Wolsey was by the resistance, his mind was
too full of vast schemes of foreign conquest to turn to any resolute
conflict with opposition at home. The treason of the Duke of Bourbon
stirred a new hope of conquering France. Bourbon was Constable of France,
the highest of the French nobles both from his blood and the almost
independent power he wielded in his own duchy and in Provence. But a legal
process by which Francis sought to recall his vast possessions to the
domain of the crown threatened him with ruin; and driven to secret revolt,
he pledged himself to rise against the king on the appearance of the
allied armies in the heart of the realm. His offer was eagerly accepted,
and so confident were the conspirators of success that they at once
settled the division of their spoil. To Henry his hopes seemed at last
near their realization; and while Burgundy fell naturally to Charles, his
ally claimed what remained of France and the French crown. The departure
of Francis with his army for Italy was to be the signal for the execution
of the scheme, a joint army of English and Imperialists advancing to
Bourbon's aid from the north while a force of Spaniards and Germans
marched to the same point from the south. As the French troops moved to
the Alps a German force penetrated in August into Lorraine, an English
army disembarked at Calais, and a body of Spaniards descended from the
Pyrenees. But at the moment of its realization the discovery of the plot
and an order for his arrest foiled Bourbon's designs; and his precipitate
flight threw these skilful plans into confusion. Francis remained in his
realm. Though the army which he sent over the Alps was driven back from
the walls of Milan it still held to Piedmont, while the allied force in
northern France under the command of the Duke of Suffolk advanced to the
Oise only to find itself unsupported and to fall hastily back, and the
slow advance of the Spaniards frustrated the campaign in Guienne. In
Scotland alone a gleam of success lighted on the English arms. At the
close of the former war Albany had withdrawn to France and Margaret
regained her power; but a quarrel both with her husband and the English
king brought the queen-mother herself to invite the Duke to return. On the
outbreak of the new struggle with Francis Henry at once insisted on his
withdrawal, and though Albany marched on England with a large and
well-equipped army, the threats of the English commander so wrought on him
that he engaged to disband it and fled over sea. Henry and his sister drew
together again; and Margaret announced that her son, James the Fifth, who
had now reached his twelfth year, assumed the government as king, while
Lord Surrey advanced across the border to support her against the French
party among the nobles. But the presence of an English army roused the
whole people to arms. Albany was recalled; and Surrey saw himself forced
to retreat while the Duke with sixty thousand men crossed the border and
formed the siege of Wark. But again his cowardice ruined all. No sooner
did Surrey, now heavily reinforced, advance to offer battle than Albany
fell back to Lauder. Laying down the regency he set sail for France, and
the resumption of her power by Margaret relieved England from its dread of
a Scotch attack.
[Sidenote: Henry and Charles]
Baffled as he had been, Henry still clung to his schemes of a French
crown; and the defeat of the French army in Lombardy in 1524, the
evacuation of Italy, and the advance of the Imperialist troops into France
itself revived his hopes of success. Unable to set an army on foot in
Picardy, he furnished the Emperor with supplies which enabled his troops
to enter the south. But the selfish policy of Charles was at once shown by
the siege of Marseilles. While Henry had gained nothing from the alliance
Charles had gained the Milanese, and he was now preparing by the conquest
of Provence and the Mediterranean coast to link his possessions in Italy
with his possessions in Spain. Such a project was more practical and
statesmanlike than the visions of a conquest of France; but it was not to
further the Emperor's greatness that England had wasted money and men.
Henry felt that he was tricked as he had been tricked in 1523. Then as now
it was clearly the aim of Charles to humble Francis, but not to transfer
the French crown to his English ally. Nor was the resentment of Wolsey at
the Emperor's treachery less than that of the king. At the death of Leo
the Tenth, as at the death of his successor, Charles had fulfilled his
pledge to the Cardinal by directing his party in the Sacred College to
support his choice. But secret directions counteracted the open ones; and
Wolsey had seen the tutor of the Emperor, Adrian the Sixth, and his
partizan, Clement the Seventh, successively raised to the papal chair. The
eyes of both king and minister were at last opened, and Henry drew
cautiously from his ally, suspending further payments to Bourbon's army,
and opening secret negotiations with France. But the face of affairs was
changed anew by the obstinate resistance of Marseilles, the ruin and
retreat of the Imperialist forces, and the sudden advance of Francis with
a new army over the Alps. Though Milan was saved from his grasp, the
Imperial troops were surrounded and besieged in Pavia. For three months
they held stubbornly out, but famine at last forced them to a desperate
resolve; and in February 1525, at a moment when the French army was
weakened by the despatch of forces to Southern Italy, a sudden attack of
the Imperialists ended in a crushing victory. The French were utterly
routed and Francis himself remained a prisoner in the hands of the
conquerors. The ruin as it seemed of France roused into fresh life the
hopes of the English king. Again drawing closely to Charles he offered to
join the Emperor in an invasion of France with forty thousand men, to head
his own forces, and to furnish heavy subsidies for the cost of the war.
Should the allies prove successful and Henry be crowned king of France, he
pledged himself to cede to Bourbon Dauphiny and his duchy, to surrender
Burgundy, Provence, and Languedoc to the Emperor, and to give Charles the
hand of his daughter, Mary, and with it the heritage of two crowns which
would in the end make him master of the world.
[Sidenote: Resistance to Benevolences]
Though such a project seemed hardly perhaps as possible to Wolsey as to
his master it served to test the sincerity of Charles in his adhesion to
the alliance. But whether they were in earnest or no in proposing it, king
and minister had alike to face the difficulty of an empty treasury. Money
was again needed for action, but to obtain a new grant from Parliament was
impossible, nor was Wolsey eager to meet fresh rebuffs from the spirit of
the Commons or the clergy. He was driven once more to the system of
Benevolences. In every county a tenth was demanded from the laity and a
fourth from the clergy by the royal commissioners. But the demand was met
by a general resistance. The political instinct of the nation discerned as
of old that in the question of self-taxation was involved that of the very
existence of freedom. The clergy put themselves in the forefront of the
opposition, and preached from every pulpit that the commission was
contrary to the liberties of the realm and that the king could take no
man's goods but by process of law. Archbishop Warham, who was pressing the
demand in Kent, was forced to write to the court that "there was sore
grudging and murmuring among the people." "If men should give their goods
by a commission," said the Kentish squires, "then it would be worse than
the taxes of France, and England should be bond, not free." So stirred was
the nation that Wolsey bent to the storm and offered to rely on the
voluntary loans of each subject. But the statute of Richard the Third
which declared all exaction of Benevolences illegal was recalled to
memory; the demand was evaded by London, and the Commissioners were driven
out of Kent. A revolt actually broke out among the weavers of Suffolk; the
men of Cambridge banded for resistance; the Norwich clothiers, though they
yielded at first, soon threatened to rise. "Who is your captain?" the Duke
of Norfolk asked the crowd. "His name is Poverty," was the answer, "for he
and his cousin Necessity have brought us to this doing." There was in fact
a general strike of the employers. Clothmakers discharged their workers,
farmers put away their servants. "They say the King asketh so much that
they be not able to do as they have done before this time." Such a peasant
insurrection as was raging in Germany was only prevented by the
unconditional withdrawal of the royal demand.
[Sidenote: End of the Austrian Alliance]
The check was too rough a one not to rouse both Wolsey and the king. Henry
was wroth at the need of giving way before rebels, and yet more wroth at
the blow which the strife had dealt to the popularity on which he set so
great a store. Wolsey was more keenly hurt by the overthrow of his hopes
for a decisive campaign. Without money it was impossible to take advantage
of the prostration of France or bring the Emperor to any serious effort
for its subjection and partition. But Charles had no purpose in any case
of playing the English game, or of carrying out the pledges by which he
had lured England into war. He concluded an armistice with his prisoner,
and used Wolsey's French negotiations in the previous year as a ground for
evading fulfilment of his stipulations. The alliance was in fact at an
end; and the schemes of winning anew "our inheritance of France" had ended
in utter failure. So sharp a blow could hardly fail to shake Wolsey's
power. The popular clamour against him on the score of the Benevolences
found echoes at court; and it was only by a dexterous gift to Henry of his
newly-built palace at Hampton Court that Wolsey again won his old
influence over the king. Buried indeed as both Henry and his minister were
in schemes of distant ambition, the sudden and general resistance of
England woke them to an uneasy consciousness that their dream of
uncontrolled authority was yet to find hindrances in the temper of the
people they ruled. And at this moment a new and irresistible power began
to quicken the national love of freedom and law. It was the influence of
religion which was destined to ruin the fabric of the Monarchy; and the
year which saw the defeat of the Crown in its exaction of Benevolences saw
the translation of the English Bible.
[Sidenote: Luther]
While Charles and Francis were struggling for the lordship of the world,
Germany had been shaken by the outburst of the Reformation. "That Luther
has a fine genius!" laughed Leo the Tenth when he heard in 1517 that a
German Professor had nailed some Propositions denouncing the abuse of
Indulgences, or of the Papal power to remit certain penalties attached to
the commission of sins, against the doors of a church at Wittemberg. But
the "Quarrel of Friars," as the controversy was termed contemptuously at
Rome, soon took larger proportions. If at the outset Luther flung himself
"prostrate at the feet" of the Papacy and owned its voice as the voice of
Christ, the sentence of Leo no sooner confirmed the doctrine of
Indulgences than their opponent appealed to a future Council of the
Church. In 1520 the rupture was complete. A Papal Bull formally condemned
the errors of the Reformer, and Luther publicly consigned the Bull to the
flames. A second condemnation expelled him from the bosom of the Church,
and the ban of the Empire was soon added to that of the Papacy. Charles
the Fifth had bought Leo's alliance with himself and England by a promise
of repressing the new heresy; and its author was called to appear before
him in a Diet at Worms. "Here stand I; I can none other," Luther replied
to the young Emperor as he pressed him to recant; and from a hiding-place
in the Thuringian forest where he was sheltered after his condemnation by
the Elector of Saxony he denounced not merely, as at first, the abuses of
the Papacy, but the Papacy itself. The heresies of Wyclif were revived;
the infallibility, the authority of the Roman See, the truth of its
doctrines, the efficacy of its worship, were denied and scoffed at in
vigorous pamphlets which issued from his retreat and were dispersed
throughout the world by the new printing-press. Germany welcomed them with
enthusiasm. Its old resentment against the oppression of Rome, the moral
revolt in its more religious minds against the secularity and corruption
of the Church, the disgust of the New Learning at the superstition which
the Papacy now formally protected, combined to secure for Luther a
widespread popularity and the protection of the northern princes of the
Empire.
[Sidenote: Luther and the New Learning]
In England his protest seemed at first to find no echo. The king himself
was both on political and religious grounds firm on the Papal side.
England and Rome were drawn to a close alliance by the identity of their
political position. Each was hard pressed between the same great powers;
Rome had to hold its own between the masters of southern and the masters
of northern Italy, as England had to hold her own between the rulers of
France and of the Netherlands. From the outset of his reign to the actual
break with Clement the Seventh the policy of Henry is always at one with
that of the Papacy. Nor were the king's religious tendencies hostile to
it. He was a trained theologian and proud of his theological knowledge,
but to the end his convictions remained firmly on the side of the
doctrines which Luther denied. In 1521 therefore he entered the lists
against Luther with an "Assertion of the Seven Sacraments" for which he
was rewarded by Leo with the title of "Defender of the Faith." The
insolent abuse of the Reformer's answer called More and Fisher into the
field. The influence of the New Learning was now strong at the English
Court. Colet and Grocyn were among its foremost preachers; Linacre was
Henry's physician; More was a privy councillor; Pace was one of the
Secretaries of State; Tunstall was Master of the Rolls. And as yet the New
Learning, though scared by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily
backed him in his struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor.
Ulrich von Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invectives as violent
as his own. But the temper of the Renascence was even more antagonistic to
the temper of Luther than that of Rome itself. From the golden dream of a
new age wrought peaceably and purely by the slow progress of intelligence,
the growth of letters, the developement of human virtue, the Reformer of
Wittemberg turned away with horror. He had little or no sympathy with the
new culture. He despised reason as heartily as any Papal dogmatist could
despise it. He hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension. He
had been driven by a moral and intellectual compulsion to declare the
Roman system a false one, but it was only to replace it by another system
of doctrine just as elaborate, and claiming precisely the same
infallibility. To degrade human nature was to attack the very base of the
New Learning; and his attack on it called the foremost of its teachers to
the field. But Erasmus no sooner advanced to its defence than Luther
declared man to be utterly enslaved by original sin and incapable through
any efforts of his own of discovering truth or of arriving at goodness.
Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the classic
past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger views of life and
of the world; it trampled in the dust reason itself, the very instrument
by which More and Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and religion.
To More especially, with his keener perception of its future effect, this
sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit, severing
Christendom into warring camps and ruining all hopes of union and
tolerance, was especially hateful. The temper which hitherto had seemed so
"endearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way. His reply to Luther's
attack upon the king sank to the level of the work it answered; and though
that of Bishop Fisher was calmer and more argumentative the divorce of the
New Learning from the Reformation seemed complete.
[Sidenote: Tyndale]
But if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from the new
movement it found a warmer welcome in the larger world where men are
stirred rather by emotion than by thought. There was an England of which
even More and Colet knew little in which Luther's words kindled a fire
that was never to die. As a great social and political movement Lollardry
had ceased to exist, and little remained of the directly religious impulse
given by Wyclif beyond a vague restlessness and discontent with the system
of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the life of Lollardry the
prosecutions whose records lie scattered over the bishops' registers
failed wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here and there to read "in
a great book of heresy all one night certain chapters of the Evangelists
in English," while transcripts of Wyclif's tracts passed from hand to
hand. The smouldering embers needed but a breath to fan them into flame,
and the breath came from William Tyndale. Born among the Cotswolds when
Bosworth Field gave England to the Tudors, Tyndale passed from Oxford to
Cambridge to feel the full impulse given by the appearance there of the
New Testament of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart.
He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the
lay people in any truth except the scripture were plainly laid before
their eyes in their mother-tongue." "If God spare my life," he said to a
learned controversialist, "ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth
the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost." But he was a
man of forty before his dream became fact. Drawn from his retirement in
Gloucestershire by the news of Luther's protest at Wittemberg, he found
shelter for a year with a London Alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He studied
most part of the day at his book," said his host afterwards, "and would
eat but sodden meat by his good will and drink but small single beer." The
book at which he studied was the Bible. But it was soon needful to quit
England if his purpose was to hold. "I understood at the last not only
that there was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New
Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England." From
Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his way to
the little town which had suddenly become the sacred city of the
Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there with an
enthusiasm which resembled that of the Crusades. "As they came in sight of
the town," a contemporary tells us, "they returned thanks to God with
clasped hands, for from Wittemberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the
light of evangelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth."
[Sidenote: Translation of the Bible]
Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the "poverty, exile, bitter
absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and
innumerable other hard and sharp fightings," which the work he had set
himself was to bring with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament was
completed, and means were furnished by English merchants for printing it
at Koeln. But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to Worms, a city
whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safer refuge, and it was from Worms
that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent in 1526 to English
shores. The king was keenly opposed to a book which he looked on as made
"at the solicitation and instance of Luther"; and even the men of the New
Learning from whom it might have hoped for welcome were estranged from it
by its Lutheran origin. We can only fairly judge their action by viewing
it in the light of the time. What Warham and More saw over sea might well
have turned them from a movement which seemed breaking down the very
foundations of religion and society. Not only was the fabric of the Church
rent asunder and the centre of Christian unity denounced as "Babylon," but
the reform itself seemed passing into anarchy. Luther was steadily moving
onward from the denial of one Catholic dogma to that of another; and what
Luther still clung to his followers were ready to fling away. Carlstadt
was denouncing the reformer of Wittemberg as fiercely as Luther himself
had denounced the Pope, and meanwhile the religious excitement was
kindling wild dreams of social revolution, and men stood aghast at the
horrors of a Peasant-War which broke out in Southern Germany. It was not
therefore as a mere translation of the Bible that Tyndale's work reached
England. It came as a part of the Lutheran movement, and it bore the
Lutheran stamp in its version of ecclesiastical words. "Church" became
"congregation," "priest" was changed into "elder." It came too in company
with Luther's bitter invectives and reprints of the tracts of Wyclif,
which the German traders of the Steelyard were importing in large numbers.
We can hardly wonder that More denounced the book as heretical, or that
Warham ordered it to be given up by all who possessed it.
[Sidenote: Wolsey and Lutheranism]
Wolsey took little heed of religious matters, but his policy was one of
political adhesion to Rome, and he presided over a solemn penance to which
some Steelyard men submitted in St. Paul's. "With six and thirty abbots,
mitred priors, and bishops, and he in his whole pomp mitred" the Cardinal
looked on while "great baskets full of books ... were commanded after the
great fire was made before the Rood of Northen," the crucifix by the great
north door of the cathedral, "thus to be burned, and those heretics to go
thrice about the fire and to cast in their fagots." But scenes and
denunciations such as these were vain in the presence of an enthusiasm
which grew every hour. "Englishmen," says a scholar of the time, "were so
eager for the gospel as to affirm that they would buy a New Testament even
if they had to give a hundred thousand pieces of money for it." Bibles and
pamphlets were smuggled over to England and circulated among the poorer
and trading classes through the agency of an association of "Christian
Brethren," consisting principally of London tradesmen and citizens, but
whose missionaries spread over the country at large. They found their way
at once to the Universities, where the intellectual impulse given by the
New Learning was quickening religious speculation. Cambridge had already
won a name for heresy; Barnes, one of its foremost scholars, had to carry
his fagot before Wolsey at St. Paul's; two other Cambridge teachers,
Bilney and Latimer, were already known as "Lutherans." The Cambridge
scholars whom Wolsey introduced into Cardinal College which he was
founding spread the contagion through Oxford. A group of "Brethren" was
formed in Cardinal College for the secret reading and discussion of the
Epistles; and this soon included the more intelligent and learned scholars
of the University. It was in vain that Clark, the centre of this group,
strove to dissuade fresh members from joining it by warnings of the
impending dangers. "I fell down on my knees at his feet," says one of
them, Anthony Dalaber, "and with tears and sighs besought him that for the
tender mercy of God he should not refuse me, saying that I trusted verily
that he who had begun this on me would not forsake me, but would give me
grace to continue therein to the end. When he heard me say so he came to
me, took me in his arms, and kissed me, saying, 'The Lord God Almighty
grant you so to do, and from henceforth ever take me for your father, and
I will take you for my son in Christ.'"
[Sidenote: Latimer]
In 1528 the excitement which followed on this rapid diffusion of Tyndale's
works forced Wolsey to more vigorous action; many of the Oxford Brethren
were thrown into prison and their books seized. But in spite of the panic
of the Protestants, some of whom fled over sea, little severity was really
exercised. Henry's chief anxiety indeed was lest in the outburst against
heresy the interest of the New Learning should suffer harm. This was
remarkably shown in the protection he extended to one who was destined to
eclipse even the fame of Colet as a popular preacher. Hugh Latimer was the
son of a Leicestershire yeoman, whose armour the boy had buckled on in
Henry the Seventh's days ere he set out to meet the Cornish insurgents at
Blackheath field. Latimer has himself described the soldierly training of
his youth. "My father was delighted to teach me to shoot with the bow. He
taught me how to draw, how to lay my body to the bow, not to draw with
strength of arm as other nations do but with the strength of the body." At
fourteen he was at Cambridge, flinging himself into the New Learning which
was winning its way there with a zeal that at last told on his physical
strength. The ardour of his mental efforts left its mark on him in
ailments and enfeebled health from which, vigorous as he was, his frame
never wholly freed itself. But he was destined to be known, not as a
scholar, but as a preacher. In his addresses from the pulpit the sturdy
good sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the schools as well as the
subtlety of the theologian. He had little turn for speculation, and in the
religious changes of the day we find him constantly lagging behind his
brother reformers. But he had the moral earnestness of a Jewish prophet,
and his denunciations of wrong had a prophetic directness and fire. "Have
pity on your soul," he cried to Henry, "and think that the day is even at
hand when you shall give an account of your office, and of the blood that
hath been shed by your sword." His irony was yet more telling than his
invective. "I would ask you a strange question," he said once at Paul's
Cross to a ring of Bishops; "who is the most diligent prelate in all
England, that passeth all the rest in doing of his office? I will tell
you. It is the Devil! of all the pack of them that have cure, the Devil
shall go for my money; for he ordereth his business. Therefore, you
unpreaching prelates, learn of the Devil to be diligent in your office. If
you will not learn of God, for shame learn of the Devil." But Latimer was
far from limiting himself to invective. His homely humour breaks in with
story and apologue; his earnestness is always tempered with good sense;
his plain and simple style quickens with a shrewd mother-wit. He talks to
his hearers as a man talks to his friends, telling stories such as we have
given of his own life at home, or chatting about the changes and chances
of the day with a transparent simplicity and truth that raises even his
chat into grandeur. His theme is always the actual world about him, and in
his simple lessons of loyalty, of industry, of pity for the poor, he
touches upon almost every subject from the plough to the throne. No such
preaching had been heard in England before his day, and with the growth of
his fame grew the danger of persecution. There were moments when, bold as
he was, Latimer's heart failed him. "If I had not trust that God will help
me," he wrote once, "I think the ocean sea would have divided my Lord of
London and me by this day." A citation for heresy at last brought the
danger home. "I intend," he wrote with his peculiar medley of humour and
pathos, "to make merry with my parishioners this Christmas, for all the
sorrow, lest perchance I may never return to them again." But he was saved
throughout by the steady protection of the Court. Wolsey upheld him
against the threats of the Bishop of Ely; Henry made him his own chaplain;
and the king's interposition at this critical moment forced Latimer's
judges to content themselves with a few vague words of submission.
[Sidenote: Anne Boleyn]
What really sheltered the reforming movement was Wolsey's indifference to
all but political matters. In spite of the foundation of Cardinal College
in which he was now engaged, and of the suppression of some lesser
monasteries for its endowment, the men of the New Learning looked on him
as really devoid of any interest in the revival of letters or in their
hopes of a general enlightenment. He took hardly more heed of the new
Lutheranism. His mind had no religious turn, and the quarrel of faiths was
with him simply one factor in the political game which he was carrying on
and which at this moment became more complex and absorbing than ever. The
victory of Pavia had ruined that system of balance which Henry the Seventh
and in his earlier days Henry the Eighth had striven to preserve. But the
ruin had not been to England's profit, but to the profit of its ally.
While the Emperor stood supreme in Europe Henry had won nothing from the
war, and it was plain that Charles meant him to win nothing. He set aside
all projects of a joint invasion; he broke his pledge to wed Mary Tudor
and married a princess of Portugal; he pressed for a peace with France
which would give him Burgundy. It was time for Henry and his minister to
change their course. They resolved to withdraw from all active part in the
rivalry of the two powers. In June, 1525, a treaty was secretly concluded
with France. But Henry remained on fair terms with the Emperor; and though
England joined the Holy League for the deliverance of Italy from the
Spaniards which was formed between France, the Pope, and the lesser
Italian states on the release of Francis in the spring of 1526 by virtue
of a treaty which he at once repudiated, she took no part in the lingering
war which went on across the Alps. Charles was too prudent to resent
Henry's alliance with his foes, and from this moment the country remained
virtually at peace. No longer spurred by the interest of great events, the
king ceased to take a busy part in foreign politics, and gave himself to
hunting and sport. Among the fairest and gayest ladies of his court stood
Anne Boleyn. She was sprung of a merchant family which had but lately
risen to distinction through two great marriages, that of her grandfather
with the heiress of the Earls of Ormond, and that of her father, Sir
Thomas Boleyn, with a sister of the Duke of Norfolk. It was probably
through his kinship with the Duke, who was now Lord 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 fifteen 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 gaiety and
wit, soon won favour with the king, and only a month after her return in
1522 the grant of honours to her father marked her influence over Henry.
Fresh gifts in the following years showed that the favour continued; but
in 1524 a new colour 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.
[Sidenote: The 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
favour 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 favourable
one.
[Sidenote: Wolsey and the Divorce]
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
favourable answer to Henry's request.
[Sidenote: The Legatine Commission]
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 re-marry 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 favour; 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
favourite 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.
[Sidenote: The Papal difficulties]
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 honoured with the state of a wife. The new legate,
Campeggio, held the bishoprick of Salisbury, and had been asked for as
judge from the belief that he would favour 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 judgement 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.
[Sidenote: The Trial of the Divorce]
Amidst 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 the eighteenth of June. 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 the twenty-third of July 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.
[Sidenote: Henry's wrath]
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 judgement 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.
[Sidenote: Wolsey's fall]
Henry's wrath fell at once on Wolsey. Whatever furtherance or hindrance
the Cardinal had given to his re-marriage, 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
favourite, 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 Praemunire. 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 judgement 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.