CHAPTER IV

THOMAS CROMWELL

1529-1540

[Sidenote: The new Despotism]

The ten years which follow the fall of Wolsey are among the most momentous

in our history. The Monarchy at last realized its power, and the work for

which Wolsey had paved the way was carried out with a terrible

thoroughness. The one great institution which could still offer resistance

to the royal will was struck down. The Church became a mere instrument of

the central despotism. The people learned their helplessness in rebellions

easily suppressed and avenged with ruthless severity. A reign of terror,

organized with consummate and merciless skill, held England panic-stricken

at Henry's feet. The noblest heads rolled from the block. Virtue and

learning could not save Thomas More; royal descent could not save Lady

Salisbury. The putting away of one queen, the execution of another, taught

England that nothing was too high for Henry's "courage" or too sacred for

his "appetite." Parliament assembled only to sanction acts of unscrupulous

tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the fabric of absolute rule.

All the constitutional safeguards of English freedom were swept away.

Arbitrary taxation, arbitrary legislation, arbitrary imprisonment were

powers claimed without dispute and unsparingly used by the Crown.

The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing less, is the

history of a single man. In the whole line of English statesmen there is

no one of whom we would willingly know so much, no one of whom we really

know so little, as of Thomas Cromwell. When he meets us in Henry's service

he had already passed middle life; and during his earlier years it is

hardly possible to do more than disentangle a few fragmentary facts from

the mass of fable which gathered round them. His youth was one of roving

adventure. Whether he was the son of a poor blacksmith at Putney or no, he

could hardly have been more than a boy when he was engaged in the service

of the Marchioness of Dorset, and he must still have been young when he

took part as a common soldier in the wars of Italy, a "ruffian," as he

owned afterwards to Cranmer, in the most unscrupulous school the world

contained. But it was a school in which he learned lessons even more

dangerous than those of the camp. He not only mastered the Italian

language but drank in the manners and tone of the Italy around him, the

Italy of the Borgias and the Medici. It was with Italian versatility that

he turned from the camp to the counting-house; he was certainly engaged as

a commercial agent to one of the Venetian traders; tradition finds him as

a clerk at Antwerp; and in 1512 history at last encounters him as a

thriving wool merchant at Middelburg in Zealand.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and Wolsey]

Returning to England, Cromwell continued to amass wealth as years went on

by adding the trade of scrivener, something between that of a banker and

attorney, to his other occupations, as well as by advancing money to the

poorer nobles; and on the outbreak of the second war with France we find

him a busy and influential member of the Commons in Parliament. Five years

later, in 1528, the aim of his ambition was declared by his entering into

Wolsey's service. The Cardinal needed a man of business for the

suppression of the smaller monasteries which he had undertaken as well as

for the transfer of their revenues to his foundations at Oxford and

Ipswich, and he showed his usual skill in the choice of men by finding

such an agent in Cromwell. The task was an unpopular one, and it was

carried out with a rough indifference to the feelings it aroused which

involved Cromwell in the hate that was gathering round his master. But his

wonderful self-reliance and sense of power only broke upon the world at

Wolsey's fall. Of the hundreds of dependants who waited on the Cardinal's

nod, Cromwell, hated and in danger as he must have known himself to be,

was the only one who clung to his master at the last. In the lonely hours

of his disgrace at Esher Wolsey "made his moan unto Master Cromwell, who

comforted him the best he could, and desired my Lord to give him leave to

go to London, where he would make or mar, which was always his common

saying." His plan was to purchase not only his master's safety but his

own. Wolsey was persuaded to buy off the hostility of the courtiers by

giving his personal confirmation to the prodigal grants of pensions and

annuities which had been already made from his revenues, while Cromwell

acquired importance as the go-between in these transactions. "Then began

both noblemen and others who had patents from the King," for grants from

the Cardinal's estate, "to make earnest suit to Master Cromwell for to

solicit their causes, and for his pains therein they promised not only to

reward him, but to show him such pleasure as should be in their power."

But if Cromwell showed his consummate craft in thus serving himself as

well as his master, he can have had no personal reasons for the stand he

made in the Parliament which was summoned in November against a bill for

disqualifying the Cardinal for all after employment, which was introduced

by Norfolk and More. It was by Cromwell that this was defeated and it was

by him that the negotiations were conducted which permitted the fallen

minister to withdraw pardoned to York.

A general esteem seems to have rewarded this rare instance of fidelity to

a ruined patron. "For his honest behaviour in his master's cause he was

esteemed the most faithfullest servant, and was of all men greatly

commended." Cromwell however had done more than save himself from ruin.

The negotiations for Wolsey's pensions had given him access to the king,

and "by his witty demeanour he grew continually in the King's favour." But

the favour had been won by more than "witty demeanour." In a private

interview with Henry Cromwell boldly advised him to cut the knot of the

divorce by the simple exercise of his own supremacy. The advice struck the

key-note of the later policy by which the daring counsellor was to change

the whole face of Church and State; but Henry still clung to the hopes

held out by the new ministers who had followed Wolsey, and shrank perhaps

as yet from the bare absolutism to which Cromwell called him. The advice

at any rate was concealed; and, though high in the king's favour, his new

servant waited patiently the progress of events.

[Sidenote: The Howards]

The first result of Wolsey's fall was a marked change in the system of

administration. Both the Tudor kings had carried on their government

mainly through the agency of great ecclesiastics. Archbishop Morton and

Bishop Fox had been successively ministers of Henry the Seventh. Wolsey

had been the minister of Henry the Eighth. But with the ruin of the

Cardinal the rule of the churchmen ceased. The seals were given to Sir

Thomas More. The real direction of affairs lay in the hands of two great

nobles, of the Duke of Suffolk who was President of the Council, and of

the Lord Treasurer, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk. From this hour to

the close of the age of the Tudors the Howards were to play a prominent

part in English history. They had originally sprung from the circle of

lawyers who rose to wealth and honour through their employment by the

Crown. Their earliest known ancestor was a judge under Edward the First;

and his descendants remained wealthy landowners in the eastern counties

till early in the fifteenth century they were suddenly raised to

distinction by the marriage of Sir Robert Howard with a wife who became

heiress of the houses of Arundel and Norfolk, the Fitz-Alans and the

Mowbrays. John Howard, the issue of this marriage, was a prominent Yorkist

and stood high in the favour of the Yorkist kings. He was one of the

councillors of Edward the Fourth, and received from Richard the Third the

old dignities of the house of Mowbray, the office of Earl Marshal and the

Dukedom of Norfolk. But he had hardly risen to greatness when he fell

fighting by Richard's side at Bosworth Field. His son was taken prisoner

in the same battle and remained for three years in the Tower. But his

refusal to join in the rising of the Earl of Lincoln was rewarded by Henry

the Seventh with his release, his restoration to the Earldom of Surrey,

and his employment in the service of the crown where he soon took rank

among the king's most trusted councillors. His military abilities were

seen in campaigns against the Scots which won back for him the office of

Earl Marshal, and in the victory of Flodden which restored to him the

Dukedom of Norfolk. The son of this victor of Flodden, Thomas, Earl of

Surrey, had already served as lieutenant in Ireland and as general against

Albany on the Scottish frontier before his succession to the dukedom in

1524. His coolness and tact had displayed themselves during the revolt

against Benevolences, when his influence alone averted a rising in the

Eastern Counties. Since Buckingham's death his house stood at the head of

the English nobility: his office of Lord Treasurer placed him high at the

royal council board; and Henry's love for his niece, Anne Boleyn, gave a

fresh spur to the duke's ambition. But his influence had till now been

overshadowed by the greatness of Wolsey. With the Cardinal's fall however

he at once came to the front. Though he had bowed to the royal policy, he

was known as the leader of the party which clung to alliance with the

Emperor, and now that such an alliance was needful Henry counted on

Norfolk to renew the friendship with Charles.

[Sidenote: The Parliament]

An even greater revolution was seen in the summons of a Parliament which

met in November 1529. Its assembly was no doubt prompted in part by the

actual needs of the Crown, for Henry was not only penniless but

overwhelmed with debts and Parliament alone could give him freedom from

these embarrassments. But the importance of the questions brought before

the Houses, and their repeated assembly throughout the rest of Henry's

reign, point to a definite change in the royal system. The policy of

Edward the Fourth, of Henry the Seventh, and of Wolsey was abandoned.

Instead of looking on Parliament as a danger the monarchy now felt itself

strong enough to use it as a tool. The obedience of the Commons was seen

in the readiness with which they at once passed a bill to release the

crown from its debts. But Henry counted on more than obedience. He

counted, and justly counted, on the warm support of the Houses in his

actual strife with Rome. The plan of a divorce was no doubt unpopular. So

violent was the indignation against Anne Boleyn that she hardly dared to

stir abroad. But popular feeling ran almost as bitterly against the

Papacy. The sight of an English king and an English queen pleading before

a foreign tribunal revived the old resentment against the subjection of

Englishmen to Papal courts. The helplessness of Clement in the grasp of

the Emperor recalled the helplessness of the Popes at Avignon in the grasp

of the kings of France. That Henry should sue for justice to Rome was

galling enough, but the hottest adherent of the Papacy was outraged when

the suit of his king was granted or refused at the will of Charles. It was

against this degradation of the Crown that the Statutes of Provisors and

Praemunire had been long since aimed. The need of Papal support to their

disputed title which had been felt by the Houses of Lancaster and York had

held these statutes in suspense, and the Legatine Court of Wolsey had

openly defied them. They were still however legally in force; they were

part of the Parliamentary tradition; and it was certain that Parliament

would be as ready as ever to enforce the independent jurisdiction of the

Crown.

[Sidenote: Hopes of the New Learning]

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 rancour, 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 behaviour 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 holydays. 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."

[Sidenote: Death of Wolsey]

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 favour of the

divorce; and he now urged on the ministry an appeal to the learned opinion

of Christendom by calling for the judgement 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 hindrance 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 ensure 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 goodwill 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 fervour 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 rumoured 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

the fourth of November, on the eve of his installation feast, the Cardinal

was arrested on a charge of high treason and conducted by the Lieutenant

of the Tower towards London. Already broken by his enormous labours, 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 grey 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."

[Sidenote: Cromwell's Policy]

No words could paint with so terrible a truthfulness the spirit of the new

despotism which Wolsey had done more than any of those who went before him

to build up. From tempers like his all sense of loyalty to England, to its

freedom, to its institutions, had utterly passed away, and the one duty

which the statesman owned was a duty to his "prince." To what issues such

a conception of a statesman's duty might lead was now to be seen in the

career of a greater than Wolsey. The two dukes had struck down the

Cardinal only to set up another master in his room. Since his interview

with Henry Cromwell had remained in the king's service, where his steady

advance in the royal favour was marked by his elevation to the post of

Secretary of State. His patience was at last rewarded by the failure of

the policy for which his own had been set aside. At the close of 1530 the

college of cardinals formally rejected the king's request for leave to

decide the whole matter in his own spiritual courts; and the defeat of

Norfolk's project drove Henry nearer and nearer to the bold plan from

which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall. Cromwell was again ready with his

suggestion that the king should disavow the Papal jurisdiction, declare

himself Head of the Church within his realm, and obtain a divorce from his

own Ecclesiastical Courts. But he looked on the divorce as simply the

prelude to a series of changes which the new minister was bent upon

accomplishing. In all his chequered life what had left its deepest stamp

on him was Italy. Not only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his

designs, but in their larger scope, their clearer purpose, and their

admirable combination, the Italian state-craft entered with Cromwell into

English politics. He is in fact the first English minister in whom we can

trace through the whole period of his rule the steady working out of a

great and definite aim, that of raising the king to absolute authority on

the ruins of every rival power within the realm. It was not that Cromwell

was a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we may trust the tale that carries

him in his youth to Florence or no, his statesmanship was closely modelled

on the ideal of the Florentine thinker whose book was constantly in his

hand. Even as a servant of Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal,

Reginald Pole, by bidding him take for his manual in politics the "Prince"

of Machiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in Caesar Borgia or in the later

Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyrannies might

unite and regenerate Italy; and terrible and ruthless as his policy was,

the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim

of securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration of

all authority in the crown.

[Sidenote: The Headship of the Church]

The first step towards such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its

spiritual obedience to Rome. What the first of the Tudors had done for the

political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its

ecclesiastical independence. Henry the Seventh had freed England from the

interference of France or the House of Burgundy; and in the question of

the divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry the Eighth to free it

from the interference of the Papacy. In such an effort resistance could be

looked for only from the clergy. But their resistance was what Cromwell

desired. The last check on royal absolutism which had survived the Wars of

the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and jurisdiction, and

the religious claims of the church; and for the success of the new policy

it was necessary to reduce the great ecclesiastical body to a mere

department of the State in which all authority should flow from the

sovereign alone, his will be the only law, his decision the only test of

truth. Such a change however was hardly to be wrought without a struggle;

and the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters

furnished ground on which the crown could conduct this struggle to the

best advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the

struggle was to be waged. A year had passed since Wolsey had been

convicted of a breach of the Statute of Praemunire. The pedantry of the

judges declared the whole nation to have been formally involved in the

same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal absurdity was

now redressed by a general pardon, but from this pardon the clergy found

themselves omitted. In the spring of 1531 Convocation was assembled to be

told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the payment

of a fine amounting to a million of our present money, and the

acknowledgement of the king as "the chief protector, the only and supreme

lord, and Head of the Church and Clergy of England." Unjust as was the

first demand, they at once submitted to it; against the second they

struggled hard. But their appeals to Henry and Cromwell met only with

demands for instant obedience. A compromise was at last arrived at by the

insertion of a qualifying phrase "So far as the law of Christ will allow";

and with this addition the words were again submitted by Warham to the

Convocation. There was a general silence. "Whoever is silent seems to

consent," said the Archbishop. "Then are we all silent," replied a voice

from among the crowd.

[Sidenote: Catharine put away]

There is no ground for thinking that the "Headship of the Church" which

Henry claimed in this submission was more than a warning addressed to the

independent spirit of the clergy, or that it bore as yet the meaning which

was afterwards attached to it. It certainly implied no independence of

Rome, for negotiations were still being carried on with the Papal Court.

But it told Clement plainly that in any strife that might come between

himself and Henry the clergy were in the king's hand, and that he must

look for no aid from them in any struggle with the crown. The warning was

backed by an address to the Pope from the Lords and some of the Commons

who assembled after a fresh prorogation of the Houses in the spring. "The

cause of his Majesty," the Peers were made to say, "is the cause of each

of ourselves." They laid before the Pope what they represented as the

judgement of the Universities in favour of the divorce; but they faced

boldly the event of its rejection. "Our condition," they ended, "will not

be wholly irremediable. Extreme remedies are ever harsh of application;

but he that is sick will by all means be rid of his distemper." In the

summer the banishment of Catharine from the king's palace to a house at

Ampthill showed the firmness of Henry's resolve. Each of these acts was no

doubt intended to tell on the Pope's decision, for Henry still clung to

the hope of extorting from Clement a favourable answer, and at the close

of the year a fresh embassy with Gardiner, now Bishop of Winchester, at

its head was despatched to the Papal court. But the embassy failed like

its predecessors, and at the opening of 1532 Cromwell was free to take

more decisive steps in the course on which he had entered.

[Sidenote: More's withdrawal]

What the nature of his policy was to be had already been detected by eyes

as keen as his own. More had seen in Wolsey's fall an opening for the

realization of those schemes of religious and even of political reform on

which the scholars of the New Learning had long been brooding. The

substitution of the Lords of the Council for the autocratic rule of the

Cardinal-minister, the break-up of the great mass of powers which had been

gathered into a single hand, the summons of a Parliament, the

ecclesiastical reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures which

promised a more legal and constitutional system of government. The

question of the divorce presented to More no serious difficulty. Untenable

as Henry's claim seemed to the now Chancellor, his faith in the

omnipotence of Parliament would have enabled him to submit to any statute

which named a new spouse as queen and her children as heirs to the crown.

But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he saw that more than this was

impending. The Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent

Christendom and of the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending,

united with More's theological convictions to resist any spiritual

severance of England from the Papacy. His love for freedom, his revolt

against the growing autocracy of the crown, the very height and grandeur

of his own spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a system which

would concentrate in the king the whole power of Church as of State, would

leave him without the one check that remained on his despotism, and make

him arbiter of the religious faith of his subjects. The later revolt of

the Puritans against the king-worship which Cromwell established proved

the justice of the prevision which forced More in the spring of 1532 to

resign the post of Chancellor.

[Sidenote: England and Rome]

But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevitable one. Till now

every Englishman had practically owned a double life and a double

allegiance. As citizen of a temporal state his life was bounded by English

shores and his loyalty due exclusively to his English king. But as citizen

of the state spiritual he belonged not to England but to Christendom. The

law which governed him was not a national law but a law that embraced

every European nation, and the ordinary course of judicial appeals in

ecclesiastical cases proved to him that the sovereignty in all matters of

conscience or religion lay not at Westminster but at Rome. Such a

distinction could scarcely fail to bring embarrassment with it as the

sense of national life and national pride waxed stronger; and from the

reign of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual and temporal

relations of the realm grew daily more difficult. Parliament had hardly

risen into life when it became the organ of the national jealousy whether

of any Papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the separate life and

separate jurisdiction of the clergy within it. The movement was long

arrested by religious reaction and civil war. But the fresh sense of

national greatness which sprang from the policy of Henry the Eighth, the

fresh sense of national unity as the Monarchy gathered all power into its

single hand, would have itself revived the contest even without the spur

of the divorce. What the question of the divorce really did was to

stimulate the movement by bringing into clearer view the wreck of the

great Christian commonwealth of which England had till now formed a part

and the impossibility of any real exercise of a spiritual sovereignty over

it by the weakened Papacy, as well as by outraging the national pride

through the summons of the king to a foreign bar and the submission of

English interests to the will of a foreign Emperor.

[Sidenote: Act of Appeals]

With such a spur as this the movement which More dreaded moved forward as

quickly as Cromwell desired. The time had come when England was to claim

for herself the fulness of power, ecclesiastical as well as temporal,

within her bounds; and in the concentration of all authority within the

hands of the sovereign which was the political characteristic of the time

to claim this power for the nation was to claim it for the king. The

import of that headship of the Church which Henry had assumed in the

preceding year was brought fully out in one of the propositions laid

before the Convocation of 1532. "The King's Majesty," runs this memorable

clause, "hath as well the care of the souls of his subjects as their

bodies; and may by the law of God by his Parliament make laws touching and

concerning as well the one as the other." The principle embodied in these

words was carried out in a series of decisive measures. Under strong

pressure the Convocation was brought to pray that the power of independent

legislation till now exercised by the Church should come to an end, and to

promise "that from henceforth we shall forbear to enact, promulge, or put

into execution any such constitutions and ordinances so by us to be made

in time coming, unless your Highness by your royal assent shall license us

to make, promulge, and execute them, and the same so made be approved by

your Highness's authority." Rome was dealt with in the same unsparing

fashion. The Parliament forbade by statute any further appeals to the

Papal Court; and on a petition from the clergy in Convocation the Houses

granted power to the king to suspend the payments of first-fruits, or the

year's revenue which each bishop paid to Rome on his election to a see.

All judicial, all financial connexion with the Papacy was broken by these

two measures. The last indeed was as yet but a menace which Henry might

use in his negotiations with Clement. The hope which had been entertained

of aid from Charles was now abandoned; and the overthrow of Norfolk and

his policy of alliance with the Empire was seen at the midsummer of 1532

in the conclusion of a league with France. Cromwell had fallen back on

Wolsey's system; and the divorce was now to be looked for from the united

pressure of the French and English kings on the Papal court.

[Sidenote: Marriage of Anne Boleyn]

But the pressure was as unsuccessful as before. In November Clement

threatened the king with excommunication if he did not restore Catharine

to her place as queen and abstain from all intercourse with Anne Boleyn

till the case was tried. But Henry still refused to submit to the

judgement of any court outside his realm; and the Pope, ready as he was

with evasion and delay, dared not alienate Charles by consenting to a

trial within it. The lavish pledges which Francis had given in an

interview during the preceding summer may have aided to spur the king to a

decisive step which closed the long debate. At the opening of 1533 Henry

was privately married to Anne Boleyn. The match however was carefully kept

secret while the Papal sanction was being gained for the appointment of

Cranmer to the See of Canterbury which had become vacant by Archbishop

Warham's death in the preceding year. But Cranmer's consecration at the

close of March was the signal for more open action, and Cromwell's policy

was at last brought fairly into play. The new primate at once laid the

question of the king's marriage before the two Houses of Convocation, and

both voted that the licence of Pope Julius had been beyond the Papal

powers and that the marriage which it authorized was void. In May the

king's suit was brought before the Archbishop in his court at Dunstable;

his judgement annulled the marriage with Catharine as void from the

beginning, and pronounced the marriage with Anne Boleyn, which her

pregnancy had forced Henry to reveal, a lawful marriage. A week later the

hand of Cranmer placed upon Anne's brow the crown which she had coveted so

long.

[Sidenote: Act of Supremacy]

"There was much murmuring" at measures such as these. Many thought "that

the Bishop of Rome would curse all Englishmen, and that the Emperor and he

would destroy all the people." Fears of the overthrow of religion told on

the clergy; the merchants dreaded an interruption of the trade with

Flanders, Italy, and Spain. But Charles, though still loyal to his aunt's

cause, had no mind to incur risks for her; and Clement, though he annulled

Cranmer's proceedings, hesitated as yet to take sterner action. Henry on

the other hand, conscious that the die was thrown, moved rapidly forward

in the path that Cromwell had opened. The Pope's reversal of the primate's

judgement was answered by an appeal to a General Council. The decision of

the cardinals to whom the case was referred in the spring of 1534, a

decision which asserted the lawfulness of Catharine's marriage, was met by

the enforcement of the long-suspended statute forbidding the payment of

first-fruits to the Pope. Though the King was still firm in his resistance

to Lutheran opinions and at this moment endeavoured to prevent by statute

the importation of Lutheran books, the less scrupulous hand of his

minister was seen already striving to find a counterpoise to the hostility

of the Emperor in an alliance with the Lutheran princes of North Germany.

Cromwell was now fast rising to a power which rivalled Wolsey's. His

elevation to the post of Lord Privy Seal placed him on a level with the

great nobles of the Council board; and Norfolk, constant in his hopes of

reconciliation with Charles and the Papacy, saw his plans set aside for

the wider and more daring projects of "the blacksmith's son." Cromwell

still clung to the political engine whose powers he had turned to the

service of the Crown. The Parliament which had been summoned at Wolsey's

fall met steadily year after year; and measure after measure had shown its

accordance with the royal will in the strife with Rome. It was now called

to deal a final blow. Step by step the ground had been cleared for the

great Statute by which the new character of the English Church was defined

in the session of 1534. By the Act of Supremacy authority in all matters

ecclesiastical was vested solely in the Crown. The courts spiritual became

as thoroughly the king's courts as the temporal courts at Westminster. The

Statute ordered that the king "shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the

only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and shall have and

enjoy annexed and united to the Imperial Crown of this realm as well the

title and state thereof as all the honours, jurisdictions, authorities,

immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity belonging, with

full power to visit, repress, redress, reform, and amend all such errors,

heresies, abuses, contempts, and enormities, which by any manner of

spiritual authority or jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed."

[Sidenote: The Vicar-General]

The full import of the Act of Supremacy was only seen in the following

year. At the opening of 1535 Henry formally took the title of "on earth

Supreme Head of the Church of England," and some months later Cromwell was

raised to the post of Vicar-General or Vicegerent of the king in all

matters ecclesiastical. His title, like his office, recalled the system of

Wolsey. It was not only as Legate but in later years as Vicar-General of

the Pope that Wolsey had brought all spiritual causes in England to an

English court. The supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the realm passed

into the hands of a minister who as Chancellor already exercised its

supreme civil jurisdiction. The Papal power had therefore long seemed

transferred to the Crown before the legislative measures which followed

the divorce actually transferred it. It was in fact the system of

Catholicism itself that trained men to look without surprise on the

concentration of all spiritual and secular authority in Cromwell.

Successor to Wolsey as Keeper of the Great Seal, it seemed natural enough

that Cromwell should succeed him also as Vicar-General of the Church and

that the union of the two powers should be restored in the hands of a

minister of the king. But the mere fact that these powers were united in

the hands not of a priest but of a layman showed the new drift of the

royal policy. The Church was no longer to be brought indirectly under the

royal power; in the policy of Cromwell it was to be openly laid prostrate

at the foot of the throne.

[Sidenote: Subjection of the Bishops]

And this policy his position enabled him to carry out with a terrible

thoroughness. One great step towards its realization had already been

taken in the statute which annihilated the free legislative powers of the

convocations of the Clergy. Another followed in an act which under the

pretext of restoring the free election of bishops turned every prelate

into a nominee of the king. The election of bishops by the chapters of

their cathedral churches had long become formal, and their appointment had

since the time of the Edwards been practically made by the Papacy on the

nomination of the Crown. The privilege of free election was now with

bitter irony restored to the chapters, but they were compelled on pain of

praemunire to choose whatever candidate was recommended by the king. This

strange expedient has lasted till the present time, though its character

has wholly changed with the developement of constitutional rule. The

nomination of bishops has ever since the accession of the Georges passed

from the King in person to the Minister who represents the will of the

people. Practically therefore an English prelate, alone among all the

prelates of the world, is now raised to his episcopal throne by the same

popular election which raised Ambrose to his episcopal chair at Milan. But

at the moment of the change Cromwell's measure reduced the English bishops

to absolute dependence on the Crown. Their dependence would have been

complete had his policy been thoroughly carried out and the royal power of

deposition put in force as well as that of appointment. As it was Henry

could warn the Archbishop of Dublin that if he persevered in his "proud

folly, we be able to remove you again and to put another man of more

virtue and honesty in your place." By the more ardent partizans of the

Reformation this dependence of the bishops on the Crown was fully

recognized. On the death of Henry the Eighth Cranmer took out a new

commission from Edward for the exercise of his office. Latimer, when the

royal policy clashed with his belief, felt bound to resign the See of

Worcester. If the power of deposition was quietly abandoned by Elizabeth,

the abandonment was due not so much to any deference for the religious

instincts of the nation as to the fact that the steady servility of the

bishops rendered its exercise unnecessary.

[Sidenote: The Religious Houses]

A second step in Cromwell's policy followed hard on this enslavement of

the episcopate. Master of Convocation, absolute master of the bishops,

Henry had become master of the monastic orders through the right of

visitation over them which had been transferred by the Act of Supremacy

from the Papacy to the Crown. The monks were soon to know what this right

of visitation implied in the hands of the Vicar-General. As an outlet for

religious enthusiasm monasticism was practically dead. The friar, now that

his fervour of devotion and his intellectual energy had passed away, had

sunk into a mere beggar. The monks had become mere land-owners. Most of

the religious houses were anxious only to enlarge their revenues and to

diminish the number of those who shared them. In the general carelessness

which prevailed as to the spiritual objects of their trust, in the

wasteful management of their estates, in the indolence and self-indulgence

which for the most part characterized them, the monastic establishments

simply exhibited the faults of all corporate bodies that have outlived the

work which they were created to perform. They were no more unpopular

however than such corporate bodies generally are. The Lollard cry for

their suppression had died away. In the north, where some of the greatest

abbeys were situated, the monks were on good terms with the country gentry

and their houses served as schools for their children; nor is there any

sign of a different feeling elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries]

But they had drawn on themselves at once the hatred of the New Learning

and of the Monarchy. In the early days of the revival of letters Popes and

bishops had joined with princes and scholars in welcoming the diffusion of

culture and the hopes of religious reform. But though an abbot or a prior

here or there might be found among the supporters of the movement, the

monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The

quarrel only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of

Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers

of darkness" and of the cloister. In England Colet and More echoed with

greater reserve the scorn and invective of their friends. The Monarchy had

other causes for its hate. In Cromwell's system there was no room for

either the virtues or the vices of monasticism, for its indolence and

superstition, or for its independence of the throne. The bold stand which

the monastic orders had made against benevolences had never been forgiven,

while the revenues of their foundations offered spoil vast enough to fill

the royal treasury and secure a host of friends for the new reforms. Two

royal commissioners therefore were despatched on a general visitation of

the religious houses, and their reports formed a "Black Book" which was

laid before Parliament in 1536. It was acknowledged that about a third of

the houses, including the bulk of the larger abbeys, were fairly and

decently conducted. The rest were charged with drunkenness, with simony,

and with the foulest and most revolting crimes. The character of the

visitors, the sweeping nature of their report, and the long debate which

followed on its reception, leaves little doubt that these charges were

grossly exaggerated. But the want of any effective discipline which had

resulted from their exemption from all but Papal supervision told fatally

against monastic morality even in abbeys like St. Albans; and the

acknowledgement of Warham, as well as a partial measure of suppression

begun by Wolsey, go some way to prove that in the smaller houses at least

indolence had passed into crime. A cry of "Down with them" broke from the

Commons as the report was read. The country however was still far from

desiring the utter downfall of the monastic system, and a long and bitter

debate was followed by a compromise which suppressed all houses whose

income fell below L200 a year. Of the thousand religious houses which then

existed in England nearly four hundred were dissolved under this Act and

their revenues granted to the Crown.

[Sidenote: Enslavement of the Clergy]

The secular clergy alone remained; and injunction after injunction from

the Vicar-General taught rector and vicar that they must learn to regard

themselves as mere mouthpieces of the royal will. The Church was gagged.

With the instinct of genius Cromwell discerned the part which the pulpit,

as the one means which then existed of speaking to the people at large,

was to play in the religious and political struggle that was at hand; and

he resolved to turn it to the profit of the Monarchy. The restriction of

the right of preaching to priests who received licenses from the Crown

silenced every voice of opposition. Even to those who received these

licenses theological controversy was forbidden; and a high-handed process

of "tuning the pulpits" by express directions as to the subject and tenor

of each special discourse made the preachers at every crisis mere means of

diffusing the royal will. As a first step in this process every bishop,

abbot, and parish priest was required by the new Vicar-General to preach

against the usurpation of the Papacy and to proclaim the king as supreme

Head of the Church on earth. The very topics of the sermon were carefully

prescribed; the bishops were held responsible for the compliance of the

clergy with these orders; and the sheriffs were held responsible for the

obedience of the bishops.

[Sidenote: The Terror]

While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress

England looked silently on. In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in

the contest over the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform

of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative

independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the king.

But from the enslavement of the priesthood, from the gagging of the

pulpits, from the suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation

stood aloof. There were few voices indeed of protest. As the royal policy

disclosed itself, as the Monarchy trampled under foot the tradition and

reverence of ages gone by, as its figure rose bare and terrible out of the

wreck of old institutions, England simply held her breath. It is only

through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of

the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of the people.

For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell's rise and after

his fall from power the reign of Henry the Eighth witnessed no more than

the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Cromwell's

administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name

that men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English Terror.

It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could plead for

him at a later time with Henry as "one whose surety was only by your

Majesty, who loved your Majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God." But

the attitude of Cromwell towards the king was something more than that of

absolute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was "so vigilant to

preserve your Majesty from all treasons," adds the Primate, "that few

could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from the

beginning." Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but

tremulously sensitive to the lightest breath of hidden disloyalty; and it

was on this dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was

hardly secretary before spies were scattered broadcast over the land.

Secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was

thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and with the detection and

suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the king.

As it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it was by terror that he

mastered the people. Men felt in England, to use the figure by which

Erasmus paints the time, "as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every

stone." The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's talk with

their closest friends found its way to his ear. "Words idly spoken," the

murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as

the nobles cried passionately at his fall, "tortured into treason." The

only chance of safety lay in silence. "Friends who used to write and send

me presents," Erasmus tells us, "now send neither letter nor gifts, nor

receive any from any one, and this through fear." But even the refuge of

silence was closed by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted

the Statute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but men

were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very silence being

punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of

liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The

noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though

Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost he had made no open attack on

the freedom of justice. If he shrank from assembling Parliaments it was

from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty. But under Cromwell

the coercion of juries and the management of judges rendered the courts

mere mouthpieces of the royal will: and where even this shadow of justice

proved an obstacle to bloodshed, Parliament was brought into play to pass

bill after bill of attainder. "He shall be judged by the bloody laws he

has himself made," was the cry of the Council at the moment of his fall,

and by a singular retribution the crowning injustice which he sought to

introduce even into the practice of attainder, the condemnation of a man

without hearing his defence, was only practised on himself.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's Temper]

But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell it was of a nobler type than

the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or

stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective

just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If

he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and

the most renowned of English Churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, it

was through Lady Salisbury, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. If

he struck at the New Learning, it was through the murder of Sir Thomas

More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper

indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which lingered among

his friends, he was a generous, kindly-hearted man, with pleasant and

winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with

a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But

no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course. The student of

Machiavelli had not studied the "Prince" in vain. He had reduced bloodshed

to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a

business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual

"remembrances" of the day. "Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to

be tried and executed at Reading." "Item, to know the King's pleasure

touching Master More." "Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his

execution, and the other." It is indeed this utter absence of all passion,

of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most

terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is

pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way

through the forest, axe in hand.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and More]

The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless precision with which

Cromwell was to strike. In the general opinion of Europe the foremost

Englishman of the time was Sir Thomas More. As the policy of the divorce

ended in an open rupture with Rome he had withdrawn silently from the

ministry, but his silent disapproval of the new policy was more telling

than the opposition of obscurer foes. To Cromwell there must have been

something specially galling in More's attitude of reserve. The religious

reforms of the New Learning were being rapidly carried out, but it was

plain that the man who represented the very life of the New Learning

believed that the sacrifice of liberty and justice was too dear a price to

pay even for religious reform. In the actual changes which the divorce

brought about there was nothing to move More to active or open opposition.

Though he looked on the divorce and re-marriage as without religious

warrant, he found no difficulty in accepting an Act of Succession passed

in 1534 which declared the marriage of Anne Boleyn valid, annulled the

title of Catharine's child, Mary, and declared the children of Anne the

only lawful heirs to the crown. His faith in the power of Parliament over

all civil matters was too complete to admit a doubt of its competence to

regulate the succession to the throne. But by the same Act an oath

recognizing the succession as then arranged was ordered to be taken by all

persons; and this oath contained an acknowledgement that the marriage with

Catharine was against Scripture and invalid from the beginning. Henry had

long known More's belief on this point; and the summons to take this oath

was simply a summons to death. More was at his house at Chelsea when the

summons called him to Lambeth, to the house where he had bandied fun with

Warham and Erasmus or bent over the easel of Holbein. For a moment there

may have been some passing impulse to yield. But it was soon over.

Triumphant in all else, the monarchy was to find its power stop short at

the conscience of man. The great battle of spiritual freedom, the battle

of the Protestant against Mary, of the Catholic against Elizabeth, of the

Puritan against Charles, of the Independent against the Presbyterian,

began at the moment when More refused to bend or to deny his convictions

at a king's bidding.

[Sidenote: More sent to the Tower]

"I thank the Lord," More said with a sudden start as the boat dropped

silently down the river from his garden steps in the early morning, "I

thank the Lord that the field is won." At Lambeth Cranmer and his

fellow-commissioners tendered to him the new oath of allegiance; but, as

they expected, it was refused. They bade him walk in the garden that he

might reconsider his reply. The day was hot and More seated himself in a

window from which he could look down into the crowded court. Even in the

presence of death the quick sympathy of his nature could enjoy the humour

and life of the throng below. "I saw," he said afterwards, "Master Latimer

very merry in the court, for he laughed and took one or twain by the neck

so handsomely that if they had been women I should have weened that he

waxed wanton." The crowd below was chiefly of priests, rectors, and

vicars, pressing to take the oath that More found harder than death. He

bore them no grudge for it. When he heard the voice of one who was known

to have boggled hard at the oath a little while before calling loudly and

ostentatiously for drink, he only noted him with his peculiar humour. "He

drank," More supposed, "either from dryness or from gladness" or "to show

quod ille notus erat Pontifici." He was called in again at last, but only

repeated his refusal. It was in vain that Cranmer plied him with

distinctions which perplexed even the subtle wit of the ex-chancellor;

More remained unshaken and passed to the Tower. He was followed there by

Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the most aged and venerable of the English

prelates, who was charged with countenancing treason by listening to the

prophecies of a religious fanatic called "The Nun of Kent." But for the

moment even Cromwell shrank from their blood. They remained prisoners

while a new and more terrible engine was devised to crush out the silent

but widespread opposition to the religious changes.

[Sidenote: Death of More]

By a statute passed at the close of 1534 a new treason was created in the

denial of the king's titles; and in the opening of 1535 Henry assumed as

we have seen the title of "on earth supreme head of the Church of

England." The measure was at once followed up by a blow at victims hardly

less venerable than More. In the general relaxation of the religious life

the charity and devotion of the brethren of the Charter-house had won the

reverence even of those who condemned monasticism. After a stubborn

resistance they had acknowledged the royal Supremacy and taken the oath of

submission prescribed by the Act. But by an infamous construction of the

statute which made the denial of the Supremacy treason, the refusal of

satisfactory answers to official questions as to a conscientious belief in

it was held to be equivalent to open denial. The aim of the new measure

was well known, and the brethren prepared to die. In the agony of waiting

enthusiasm brought its imaginative consolations; "when the Host was lifted

up there came as it were a whisper of air which breathed upon our faces as

we knelt; and there came a sweet soft sound of music." They had not long

however to wait, for their refusal to answer was the signal for their

doom. Three of the brethren went to the gallows; the rest were flung into

Newgate, chained to posts in a noisome dungeon where, "tied and not able

to stir," they were left to perish of gaol-fever and starvation. In a

fortnight five were dead and the rest at the point of death, "almost

despatched," Cromwell's envoy wrote to him, "by the hand of God, of which,

considering their behaviour, I am not sorry." Their death was soon

followed by that of More. The interval of imprisonment had failed to break

his resolution, and the new statute sufficed to bring him to the block.

With Fisher he was convicted of denying the king's title as only supreme

head of the Church. The old Bishop approached the scaffold with a book of

the New Testament in his hand. He opened it at a venture ere he knelt, and

read, "This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God." In July

More followed his fellow-prisoner to the block. Just before the fatal blow

he moved his beard carefully from the reach of the doomsman's axe. "Pity

that should be cut," he was heard to mutter with a touch of the old sad

irony, "that has never committed treason."

[Sidenote: Cromwell and the Nobles]

Cromwell had at last reached his aim. England lay panic-stricken at the

feet of the "low-born knave," as the nobles called him, who represented

the omnipotence of the crown. Like Wolsey he concentrated in his hands the

whole administration of the state; he was at once foreign minister and

home minister, and vicar-general of the Church, the creator of a new

fleet, the organizer of armies, the president of the terrible Star

Chamber. His Italian indifference to the mere show of power stood out in

strong contrast with the pomp of the Cardinal. Cromwell's personal habits

were simple and unostentatious; if he clutched at money, it was to feed

the army of spies whom he maintained at his own expense, and whose work he

surveyed with a ceaseless vigilance. For his activity was boundless. More

than fifty volumes remain of the gigantic mass of his correspondence.

Thousands of letters from "poor bedesmen," from outraged wives and wronged

labourers and persecuted heretics flowed in to the all-powerful minister

whose system of personal government turned him into the universal court of

appeal. But powerful as he was, and mighty as was the work which he had

accomplished, he knew that harder blows had to be struck before his

position was secure. The new changes, above all the irritation which had

been caused by the outrages with which the dissolution of the monasteries

was accompanied, gave point to the mutinous temper that prevailed

throughout the country; for the revolution in agriculture was still going

on, and evictions furnished embittered outcasts to swell the ranks of any

rising. Nor did it seem as though revolt, if it once broke out, would want

leaders to head it. The nobles who had writhed under the rule of the

Cardinal, writhed yet more bitterly under the rule of one whom they looked

upon not only as Wolsey's tool, but as a low-born upstart. "The world will

never mend," Lord Hussey had been heard to say, "till we fight for it."

"Knaves rule about the king!" cried Lord Exeter, "I trust some day to give

them a buffet." At this moment too the hopes of political reaction were

stirred by the fate of one whom the friends of the old order looked upon

as the source of all their troubles. In the spring of 1536, while the

dissolution of the monasteries was marking the triumph of the new policy,

Anne Boleyn was suddenly charged with adultery, and sent to the Tower. A

few days later she was tried, condemned, and brought to the block. The

queen's ruin was everywhere taken as an omen of ruin to the cause which

had become identified with her own, and the old nobility mustered courage

to face the minister who held them at his feet.

[Sidenote: Pilgrimage of Grace]

They found their opportunity in the discontent of the north, where the

monasteries had been popular, and where the rougher mood of the people

turned easily to resistance. In the autumn of 1536 a rising broke out in

Lincolnshire, and this was hardly quelled when all Yorkshire rose in arms.

From every parish the farmers marched with the parish priest at their head

upon York, and the surrender of this city determined the waverers. In a

few days Skipton Castle, where the Earl of Cumberland held out with a

handful of men, was the only spot north of the Humber which remained true

to the king. Durham rose at the call of the chiefs of the house of

Neville, Lords Westmoreland and Latimer. Though the Earl of Northumberland

feigned sickness, the Percies joined the revolt. Lord Darcy, the chief of

the Yorkshire nobles, surrendered Pomfret, and was acknowledged as their

chief by the insurgents. The whole nobility of the north were now enlisted

in the "Pilgrimage of Grace," as the rising called itself, and thirty

thousand "tall men and well horsed" moved on the Don demanding the

reversal of the royal policy, a reunion with Rome, the restoration of

Catharine's daughter, Mary, to her rights as heiress of the Crown, redress

for the wrongs done to the Church, and above all the driving away of

base-born councillors, or in other words, the fall of Cromwell. Though

their advance was checked by negotiation, the organization of the revolt

went steadily on throughout the winter, and a Parliament of the North

which gathered at Pomfret formally adopted the demands of the insurgents.

Only six thousand men under Norfolk barred their way southward, and the

Midland counties were known to be disaffected.

[Sidenote: Its Suppression]

But Cromwell remained undaunted by the peril. He suffered indeed Norfolk

to negotiate; and allowed Henry under pressure from his Council to promise

pardon and a free Parliament at York, a pledge which Norfolk and Darcy

alike construed into an acceptance of the demands made by the insurgents.

Their leaders at once flung aside the badge of the Five Wounds which they

had worn with a cry, "We will wear no badge but that of our Lord the

King," and nobles and farmers dispersed to their homes in triumph. But the

towns of the North were no sooner garrisoned and Norfolk's army in the

heart of Yorkshire than the veil was flung aside. A few isolated outbreaks

in the spring of 1537 gave a pretext for the withdrawal of every

concession. The arrest of the leaders of the "Pilgrimage of Grace" was

followed by ruthless severities. The country was covered with gibbets.

Whole districts were given up to military execution. But it was on the

leaders of the rising that Cromwell's hand fell heaviest. He seized his

opportunity for dealing at the northern nobles a fatal blow. "Cromwell,"

one of the chief among them broke fiercely out as he stood at the Council

board, "it is thou that art the very special and chief cause of all this

rebellion and wickedness, and dost daily travail to bring us to our ends

and strike off our heads. I trust that ere thou die, though thou wouldst

procure all the noblest heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet

there shall one head remain that shall strike off thy head." But the

warning was unheeded. Lord Darcy, who stood first among the nobles of

Yorkshire, and Lord Hussey, who stood first among the nobles of

Lincolnshire, went alike to the block. The Abbot of Barlings, who had

ridden into Lincoln with his canons in full armour, swung with his brother

Abbots of Whalley, Woburn, and Sawley from the gallows. The Abbots of

Fountains and of Jervaulx were hanged at Tyburn side by side with the

representative of the great line of Percy. Lady Bulmer was burned at the

stake. Sir Robert Constable was hanged in chains before the gate of Hull.

[Sidenote: Ireland]

The defeat of the northern revolt showed the immense force which the

monarchy had gained. Even among the rebels themselves not a voice had

threatened Henry's throne. It was not at the king that they aimed these

blows, but at the "low-born knaves" who stood about the king. At this

moment too Henry's position was strengthened by the birth of an heir. On

the death of Anne Boleyn he had married Jane Seymour, the daughter of a

Wiltshire knight; and in 1537 this queen died in giving birth to a boy,

the future Edward the Sixth. The triumph of the Crown at home was doubled

by its triumph in the great dependency which had so long held the English

authority at bay, across St. George's Channel. Though Henry the Seventh

had begun the work of bridling Ireland he had no strength for exacting a

real submission; and the great Norman lords of the Pale, the Butlers and

Geraldines, the De la Poers and the Fitzpatricks, though subjects in name,

remained in fact defiant of the royal authority. In manners and outer

seeming they had sunk into mere natives; their feuds were as incessant as

those of the Irish septs; and their despotism combined the horrors of

feudal oppression with those of Celtic anarchy. Crushed by taxation, by

oppression, by misgovernment, plundered alike by native marauders and by

the troops levied to disperse them, the wretched descendants of the first

English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to English "order," and the

border of the Pale retreated steadily towards Dublin. The towns of the

seaboard, sheltered by their walls and their municipal self-government,

formed the only exceptions to the general chaos; elsewhere throughout its

dominions the English Government, though still strong enough to break down

any open revolt, was a mere phantom of rule. From the Celtic tribes

without the Pale even the remnant of civilization and of native union

which had lingered on to the time of Strongbow had vanished away. The

feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their hatred of the stranger;

and the Government at Dublin found it easy to maintain a strife which

saved it the necessity of self-defence among a people whose "nature is

such that for money one shall have the son to war against the father, and

the father against his child." During the first thirty years of the

sixteenth century the annals of the country which remained under native

rule record more than a hundred raids and battles between clans of the

north alone.

[Sidenote: Ireland and Cromwell]

But the time came at last for a vigorous attempt on the part of England to

introduce order into this chaos of turbulence and misrule. To Henry the

Eighth the policy of forbearance, of ruling Ireland through the great

Irish lords, was utterly hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland as

thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in England, and during the latter

half of his reign he bent his whole energies to accomplish this aim. From

the first hour of his accession indeed the Irish lords felt the heavier

hand of a master. The Geraldines, who had been suffered under the

preceding reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick to

discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their tool. Their

head, the Earl of Kildare, was called to England and thrown into the

Tower. The great house resolved to frighten England again into a

conviction of its helplessness; and a rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald in

1534 followed the usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the

Archbishop of Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle,

a harrying of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels

among the bogs and forests of the border on the advance of the English

forces. It had been usual to meet such an onset as this by a raid of the

same character, by a corresponding failure before the castle of the

rebellious noble, and a retreat like his own which served as a preliminary

to negotiations and a compromise. Unluckily for the Fitzgeralds Henry

resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he had Cromwell to execute

his will. Skeffington, a new Lord Deputy who was sent over in 1535,

brought with him a train of artillery which worked a startling change in

the political aspect of the island. The castles that had hitherto

sheltered rebellion were battered into ruins. Maynooth, a stronghold from

which the Geraldines threatened Dublin and ruled the Pale at their will,

was beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen was the blow

that resistance was at once at an end. Not only was the power of the great

Norman house which had towered over Ireland utterly broken, but only a

single boy was left to preserve its name.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Ireland]

With the fall of the Fitzgeralds Ireland felt itself in a master's grasp.

"Irishmen," wrote one of the Lord Justices to Cromwell, "were never in

such fear as now. The king's sessions are being kept in five shires more

than formerly." Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale at Henry's feet

but the kerns of Wicklow and Wexford sent in their submission; and for the

first time in men's memory an English army appeared in Munster and reduced

the south to obedience. The border of the Pale was crossed, and the wide

territory where the Celtic tribes had preserved their independence since

the days of the Angevins was trampled into subjection. A castle of the

O'Briens which guarded the passage of the Shannon was taken by assault,

and its fall carried with it the submission of Clare. The capture of

Athlone brought about the reduction of Connaught, and assured the loyalty

of the great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes who had assumed an

almost royal authority in the west. The resistance of the tribes of the

north was broken in a victory at Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through

the vigour of Skeffington's successor, Lord Leonard Grey, and still more

through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown,

which had been limited to the walls of Dublin, was acknowledged over the

length and breadth of the land.

[Sidenote: Henry's Irish Government]

But submission was far from being all that Henry desired. His aim was to

civilize the people whom he had conquered--to rule not by force but by

law. But the only conception of law which the king or his ministers could

frame was that of English law. The customary law which prevailed without

the Pale, the native system of clan government and common tenure of land

by the tribe, as well as the poetry and literature which threw their

lustre over the Irish tongue, were either unknown to the English statesmen

or despised by them as barbarous. The one mode of civilizing Ireland and

redressing its chaotic misrule which presented itself to their minds was

that of destroying the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people--that of

"making Ireland English" in manners, in law, and in tongue. The Deputy,

Parliament, Judges, Sheriffs, which already existed within the Pale,

furnished a faint copy of English institutions; and it was hoped that

these might be gradually extended over the whole island. The English

language and mode of life would follow, it was believed, the English law.

The one effectual way of bringing about such a change as this lay in a

complete conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English

settlers; but from this course, pressed on him as it was by his own

lieutenants and by the settlers of the Pale, even the iron will of

Cromwell shrank. It was at once too bloody and too expensive. To win over

the chiefs, to turn them by policy and a patient generosity into English

nobles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal dependence as a

means of diffusing the new civilization of their chiefs, to trust to time

and steady government for the gradual reformation of the country, was a

policy safer, cheaper, more humane, and more statesmanlike.

It was this system which, even before the fall of the Geraldines, Henry

had resolved to adopt; and it was this that he pressed on Ireland when the

conquest laid it at his feet. The chiefs were to be persuaded of the

advantages of justice and legal rule. Their fear of any purpose to "expel

them from their lands and dominions lawfully possessed" was to be

dispelled by a promise "to conserve them as their own." Even their

remonstrances against the introduction of English law were to be regarded,

and the course of justice to be enforced or mitigated according to the

circumstances of the country. In the resumption of lands or rights which

clearly belonged to the Crown "sober ways, politic shifts, and amiable

persuasions" were to be preferred to rigorous dealing. It was this system

of conciliation which was in the main carried out by the English

Government under Henry and his two successors. Chieftain after chieftain

was won over to the acceptance of the indenture which guaranteed him in

the possession of his lands and left his authority over his tribesmen

untouched on condition of a pledge of loyalty, of abstinence from illegal

wars and exactions on his fellow-subjects, and of rendering a fixed

tribute and service in war-time to the Crown. The sole test of loyalty

demanded was the acceptance of an English title and the education of a son

at the English court; though in some cases, like that of the O'Neills, a

promise was exacted to use the English language and dress, and to

encourage tillage and husbandry. Compliance with conditions such as these

was procured not merely by the terror of the royal name but by heavy

bribes. The chieftains in fact profited greatly by the change. Not only

were the lands of the suppressed abbeys granted to them on their

assumption of their new titles, but the English law-courts, ignoring the

Irish custom by which the land belonged to the tribe at large, regarded

the chiefs as the sole proprietors of the soil. The merits of the system

were unquestionable; its faults were such as a statesman of that day could

hardly be expected to perceive. The Tudor politicians held that the one

hope for the regeneration of Ireland lay in its absorbing the civilization

of England. The prohibition of the national dress, customs, laws, and

language must have seemed to them merely the suppression of a barbarism

which stood in the way of all improvement.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's Reform of Religion]

With England and Ireland alike at his feet Cromwell could venture on a

last and crowning change. He could claim for the monarchy the right of

dictating at its pleasure the form of faith and doctrine to be taught

throughout the land. Henry had remained true to the standpoint of the New

Learning; and the sympathies of Cromwell were mainly with those of his

master. They had no wish for any violent break with the ecclesiastical

forms of the past. They desired religious reform rather than religious

revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any radical change in

it, the purification of worship rather than the introduction of any wholly

new ritual. Their theology remained, as they believed, a Catholic

theology, but a theology cleared of the superstitious growths which

obscured the true Catholicism of the early Church. In a word their dream

was the dream of Erasmus and Colet. The spirit of Erasmus was seen in the

Articles of religion which were laid before Convocation in 1536, in the

acknowledgement of Justification by Faith, a doctrine for which the

founders of the New Learning, such as Contarini and Pole, were struggling

at Rome itself, in the condemnation of purgatory, of pardons, and of

masses for the dead, as it was seen in the admission of prayers for the

dead and in the retention of the ceremonies of the church without material

change. A series of royal injunctions which followed carried out the same

policy of reform. Pilgrimages were suppressed; the excessive number of

holy days was curtailed; the worship of images and relics was discouraged

in words which seem almost copied from the protest of Erasmus. His appeal

for a translation of the Bible which weavers might repeat at their shuttle

and ploughmen sing at their plough received at last a reply. At the outset

of the ministry of Norfolk and More the king had promised an English

version of the scriptures, while prohibiting the circulation of Tyndale's

Lutheran translation. The work however lagged in the hands of the bishops;

and as a preliminary measure the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten

Commandments were now rendered into English, and ordered to be taught by

every schoolmaster and father of a family to his children and pupils. But

the bishops' version still hung on hand; till in despair of its appearance

a friend of Archbishop Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, was employed to correct

and revise the translation of Tyndale; and the Bible which he edited was

published in 1538 under the avowed patronage of Henry himself.

[Sidenote: The Lutheran Alliance]

But the force of events was already carrying England far from the

standpoint of Erasmus or More. The dream of the New Learning was to be

wrought out through the progress of education and piety. In the policy of

Cromwell reform was to be brought about by the brute force of the

Monarchy. The story of the royal supremacy was graven even on the

titlepage of the new Bible. It is Henry on his throne who gives the sacred

volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to the

throng of priests and laymen below. Hitherto men had looked on religious

truth as a gift from the Church. They were now to look on it as a gift

from the king. The very gratitude of Englishmen for fresh spiritual

enlightenment was to tell to the profit of the royal power. No conception

could be further from that of the New Learning, from the plea for

intellectual freedom which runs through the life of Erasmus or the craving

for political liberty which gives nobleness to the speculations of More.

Nor was it possible for Henry himself to avoid drifting from the

standpoint he had chosen. He had written against Luther; he had persisted

in opposing Lutheran doctrine; he had passed new laws to hinder the

circulation of Lutheran books in his realm. But influences from without as

from within drove him nearer to Lutheranism. If the encouragement of

Francis had done somewhat to bring about his final breach with the Papacy,

he soon found little will in the French king to follow him in any course

of separation from Rome; and the French alliance threatened to become

useless as a shelter against the wrath of the Emperor. Charles was goaded

into action by the bill annulling Mary's right of succession; and in 1535

he proposed to unite his house with that of Francis by close intermarriage

and to sanction Mary's marriage with a son of the French king, if Francis

would join in an attack on England. Whether such a proposal was serious or

no, Henry had to dread attack from Charles himself and to look for new

allies against it. He was driven to offer his alliance to the Lutheran

princes of North Germany, who dreaded like himself the power of the

Emperor, and who were now gathering in the League of Schmalkald.

[Sidenote: The Articles of 1536]

But the German Princes made agreement as to doctrine a condition of their

alliance; and their pressure was backed by Henry's partizans among the

clergy at home. In Cromwell's scheme for mastering the priesthood it had

been needful to place men on whom the king could rely at their head.

Cranmer became Primate, Latimer became Bishop of Worcester, Shaxton and

Barlow were raised to the sees of Salisbury and St. David's, Hilsey to

that of Rochester, Goodrich to that of Ely, Fox to that of Hereford. But

it was hard to find men among the clergy who paused at Henry's theological

resting-place; and of these prelates all except Latimer were known to

sympathize with Lutheranism, though Cranmer lagged far behind his fellows

in their zeal for reform. The influence of these men as well as of an

attempt to comply at least partly with the demand of the German Princes

left its stamp on the Articles of 1536. For the principle of Catholicism,

of a universal form of faith overspreading all temporal dominions, the

Lutheran states had substituted the principle of territorial religion, of

the right of each sovereign or people to determine the form of belief

which should be held within their bounds. The severance from Rome had

already brought Henry to this principle; and the Act of Supremacy was its

emphatic assertion. In England too, as in North Germany, the repudiation

of the Papal authority as a ground of faith, of the voice of the Pope as a

declaration of truth, had driven men to find such a ground and declaration

in the Bible; and the Articles expressly based the faith of the Church of

England on the Bible and the three Creeds. With such fundamental

principles of agreement it was possible to borrow from the Augsburg

Confession five of the ten articles which Henry laid before the

Convocation. If penance was still retained as a sacrament, baptism and the

Lord's Supper were alone maintained to be sacraments with it; the doctrine

of Transubstantiation which Henry stubbornly maintained differed so little

from the doctrine maintained by Luther that the words of Lutheran

formularies were borrowed to explain it; Confession was admitted by the

Lutheran Churches as well as by the English. The veneration of saints and

the doctrine of prayer to them, though still retained, was so modified as

to present little difficulty even to a Lutheran.

[Sidenote: The Irish Churches]

However disguised in form, the doctrinal advance made in the Articles of

1536 was an immense one; and a vehement opposition might have been looked

for from those of the bishops like Gardiner, who while they agreed with

Henry's policy of establishing a national Church remained opposed to any

change in faith. But the Articles had been drawn up by Henry's own hand,

and all whisper of opposition was hushed. Bishops, abbots, clergy, not

only subscribed to them, but carried out with implicit obedience the

injunctions which put their doctrine roughly into practice; and the

failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the following autumn ended all

thought of resistance among the laity. But Cromwell found a different

reception for his reforms when he turned to extend them to the sister

island. The religious aspect of Ireland was hardly less chaotic than its

political aspect had been. Ever since Strongbow's landing there had been

no one Irish Church, simply because there had been no one Irish nation.

There was not the slightest difference in doctrine or discipline between

the Church without the Pale and the Church within it. But within the Pale

the clergy were exclusively of English blood and speech, and without it

they were exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by law from abbeys

and churches within the English boundary, and the ill-will of the natives

shut out Englishmen from churches and abbeys outside it. As to the

religious state of the country, it was much on a level with its political

condition. Feuds and misrule told fatally on ecclesiastical discipline.

The bishops were political officers, or hard fighters like the chiefs

around them; their sees were neglected, their cathedrals abandoned to

decay. Through whole dioceses the churches lay in ruins and without

priests. The only preaching done in the country was done by the begging

friars, and the results of the friars' preaching were small. "If the King

do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525, "there will be no more

Christentie than in the middle of Turkey."

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Supremacy]

Unfortunately the remedy which Henry provided was worse than the disease.

Politically Ireland was one with England, and the great revolution which

was severing the one country from the Papacy extended itself naturally to

the other. The results of it indeed at first seemed small enough. The

Supremacy, a question which had convulsed England, passed over into

Ireland to meet its only obstacle in a general indifference. Everybody was

ready to accept it without a thought of the consequences. The bishops and

clergy within the Pale bent to the king's will as easily as their fellows

in England, and their example was followed by at least four prelates of

dioceses without the Pale. The native chieftains made no more scruple than

the Lords of the Council in renouncing obedience to the Bishop of Rome,

and in acknowledging Henry as the "Supreme Head of the Church of England

and Ireland under Christ." There was none of the resistance to the

dissolution of the abbeys which had been witnessed on the other side of

the Channel, and the greedy chieftains showed themselves perfectly willing

to share the plunder of the Church. But the results of the measure were

fatal to the little culture and religion which even the past centuries of

disorder had spared. Such as they were, the religious houses were the only

schools that Ireland contained. The system of vicars, so general in

England, was rare in Ireland; churches in the patronage of the abbeys were

for the most part served by the religious themselves, and the dissolution

of their houses suspended public worship over large districts of the

country. The friars, hitherto the only preachers, and who continued to

labour and teach in spite of the efforts of the Government, were thrown

necessarily into a position of antagonism to the English rule.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Religious Changes]

Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the country ended here

however, in the end little harm would have been done. But in England the

breach with Rome, the destruction of the monastic orders, and the

establishment of the Supremacy, had roused in a portion of the people

itself a desire for theological change which Henry shared and was

cautiously satisfying. In Ireland the spirit of the Reformation never

existed among the people at all. They accepted the legislative measures

passed in the English Parliament without any dream of theological

consequences or of any change in the doctrine or ceremonies of the Church.

Not a single voice demanded the abolition of pilgrimages, or the

destruction of images, or the reform of public worship. The mission of

Archbishop Browne in 1535 "for the plucking down of idols and

extinguishing of idolatry" was a first step in the long effort of the

English Government to force a new faith on a people who to a man clung

passionately to their old religion. Browne's attempts at "tuning the

pulpits" were met by a sullen and significant opposition. "Neither by

gentle exhortation," the Archbishop wrote to Cromwell, "nor by evangelical

instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly taken, nor yet by threats of

sharp correction may I persuade or induce any whether religious or secular

since my coming over once to preach the Word of God nor the just title of

our illustrious Prince." Even the acceptance of the Supremacy, which had

been so quietly effected, was brought into question when its results

became clear. The bishops abstained from compliance with the order to

erase the Pope's name out of their mass-books. The pulpits remained

steadily silent. When Browne ordered the destruction of the images and

relics in his own cathedral, he had to report that the prior and canons

"find them so sweet for their gain that they heed not my words." Cromwell

however was resolute for a religious uniformity between the two islands,

and the Primate borrowed some of his patron's vigour. Recalcitrant priests

were thrown into prison, images were plucked down from the rood-loft, and

the most venerable of Irish relics, the staff of St. Patrick, was burned

in the market-place. But he found no support in his vigour save from

across the Channel. The Irish Council looked coldly on; even the Lord

Deputy still knelt to say prayers before an image at Trim. A sullen dogged

opposition baffled Cromwell's efforts, and their only result was to unite

all Ireland against the Crown.

[Sidenote: The English Protestants]

But Cromwell found it easier to deal with Irish inaction than with the

feverish activity which his reforms stirred in England itself. It was

impossible to strike blow after blow at the Church without rousing wild

hopes in the party who sympathized with the work which Luther was doing

over-sea. Few as these "Lutherans" or "Protestants" still were in numbers,

their new hopes made them a formidable force; and in the school of

persecution they had learned a violence which delighted in outrages on the

faith which had so long trampled them under foot. At the very outset of

Cromwell's changes four Suffolk youths broke into a church at Dovercourt,

tore down a wonder-working crucifix, and burned it in the fields. The

suppression of the lesser monasteries was the signal for a new outburst of

ribald insult to the old religion. The roughness, insolence, and extortion

of the Commissioners sent to effect it drove the whole monastic body to

despair. Their servants rode along the road with copes for doublets or

tunicles for saddle-cloths, and scattered panic among the larger houses

which were left. Some sold their jewels and relics to provide for the evil

day they saw approaching. Some begged of their own will for dissolution.

It was worse when fresh ordinances of the Vicar-General ordered the

removal of objects of superstitious veneration. Their removal, bitter

enough to those whose religion twined itself around the image or the relic

which was taken away, was embittered yet more by the insults with which it

was accompanied. A miraculous rood at Boxley, which bowed its head and

stirred its eyes, was paraded from market to market and exhibited as a

juggle before the Court. Images of the Virgin were stripped of their

costly vestments and sent to be publicly burned at London. Latimer

forwarded to the capital the figure of Our Lady, which he had thrust out

of his cathedral church at Worcester, with rough words of scorn: "She with

her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, and their two

other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster at

Smithfield." Fresh orders were given to fling all relics from their

reliquaries, and to level every shrine with the ground. In 1538 the bones

of St. Thomas of Canterbury were torn from the stately shrine which had

been the glory of his metropolitan church, and his name was erased from

the service-books as that of a traitor.

The introduction of the English Bible into churches gave a new opening for

the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of royal injunctions that it should

be read decently and without comment, the young zealots of the party

prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited hearers during

the service of mass, and accompanied their reading with violent

expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English primer to church with

them and studied it ostentatiously during matins. Insult passed into open

violence when the Bishops' Courts were invaded and broken up by Protestant

mobs; and law and public opinion were outraged at once when priests who

favoured the new doctrines began openly to bring home wives to their

vicarages. A fiery outburst of popular discussion compensated for the

silence of the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of

complaint, were "disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and

alehouse." The articles which dictated the belief of the English Church

roused a furious controversy. Above all, the Sacrament of the Mass, the

centre of the Catholic system of faith and worship, and which still

remained sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility

and profaneness which passes belief. The doctrine of Transubstantiation,

which was as yet recognized by law, was held up to scorn in ballads and

mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands

when the priest elevated the Host. The most sacred words of the old

worship, the words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into

a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus."

[Sidenote: The Six Articles]

It was by this attack on the Mass, even more than by the other outrages,

that the temper both of Henry and the nation was stirred to a deep

resentment. With the Protestants Henry had no sympathy whatever. He was a

man of the New Learning; he was proud of his orthodoxy and of his title of

Defender of the Faith. And above all he shared to the utmost his people's

love of order, their clinging to the past, their hatred of extravagance

and excess. The first sign of reaction was seen in the Parliament of 1539.

Never had the Houses shown so little care for political liberty. The

Monarchy seemed to free itself from all parliamentary restrictions

whatever when a formal statute gave the king's proclamations the force of

parliamentary laws. Nor did the Church find favour with them. No word of

the old opposition was heard when a bill was introduced granting to the

king the greater monasteries which had been saved in 1536. More than six

hundred religious houses fell at a blow, and so great was the spoil that

the king promised never again to call on his people for subsidies. But the

Houses were equally at one in withstanding the new innovations in

religion, and an act for "abolishing diversity of opinions in certain

articles concerning Christian religion" passed with general assent. On the

doctrine of Transubstantiation, which was reasserted by the first of six

Articles to which the Act owes its usual name, there was no difference of

feeling or belief between the men of the New Learning and the older

Catholics. But the road to a further instalment of even moderate reform

seemed closed by the five other articles which sanctioned communion in one

kind, the celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, private masses, and

auricular confession. A more terrible feature of the reaction was the

revival of persecution. Burning was denounced as the penalty for a denial

of transubstantiation; on a second offence it became the penalty for an

infraction of the other five doctrines. A refusal to confess or to attend

Mass was made felony. It was in vain that Cranmer, with the five bishops

who partially sympathized with the Protestants, struggled against the bill

in the Lords: the Commons were "all of one opinion," and Henry himself

acted as spokesman on the side of the articles. In London alone five

hundred Protestants were indicted under the new act. Latimer and Shaxton

were imprisoned, and the former forced into a resignation of his see.

Cranmer himself was only saved by Henry's personal favour.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's last Struggle]

But the first burst of triumph was no sooner spent than the hand of

Cromwell made itself felt. Though his opinions remained those of the New

Learning and differed little from the general sentiment which found itself

represented in the act, he leaned instinctively to the one party which did

not long for his fall. His wish was to restrain the Protestant excesses,

but he had no mind to ruin the Protestants. In a little time therefore the

bishops were quietly released. The London indictments were quashed. The

magistrates were checked in their enforcement of the law, while a general

pardon cleared the prisons of the heretics who had been arrested under its

provisions. A few months after the enactment of the Six Articles we find

from a Protestant letter that persecution had wholly ceased, "the Word is

powerfully preached and books of every kind may safely be exposed for

sale." Never indeed had Cromwell shown such greatness as in his last

struggle against Fate. "Beknaved" by the king, whose confidence in him

waned as he discerned the full meaning of the religious changes which

Cromwell had brought about, met too by a growing opposition in the Council

as his favour declined, the temper of the man remained indomitable as

ever. He stood absolutely alone. Wolsey, hated as he had been by the

nobles, had been supported by the Church; but Churchmen hated Cromwell

with an even fiercer hate than the nobles themselves. His only friends

were the Protestants, and their friendship was more fatal than the hatred

of his foes. But he showed no signs of fear or of halting in the course he

had entered on. So long as Henry supported him, however reluctant his

support might be, he was more than a match for his foes. He was strong

enough to expel his chief opponent, Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, from

the royal Council. He met the hostility of the nobles with a threat which

marked his power. "If the lords would handle him so, he would give them

such a breakfast as never was made in England, and that the proudest of

them should know."

[Sidenote: The Courtenays and the Poles]

He soon gave a terrible earnest of the way in which he could fulfil his

threat. The opposition to his system gathered above all round two houses

which represented what yet lingered of the Yorkist tradition, the

Courtenays and the Poles. Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, was of royal

blood, a grandson through his mother of Edward the Fourth. He was known to

have bitterly denounced the "knaves that ruled about the King"; and his

threats to "give them some day a buffet" were formidable in the mouth of

one whose influence in the western counties was supreme. Margaret, the

Countess of Salisbury, a daughter of the Duke of Clarence by the heiress

of the Earl of Warwick, and a niece of Edward the Fourth, had married Sir

Richard Pole, and became mother of Lord Montacute as of Sir Geoffry and

Reginald Pole. The temper of her house might be guessed from the conduct

of the younger of the three brothers. After refusing the highest favours

from Henry as the price of his approval of the divorce, Reginald Pole had

taken refuge at Rome, where he had bitterly attacked the king in a book on

"The Unity of the Church." "There may be found ways enough in Italy,"

Cromwell wrote to him in significant words, "to rid a treacherous subject.

When Justice can take no place by process of law at home, sometimes she

may be enforced to take new means abroad." But he had left hostages in

Henry's hands. "Pity that the folly of one witless fool," Cromwell wrote

ominously, "should be the ruin of so great a family. Let him follow

ambition as fast as he can, those that little have offended (saving that

he is of their kin), were it not for the great mercy and benignity of the

prince, should and might feel what it is to have such a traitor as their

kinsman." The "great mercy and benignity of the prince" was no longer to

shelter them. In 1538 the Pope, Paul the Third, published a bull of

excommunication and deposition against Henry, and Pole pressed the Emperor

vigorously though ineffectually to carry the bull into execution. His

efforts only brought about, as Cromwell had threatened, the ruin of his

house. His brother Lord Montacute and the Marquis of Exeter, with other

friends of the two great families, were arrested on a charge of treason

and executed in the opening of 1539, while the Countess of Salisbury was

attainted in Parliament and sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: The Lutheran Marriage]

Almost as terrible an act of bloodshed closed the year. The abbots of

Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, men who had sate as mitred abbots

among the lords, were charged with a denial of the king's supremacy and

hanged as traitors. But Cromwell relied for success on more than terror.

His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim was to bind

England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry helplessly to

his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid afterwards to

Cromwell's charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his

system, "In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the King

with all his power should not be able to hinder him." His plans rested,

like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his

master. Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, had died in childbirth; and in

the opening of 1540 Cromwell replaced her by a German consort, Anne of

Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran Elector of Saxony. He dared even

to resist Henry's caprice when the king revolted on their first interview

from the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the

moment Cromwell had brought matters "to such a pass" that it was

impossible to recoil from the marriage, and the minister's elevation to

the Earldom of Essex seemed to proclaim his success. The marriage of Anne

of Cleves however was but the first step in a policy which, had it been

carried out as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of

Richelieu. Charles and the House of Austria could alone bring about a

Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation;

and Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany than

he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of the Emperor.

[Sidenote: Fall of Cromwell]

Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have been changed,

Southern Germany would have been secured for Protestantism, and the Thirty

Years War averted. But he failed as men failed who stand ahead of their

age. The German princes shrank from a contest with the Emperor, France

from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism; and Henry, left alone

to bear the resentment of the House of Austria and chained to a wife he

loathed, turned savagely on his minister. In June the long struggle came

to an end. The nobles sprang on Cromwell with a fierceness that told of

their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execrations burst from the Lords at

the Council table as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been entrusted with the

minister's arrest, tore the ensign of the Garter from his neck. At the

charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a passionate

cry of despair. "This then," he exclaimed, "is my guerdon for the services

I have done! On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?" Then with a

sudden sense that all was over he bade his foes make quick work, and not

leave him to languish in prison. Quick work was made. A few days after his

arrest he was attainted in Parliament, and at the close of July a burst of

popular applause hailed his death on the scaffold.

END OF VOL. III