THE LAST YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WOLSEY
Times were changed in England since the second Henry walked barefoot
through the streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the monks flogged him on
the pavement in the Chapter-house, doing penance for Becket's murder. The
clergy had won the battle in the twelfth century because they deserved to
win it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt the
meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their
authority was exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of the
crown; and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to
stoop before them. The victory was great; but, like many victories, it was
fatal to the conquerors. It filled them full with the vanity of power; they
forgot their duties in their privileges; and when, a century later, the
conflict recommenced, the altering issue proved the altering nature of the
conditions under which it was fought. The laity were sustained in vigour by
the practical obligations of life; the clergy sunk under the influence of a
waning religion, the administration of the forms of which had become their
sole occupation; and as character forsook them, the Mortmain Act,[82] the
Acts of Premunire, and the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors mark
the successive defeats that drove them back from the high post of command
which character alone had earned for them. If the Black Prince had lived,
or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the
ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer
reprieve. Its worst abuses would have then terminated, and the reformation
of _doctrine_ in the sixteenth century would have been left to fight its
independent way unsupported by the moral corruption of the church from
which it received its most powerful impetus. The nation was ready for
sweeping remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the pope, as the
language of the Statutes of Provisors[83] conclusively proves, and they
were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the
religious houses--a complete measure of secularisation being then, as I
have already said,[84] the expressed desire of the House of Commons.[85]
With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have
been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed.
It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a
hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that
she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and
that faith and manners might be changed together.
The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion.
It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution effected by
Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church's favour; and it is
certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the
church, determined to conciliate it. He confirmed the Statutes of
Provisors,[86] but he allowed them to sink into disuse. He forbade the
further mooting of the confiscation project; and to him is due the first
permission of the bishops to send heretics to the stake.[87] If English
tradition is to be trusted, the clergy still felt insecure; and the French
wars of Henry V. are said to have been undertaken, as we all know from
Shakspeare, at the persuasion of Archbishop Chichele, who desired to
distract his attention from reverting to dangerous subjects. Whether this
be true or not, no prince of the house of Lancaster betrayed a wish to
renew the quarrel with the church. The battle of Agincourt, the conquest
and re-conquest of France, called off the attention of the people; while
the rise of the Lollards, and the intrusion of speculative questions, the
agitation of which has ever been the chief aversion of English statesmen,
contributed to change the current; and the reforming spirit must have
lulled before the outbreak of the wars of the Roses, or one of the two
parties in so desperate a struggle would have scarcely failed to have
availed themselves of it. Edward IV. is said to have been lenient towards
heresy; but his toleration, if it was more than imaginary, was tacit only;
he never ventured to avow it. It is more likely that in the inveterate
frenzy of those years men had no leisure to remember that heresy existed.
The clergy were thus left undisturbed to go their own course to its natural
end. The storm had passed over them without breaking; and they did not
dream that it would again gather. The immunity which they enjoyed from the
general sufferings of the civil war contributed to deceive them; and
without anxiety for the consequences, and forgetting the significant
warning which they had received, they sank steadily into that condition
which is inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men
without faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet condemned to
celibacy, and cut off from the common duties and common pleasures of
ordinary life. On the return of a settled government, they were startled
for a moment in their security; the conduct of some among them had become
so unbearable, that even Henry VII., who inherited the Lancastrian
sympathies, was compelled to notice it; and the following brief act was
passed by his first parliament, proving by the very terms in which it is
couched the existing nature of church discipline. "For the more sure and
likely reformation," it runs, "of priests, clerks, and religious men,
culpable, or by their demerits openly noised of incontinent living in their
bodies, contrary to their order, be it enacted, ordained, and established,
that it be lawful to all archbishops and bishops, and other ordinaries
having episcopal jurisdiction, to punish and chastise such religious men,
being within the bounds of their jurisdiction, as shall be convict before
them, by lawful proof, of adultery, fornication, incest, or other fleshly
incontinency, by committing them to ward and prison, there to remain for
such time as shall be thought convenient for the quality of their
trespasses."[88]
Previous to the passing of this act, therefore, the bishops, who had power
to arrest laymen on suspicion of heresy, and detain them in prison
untried,[89] had no power to imprison priests, even though convicted of
adultery or incest. The legislature were supported by the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Cardinal Morton procured authority from the pope to visit the
religious houses, the abominations of which had become notorious;[90] and
in a provincial synod held on the 24th of February, 1486, he laid the
condition of the secular clergy before the assembled prelates. Many
priests, it was stated, spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging
at taverns, in the dissolute enjoyment of the world. They wore their hair
long like laymen; they were to be seen lounging in the streets with cloak
and doublet, sword and dagger. By the scandal of their lives they
imperilled the stability of their order.[91] A number of the worst
offenders, in London especially, were summoned before the synod and
admonished;[92] certain of the more zealous among the learned (_complures
docti_) who had preached against clerical abuses were advised to be more
cautious, for the avoiding of scandal;[93] but the archbishop, taking the
duty upon himself, sent round a circular among the clergy of his province,
exhorting them to general amendment.[94]
Yet this little cloud again disappeared. Henry VII. sat too insecurely on
his throne to venture on a resolute reform, even if his feelings had
inclined him towards it, which they did not. Morton durst not resolutely
grapple with the evil. He rebuked and remonstrated; but punishment would
have caused a public scandal. He would not invite the inspection of the
laity into a disease which, without their assistance, he had not the
strength to encounter; and his incipient reformation died away
ineffectually in words. The church, to outward appearance, stood more
securely than ever. The obnoxious statutes of the Plantagenets were in
abeyance, their very existence, as it seemed, was forgotten; and Thomas à
Becket never desired more absolute independence for the ecclesiastical
order than Archbishop Warham found established when he succeeded to the
primacy. He, too, ventured to repeat the experiment of his predecessor. In
1511 he attempted a second visitation of the monasteries, and again
exhorted a reform; but his efforts were even slighter than Morton's, and in
their results equally without fruit. The maintenance of his order in its
political supremacy was of greater moment to him than its moral purity: a
decent veil was cast over the clerical infirmities, and their vices were
forgotten as soon as they ceased to be proclaimed.[95] Henry VIII., a mere
boy on his accession, was borne away with the prevailing stream; and
trained from his childhood by theologians, he entered upon his reign
saturated with theological prepossessions. The intensity of his nature
recognising no half measures, he was prepared to make them the law of his
life; and so zealous was he, that it seemed as if the church had found in
him a new Alfred or a Charlemagne. Unfortunately for the church,
institutions may be restored in theory; but theory, be it never so perfect,
will not give them back their life; and Henry discovered, at length, that
the church of the sixteenth century as little resembled the church of the
eleventh, as Leo X. resembled Hildebrand, or Warham resembled St. Anselm.
If, however, there were no longer saints among the clergy, there could
still arise among them a remarkable man; and in Cardinal Wolsey the king
found an adviser who was able to retain him longer than would otherwise
have been possible in the course which he had entered upon; who, holding a
middle place between an English statesman and a catholic of the old order,
was essentially a transition minister; and who was qualified, above all men
then living, by a combination of talent, honesty, and arrogance, to open
questions which could not again be closed when they had escaped the grasp
of their originator. Under Wolsey's influence Henry made war with Louis of
France, in the pope's quarrel, entered the polemic lists with Luther, and
persecuted the English protestants. But Wolsey could not blind himself to
the true condition of the church. He was too wise to be deceived with
outward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, in Europe and at
home, the alternative of ruin or amendment; and therefore he familiarised
Henry with the sense that a reformation was inevitable, and dreaming that
it could be effected from within, by the church itself inspired with a
wiser spirit, he himself fell first victim of a convulsion which he had
assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay.
His intended measures were approaching maturity, when all Europe was
startled by the news that Rome had been stormed by the Imperial army, that
the pope was imprisoned, the churches pillaged, the cardinals insulted, and
all holiest things polluted and profaned. A spectator, judging only by
outward symptoms, would have seen at that strange crisis in Charles V. the
worst patron of heresy, and the most dangerous enemy of the Holy See; while
the indignation with which the news of these outrages was received at the
English court, would have taught him to look on Henry as the one sovereign
in Europe on whom that See might calculate most surely for support in its
hour of danger. If he could have pierced below the surface, he would have
found that the pope's best friend was the prince who held him prisoner;
that Henry was but doubtfully acquiescing in the policy of an unpopular
minister; and that the English nation would have looked on with stoical
resignation if pope and papacy had been wrecked together. They were not
inclined to heresy; but the ecclesiastical system was not the catholic
faith; and this system, ruined by prosperity, was fast pressing its
excesses to the extreme limit, beyond which it could not be endured. Wolsey
talked of reformation, but delayed its coming; and in the mean time, the
persons to be reformed showed no fear that it would come at all. The
monasteries grew worse and worse. The people were taught only what they
could teach themselves. The consistory courts became more oppressive.
Pluralities multiplied, and non-residence and profligacy. Favoured parish
clergy held as many as eight benefices.[96] Bishops accumulated sees, and,
unable to attend to all, attended to none. Wolsey himself, the church
reformer (so little did he really know what a reformation meant), was at
once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, of Bath, and of Durham, and
Abbot of St. Alban's. In Latimer's opinion, even twenty years later, and
after no little reform in such matters, there was but one bishop in all
England who was ever at his work and ever in his diocese. "I would ask a
strange question," he said, in an audacious sermon at Paul's Cross, "Who is
the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the
rest in doing of his office?[97] I can tell, for I know him who it is; I
know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I
should name him. There is one that passeth all the others, and is the most
diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I
will tell you. It is the devil. Among all the pack of them that have cure,
the devil shall go for my money, for he applieth his business. Therefore,
ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil to be diligent in your office.
If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil."[98]
Under such circumstances, we need not be surprised to find the clergy sunk
low in the respect of the English people. Sternly intolerant of each
other's faults, the laity were not likely to be indulgent to the vices of
men who ought to have set an example of purity; and from time to time,
during the first quarter of the century, there were explosions of temper
which might have served as a warning if any sense or judgment had been left
to profit by it.
In 1514 a London merchant was committed to the Lollards' Tower for refusing
to submit to an unjust exaction of mortuary;[99] and a few days after was
found dead in his cell. An inquest was held upon the body, when a verdict
of wilful murder was returned against the chancellor of the Bishop of
London; and so intense was the feeling of the city, that the bishop applied
to Wolsey for a special jury to be chosen on the trial. "For assured I am,"
he said, "that if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they
be so maliciously set _in favorem hæreticæ pravitatis_, that they will cast
and condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel."[100] Fish's
famous pamphlet also shows the spirit which was seething; and though we may
make some allowance for angry rhetoric, his words have the clear ring of
honesty in them; and he spoke of what he had seen and knew. The monks, he
tells the king, "be they that have made a hundred thousand idle dissolute
women in your realm, who would have gotten their living honestly in the
sweat of their faces had not their superfluous riches allured them to lust
and idleness. These be they that when they have drawn men's wives to such
incontinency, spend away their husbands' goods, make the women to run away
from their husbands, bringing both man, wife, and children to idleness,
theft, and beggary. Yea, who is able to number the great broad bottomless
ocean sea full of evils that this mischievous generation may bring upon us
if unpunished?"[101]
Copies of this book were strewed about the London streets; Wolsey issued a
prohibition against it, with the effect which such prohibitions usually
have. Means were found to bring it under the eyes of Henry himself; and the
manner in which it was received by him is full of significance, and betrays
that the facts of the age were already telling on his understanding. He was
always easy of access and easy of manner; and the story, although it rests
on Foxe's authority, has internal marks of authenticity.
"One Master Edmund Moddis, being with the king in talk of religion, and of
the new books that were come from beyond the seas, said that if it might
please his Highness to pardon him, and such as he would bring to his Grace,
he should see such a book as it was a marvel to hear of. The king demanded
who they were? He said 'Two of your merchants--George Elliot and George
Robinson.' The king appointed a time to speak with them. When they came
before his presence in a privy closet, he demanded what they had to say or
to shew him. One of them said that there was a book come to their hands
which they had there to shew his Grace. When he saw it he demanded if any
of them could read it. 'Yea,' said George Elliot, 'if it please your Grace
to hear it.' 'I thought so,' said the king; 'if need were, thou couldst say
it without book.'
"The whole book being read out, the king made a long pause, and then said,
'If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and should begin at the lower
part, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head.' Then he
took the book, and put it in his desk, and commanded them, on their
allegiance, that they should not tell any man that he had seen it."[102]
Symptoms such as these boded ill for a self-reform of the church, and it
was further imperilled by the difficulty which it is not easy to believe
that Wolsey had forgotten. No measures would be of efficacy which spared
the religious houses, and they would be equally useless unless the bishops,
as well as the inferior clergy, were comprehended in the scheme of
amendment. But neither with monks nor bishops could Wolsey interfere except
by a commission from the pope, and the laws were unrepealed which forbade
English subjects, under the severest penalties, to accept or exercise
within the realm an authority which they had received from the Holy See.
Morton had gone beyond the limits of the statute of provisors in receiving
powers from Pope Innocent to visit the monasteries. But Morton had stopped
short with inquiry and admonition. Wolsey, who was in earnest with the
work, had desired and obtained a full commission as legate, but he could
only make use of it at his peril. The statute slumbered, but it still
existed.[103] He was exposing not himself only, but all persons, lay and
clerical, who might recognise his legacy to a Premunire; and he knew well
that Henry's connivance, or even expressed permission, could not avail him
if his conduct was challenged. He could not venture to appeal to
parliament. Parliament was the last authority whose jurisdiction a
churchman would acknowledge in the concerns of the clergy; and his project
must sooner or later have sunk, like those of his two predecessors, under
its own internal difficulties, even if the accident had not arisen which
brought the dispute to a special issue in its most vital point, and which,
fostered by Wolsey for his own purposes, precipitated his ruin.
It is never more difficult to judge equitably the actions of public men
than when private as well as general motives have been allowed to influence
them, or when their actions may admit of being represented as resulting
from personal inclination, as well as from national policy. In life, as we
actually experience it, motives slide one into the other, and the most
careful analysis will fail adequately to sift them. In history, from the
effort to make our conceptions distinct, we pronounce upon these intricate
matters with unhesitating certainty, and we lose sight of truth in the
desire to make it truer than itself. The difficulty is further complicated
by the different points of view which are chosen by contemporaries and by
posterity. Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell most on those
which approach nearest to themselves: contemporaries whose interests are at
stake overlook what is personal in consideration of what is to them of
broader moment; posterity, unable to realise political embarrassments which
have ceased to concern them, concentrate their attention on such features
of the story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to the
private and personal passions of the men and women whose character they are
considering.
These natural, and to some extent inevitable tendencies, explain the
difference with which the divorce between Henry VIII. and Catherine of
Arragon has been regarded by the English nation in the sixteenth and in the
nineteenth centuries. In the former, not only did the parliament profess to
desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary[104]
that "all indifferent and discreet persons" judged that it was right and
necessary. In the latter, perhaps, there is not one of ourselves who has
not been taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the
sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of
the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth, she is
an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle
appetite. The story is a long and painful one, and on its personal side
need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private
character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some
length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself
into the question, and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been
at stake beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his
queen, the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of
England would have coloured the entire complexion of the Reformation.
The succession to the throne, although determined in theory by the ordinary
law of primogeniture, was nevertheless, subject to repeated arbitrary
changes. The uncertainty of the rule was acknowledged and deplored by the
parliament,[105] and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity
of sentiment, compelled the observance. An opinion prevailed--not, I
believe, traceable to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force
of statute in the prejudices of the nation--that no stranger born out of
the realm could inherit.[106] Although the descent in the female line was
not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the
throne.[107] Even Henry VII. refused to strengthen his title by advancing
the claims of his wife: and the uncertainty of the laws of marriage, and
the innumerable refinements of the Romish canon law, which affected the
legitimacy of children,[108] furnished, in connection with the further
ambiguities of clerical dispensations, perpetual pretexts, whenever
pretexts were needed, for a breach of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the
character of the nation remained essentially military, it could as little
tolerate an incapable king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with
an inefficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the title,
when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward II., a Richard
II., or a Henry VI., the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was
wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The
consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a
statute,[109] as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and
Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his
opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.[110] So
many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in
English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its character
in blood in the private records of every English family, having been the
long struggle of the preceding century, from which the nation was still
suffering, and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it
had endured. It had decimated itself for a question which involved no
principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be
searched in vain for any parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so
unmeaning.
This very unmeaning character of the dispute increased the difficulty of
ending it. In wars of conquest or of principle, when something definite is
at stake, the victory is either won, or it is lost; the conduct of
individual men, at all events, is overruled by considerations external to
themselves which admit of being weighed and calculated. In a war of
succession, where the great families were divided in their allegiance, and
supported the rival claimants in evenly balanced numbers, the inveteracy of
the conflict increased with its duration, and propagated itself from
generation to generation. Every family was in blood feud with its
neighbour; and children, as they grew to manhood, inherited the duty of
revenging their fathers' deaths.
No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in
the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of
York and the battle of Bosworth; and experience too truly convinced Henry
VII. that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because
there was no will to continue it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of
suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon
his mind of the constant dread of an explosion, can we excuse or
understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the Earl of
Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present an act of arbitrary
or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty.
Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been without their
effects. The country had collected itself; the feuds of the families had
been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth
and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those
advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience,
had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better
fed, better cared for, more justly governed than they had ever been before;
and though abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of
the nation, looking back from their new vantage-ground, were able to
recognise the past in its true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of
succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the
safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which
it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the
determining principle of their action.
It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII.
perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born
dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if
his family were under a blight. When the queen had advanced to an age which
precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm
girl, the unpromising prospect became yet more alarming. The life of the
Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood.
If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to insurrection; if she
did not live, and the king had no other children, a civil war was
inevitable. At present such a difficulty would be disposed of by an
immediate and simple reference to the collateral branches of the royal
family; the crown would descend with even more facility than the property
of an intestate to the next of kin. At that time, if the rule had been
recognised, it would only have increased the difficulty, for the next heir
in blood was James of Scotland; and, gravely as statesmen desired the union
of the two countries, in the existing mood of the people, the very stones
in London streets, it was said,[111] would rise up against a king of
Scotland who claimed to enter England as sovereign. Even the parliament
itself declared in formal language that they would resist any attempt on
the part of the Scottish king "to the uttermost of their power."[112]
As little, however, as the English would have admitted James's claims,
would James himself have acknowledged their right to reject them. He would
have pleaded the sacred right of inheritance, refusing utterly the
imaginary law which disentitled him: he would have pressed his title with
all Scotland to back him, and probably with the open support of France.
Centuries of humiliation remained unrevenged, which both France and
Scotland had endured at English hands. It was not likely that they would
waste an opportunity thrust upon them by Providence. The country might, it
is true, have encountered this danger, serious as it would have been, if
there had been hope that it would itself have agreed to any other choice.
England had many times fought successfully against the same odds, and would
have cared little for a renewal of the struggle, if united in itself: but
the prospect on this side, also, was fatally discouraging. The elements of
the old factions were dormant, but still smouldering. Throughout Henry's
reign a White Rose agitation had been secretly fermenting; without open
success, and without chance of success so long as Henry lived, but
formidable in a high degree if opportunity to strike should offer itself.
Richard de la Pole, the representative of this party, had been killed at
Pavia, but his loss had rather strengthened their cause than weakened it,
for by his long exile he was unknown in England; his personal character was
without energy; while he made place for the leadership of a far more
powerful spirit in the sister of the murdered Earl of Warwick, the Countess
of Salisbury, mother of Reginald Pole. This lady had inherited, in no
common degree, the fierce nature of the Plantagenets; born to command, she
had rallied round her the Courtenays, the Nevilles, and all the powerful
kindred of Richard the King Maker, her grandfather. Her Plantagenet descent
was purer than the king's; and if Mary died and Henry left no other issue,
half England was likely to declare either for one of her sons, or for the
Marquis of Exeter, the grandson of Edward IV.
In 1515, when Giustiniani,[113] the Venetian ambassador, was at the court,
the Dukes of Buckingham, of Suffolk, and of Norfolk, were also mentioned to
him as having each of them hopes of the crown. Buckingham, meddling
prematurely in the dangerous game, had lost his life for it; but in his
death he had strengthened the chance of Norfolk, who had married his
daughter. Suffolk was Henry's brother-in-law;[114] chivalrous, popular, and
the ablest soldier of his day; and Lady Margaret Lennox, also, daughter of
the Queen of Scotland by her second marriage, would not have wanted
supporters, and early became an object of intrigue. Indeed, as she had been
born in England, it was held in parliament that she stood next in order to
the Princess Mary.[115]
Many of these claims were likely to be advanced if Henry died leaving a
daughter to succeed him. They would all inevitably be advanced if he died
childless; and no great political sagacity was required to foresee the
probable fate of the country if such a moment was chosen for a French and
Scottish invasion. The very worst disasters might be too surely looked for,
and the hope of escape, precarious at the best, hung upon the frail thread
of a single life. We may therefore imagine the dismay with which the nation
saw this last hope failing them--and failing them even in a manner more
dangerous than if it had failed by death; for it did but add another doubt,
when already there were too many. In order to detach France from Scotland,
and secure, if possible, its support for the claims of the princess, it had
been proposed to marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king. The
negotiations were conducted through the Bishop of Tarbês,[116] and at the
first conference the Bishop raised a question in the name of his
government, on the validity of the papal dispensation granted by Julius the
Second, to legalise the marriage from which she was sprung. The abortive
marriage Scheme perished in its birth, but the doubt which had been raised
could not perish with it. Doubt on such a subject once mooted might not be
left unresolved, even if the raising it thus publicly had not itself
destroyed the frail chance of an undisputed succession. If the relations of
Henry with Queen Catherine had been of a cordial kind, it is possible that
he would have been contented with resentment; that he would have refused to
reconsider a question which touched his honour and his conscience; and,
united with parliament, would have endeavoured to bear down all
difficulties with a high hand. This at least he might have himself
attempted. Whether the parliament, with so precarious a future before them,
would have consented, is less easy to say. Fortunately or unfortunately,
the interests of the nation pointed out another road, which Henry had no
unwillingness to enter.
On the death of Prince Arthur, five months after his marriage, Henry VII.
and the father of the Princess alike desired that the bond between their
families thus broken should be re-united; and, as soon as it became clear
that Catherine had not been left pregnant (a point which, tacitly at least,
she allowed to be considered uncertain at the time of her husband's
decease), it was proposed that she should be transferred, with the
inheritance of the crown, to the new heir. A dispensation was reluctantly
granted by the pope,[117] and reluctantly accepted by the English ministry.
The Prince of Wales, who was no more than twelve years old at the time, was
under the age at which he could legally sue for such an object; and a
portion of the English council, the Archbishop of Canterbury among them,
were unsatisfied,[118] both with the marriage itself, and with the adequacy
of the forms observed in a matter of so dubious an import. The betrothal
took place at the urgency of Ferdinand. In the year following Henry VII.
became suddenly ill; Queen Elizabeth died; and superstition working on the
previous hesitation, misfortune was construed into an indication of the
displeasure of Heaven. The intention was renounced, and the prince, as soon
as he had completed his fourteenth year, was invited and required to
disown, by a formal act, the obligations contracted in his name.[119] Again
there was a change. The king lived on, the alarm yielded to the temptations
of covetousness. Had he restored Catherine to her father he must have
restored with her the portion of her dowry which had been already received;
he must have relinquished the prospect of the moiety which had yet to be
received. The negotiation was renewed. Henry VII. lived to sign the
receipts for the first instalment of the second payment;[120] and on his
death, notwithstanding much general murmuring,[121] the young Henry, then a
boy of eighteen, proceeded to carry out his father's ultimate intentions.
The princess-dowager, notwithstanding what had passed, was still on her
side willing;--and the difference of age (she was six years older than
Henry) seeming of little moment when both were comparatively young, they
were married. For many years all went well; opposition was silenced by the
success which seemed to have followed, and the original scruples were
forgotten. Though the marriage was dictated by political convenience, Henry
was faithful, with but one exception, to his wife's bed--no slight honour
to him, if he is measured by the average royal standard in such matters;
and, if his sons had lived to grow up around his throne, there is no reason
to believe that the peace of his married life would have been interrupted,
or that, whatever might have been his private feelings, he would have
appeared in the world's eye other than acquiescent in his condition.
But his sons had not lived; years passed on, bringing with them premature
births, children born dead, or dying after a few days or hours,[122] and
the disappointment was intense in proportion to the interests which were at
issue. The especial penalty denounced against the marriage with a brother's
wife[123] had been all but literally enforced; and the king found himself
growing to middle life and his queen passing beyond it with his prayers
unheard, and no hope any longer that they might be heard. The disparity of
age also was more perceptible as time went by, while Catherine's
constitution was affected by her misfortunes, and differences arose on
which there is no occasion to dwell in these pages--differences which in
themselves reflected no discredit either on the husband or the wife, but
which were sufficient to extinguish between two infirm human beings an
affection that had rested only upon mutual esteem, but had not assumed the
character of love.
The circumstances in which Catherine was placed were of a kind which no
sensitive woman could have endured without impatience and mortification;
but her conduct, however natural, only widened the breach which personal
repugnance and radical opposition of character had already made too wide.
So far Henry and she were alike that both had imperious tempers, and both
were indomitably obstinate; but Henry was hot and impetuous, Catherine was
cold and self-contained--Henry saw his duty through his wishes; Catherine,
in her strong Castilian austerity, measured her steps by the letter of the
law; the more her husband withdrew from her, the more she insisted upon her
relation to him as his wife; and continued with fixed purpose and immovable
countenance[124] to share his table and his bed long after she was aware of
his dislike for her.
If the validity of so unfortunate a connection had never been questioned,
or if no national interests had been dependent on the continuance or the
abolition of it, these discomforts were not too great to have been endured
in silence. They were not originally occasioned by any latent inclination
on the part of the king for another woman. They had arisen to their worst
dimensions before he had ever seen Anne Boleyn, and were produced by causes
of a wholly independent kind; and even if it had not been so, when we
remember the tenor of his early life we need not think that he would have
been unequal to the restraint which ordinary persons in similar
circumstances are able to impose on their caprices. The legates spoke no
more than the truth when they wrote to the pope, saying that "it was mere
madness to suppose that the king would act as he was doing merely out of
dislike of the queen, or out of inclination, for another person; he was not
a man whom harsh manners and an unpleasant disposition (_duri mores et
injucunda consuetudo_) could so far provoke; nor could any sane man believe
him to be so infirm of character that sensual allurements would have led
him to dissolve a connexion in which he had passed the flower of youth
without stain or blemish, and in which he had borne himself in his trial so
reverently and honourably."[125] I consider this entirely true in a sense
which no great knowledge of human nature is required to understand. The
king's personal dissatisfaction was great: if this had been all, however,
it would have been extinguished or endured; but the interests of the
nation, imperilled as they were by the maintenance of the marriage,
entitled him to regard his position under another aspect. Even if the
marriage in itself had never been questioned, he might justly have desired
the dissolution of it; and when he recalled the circumstances under which
it was contracted, the hesitation of the council, the reluctance of the
pope, the alarms and vacillation of his father, we may readily perceive how
scruples of conscience must have arisen in a soil well prepared to receive
them--how the loss of his children must have appeared as a judicial
sentence on a violation of the Divine law. The divorce presented itself to
him as a moral obligation, when national advantage combined with
superstition to encourage what he secretly desired; and if he persuaded
himself that those public reasons, without which, in truth and fact, he
would not have stirred, were those that alone were influencing him, the
self-deceit was of a kind with which the experience of most men will
probably have made them too familiar. In those rare cases where inclination
coincides with right, we cannot be surprised if mankind should mislead
themselves with the belief that the disinterested motives weigh more with
them than the personal.
A remarkable and very candid account of Henry's feelings is furnished by
himself in one of the many papers of instructions[126] which he forwarded
to his secretary at Rome. Hypocrisy was not among his faults, and in
detailing the arguments which were to be laid before the pope he has
exhibited a more complete revelation of what was passing in himself--and
indirectly of his own nature in its strength and weakness--than he perhaps
imagined while he wrote. The despatch is long and perplexed; the style that
of a man who saw his end clearly, and was vexed with the intricate and
dishonest trifling with which his way was impeded, and which nevertheless
he was struggling to tolerate. The secretary was to say, "that the King's
Highness having above all other things his intent and mind ever founded
upon such respect unto Almighty God as to a Christian and catholic prince
doth appertain, knowing the fragility and uncertainty of all earthly
things, and how displeasant unto God, how much dangerous to the soul, how
dishonourable and damageable to the world it were to prefer vain and
transitory things unto those that be perfect and certain, hath in this
cause, doubt, and matter of matrimony, whereupon depend so high and
manifold consequences of greatest importance, always cast from his conceit
the darkness and blundering confusion of falsity, and specially hath had
and put before his eyes the light and shining brightness of truth; upon
which foundation as a most sure base for perpetual tranquillity of his
conscience his Highness hath expressly resolved and determined with himself
to build and establish all his acts, deeds, and cogitations touching this
matter; without God did build the house, in vain they laboured that went
about to build it; and all actions grounded upon that immovable fundament
of truth, must needs therein be firm, sound, whole, perfect, and worthy of
a Christian man; which if truth were put apart, they could not for the same
reason be but evil, vain, slipper, uncertain, and in nowise permanent or
endurable." He then laboured to urge on the pope the duty of
straightforward dealing; and dwelt in words which have a sad interest for
us (when we consider the manner in which the subject of them has been dealt
with) on the judgment bar, not of God only, but of human posterity, at
which his conduct would be ultimately tried.
"The causes of private persons dark and doubtful be sometimes," the king
said, "pretermitted and passed over as things more meet at some seasons to
be dissimuled than by continual strife and plea to nourish controversies.
Yet since all people have their eyes conject upon princes, whose acts and
doings not only be observed in the mouths of them that now do live, but
also remain in such perpetual memory to our posterity [so that] the evil,
if any there be, cannot but appear and come to light, there is no reason
for toleration, no place for dissimulation; but [there is reason] more
deeply, highly, and profoundly to penetrate and search for the truth, so
that the same may vanquish and overcome, and all guilt, craft, and
falsehood clearly be extirpate and reject."
I am anticipating the progress of the story in making these quotations; for
the main burden of the despatch concerns a forged document which had been
introduced by the Roman lawyers to embarrass the process, and of which I
shall by-and-bye have to speak directly; but I have desired to illustrate
the spirit in which Henry entered upon the general question--assuredly a
more calm and rational one than historians have usually represented it to
be. In dealing with the obstacle which had been raised, he displayed a most
efficient mastery over himself, although he did not conclude without
touching the pith of the matter with telling clearness. The secretary was
to take some opportunity of speaking to the pope privately; and of warning
him, "as of himself," that there was no hope that the king would give way:
he was to "say plainly to his Holiness that the king's desire and intent
_convolare ad secundas nuptias non patitur negativum_; and whatsoever
should be found of bull, brief, or otherwise, his Highness found his
conscience so inquieted, his succession in such danger, and his most royal
person in such perplexity for things unknown and not to be spoken, that
other remedy there was not but his Grace to come by one way or other, and
specially at his hands, if it might be, to the desired end; and that all
concertation to the contrary should be vain and frustrate."
So peremptory a conviction and so determined a purpose were of no sudden
growth, and had been probably maturing in his mind for years, when the
gangrene was torn open by the Bishop of Tarbês, and accident precipitated
his resolution. The momentous consequences involved, and the reluctance to
encounter a probable quarrel with the emperor, might have long kept him
silent, except for some extraneous casualty; but the tree being thus rudely
shaken, the ripe fruit fell. The capture of Rome occurring almost at the
same moment, Wolsey caught the opportunity to break the Spanish alliance;
and the prospect of a divorce was grasped at by him as a lever by which to
throw the weight of English power and influence into the papal scale, to
commit Henry definitely to the catholic cause. Like his acceptance of
legatine authority, the expedient was a desperate one, and if it failed it
was ruinous. The nation at that time was sincerely attached to Spain. The
alliance with the house of Burgundy was of old date; the commercial
intercourse with Flanders was enormous, Flanders, in fact, absorbing all
the English exports; and as many as 15,000 Flemings were settled in London.
Charles himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in
the late French war; and when in his supposed character of leader of the
anti-papal party in Europe he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate Rome, he
had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was fermenting in
the population. France, on the other hand, was as cordially hated as Spain
was beloved. A state of war with France was the normal condition of
England; and the reconquest of it the universal dream from the cottage to
the castle. Henry himself, early in his reign, had shared in this delusive
ambition; and but three years before the sack of Rome, when the Duke of
Suffolk led an army into Normandy, Wolsey's purposed tardiness in sending
reinforcements had alone saved Paris.[127]
There could be no doubt, therefore, that a breach with the emperor would in
a high degree be unwelcome to the country. The king, and probably such
members of the council as were aware of his feelings, shrank from offering
an open affront to the Spanish people., and anxious as they were for a
settlement of the succession, perhaps trusted that advantage might be taken
of some political contingency for a private arrangement; that Catherine
might be induced by Charles himself to retire privately, and sacrifice
herself, of her free will, to the interests of the two countries. This,
however, is no more than conjecture; I think it probable, because so many
English statesmen were in favour at once of the divorce and of the Spanish
alliance--two objects which, only on some such hypothesis, were compatible.
The fact cannot be ascertained, however, because the divorce itself was not
discussed at the council table until Wolsey had induced the king to change
his policy by the hope of immediate relief.
Wolsey has revealed to us fully his own objects in a letter to Sir Gregory
Cassalis, his agent at Rome. He shared with half Europe in an impression
that the emperor's Italian campaigns were designed to further the
Reformation; and of this central delusion he formed the keystone of his
conduct. "First condoling with his Holiness," he wrote, "on the unhappy
position in which, with the college of the most reverend cardinals, he is
placed,[128] you shall tell him how, day and night, I am revolving by what
means or contrivance I may bring comfort to the church of Christ, and raise
the fallen state of our most Holy Lord. I care not whit it may cost me,
whether of expense or trouble; nay, though I have to shed my blood, or give
my life for it, assuredly so long as life remains to me for this I will
labour. And how let me mention the great and marvellous effects which have
been wrought by my instrumentality on the mind of my most excellent master
the king, whom I have persuaded to unite himself with his Holiness in heart
and soul. I urged innumerable reasons to induce him to part him from the
emperor, to whom he clung with much tenacity. The most effective of them
all was the constancy with which I assured him of the good-will and
affection which were felt for him by his Holiness, and the certainty that
his Holiness would furnish proof of his friendship in conceding his said
Majesty's requests, in such form as the church's treasure and the authority
of the Vicar of Christ shall permit, or so far as that authority extends or
may extend. I have undertaken, moreover, for all these things in their
utmost latitude, pledging my salvation, my faith, my honour and soul upon
them. I have said that his demands shall be granted amply and fully,
without scruple, without room or occasion being left for
after-retractation; and the King's Majesty, in consequence, believing on
these my solemn asseverations that the Pope's Holiness is really and indeed
well inclined towards him, accepting what is spoken by me as spoken by the
legate of the Apostolic See, and therefore, as in the name of his Holiness,
has determined to run the risk which I have pressed upon him; he will spare
no labour or expense, he will disregard the wishes of his subjects, and the
private interest of his Realm, to attach himself cordially and constantly
to the Holy See."[129]
These were the words of a man who loved England well, but who loved Rome
better; and Wolsey has received but scanty justice from catholic writers,
since he sacrificed himself for the catholic cause. His scheme was bold and
well laid, being weak only in that it was confessedly in contradiction to
the instincts and genius of the nation, by which, and by which alone, in
the long run, either this or any other country has been successfully
governed. And yet he might well be forgiven if he ventured on an unpopular
course in the belief that the event would justify him; and that, in uniting
with France to support the pope, he was not only consulting the true
interest of England, but was doing what England actually desired, although
blindly aiming at her object by other means. The French wars, however
traditionally popular, were fertile only in glory. The rivalry of the two
countries was a splendid folly, wasting the best blood of both countries
for an impracticable chimera; and though there was impatience of
ecclesiastical misrule, though there was jealousy of foreign interference,
and general irritation with the state of the church, yet the mass of the
people hated protestantism even worse than they hated the pope, the clergy,
and the consistory courts. They believed--and Wolsey was, perhaps, the only
leading member of the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not
under the same delusion--that it was possible for a national church to
separate itself from the unity of Christendom, and at the same time to
crush or prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental
system could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those
mysteries were dispensed should minister in gilded chains. This was the
English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the second Henry,
and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a thing of words and
paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew well that an
ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation of doctrine; that
plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the
priesthood, when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an
earthly authority higher than their own. He was not to be blamed if he took
the people at their word; if he believed that, in their doctrinal
conservatism, they knew and meant what they were saying: and the reaction
which took place under Queen Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried
and failed, and the alternative was seen to be absolute between a union
with Rome or a forfeiture of catholic orthodoxy, prove after all that he
was wiser than in the immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy
had succeeded, and if, strengthened by success, he had introduced into the
church those reforms which he had promised and desired,[130] he would have
satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation.
Like other men of genius, Wolsey also combined practical sagacity with an
unmeasured power of hoping. As difficulties gathered round him, he
encountered them with the increasing magnificence of his schemes; and after
thirty years' experience of public life, he was as sanguine as a boy. Armed
with this little lever of the divorce, he saw himself, in imagination, the
rebuilder of the catholic faith and the deliverer of Europe. The king being
remarried, and the succession settled, he would purge the Church of
England, and convert the monasteries into intellectual garrisons of pious
and learned men, occupying the land from end to end. The feuds with France
should cease for ever, and, united in a holy cause, the two countries
should restore the papacy, put down the German heresies, depose the
emperor, and establish in his place some faithful servant of the church.
Then Europe once more at peace, the hordes of the Crescent, which were
threatening to settle the quarrels of Christians in the West as they had
settled them in the East--by the extinction of Christianity itself,--were
to be hurled back into their proper barbarism.[131] These magnificent
visions fell from him in conversations with the Bishop of Bayonne, and may
be gathered from hints and fragments of his correspondence. Extravagant as
they seem, the prospect of realising them was, humanly speaking, neither
chimerical nor even improbable. He had but made the common mistake of men
of the world who are the representatives of an old order of things at the
time when that order is doomed and dying. He could not read the signs of
the times; and confounded the barrenness of death with the barrenness of a
winter which might be followed by a new spring and summer; he believed that
the old life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the
ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called
heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of
princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could trample
out; and as in the early years of Christianity the meanest slave who was
thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the forbidden mysteries of
the gospel, saw deeper, in the divine power of his faith, into the future
even of this earthly world than the sagest of his imperial persecutors, so
a truer political prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most
ignorant of those poor men, for whom his myrmidons were searching in the
purlieus of London, who were risking death and torture in disseminating the
pernicious volumes of the English Testament.
If we look at the matter, however, from a more earthly point of view, the
causes which immediately defeated Wolsey's policy were not such as human
foresight could have anticipated. We ourselves, surveying the various
parties in Europe with the light of our knowledge of the actual sequel, are
perhaps able to understand their real relations; but if in 1527 a political
astrologer had foretold that within two years of that time the pope and the
emperor who had imprisoned him would be cordial allies, that the positions
of England and Spain toward the papacy would be diametrically reversed, and
that the two countries were on the point of taking their posts, which they
would ever afterwards maintain, as the champions respectively of the
opposite principles to those which at that time they seemed to represent,
the prophecy would have been held scarcely less insane than a prophecy six
or even three years before the event, that in the year 1854 England would
be united with an Emperor Napoleon for the preservation of European order.
Henry, then, in the spring of the year 1527, definitively breaking the
Spanish alliance, formed a league with Francis I., the avowed object of
which was the expulsion of the Imperialists from Italy; with a further
intention--if it could be carried into effect--of avenging the outrage
offered to Europe in the pope's imprisonment, by declaring vacant the
imperial throne. Simultaneously with the congress at Amiens where the terms
of the alliance were arranged, confidential persons were despatched into
Italy to obtain an interview--if possible--with the pope, and formally
laying before him the circumstances of the king's position, to request him
to make use of his powers to provide a remedy. It is noticeable that at the
outset of the negotiation the king did not fully trust Wolsey. The latter
had suggested, as the simplest method of proceeding, that the pope should
extend his authority as legate, granting him plenary power to act as
English vicegerent so long as Rome was occupied by the Emperor's troops.
Henry, not wholly satisfied that he was acquainted with his minister's full
intentions in desiring so large a capacity, sent his own secretary, unknown
to Wolsey, with his own private propositions--requesting simply a
dispensation to take a second wife, his former marriage being allowed to
stand with no definite sentence passed upon it; or, if that were
impossible, leaving the pope to choose his own method, and settle the
question in the manner least difficult and least offensive.[132]
Wolsey, however, soon satisfied the king that he had no sinister
intentions. By the middle of the winter we find the private messenger
associated openly with Sir Gregory Cassalis, the agent of the minister's
communications;[133] and a series of formal demands were presented jointly
by these two persons in the names of Henry and the legate; which, though
taking many forms, resolved themselves substantially into one. The pope was
required to make use of his dispensing power to enable the King of England
to marry a wife who could bear him children, and thus provide some better
security than already existed for the succession to the throne. This demand
could not be considered as in itself unreasonable; and if personal feeling
was combined with other motives to induce Henry to press it, personal
feeling did not affect the general bearing of the question. The king's
desire was publicly urged on public grounds, and thus, and thus only, the
pope was at liberty to consider it. The marriages of princes have ever been
affected by other considerations than those which influence such relations
between private persons. Princes may not, as "unvalued persons" may, "carve
for themselves;" they pay the penalty of their high place, in submitting
their affections to the welfare of the state; and the same causes which
regulate the formation of these ties must be allowed to influence the
continuance of them. The case which was submitted to the pope was one of
those for which his very power of dispensing had been vested in him; and
being, as he called himself, the Father of Christendom, the nation thought
themselves entitled to call upon him to make use of that power. A resource
of the kind must exist somewhere--the relation between princes and subjects
indispensably requiring it. It had been vested in the Bishop of Rome,
because it had been presumed that the sanctity of his office would secure
an impartial exercise of his authority. And unless he could have shown
(which he never attempted to show) that the circumstances of the succession
were not so precarious as to call for his interference, it would seem that
the express contingency had arisen which was contemplated in the
constitution of the canon law;[134] and that where a provision had been
made by the church of which he was the earthly head, for difficulties of
this precise description, the pope was under an obligation either to make
the required concessions in virtue of his faculty, or, if he found himself
unable to make those concessions, to offer some distinct explanation of his
refusal. I speak of the question as nakedly political. I am not considering
the private injuries of which Catherine had so deep a right to complain,
nor the complications subsequently raised on the original validity of the
first marriage. A political difficulty, on which alone he was bound to give
sentence, was laid before the pope in his judicial capacity, in the name of
the nation; and the painful features which the process afterwards assumed
are due wholly to his original weakness and vacillation.
Deeply, however, as we must all deplore the scandal and suffering which
were occasioned by the dispute, it was in a high degree fortunate, that at
the crisis of public dissatisfaction in England with the condition of the
church, especially in the conduct of its courts of justice, a cause should
have arisen which tested the whole question of church authority in its
highest form; where the dispute between the laity and the ecclesiastics was
represented in a process in which the pope sat as judge; in which the king
was the appellant, and the most vital interests of the nation were at stake
upon the issue. It was no accident which connected a suit for divorce with
the reformation of religion. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction was upon its
trial, and the future relations of church and state depended upon the
pope's conduct in a matter which no technical skill was required to decide,
but only the moral virtues of probity and courage. The time had been when
the clergy feared only to be unjust, and when the functions of judges might
safely be entrusted to them. The small iniquities of the consistory courts
had shaken the popular faith in the continued operation of such a fear; and
the experience of an Alexander VI., a Julius II., and a Leo X. had induced
a suspicion that even in the highest quarters justice had ceased to be much
considered. It remained for Clement VII. to disabuse men of their alarms,
or by confirming them to forfeit for ever the supremacy of his order in
England. Nor can it be said for him that the case was one in which it was
unusually difficult to be virtuous. Justice, wounded dignity, and the
interests of the See pointed alike to the same course. Queen Catherine's
relationship to the emperor could not have recommended her to the
tenderness of the pope, and the policy of assenting to an act which would
infallibly alienate Henry from Charles, and therefore attach him to the
Roman interests, did not require the eloquence of Wolsey to make it
intelligible. If, because he was in the emperor's power, he therefore
feared the personal consequences to himself, his cowardice of itself
disqualified him to sit as a judge.
It does not fall within my present purpose to detail the first stages of
the proceedings which followed. In substance they are well known to all
readers of English history, and may be understood without difficulty as
soon as we possess the clue to the conduct of Wolsey. I shall, however, in
a few pages briefly epitomise what passed.
At the outset of the negotiation, the pope, although he would take no
positive steps, was all, in words, which he was expected to be. Neither he
nor the cardinals refused to acknowledge the dangers which threatened the
country. He discussed freely the position of the different parties, the
probabilities of a disputed succession, and the various claimants who would
present themselves, if the king died without an heir of undisputed
legitimacy.[135] Gardiner writes to Wolsey,[136] "We did even more
inculcate what speed and celerity the thing required, and what danger it
was to the realm to have this matter hang in suspense. His Holiness
confessed the same, and thereupon began to reckon what divers titles might
be pretended by the King of Scots and others, and granted that, without an
heir male, with provision to be made by consent of the state for his
succession, and unless that what shall be done herein be established in
such fashion as nothing may hereafter be objected thereto, the realm was
like to come to dissolution."