The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a
charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their
advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed
upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries,
have been set aside, and others of a widely different character
pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper,
and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to
gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer
of the very highest and best class,--as the man who alone thoroughly
understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument
to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose
members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow
the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the
personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the
interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central
government, so far as that work was possible,--thus proceeding in the
spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the
victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars.
This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long
prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references
to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of
American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck
down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in
his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a
truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance
between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman
whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while
Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by
quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834
concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its
chiefs, and the man who should now bring forward the conqueror of Gaul
as a vulgar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that
man who should insist that General Jackson destroyed American liberty
when he removed the deposits from the national bank. The facts and
fears of one generation often furnish material for nothing but jests
and jeers to that generation's successors; and we who behold a million
of men in arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all
calling themselves Americans, are astonished when we read or remember
that our immediate predecessors in the political world went to the
verge of madness on the Currency question. Perhaps the men of 1889 may
be equally astonished, when they shall turn to files of newspapers that
were published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events
that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thousands of
families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the
misjudging of the present, and the failure to comprehend the future.
Men of a very different stamp from the first of the Romans have been
allowed the benefits that come from a rehearing of their causes.
Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has
found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that
greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was
an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had
the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to
be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have
tried the soundest of heads, even had that head been united with the
purest of hearts. But the apologists of "the sea-green incorruptible,"
it must be admitted, have not been very successful, as the sence of
mankind revolts at indiscriminate murder, even when the murderer's
hands have no other stain than that which comes from blood,--for that
is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or
cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and
Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender
or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly
recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and
career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he
received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. Mr.
Paget has all but whitewashed Marlborough, and has shaken many men's
faith in the justice of Lord Macauley's judgement and in the accuracy
of his assertions. Richard III., by all who can look through the clouds
raised by Shakespeare over English history of the fifteenth century, is
admitted to have been a much better man and ruler than were the average
of British monarchs from the Conquest to the Revolution, thanks to the
labors of Horace Walpole and Caroline Halsted, who, however, have only
followed in the path struck out by Sir George Buck at a much earlier
period. The case of Mary Stuart still remains unsettled, and bids fair
to be the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case of history; but this is owing to
the circumstance that that unfortunate queen is so closely associated
with the origin of our modern parties that justice where her reputation
is concerned is scarcely to be looked for. Little has been said for
King John; and Mr. Woolryche's kind attempt to reconcile men to the
name of Jeffreys has proved a total failure. Strafford has about as
many admirers as enemies among those who know his history, but this is
due more to the manner of his death than to any love of his life: of so
much more importance is it that men should die well than live well, so
far as the judgement of posterity is concerned with their actions.
Strafford's master, who so scandalously abandoned him to the headsman,
owes the existence of the party that still upholds his conduct to the
dignified manner in which he faced death, a death at which the whole
world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has
found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now
generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an
ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that
have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political
pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that
tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions,
have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential
affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it
will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian
gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian _gens_. It must be confessed
that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything
else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper
character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his
marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet.
They would have been mighty interesting reading,--as full of lies,
probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on
that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained
nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found
defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the
cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear
rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals
were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet
and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists
is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man
who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.
Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished
not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which
have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates.
Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of
anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in
crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Albèri, Catharine was not the
harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that
she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital
defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre
of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French _coup
d'état_, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions
seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in
1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if
she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender
mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was
only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,--a sort
of argument the force of which we always have been unable to
appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed
that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted. The
incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils
three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the
vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an
insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth
century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the
gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the
excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they
can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and
other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but
the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those
loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose
reign they were perpetrated.
The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology
than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in
history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and
winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith
because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he
nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man
and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the
sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform
movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed. A
legitimate king, though the heir of a successful usurpation, and
holding the royal prerogative as high as any man who ever grasped the
sceptre, he was the tool of the mightiest of revolutionists, and poured
out more royal and noble blood than ever flowed at the command of all
the Jacobins and Democrats that have warred against thrones and
dynasties and aristocracies. He is abhorred of Catholics, and
Protestants do not love him; for he pulled down the old religious
fabric of his kingdom, and furnished to the Reformers a permanent
standing-place from which to move the world, while at the same time he
slaughtered Protestants as ruthlessly as ever they were disposed of by
any ruler of the Houses of Austria and Valois. Reeking with blood, and
apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet
popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that
popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the
unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on
account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly
known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general
estimate of his character than would a whole volume of professed
personal panegyric, or of elaborate defence of his policy and his
deeds. But this is not sufficient for those persons who would have
reasons for their historical belief, and who seek to have a solid
foundation for the faith they feel in the real greatness of the second
Tudor king of England. Men of ability have occasionally sought to
create an intelligible Henry VIII., and to cause us to respect one
whose doings have so potently affected human affairs through ten
generations, and the force of whose labors, whether those labors were
blindly or rationally wrought, is apparently as unspent as it was on
that day on which, having provided for the butchery of the noblest of
his servants, he fell into his final sleep. At the head of these
philosophic writers, and so far ahead of them as to leave them all out
of sight, is Mr. James Anthony Froude, whose "History of England from
the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" has been brought down to
the death of Mary I., in six volumes,--another proof of the grand scale
on which history is now written, in order that it may be read on the
small scale; for it is not given to many men to have the time for study
which even a moderate modern course of history requires in these active
days. Mr. Froude is a very different writer from Dr. Nares, but the
suggestions made to the heavy Doctor by Macaulay might be borne in mind
by the lively historian. He should remember that "the life of man is
now threescore years and ten," and not "demand from us so large a
portion of so short an existence" as must necessarily be required for
the perusal of a history which gives an octavo volume for every five
years of the annals of a small, though influential monarchy.
Mr. Froude did not commence his work in a state of blind admiration of
his royal hero,--the tone of his first volume being quite calm, and on
the whole as impartial as could reasonably have been expected from an
Englishman writing of the great men of a great period in his country's
history; but so natural is it for a man who has assumed the part of an
advocate to identify himself with the cause of his client, that our
author rapidly passes from the character of a mere advocate to that of
a partisan, and by the time that he has brought his work down to the
execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint,
with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do
no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it
may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history,
unless we are desirous of seeing that become a mere party-record. The
practice of publishing books in an incomplete state is one that by no
means tends to render them impartial, when they relate to matters that
are in dispute. Mr. Froude's first and second volumes, which bring the
work down to the murder of Anne Boleyn, afforded the most desirable
material for the critics, many of whom most pointedly dissented from
his views, and some of whom severely attacked his positions, and not
always unsuccessfully. They were, naturally, not disposed to think that
an act bad in itself changed its character when it became the act of
Henry VIII. It was contrary to all human experience to suppose that
Henry was in all cases in the right, while his opponents and his
victims were as invariably in the wrong. If there ever had lived and
reigned a man who could not do wrong, it was preposterous to look for
him in one who had been a wife-killer, a persecutor, the slayer of the
nobility of his kingdom, the exterminator of the last remnants of an
old royal race, the patron of fagots and ropes and axes, and a
hard-hearted and selfish voluptuary, who seems never to have been open
to one kind or generous feeling. Most of those tyrants that have been
hung up on high, by way of warning to despots, have had their
"uncorrupted hours," in which they vindicated their claim to humanity
by the performance of some good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is
supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with
garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same
moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish
father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the
feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the
death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's critics
failed to accept his estimate of Henry, or that they arrayed anew the
long list of his shocking misdeeds, and dwelt with unction on his total
want of sympathy with ordinary humanity. As little surprising is it
that Mr. Froude's attachment to the kingly queen-killer should be
increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The
biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To
endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes
the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have
denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man
of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly,
had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere,
enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have
been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of
men. A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct
of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been
logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was
with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had
taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon
his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the
neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and
quilting-parties.
Mr. Froude is too able a man to seek to pass crude eulogy of Henry
VIII. upon the world. He knows that the reason why this or that or the
other thing was done is what his readers will demand, and he does his
best to meet their requirements. Very plausible, and very well
sustained by numerous facts, as well as by philosophical theory, is the
position which he assumes in reference to Henry's conduct. Henry,
according to the Froudean theory, was troubled about the succession to
the throne. His great purpose was to prevent the renewal of civil war
in England, a war for the succession. When he divorced Catharine of
Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn, when he libelled and murdered Anne
Boleyn, when he wedded Jane Seymour, when he became disgusted with and
divorced Anne of Cleves, when he married and when he beheaded Catharine
Howard, when he patronized, used, and rewarded Cromwell, and when he
sent Cromwell to the scaffold and refused to listen to his plaintive
plea for mercy, when he caused Plantagenet and Neville blood to flow
like water from the veins of old women as well as from those of young
men, when he hanged Catholics and burned Protestants, when he caused
Surrey to lose the finest head in England,--in short, no matter what he
did, he always had his eye steadily fixed across that boiling sea of
blood that he had created upon one grand point, namely, the
preservation of the internal peace of England, not only while he
himself should live, but after his death. His son, or whoso should be
his heir, must succeed to an undisputed inheritance, even if it should
be necessary to make away with all the nobility of the realm, and most
of the people, in order to secure the so-much-desired quiet.
Church-yards were to be filled in order that all England might be
reduced to the condition of a church-yard. That _Red Spectre_
which has so often frightened even sensible men since 1789, and caused
some remarkably humiliating displays of human weakness during our
generation and its immediate predecessor, was, it should seem, ever
present to the eyes of Henry VIII. He saw Anarchy perpetually
struggling to get free from those bonds in which Henry VIII. had
confined that monster, and he cut off nearly every man or woman in
whose name a plea for the crown could be set up as against a Tudor
prince or princess. Like his father, to use Mr. Froude's admirable
expression, "he breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection," and
he was fixed and firm in his purpose to deprive all rebelliously
disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would
naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually
striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by
ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a
failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian,
might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to
find that they were playing the losing game.
Now, this succession-question theory has the merit of meeting the very
difficulty that besets us when we study the history of Henry's reign,
and it is justified by many things that belong to English history for a
period of more than two centuries,--that is to say, from the deposition
of Richard II., in 1399, to the death of Elizabeth, in 1603. It is a
strangely suggestive satire on the alleged excellence of hereditary
monarchy as a mode of government that promotes the existence of order
beyond any other, that England should not have been free from trouble
for two hundred years, because her people could not agree upon the
question of the right to the crown, and so long as that question was
left unsettled, there could be no such thing as permanent peace for
the castle or the cottage or the city. Town and country, citizen,
baron, and peasant, were alike dependent upon the ambition of aspiring
princes and king-makers for the condition of their existence. The folly
of Richard II. enabled Henry of Bolingbroke to convert his ducal
coronet into a royal crown, and to bring about that object which his
father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seems to have ever had at
heart. Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title,
according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the
body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in
virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third
son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that
monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his
title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to
the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have
been the _elder_ brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached
to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created
by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began
endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and
the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of
James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of
Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and
wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally
great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line
of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all
writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans
was fought, but in fact the contest of which that war was but the
extreme utterance began nearly sixty years earlier than the day of the
Battle of St. Albans, its commencement dating from the time that Henry
IV. became King. A variety of circumstances prevented it from assuming
its severest development until long after all the actors in its early
stages had gone to their graves. Henry IV. was a man of superior
ability, which enabled him, though not without struggling hard for it,
to triumph over all his enemies; and his early death prevented a
renewal of the wars that had been waged against him. His son, the
overrated Henry V., who was far inferior to his father as a statesman,
entered upon a war with France, and so distracted English attention
from English affairs; and had he lived to complete his successes, all
objection to his title would have disappeared. Indeed, England herself
would have disappeared as a nation, becoming a mere French province, a
dependency of the House of Plantagenet reigning at Paris. But the
victor of Agincourt, like all the sovereigns of his line, died young,
comparatively speaking, and left his dominions to a child who was not a
year old, the ill-fated Henry VI. Then would have broken out the
quarrel that came to a head at the beginning of the next generation,
but for two circumstances. The first was, that the King's uncles were
able men, and maintained their brother's policy, and so continued that
foreign distraction which prevented the occurrence of serious internal
troubles for some years. The second was, that the Clarence or Mortimer
party had no leader.
There is a strange episode in the history of Henry V., which shows how
unstable was the foundation of that monarch's throne. While he was
preparing, at Southampton, for the invasion of France, a conspiracy was
discovered to have been formed to take the throne from him. The chief
actor in it was the Earl of Cambridge, who was speedily tried,
convicted, and beheaded, sharing the fate of his associates. Cambridge
was a son of the Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III., and he had
married Anne Mortimer, daughter of Roger Earl of March; and the
intention of the conspirators was to have raised that lady's brother,
Edmund Earl of March, to Henry's place. March was a feeble character,
and Cambridge is believed to have looked to his own wife's becoming
Queen-Regnant of England. The plot, according to one account, was
betrayed by March to the King, and the latter soon got rid of one whose
daring character and ambitious purpose showed that he must be dangerous
as an opposition chief. Henry's enemies were thus left without a head,
in consequence of their leader's having lost his head; and the French
war rapidly absorbing men's attention, all doubts as to Henry's title
were lost sight of in the blaze of glory that came from the field of
Agincourt. The spirit of opposition, however, revived as soon as the
anti-Lancastrians obtained a leader, and public discontent had been
created by domestic misrule and failure in France. That leader was the
Duke of York, son of that Earl of Cambridge who had been executed for
his part in the Southampton conspiracy, which conspiracy has been
called by an eminent authority the first spark of the flame which in
the course of time consumed the two Houses of York and Lancaster. Left
an infant of three years, it was long before York became a
party-leader, and probably he never would have disputed the succession
but for the weakness of Henry VI, which amounted to imbecility, and the
urging of stronger-minded men than himself. As it was, the open
struggle began in 1455, and did not end until the defeat and capture of
the person called Perkin Warbeck, in 1497. The greatest battles of
English history took place in the course of these campaigns, and the
greater part of the royal family and most of the old nobility perished
in them, or by assassination, or on the scaffold.
But the Yorkist party, though vanquished, was far from extinguished by
the military and political successes of Henry VII. It testifies
emphatically to the original strength of that party, and to the extent
and the depth of its influence, that it should be found a powerful
faction as late as the last quarter of Henry VIII.'s reign, fifty years
after the Battle of Stoke. "The elements of the old factions were
dormant," says Mr. Froude, "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 on his death, without a male child, half England was likely
to declare either for one of her sons, or for the Marquis of Exeter,
the grandson of Edward IV." Of the general condition of the English
mind at about the date of the fall of Wolsey Mr. Froude gives us a very
accurate picture. "The country," he says, "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 recognize the past in
its true hatefulness. Henceforward 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
aspect 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
recognized, 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, 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 Scotch king 'to the uttermost of their
power.'"
There can be no doubt that Mr. Froude has made out his case, and that
"the predominating terror," not only of English statesmen, but of the
English people and their King, was a war of succession. If we were not
convinced by what the historian says, we should only have to look over
the reign of Elizabeth, and observe how anxious the statesmen of that
time were to have the succession question settled, and how singular was
the effect of that question's existence and overshadowing importance on
the conduct of the Great Queen. The desire that she should marry, and
the pertinacity with which she was urged to abandon her maiden state by
Parliament, which strike us of the nineteenth century as being not
simply indelicate, but utterly gross even in the coarse sixteenth
century, must in fairness be attributed to the fear that prevailed
throughout England that that country might again become the theatre of
a civil conflict as extensive, as bloody, and as destructive of
material prosperity and moral excellence as had been the Wars of the
Roses,--a fear which the existence of the contest between Catholicism
and Protestantism was well calculated to exaggerate to a very alarming
extent. The coquetry and affectation of the Queen, which have been held
to detract largely from her claim to be considered a woman of sense and
capacity, become natural in her and intelligible to us when we consider
them in connection with the succession question. She could not
positively declare that she would under no circumstances become a
wife, but at the same time she was firm in her heart never to have a
husband. So she followed the politician's common plan: she compromised.
She allowed her hand to be sought by every empty-handed and
empty-headed and hollow-hearted prince or noble in Europe, determined
that each in his turn should go empty away; and so she played off
princes against her own people, until the course of years had left no
doubt that she had become, and must ever remain, indeed "a barren
stock." Her conduct, which is generally regarded as having been
ridiculous, and which may have been so in its details, and looked upon
only from its feminine side, throws considerable light upon the entire
field of English politics under the Tudor dynasty.
If it could be established that the conduct of Henry VIII. toward his
people, his church, his nobles, and his wives was regulated solely with
reference to the succession question, and by his desire to preserve
the peace of his kingdom, we believe that few men would be disposed to
condemn most of those of his acts that have been long admitted to
blacken his memory, and which have placed him almost at the very head
of the long roll of heartless tyrants. That the end justifies the
means is a doctrine which everybody condemns by word of mouth, but the
practice founded upon which almost all men approve in their hearts,
whenever it applies to their own schemes, or to schemes the success of
which promises to benefit them, either individually or in the mass. As
the apologists of the French Jacobins have argued that their favorites
were cruel as the grave against Frenchmen only that they might
preserve France from destruction, so might the admirers of Henry plead
that he was vindictively cruel only that the English masses might live
in peace, and be protected in quietly tilling their fields, manuring
them after their own fashion, and not having them turned up and
fertilized after the fashion of Bosworth and Towton and Barnet. Surely
Henry Tudor, second of that name, is entitled to the same grace that is
extended to Maximilien Robespierre, supposing the facts to be in his
favor.
But are the facts, when fairly stated, in his favor? They are not. His
advocates must find themselves terribly puzzled to reconcile his
practice with their theory. They prove beyond all dispute that the
succession question was the grand thought of England in Henry's time;
but they do not prove, because they cannot prove, that the King's
action was such as to show that he was ready, we will not say to make
important sacrifices to lessen the probabilities of the occurrence of a
succession war, but to do anything in that way that required him to
control any one of the gross passions or grosser appetites of which he
was throughout his loathsome life the slave and the victim. He seems to
have passed the last twenty years of his reign in doing deeds that give
flat contradiction to the theory set up by his good-natured admirers of
after-times, that he was the victim of circumstances, and that, though
one of the mildest and most merciful of men in fact, those villanous
circumstances did compel him to become a tyrant, a murderer, a
repudiator of sacramental and pecuniary and diplomatic obligations, a
savage on a throne, and a Nebuchadnezzar for pride and arrogance, only
that, unfortunately for his subjects in general, and for his wives in
particular, he was not turned out to grass. A beast in fact, he did not
become a beast in form. Scarcely one of his acts, after the divorce of
Catharine of Aragon, was of a character to favor the continuance of
peace in England, while many of them were admirably calculated to
bring about a war for the regal succession. Grant that he was justified
in putting away his Spanish wife,--a most excellent and eminently
disagreeable woman, a combination of qualities by no means
uncommon,--where was the necessity of his taking Anne Boleyn to wife?
Why could he not have given his hand to some foreign princess, and so
have atoned to his subjects for breaking up the Spanish alliance, in
the continuance of which the English people had no common political
interest, and an extraordinary commercial interest? Why could he not
have sent to Germany for some fair-haired princess, as he did years
later, and got Anne of Cleves for his pains, whose ugly face cost poor
Cromwell his head, which was giving the wisest head in England for
the worst one out of it? Henry, Mr. Froude would have us believe,
divorced Catharine of Aragon because he desired to have sons, as one
way to avoid the breaking out of a civil war; and yet it was a sure way
to bring Charles V. into an English dispute for the regal succession,
as the supporter of any pretender, to repudiate the aunt of that
powerful imperial and royal personage. The English nation, Mr. Froude
truly tells us, was at that time "sincerely attached to Spain. The
alliance with the House of Burgundy" (of which Charles V. was the head)
"was of old date; the commercial intercourse with Flanders was
enormous,--Flanders, in fact, absorbing all the English exports; and as
many as fifteen thousand 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
fomenting in the population." Was it not a strange way to proceed for
the preservation of peace in England to offend a foreign sovereign who
stood in so strong and influential a position to the English people?
Charles was not merely displeased because of the divorce of his
relative, his mother's sister, a daughter of the renowned Isabella, who
had wrought such great things for Christendom,--promoting the discovery
of America, and conquering Granada,--but he was incensed at the mere
thought of preferring to her place a private gentlewoman, who would
never have been heard of, if Henry had not seen fit to raise her from
common life, first to the throne, and then to the scaffold. That was an
insult to the whole Austro-Burgundian family, whose dominions rivalled
those of the Roman Caesars, and whose chief had just held a King of
France captive and a Pope of Rome besieged. The Emperor might, perhaps,
have been sooted, had his relative's place been bestowed upon some lady
of corresponding blueness of blood; but it offended his pride, when he
reflected on her being supplanted by Mrs. Boleyn. The aristocratical
_morgue_ was too strong in him to bear such an insult with
fortitude. Yet none other than Mrs. Boleyn would Henry have,
notwithstanding the certainty of enraging Charles, and with the equal
certainty of disgusting a majority of his own subjects. If it had been
simply a wife that he desired, and if he was thinking merely of the
succession, and so sought only for an opportunity to beget legitimate
children, why did he so pertinaciously insist upon having no one but
"Mistress Anne" for the partner of his throne and bed?
When he married Jane Seymour on the 20th of May, 1536, having had
Anne's head cut off on the 19th, Mr. Froude sees in that infamous
proceeding--a proceeding without parallel in the annals of villany,
and which would have disgraced the worst members of Sawney Bean's
unpromising family--nothing but a simple business-transaction. The
Privy Council and the peers, troubled about the succession, asked
Henry to marry again without any delay, when Anne had been prepared for
condemnation. The King was graciously pleased to comply with this
request, which was probably made in compliance with suggestions from
himself,--the marriage with Jane Seymour having been resolved upon
long before it took place, and the desire to effect it being the cause
of the legal assassination of Anne Boleyn, which could be brought about
only through the "cooking" of a series of charges that could have
originated nowhere out of her husband's vile mind, and which led to the
deaths of six innocent persons. "The indecent haste" of the King's
marriage with the Seymour, Mr. Froude says, "is usually considered a
proof entirely conclusive of the cause of Anne Boleyn's ruin. To
myself the haste is an evidence of something very different. Henry, who
waited seven years for Anne Boleyn, was not without some control over
his passions; and if appetite had been the moving influence with him,
he would scarcely, with the eyes of all the world fixed upon his
conduct, have passed so extravagant an insult upon the nation of which
he was the sovereign. The precipitancy with which he acted is to me a
proof that he looked on matrimony as an indifferent official act which
his duty required at the moment. This was the interpretation which
was given to his conduct by the Lords and Commons of England. In the
absence of any evidence, or shadow of evidence, that among
contemporaries who had means of knowing the truth another judgment was
passed upon it, the deliberate assertion of an Act of Parliament must
be considered a safer guide than modern unsupported conjecture."
[Footnote: Mr. Froude mentions that a request that the King would
marry, similar to that which he received after the fall of Anne
Boleyn, was urged by the Council on the death of Jane Seymour; but, as
he allowed more than two years to elapse between the date of Jane's
death and the date of his marriage with Anne of Cleves, which marriage
he refused to consummate, is not the inference unavoidable that he
wedded Jane Seymour so hurriedly merely to gratify his desire to
possess her person, and that in 1537-39 he was singularly indifferent
to the claims of a question upon his attention?]
We submit that the approving action of men who were partakers of
Henry's guilt is no proof of his innocence. Their conduct throughout
the Boleyn business simply proves that they were slaves, and that the
slaves were as brutal as their master. If Henry was so indifferent in
the matter of matrimony as to look upon all women with the same
feelings, if he married officially as the King, and not lovingly as a
man, how came it to pass that he was thrown into such an agony of rage,
when, being nearly fifty years old, ugly Anne of Cleves was provided
for him? His disappointment and mortification were then so great that
they hastened that political change which led to Cromwell's fall and
execution. When Henry first saw the German lady, he was as much
affected as George, Prince of Wales, was when he first saw Caroline of
Brunswick, but he behaved better than George in the lady's presence.
Much as he desired children, he never consummated his marriage with
Anne of Cleves, though he must have known that the world would be but
ill-peopled, if none but beautiful women were to be married. Had he
fulfilled the contract made with her, he might have had many sons and
daughters, and the House of Tudor might have been reigning over England
at this day. Both his fifth and sixth wives, Catharine Howard and
Catharine Parr, were fine women; and if he had lived long enough to get
rid of the latter, he would, beyond all question, have given her place
to the most beautiful woman whom he could have prevailed upon to risk
his perilous embraces preliminarily to those of the hangman.
If Henry had married solely for the purpose of begetting children, he
never would have divorced and slaughtered Anne Boleyn. During her brief
connection with him, she gave birth to two children, one a still-born
son, and the other the future Queen Elizabeth, who lived to her
seventieth year, and whose enormous vitality and intellectual energy
speak well for the physical excellence of her mother. The miscarriage
that Anne experienced in February, 1536, was probably the occasion of
her repudiation and murder in the following May, as Henry was always
inclined to attribute disappointments of this kind to his wives, who
ever dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death.[Footnote: Henry
thought of divorcing Catharine of Aragon some years before she had
become too old to bear children. She was born in the last month of
1485, and the "King's secret matter," as the divorce question was
called, was in agitation as early as the first half of 1527, and
probably at an earlier period. Catharine was the mother of five
children, but one of whom lived, namely, the Princess Mary, afterward
Mary I.] The most charitable view that can be taken of Henry's
abominable treatment of his second wife is, that he was led by his
superstitious feelings, which _he_ called religion, to sacrifice
her to the manes of his first wife, whom Anne had badly treated, and
who died on the 7th of January, 1536. Henry, after his fashion, was
much moved by Catharine's death, and by perusal of the letter which she
wrote him from her dying bed; and so he resolved to make the only
atonement of which his savage nature was capable, and one, too, which
the bigoted Spanish woman would have been satisfied with, could she
have foreseen it. As the alliance between the royal houses of England
and Spain was sealed with the blood of the innocent Warwick, who was
sent to the scaffold by Henry VII. to satisfy Catharine's father,
Ferdinand of Aragon, so were the wrongs of Catharine to be acknowledged
by shedding the innocent blood of Anne Boleyn. The connection, as it
were, began with the butchery of a boy, reduced to idiocy by
ill-treatment, on Tower Hill, and it ended with the butchery of a
woman, who had been reduced almost to imbecility by cruelty, on the
Tower Green. Heaven's judgement would seem to have been openly
pronounced against that blood-cemented alliance, formed by two of the
greatest of those royal ruffians who figured in the fifteenth century,
and destined to lead to nothing but misery to all who were brought
together in consequence of it's having been made. If one were seeking
for proofs of the direct and immediate interposition of a Higher Power
in the ordering of human affairs, it would be no difficult matter to
discover them in the history of the royal houses of England during
the existence of the Lancastrian, the York, and the Tudor families.
Crime leads to crime therein in regular sequence, the guiltless
suffering with the guilty, and because of their connection with the
guilty, until the palaces of the Henries and the Edwards become as
haunted with horrors as were the halls of the Atridae. The "pale
nurslings that had perished by kindred hands," seen by Cassandra when
she passed the threshold of Agamemnon's abode, might have been
paralleled by similar "phantom dreams," had another Cassandra
accompanied Henry VII. when he came from Bosworth Field to take
possession of the royal abodes at London. She, too, might have spoken,
taking the Tower for her place of denunciation, of "that human
shamble-house, that bloody floor, that dwelling abhorred by Heaven,
privy to so many horrors against the most sacred ties." And she might
have seen in advance the yet greater horrors that were to come, and
that hung "over the inexpiable threshold; the curse passing from
generation to generation."
Mr. Froude thinks that Catharine Howard, the fifth of Henry's wives,
was not only guilty of antenuptial slips, but of unfaithfulness to the
royal bed. It is so necessary to establish the fact of her infidelity,
in order to save the King's reputation,--for he could not with any
justice have punished her for the irregularities of her unmarried
life, and not even in this age, when we have organized divorce, could
such slips be brought forward against a wife of whom a husband had
become weary,--that we should be careful how we attach credit to what
is called the evidence against Catharine Howard; and her
contemporaries, who had means of weighing and criticizing that
evidence, did not agree in believing her guilty. Mr. Froude, who would,
to use a saying of Henry's time, find Abel guilty of murder of Cain,
were that necessary to support his royal favorite's hideous cause, not
only declares that the unhappy girl was guilty throughout, but lugs God
into the tragedy, and makes Him responsible for what was, perhaps, the
cruellest and most devilish of all the many murders perpetrated by
Henry VIII. The luckless lady was but a child at the time she was
devoured by "the jaws of darkness." At most she was but in her
twentieth year, and probably she was a year or two younger than that
age. Any other king than Henry would have pardoned her, if for no other
reason, then for this, that he had coupled her youth with his age, and
so placed her in an unnatural position, in which the temptation to
error was all the greater, and the less likely to be resisted, because
of the girl's evil training,--a training that could not have been
unknown to the King, and on the incidents of which the Protestant plot
for her ruin, and that of the political party of which she was the
instrument, had been founded. But of Henry VIII., far more truly than
of James II., could it have been said by any one of his innumerable
victims, that, though it was in his power to forgive an offender, it
was not in his nature to do so.
No tyrant ever was preceded to the tomb by such an array of victims as
Henry VIII. If Shakspeare had chosen to bring the highest of those
victims around the last bed that Henry was to press on earth, after the
fashion in which he sent the real or supposed victims of Richard III.
to haunt the last earthly sleep of the last royal Plantagenet, he would
have had to bring them up by sections, and not individually, in
battalions, and not as single spies. Buckingham, Wolsey, More, Fisher,
Catharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Rocheford, Cromwell, Catharine
Howard, Exeter, Montague, Lambert, Aske, Lady Salisbury,
Surrey,--these, and hundreds of others, selected principally from the
patrician order, or from the officers of the old church, might have led
the ghostly array which should have told the monarch to die and to
despair of redemption; while an innumerable host of victims of lower
rank might have followed these more conspicuous sufferers from the
King's "jealous rage." Undoubtedly some of these persons had justly
incurred death, but it is beyond belief that they were all guilty of
the crimes laid to their charge; yet Mr. Froude can find as little
good in any of them as of evil in Henry's treatment of them. He would
have us believe that Henry was scrupulously observant of the law! and
that he allowed Cromwell to perish because he had violated the laws of
England, and sought to carry out that "higher law" which politicians
out of power are so fond of appealing to, but which politicians in
power seldom heed. And such stuff we are expected to receive as
historical criticism, and the philosophy of history! And pray, of what
breach of the law had the Countess of Salisbury been guilty, that she
should be sent to execution when she had arrived at so advanced an age
that she must soon have passed away in the course of Nature? She was
one of Cromwell's victims, and as he had been deemed unfit to live
because of his violations of the laws of the realm, it would follow
that one whose attainder had been procured through his devices could
not be fairly put to death. She suffered ten months after Cromwell, and
could have committed no fresh offence in the interval, as she was a
prisoner in the Tower at the time of her persecutor's fall, and so
remained until the day of her murder. The causes of her death,
however, are not far to seek: she was the daughter of George
Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV., and Henry hated
every member of that royal race which the Tudors had supplanted; and
she was the mother of Reginald Pole, whom the King detested both for
his Plantagenet blood and for the expositions which he made of the
despot's crimes.
One of the victims sacrificed by Mr. Froude on the altar of his Moloch
even he must have reluctantly brought to the temple, and have offered
up with a pang, but whose character he has blackened beyond all
redemption, as if he had used upon it all the dirt he has so
assiduously taken from the character of his royal favorite. There are
few names or titles of higher consideration than that of Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey. It is sufficient to name Surrey to be reminded of the
high-born scholar, the gallant soldier, one of the founders of English
literature, and a poet of equal vigor of thought and melodiousness of
expression. His early and violent death, at the behest of a tyrant,
who himself had not ten days to live when he stamped--for he could no
longer write--the death-warrant of his noblest subject, has helped to
endear his memory for three centuries; and many a man whose sympathies
are entirely with the Reformation and the "new men" of 1546, regrets
the untimely death of the Byron of those days, though the noble poet
was at the head of the reactionary party, and desired nothing so much
as to have it in his power to dispose of the "new men," in which case
he would have had the heads of Hertford and his friends chopped off as
summarily as his own head fell before the mandate of the King.
Everything else is forgotten in the recollection of the Earl's youth,
his lofty origin, his brilliant talents, his rank as a man of letters,
and his prompt consignment to a bloody grave, the last of the legion of
patricians sent by Henry to the block or the gallows. Yet it is Surrey
upon whom Mr. Froude makes his last attack, and whom he puts down as a
dirty dog, in order that Henry VIII may not be seen devoting what were
all but his very latest hours to the task of completing the judicial
murder of one whom he hated because he was so wonderfully elevated
above all the rest of his subjects as to be believed capable of
snatching at the crown, though three of the King's children were then
alive, and there were several descendants of two of his sisters in both
Scotland and England. Because, of all men who were then living, Surrey
most deserved to reign over England, the jealous tyrant supposed there
could be no safety for his youthful son until the House of Howard had
been humiliated, and both its present head and its prospective head
ceased to exist. Not satisfied with attributing to him political
offences that do not necessarily imply baseness in the offender, Mr.
Froude indorses the most odious charges that have been brought against
Surrey, and which, if well founded, utterly destroy all his claims to
be considered, we will not say a man of honor, but a man of common
decency. Without having stated much that is absolutely new, Mr. Froude
has so used his materials as to create the impression that Surrey, the
man honored for three centuries as one of the most chivalrous of
Englishmen, and as imbued with the elevating spirit of poetry, was a
foul fellow, who sought to engage his sister in one of the vilest
intrigues ever concocted by courtier, in order that she might be made a
useful instrument in the work of changing the political condition of
England. Henry's illegitimate son, Henry Fitz-Roy, Duke of Richmond,
whom he had at one time thought of declaring his successor, died,
leaving a widow, who was Surrey's sister. This lady told Sir Gawin
Carew that her brother had advised her so to bear herself toward the
King that possibly "his Majesty might cast some love unto her, whereby
in process she should bear as great a stroke about him as Madame
d'Estampes did about the French king." Madame d'Estampes was the most
notorious and influential of Francis I.'s many mistresses; and if
Carew's evidence is to be depended upon, we see what was the part
assigned by Surrey to his sister in the political game the old
aristocracy and the Catholics were playing. She, the widow of the
King's son, was to seduce the King, and to become his mistress! Carew's
story was confirmed by another witness, and Lady Richmond had
complained of Surrey's "language to her with abhorrence and disgust,
and had added, 'that she defied her brother, and said that they should
all perish, and she would cut her own throat, rather than she would
consent to such villany.'" On Surrey's trial, Lady Richmond also
confirmed the story, and "revealed his deep hate of the 'new men,' who,
'when the King was dead,' he had sworn 'should smart for it.'" Such is
the tale, and such is the evidence upon which it rests. Its truth at
first appears to be beyond dispute, but it is possible that all the
witnesses lied, and that the whole process was a made-up thing to aid
in reconciling the public to the summary destruction of so illustrious
a man as Surrey; and it was well adapted to that end,--the English
people having exceeded all others in their regard for domestic
decencies and in reverence for the family relations of the sexes.
Should it be said that it is more probable that Surrey was guilty of
the moral offence charged upon him than that his sister could be
guilty of inventing the story and then of perjuring herself to support
it, we can but reply, that Lady Rocheford, wife of Anne Boleyn's
brother, testified that Anne had been guilty of incest with that
brother, and afterward, when about to die, admitted that she had
perjured herself. Of the two offences, supposing Lady Richmond to
have sworn away her brother's life, that of Lady Rocheford was by far
the more criminal, and it is beyond all doubt. So long as there is
room for doubting Surrey's guilt, we shall follow the teaching of the
charitable maxim of our law, and give him the benefit of the doubt
which is his due.
The question of the guilt or innocence of Anne Boleyn is a tempting
one, in connection with Henry VIII.'s history; but we have not now the
space that is necessary to treat it justly. We may take it up another
time, and follow Mr. Froude through his ingenious attempts to show that
Anne must have been guilty of incest and adultery, or else--dreadful
alternative!--we must come to the conclusion that Henry VIII. was not
the just man made perfect on earth.
* * * * *