very much against his will, was elevated to the Chancellorship.
For a commoner and a layman to receive the appointment was almost
revolutionary--at least it was a very signal mark of the depression of
the nobility, although it was many a year since any but an ecclesiastic
had held the office. In everything, More proved himself a notably
admirable occupant of the post, dealing out justice with unprecedented
despatch; not only without allowing himself to be corrupted, in which
he was not unique, but also without accepting those substantial
compliments from suitors which less rigidly scrupulous judges were
in the habit of profiting by, even when they did not allow their
decisions to be affected. No personal or professional considerations
were ever permitted by him to interfere with the ends of justice, the
most exact that it was in his power to achieve. But his tenure of the
Chancellorship was brief. More was unique in many respects, and in his
own day he was unique in refusing to retain office when he could no
longer do so without violating his conscience--without making himself
a party to a policy which he held to be wrong. Other men shifted the
responsibility on to the king; More felt that the responsibility could
not be shifted, and in 1532 he resigned.
The cause of the resignation was Henry’s ecclesiastical policy; its
immediate occasion, the submission of the clergy. The fall of Wolsey
was simultaneous with the summoning of the famous “Seven Years” or
“Reformation” Parliament of Henry VIII. The king had given no sort of
sign of any disposition to relax the severity of his attitude towards
heresy; but as the months and years passed, it became increasingly
evident that his rigid orthodoxy was to be accompanied by a prolonged
anti-clerical and anti-Papal campaign, the meaning whereof was to be
revealed only by degrees. A twelvemonth had barely passed when the
clergy were suddenly notified that they had as a body been guilty of a
breach of _Præmunire_ in accepting the Legatine authority of Wolsey,
and this was followed up by requiring Convocation to affirm that the
king was sole and Supreme Protector and Head of the Church. No new
authority was directly claimed for the Crown--without reading between
the lines; though it was tolerably clear that a good deal more might
be read into the declaration. The clergy yielded. Then the Commons
presented their supplication against the ordinaries. The subsequent
operations showed that the Royal Supremacy was to be applied after
quite a new fashion. The clergy yielded to the logic of force, and made
their “submission.” More, holding that no layman, king or not, could
by any possibility be rightfully head of the Church in this new sense,
concluded that he had no alternative but to retire into private life.
VI
INDIGNATIO PRINCIPIS
The divorce was Henry’s first objective; it was duly pronounced by
the new Archbishop in the following spring. The step, however, was
intensely unpopular. The more clearly this was brought home to the
king’s mind, the more anxious he became to have the avowed support
of every one whose opinion carried weight. Irritation reached its
climax over the affair of the “Nun of Kent,” a young woman named
Elizabeth Barton, who had for some little time been posing as a
sort of prophetess. How far she believed in her own imposture it is
not possible to tell, but she was certainly exploited by fanatical
adherents of the Papacy, and when she took to denouncing the wrath of
God against the king for the divorce, there was a real risk that the
superstition of the day would make her ravings dangerous. There were
two men whom no persuasions had prevailed upon to pronounce in favour
of the Boleyn marriage--Fisher of Rochester and Sir Thomas More. It
was found that both had had some sort of dealings with the nun. Henry
determined that they should both suffer as her accomplices, unless
they would openly range themselves with his supporters. But the case
against More was so hopelessly futile that the king’s advisers warned
him that the ex-Chancellor’s inclusion in the Bill of Attainder could
only result in the Bill itself being thrown out. His name was therefore
removed, to the great rejoicing of his friends. More saw farther into
the king’s mind than they did. “_Quod defertur non aufertur_,” he said
to his daughter.
He was right. The king and Cromwell were ready to go to the last
extremity to force the two recalcitrants into line. An Act had been
passed, fixing the succession to the throne on the children of Anne
Boleyn. The ratification of the marriage had led him to remark to
Roper: “God give grace, son, that these matters be not in a while
confirmed with oaths.” The Act of Succession carried with it authority
to impose an oath to maintain it; but the oath subsequently formulated
was so worded as to bind the subscriber to the admission of the
invalidity of the marriage with Katharine, and the denial of the Papal
authority. The oath was proffered to More and Fisher; both refused it,
though both were ready to maintain the succession. Both were sent to
the Tower.
It was in fact more than doubtful whether the Act warranted the
imposition of the oath in the prescribed form. The imprisonment of the
culprits without trial was in any case illegal, and every attempt to
persuade them to yield failed. The King always preferred to have the
letter of the law on his side; and it was impossible to pretend that
the refusal to subscribe involved treason. To give their destruction a
legal colour, a fresh Act of Succession was passed at the end of the
year (1534), expressly confirming the form of the oath; and this was
accompanied by an Act of Supremacy, making it treason to refuse to
affirm the Royal Supremacy. After that, it was simple enough to send
More and Fisher to their doom. To deny the Supremacy was one thing;
More had abstained from that. To refuse to affirm it was another; More
had always done so. He maintained his position, and was condemned to
death as a traitor, under the law which had been framed expressly
to enmesh him. His defence was only that the law itself was invalid
as being against the law of Christendom, and the liberties of the
Church as affirmed in _Magna Charta_; which of course the judges
could not admit. A week later, on July 6--the Eve of St. Thomas (of
Canterbury)--1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded.
VII
CHARACTER AND DEATH
Thanks mainly to the charm of the biography by his son-in-law, William
Roper, the private life and character of Thomas More are among the
most familiar to us in history. It is a life good to dwell upon, sweet
and wholesome. Even in its public aspects there is but the single
note that jars, his harshness--_molestia_ he called it--towards the
heretics, whom he classed with homicides and robbers: in its domestic
aspects it is wholly charming. In his private capacity he could love
even a heretic. Roper himself, the sympathetic husband of his favourite
daughter Margaret, was bitten with Lutheran doctrines, which even the
persuasiveness of his revered father-in-law could not induce him to
relinquish. To the error, as he deemed it, which was not accompanied by
propagandism, More was as tender as could be desired. “Meg,” he said to
Mistress Roper, “I have borne long with thy husband; I have reasoned
long time with him, and still given him my fatherly counsel; but I
perceive none of this can call him home again. And therefore, Meg, I
will no longer dispute with him, nor yet will I give him over, but I
will go another way to work, and get me to God and pray for him.”
There we have the natural Thomas More, obeying the kindly dictates of
his own heart, which held no rancour towards any one who had not in
some sort constituted himself an enemy of the “weal publick.” Personal
hostility to himself he held of no account. Shortly before he was made
Lord Chancellor, an old servant of his came to him in great indignation
against some merchants who had been “liberally rayling” at More.
Would he not, seeing what his favour was with the king, punish these
scurrilous people as they deserved? But More’s reply was a very sound
piece of philosophy in his usual humorous vein--“Would you have me
punish them by whome I receave more benefitt than by you all that be my
friends? Lett them a God’s name speake as lewedly as they list of me,
and shoote never soe many arrowes at me, so long as they do not hitt
me, what am I the worse? But if they should once hitt me, then would it
a little trouble me. Howbeit, I trust by Gode’s helpe, there shall none
of them all be able once to touch me. I have more cause, I assure thee,
to pittie them than to be angrie with them.”
We are told much of his simple piety and faith. The same ardently
reverent spirit, which made him cling to the Church and uphold her
authority, at one time very nearly sent him into the cloister, and did
cause him to retain so much of the ascetic tradition that he wore a
hair-shirt next his skin all his days; though it was only by accident
that any one save his beloved “Meg,” Margaret Roper, became aware of
the fact. His subjugation of the flesh was free from its too common
accompaniment of arrogant or morbid austerity. It was little more than
an avoidance of insidious and apparently harmless temptations, an
appreciation of the unimportance of gratifying physical appetites. He
reaped his reward. The sudden descent from ample wealth to a narrow
income, involved in his resignation of the Chancellorship, had no
terrors for him. He had tried hard fare at Oxford, less hard at New
Inn, something better at Lincoln’s Inn. He and his family could very
well live by the Lincoln’s Inn standard. If they found that too high
for the reduced exchequer, there was the New Inn standard to fall back
on, and after that the Oxford standard. And even after that “May we
yeat with bagges and walletts go a-begging togither ... and soe still
keepe companie merrily together.” A cheery philosophy.
Two of Roper’s anecdotes show, in the dramatic touches which bring a
very living Duke of Norfolk before us, how the son-in-law profited
by his father-in-law’s example; besides illustrating More’s quaint
combination of seriousness and humour. The duke went to see him about
his resignation, at Chelsea, and found him singing in the Church choir.
“To whome after service, as they went home togither arme in arme, the
duke said, ‘God body, God body, my Ld. Chancellor, a parish Clarke, a
parish Clarke, you dishonour the King and his office.’ ‘Nay,’ quoth Sir
Thomas Moore smilinge upon the Duke, ‘your Grace may not thinke, that
the Kinge your Master and myne, will with me for serving God his Master
be offended, or thereby count his office dishonoured.’” And again,
when he had escaped the Bill of Attainder: “The Duke sayd unto him,
‘By the masse, Mr. Moore, it is perillous strivinge with Princes, and
therefore I would wish you somewhat to inclyne to the Kinge’s pleasure.
For by Gode’s body Mr. Moore _Indignatio principis mors est_.’ ‘Ys that
all, my Lord?’ quoth he. ‘Is there in good fayth noe more difference
betweene your Grace and me but that I shall dye to day and you
tomorrow?’”
But in the last days, the never-failing humour has an exquisitely
pathetic setting.
The worthy wife, “somewhat worldlie too,” comes to see her husband in
the Tower; she cannot understand why he is so silly as to stop there,
when he might so easily recover the king’s goodwill by doing “as all
the Busshopps and best learned of this realm have done.” He listens
placidly to the outburst, then: “I pray thee, good Mistress Alice, tell
me one thing: is not this house as nighe heaven as mine own?” We are
reminded of the last words Humphrey Gilbert was heard to utter before
the _Squirrel_ foundered: “We are as near God by sea as by land.” But
there was no one to reply to Gilbert as “shee, after her accustomed
fashion, not likeinge such talke, answeared _Tille valle, tille
valle_.” The good soul has no patience for such incomprehensible folly.
Margaret Roper visits him, the darling daughter, of all his children
the likest to him in wit and in person; with her he is sure of perfect
sympathy. She knows that his doom is absolutely certain, nor is she one
to dissuade him from following the dictates of his conscience. After
the sentence in Westminster Hall, she is waiting at the Tower wharf for
the last fond farewell, the parting blessing. Heedless of spectators,
she darts through the press of halberdiers guarding the prisoner, to
fling herself on his neck, pour out her tears and her love on his
breast. He soothes her with words of tender counsel and affection. At
last she tears herself away, but overcome with the passion of devotion,
“suddenlye turned back againe, and rann to him as before, tooke him
about the necke, and divers times togeather most lovingely kissed him,
and at last with a full heavie harte was fayne to separate from him:
the behouldinge whereof was to manye of them that were present thereat
soe lamentable that it made them for very sorrow to mourne and weepe.”
Shall we wonder at such love for the man who on receiving sentence
could say to his judges, as reported by Anthony St. Leger, “I verily
trust and right heartily pray that though your lordships have now in
earth been Judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven
merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation”; whose spirit
was so imperturbable in its serenity, that it looked upon death as a
mere casual episode which in no wise ruffled his habitual humour. “I
pray you, Mr. Lieutenant,” he said, with his foot on the scaffold,
noticing how ill it had been put together, “see me safe up. For my
coming down, let me shift for myself”: and as he laid his neck on
the block, moving his beard aside, “Pity that should be cut; it hath
committed no treason.”
His head, according to custom, was set on Temple Bar, but Margaret
Roper, she “who clasped in her last trance her murdered father’s head,”
was allowed to obtain possession of it, and preserved it in spices till
her own death. The news of the execution was conveyed to Charles V.
His comment is endorsed by posterity--“If we had been master of such a
servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than
have lost such a worthy Councillor.”
THOMAS CROMWELL
I
THOMAS CROMWELL
For six years, Thomas Cromwell was palpably and unmistakably the
ruler of England--subject to the approval of the king. For the four
years preceding, it is practically certain that he both suggested
and organised Henry’s policy. England has never known a statesman so
irresistible, so relentless, while his power lasted; nor one whose
downfall was more sudden or so universally applauded. He is the most
terrifying because he is the most passionless figure in our history.
He wrought like fate, with a perfect disregard of all human sentiment
and emotion; a scourge of God. Not, however, a mere scourge like
the earthquake and the pestilence; not a mere destroyer; for, while
he shattered, he built. But for Cromwell, it may be doubted whether
Elizabeth’s England could have come into being.
For a second time Henry VIII. found the man most consummately fitted
to minister to his own ambition; to plan, to organise, to smite--and
to be smitten. As Wolsey, having accomplished his work, fell because
he failed to engineer his master’s matrimonial projects, so Cromwell,
having accomplished his work, fell in attempting to engineer a
matrimonial project which displeased his master. Both the great
ministers were men of humble birth at the best: popular report gave
out that the father of the one was a butcher, that of the other a
blacksmith. The one mounted to power, the last and perhaps the greatest
product of the old relation between Church and State; the other was
the first layman who, lacking even gentle blood, achieved the highest
position in the State, and shattered her old relation with the Church.
The reign of Henry VIII. abounds in huge ironies: it is not perhaps the
least of them that the Hammer of the Monks passed into the service of
the king from the service of the Cardinal.
[Illustration: _THOMAS CROMWELL 1st EARL OF ESSEX_
_By_ HOLBEIN, _from an Engraving by Houbraken in the British Museum_]
Diversities in the judgments passed on Thomas Cromwell are less
marked than in the case of most of the statesmen portrayed in this
volume. There is no possibility of questioning the utter absence
of moral scruple in the methods by which he pursued his ends, the
completeness with which he subordinated every other consideration to
their achievement, the vast organising power he displayed. That he
was actuated by a moral repulsion to the Roman system, or a religious
enthusiasm for the purity of the Gospel, is a view that can only
be put forward on the sweeping assumption that everybody concerned
in the Reformation at all was so actuated, except feeble or wicked
bigots who clung to the old order. Cromwell as a Protestant Martyr is
very much like Frederic the Great as Protestant Hero. Every one who
believes that it was good for England to reject the Papal authority
and to subordinate the Church in England to the State, is bound
to consider that the man who did these things for England rendered
his country a great service. Every one who holds the contrary view as
to the Papacy and the Church must hold that he rendered her almost
immeasurable dis-service. But these are judgments not on the man but on
the circumstances.
Yet there is one very curious fact about Thomas Cromwell. Although he
set his mark indelibly on the history of his country, and in spite
of the exceptionally dramatic course of his career, his name seems
to convey very little to most Englishmen--save as the secretary whom
Wolsey charged to “fling away ambition.” Oliver looms so large that it
is difficult to grasp the idea that another person of the same name
also loomed large a hundred years earlier. No playwright or novelist
has made him a central figure in drama or novel. Yet it may at least be
argued that of the ten characters here examined, his personality was
the one which most decisively influenced the course of history.
II
EARLIER CAREER AND RISE TO POWER
In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there was dwelling in
Putney one Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, who appears to have been a
brewer, smith, and armourer, and incidentally to have been a very
troublesome person with a taste for breaking the law in minor matters.
There is no doubt that Walter was the father of Thomas: whose birth
conjecture places about 1485. Down to 1512, the accounts of Cromwell’s
life rest entirely on later gossip, sometimes professedly derived
from remarks which he himself let fall. All reports, however, agree
in saying that he went to Italy when very young--“fleeing from his
father,” one of them avers. It needs no evidence to show that he had
a remarkably enterprising and self-reliant spirit, and if he did
run away from a turbulent parent to seek his fortune by his wits,
it was a course thoroughly consonant with his subsequent career.
The reports state further that he served as a man-at-arms under an
Italian nobleman, and with the French in 1503. Allowing for presumable
inaccuracies of detail, there is no reason to doubt that he tried his
hand as a trader of sorts in the Low Countries and in Italy. There is,
however, definite ground for believing that he returned to England
about 1512, and married the next year. If Mistress Elizabeth Wykeys did
not bring something fairly handsome in the way of a fortune, Thomas
Cromwell must have strangely forgotten himself. For some years, it
may be affirmed with confidence that he took part in business as a
wool-merchant or “shearman,” combining this trade with practice as an
attorney. Documentary evidence puts it effectively beyond doubt that he
was professionally known as a man of law to Wolsey in 1520. In 1523 he
sat in the House of Commons as a Member of that Parliament which, under
Sir Thomas More’s Speakership, declined to discuss the voting of a
subsidy in the Cardinal’s presence.
By this time we are getting away from the region of conjecture,
anecdote, and hearsay, into that of definite records. What we know of
Cromwell’s share in this Parliament is derived from two documents;
one, a letter of his own, in which he gibes at his fellow members for
having babbled at large about everything under the sun without doing
anything. “I have endured,” he says, “a Parliament which continued by
the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace,
strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury,
truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity,
activity, force, temperance, treason, murder, felony, and also how a
commonwealth might be edified and continued within our realm. Howbeit,
in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do;
that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.’ If
Carlyle had lighted upon that, how his heart would have rejoiced! The
second document, however, suggests that if Cromwell, like Carlyle, had
no great opinion of talkers, he meant his own voice to be heard: since
it is almost certainly the MS. draft of a speech which he prepared for
delivery in that same Parliament. The speech is exceedingly clever, and
most diplomatically expressed--but is dead against Wolsey’s subsidy.
Perhaps he thought better of it, and kept it in MS. If not, it was an
audacious speech to make, for a man who was getting in touch with the
Cardinal, from whose good graces much might be hoped. Still, a like
audacity paid him well some six years later. It may have been carefully
calculated in both instances; but in both there were big risks.@
At any rate, his favour with the great minister increased. He dropped
his wool-business, extended his private legal practice, was entrusted
with much legal work by the Cardinal, and became known as the person
through whom suitors to Wolsey might find it advisable to make their
applications. It was not long before he found, in his capacity as a
man of law, congenial employment in the suppression of small religious
Houses, and the appropriation of their endowments to Wolsey’s colleges
at Ipswich and Oxford. This business he did to the entire satisfaction
of his master; and since he never at any time hesitated to accept or
extract material contributions to his private exchequer from any one
concerned, his accumulations grew _pari passu_ with his favour. So
also, incidentally, did his unpopularity, for which he cared absolutely
nothing. His confidential relations with the apparently all-powerful
minister made him a person of considerable though unofficial
importance; bringing him in contact with people of high position. Thus
in 1527 he was well-known to Reginald Pole (afterwards Cardinal),
whom he counselled to drop high-flown ideas, and learn the practical
business of a politician by studying Machiavelli’s “Prince”--a work of
which he must have obtained a MS. copy, as it had not yet been printed,
though written probably as early as 1513.
But the toils of the divorce business were already enmeshing Cromwell’s
patron; as the year 1529 advanced, clouds, lightning-charged, were
gathering over his head, and the secretary knew that the hour was about
to strike when he himself must either “make or mar.”