laid down a policy of his own for the Cardinal to carry out. In the
first place he had two personal reasons for wanting the divorce--a
superstitious impression that the failure of Katharine to supply him
with a male heir was Heaven’s punishment for a marriage which the Pope
ought never to have sanctioned; and a passion for Anne Boleyn. In the
second place, the policy of alliance with Charles against Francis
had worked out badly, and a rupture with Charles must come in any
case. Wolsey should manage it, or should help: and if he began with
a belief that a French marriage might be the outcome, there would be
no harm done. The policy, as before, was a deviation from Wolsey’s,
but did not seem superficially to run counter to the broad principle
on which it was based, that England was to prove her effective
predominance by throwing her weight into the French or the Imperial
scale as circumstances might demand. But, as before, the method
was short-sighted. On the other hand, we find Wolsey behaving also
precisely as he did before. If the king did elect to lay down a policy,
he must be the instrument through which it should be carried out.
He could not prevent it; he must make the best of it, and as far as
possible neutralise the bad effects by skilful handling. He made his
attempt, failed, and fell. It would have been better for his credit if
he had fallen in open instead of in covert opposition.
It remains in any case impossible to dogmatise; the whole thing is
a tangle, and there are difficulties in the way of accepting each
solution. To the theory that the divorce was primarily a plan of
Wolsey’s in order to facilitate a French alliance, there is a further
objection that a negotiation was already on foot for marrying the
Princess Mary to Henry of Orleans, the French king’s second son, who
afterwards became Henry II. The substitution of the marriage of the
king himself to a French princess would have hardly been in itself
a closer bond; yet we should be compelled to believe that Wolsey
deliberately, with no greater advantage in view, sought to make this
change at the cost of a probably irreparable breach with the emperor.
The political motive is inadequate. Whereas, for the king, who had a
powerful non-political motive thrown in, the plan becomes intelligible
enough. The divorce should be so managed that Mary’s legitimacy should
still be secured, the marriage with Orleans could go forward, and he
himself would get the wife he wanted. That in 1527 his passion for Anne
was a very powerful motive is not to be disputed--the love-letters,
uncertain as their dates are, cannot be attributed to a still later
time.
It is also tolerably clear that the king meant to have the divorce in
any case, whether it upset foreign relations or not. Moreover, if the
plan was Wolsey’s, he would have been satisfied to leave the Cardinal
to work it out, which he was not. From the beginning he appears to have
suspected--if there was not more than a suspicion--that his minister
disliked the whole idea, and would be only too pleased if it were
shelved; and he employed other agents to get the thing done, behind
Wolsey’s back. Wolsey was very much in the position of a lawyer whose
client, with whom he cannot afford to quarrel, insists on his adopting
a certain course in defiance of his own judgment. He devised ingenious
expedients; he tried to make his case as safe as possible; he gave
nothing away to the other side; but he was reluctant throughout, while
the king was invincibly obstinate.
Assuming then that it was Henry, not Wolsey, who from the commencement
sought the divorce, the Cardinal’s consistency is restored. So far
also the consistency of Henry’s character is maintained. He never laid
out a great political scheme, calculating for the future; but when
Wolsey formulated a large design, he readily recognised its merits,
and recognised Wolsey himself as the man to carry it through. But
three times he was moved with a desire to obtain a particular end,
without realising that to do so would overturn the main scheme; on
each occasion the minister formally and officially obeyed his master’s
behest. Over the divorce, however, Henry’s behaviour presents an
interesting psychological study.
There have been many statesmen, successful in varying degree, who have
quite deliberately ignored moral considerations in their policy. They
have not admitted that unrighteous action as such carries any penalty
attached to it. Crime which shocks public sentiment violently they may
avoid; not because it is criminal, but because public sentiment cannot
be ignored. The mere fact that a particular course of action involves
injustice or cruelty, or otherwise over-rides the moral law, is not
permitted to weigh at all in judging of its expediency. Such a one was
Thomas Cromwell. There have been others who would never allow any claim
of mere expediency to countervail against the dictates of conscience.
Such a one was Thomas More.
The average man is content to compromise: not drawing the line very
high, but still drawing it somewhere. Henry belonged to the class
who would never violate conscience; but, when any particular course
presented itself to his mind as expedient or desirable, he had a quite
unique power of convincing himself not only that the thing would not be
wrong, but that conscience positively clamoured that it must be done:
nothing was so monstrous that he could not solemnly persuade himself
that it was a sad duty. There are men who are made that way. They will
rob the widow and swindle the orphan, but they must and do first trick
themselves into an amazing belief that in so doing they are serving
heaven or society. Henry was much more dangerous than a commonplace
hypocrite who assumes a mask to deceive the world, since he had to
begin by making the deception convincing to himself.
Thus it was in the matter of the divorce. It was of real urgent
importance that he should have a male heir, and there was no hope of
his wife giving him one; he wanted very much to marry Anne, and he
could not do so while his wife was living; but with what conscience
could he get rid of that wife? Henry’s conscience gave him the answer
he wanted, pat: it always did. Conscience pointed out that the children
of the marriage, except one girl, all came to grief--were still-born,
or died in a few weeks. Surely, here was Heaven’s judgment on a
sinful union. True, the contracting parties had sinned with a Pope’s
benediction, and thinking there was nothing wrong. But clearly the
Pope must have erred. Conscience therefore did not merely excuse, it
demanded, the dissolution of the unholy bond. Conscience permitted
Henry to declare fervently that nothing would please him so much as
to find that his scruples were groundless; but nothing would ever
have persuaded him that they were so except perhaps the death of Anne
Boleyn. Having once thoroughly satisfied himself that the divorce was a
duty, whatever any one might say to the contrary, it followed that some
legal method of accomplishing it must exist. If the Pope did not see
the thing in the same light, there must be something defective in the
Papal authority after all. The scruple of conscience gradually assumed
an axiomatic character to Henry; and the repudiation of Clement, who
regarded it as an extremely questionable postulate, followed logically.
Until Clement revoked the cause to Rome--a practical demonstration that
he would not sanction a verdict objectionable to the emperor--nothing
demanding revolutionary measures had occurred. That event, however,
changed the situation. There would have to be a fight with the Papacy,
which could not be conducted under the Cardinal’s captaincy. The
Cardinal had failed badly; his behaviour had been suspicious. It did
not take the conscientious monarch long to discover that advantage had
been taken of his own generous trustfulness, that he had been warming
a viper in his bosom. Wolsey was thrown to the wolves. It is curiously
characteristic of Henry that the instrument by which he shattered
Wolsey was the charge of a breach of _Præmunire_ in accepting and
exercising the legatine authority. The mere fact that this had been
done with the king’s own licence, almost at his instigation, would have
checked any other monarch. Henry found in it an additional cause of
offence. The Cardinal had not only broken the law--he, whose business
it was to see that the king did not accidentally transgress, had
actually inveigled the king into transgression. A just man, tricked
by his own familiar friend into committing an act of injustice, feels
righteous indignation against the friend. Such was the indignation of
the king against the Cardinal, as of Adam against Eve.
V
THE NEW POLICY
The fall of Wolsey marks, as the beginning of the divorce proceedings
really commences, the second stage of Henry’s career. Had he died
before 1529, the Bluebeard legend would never have been applied to
him, and his connexion with the Reformation would have been in effect
limited to a controversial pamphlet in favour of the extreme Papal
claims, directed against Luther. This was all that the uprising of the
great Reformer had evoked from the prince who was expected to be the
royal champion of the Intellectuals. No one would have called him a
tyrant. It is true that Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, had been
put to death at the beginning of the reign--as tradition says, in
fulfilment of the advice of Henry VII. It is true also that Buckingham
had been executed, not so much because he had committed any treason as
because he was thought dangerous; but the world would have been content
to leave that as one of the charges against Wolsey. Henry would have
passed with posterity as a pleasure-loving monarch with a great taste
for extravagance, who cheerfully left the government of the country
to an able and unscrupulous minister, and did absolutely nothing
personally in the twenty years of his reign to justify the high hopes
with which his accession was hailed. The reign would have been recorded
as the reign of the Cardinal, and our ideas of the king himself would
have been conveyed mainly in the anecdotes of his personal vanity
and love of pageantry and popularity. It is the forcefulness, energy,
and resolution--or the violence, fickleness, and obstinacy--displayed
in the second period which make us revise our judgment of the
first, and set us seeking therein for some appearance of these same
characteristics, and discovering in them the explanation of some
puzzles in the Cardinal’s policy.
The new stage of Henry’s career presents us with a problem at the
outset. Hitherto, he had followed Wolsey’s counsels; very shortly,
the Machiavellian maxims of Cromwell guided his course; but there is
no one to bridge the gap between Wolsey and Cromwell. Sir Thomas More
succeeded the Cardinal as Chancellor, but not as first minister--he
never made any secret, to the king, of his conviction that the marriage
with Katharine could not and should not be invalidated. Nothing
points to Norfolk or Suffolk as guiding policy. The newly discovered
Cranmer had suggested a principle for dealing with the divorce, but
his appearance is merely in the character of a University doctor, not
of a statesman. Precisely at this moment, before he knew anything of
Cromwell, with Wolsey, so to speak, hanging on the very verge of the
precipice, a Parliament is called suddenly, which remains undissolved
until its seventh year. Since 1515 there had been only one Parliament,
that of 1523-1524. Between 1500 and 1515 Parliaments had been rare.
Henry VII., when he no longer felt the need of constant Parliamentary
sanction, and Wolsey after him, had gone steadily on the rule of
accustoming the country to have the government carried on almost
without Parliaments, and of establishing absolutism on those lines.
From this moment that attitude towards Parliament disappears. For
the rest of the reign, there is no prolonged interval without one;
Parliament itself is converted into the instrument and the buttress of
despotism.
In the preceding study of Thomas Cromwell the view was adopted that
he was the real author of what was one comprehensive design for
establishing the royal power high over everything else, including
therein the repudiation of Papal rivalry, and the subordination of the
clerical organisation; while the method, of deliberately choosing to
make Parliament share the responsibility, was his also. Yet the calling
of this Parliament in 1529, and its initial measures of ecclesiastical
reform, cannot be attributed to him. Henry did it out of his own head.
It will be found, however, that the apparent contradictions are easily
reconcilable.
Henry found, in 1529, that his determination to have a divorce would
involve either a fight with the Papacy or a struggle to secure Papal
support in despite of the emperor. Also he felt that the Cardinal was
not to be depended on as the manager of that struggle. He had no one
ready to take the Cardinal’s place, though Stephen Gardiner might have
done so had he been a layman. He had formulated no plan of campaign
beyond that of sending the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn’s father,
with Cranmer in his train, on an embassy to Bologna. But he might
find himself impelled to do more or less questionable things; the
precedent of his father’s first years suggested that in that case it
would be useful to be able to say that he had acted with the sanction
of Parliament; and he had the Tudor instinct of appreciating the value
of conciliating popular sentiment. Nothing would conciliate popular
sentiment so much as inducing his subjects to believe that it was
their interests and their opinions he was consulting. So he summoned
Parliament.
Thus, Henry called the Parliament: Henry authorised clerical reform:
Henry meditated a possible quarrel with the Pope. But it was Cromwell
who co-ordinated Henry’s ideas--clever enough as far as they went, but
not going far--into a single far-reaching scheme, wherein the things
his master had thought of were nicely adjusted, gaps were filled
in, consequences calculated, and a systematic evolution arranged in
which every step should seem the corollary of what had already been
accomplished. How far individual steps were invented by Henry, and how
far by Cromwell, it is not possible to gauge. Cromwell never assumed
the pose of Wolsey--the pose which the Cardinal did indubitably adopt,
although it was erroneously inferred from the famous if legendary
phrase, _Ego et rex meus_. He was always ostensibly the king’s
instrument. In Wolsey’s time a question had once arisen whether in
sending certain official despatches the full information should be
sent to him, and only general remarks to the king, or _vice versa_.
That would not have happened with Thomas Cromwell. The full official
despatch would have gone to the king as a matter of course--but
Cromwell might have had a private unofficial commentary. Henry,
during the Cromwell _régime_, was in constant evidence as the ruler
of the country. During Wolsey’s _régime_, he ostentatiously left the
management in Wolsey’s hands. But during both periods we can at any
rate form a shrewd guess at the points on which king and minister were
in harmony, and those where the minister had to yield to the king.
Beyond minor reforms of abuses, and the movement for taking the opinion
of the Universities on the divorce, there was no immediate sign, after
the Cardinal’s fall, of a definitely anti-clerical or anti-Papal
policy. The first blow--the demand for a ransom from the clergy under
the _Præmunire_--would have been entirely characteristic of either
the king or Cromwell: the idea was after all merely a very much more
audacious application of the method adopted towards Wolsey. Whoever hit
upon the notion, it was made the first step in the systematic grinding
down of the clergy between the upper and the nether millstones of
financial spoliation and political subjection. The Supplication against
the Ordinaries in Parliament, the Submission of the Clergy, forced upon
Convocation as the clause of the “Supreme Head” had been, appear to
be more decisively Cromwell’s handiwork. There is no adequate reason
to suppose that Parliament had these measures thrust down its throat:
anti-clericalism was not a new idea, and was usually popular; and if
the Supplication included matters about which the general public cared
very little, such as the right of ecclesiastical legislation exercised
by Convocation, it also carefully embodied popular grievances, though
they may not have been as flagrant as was represented. But on the
other hand, if the Supplication emanated from any one but Cromwell, it
implies an elaboration of organised action among private members which
there is nothing to corroborate. It must have been what may be called
a Government measure, which on the whole had the support--possibly the
enthusiastic support--of the House. The Annates Act, opposed by the
bishops, was not enthusiastically adopted by the Commons--not so much
because they objected to depriving the Pope of the impost as because
they saw no reason why the clergy should be relieved of it. They did
not realise that the king and Cromwell had no intention of allowing it
to become an effective measure of relief at all.
VI
DIVERGENCES BETWEEN HENRY AND CROMWELL
In short, down to the pronouncement of the divorce, Henry and Cromwell
are clearly working in perfect accord--whether minister or king
devised the programme: Convocation is being steadily compelled, very
much against its will, to endorse the propositions of the Crown,
and Parliament is at any rate acquiescent. We may, however, suspect
that Henry, up to this point at least if not for nearly a year
more, inclined to hope that the Pope might yet give way; whereas in
the overtures to the Lutheran Princes in 1533 we may see Cromwell
working to make doubly sure the assurance of complete severance from
Rome. The Lutheran alliance was unquestionably a favourite scheme of
Cromwell’s, but the king never did more than dally with it. In his pet
character of theologian he could never bring himself to accept the
Augsburg Confession, or any compromise which would have satisfied the
Protestants.
Cromwell was always possessed with the belief that a combination of
Powers favourable to the Papacy would be formed sooner or later for
the destruction of England and the Protestants on the Continent: the
coalition of Charles and Francis was his bugbear. On the other hand, he
saw no hope of an effective union between England and France; while he
fancied that, if the bar between Henry and Charles, irremovable while
Katharine lived, were once annulled by her death, the emperor--whose
troops had sacked Rome in 1527, and who had in many respects evinced
very little real regard for the Pope’s authority--might be brought
over to the anti-Papal side. Therefore, whenever he thought there was
a prospect of effecting an Imperial alliance, he let the idea of the
Protestant alliance go; whenever the Imperial alliance seemed hopeless,
the Protestant alliance re-appeared on his programme.
Henry, however, was not at one with Cromwell. He looked askance at the
idea of a Protestant alliance because he did not consider himself a
Protestant; on the contrary, he accounted Lutheranism as heresy, and
himself as a pattern of orthodoxy. From his point of view, the only
quarrel with Rome lay in the Pope’s assertion of usurped claims to
jurisdiction, which either Charles or Francis might find themselves
ready to repudiate in their own dominion at any convenient moment.
He remembered Wolsey’s doctrine. Francis and Charles had so many
antagonistic interests that they could never co-operate for long. The
business of England was to make each desire her alliance; to avoid
the mistake of committing herself too deeply to either. For a short
time--in 1539--he began to think that Cromwell might be right about the
danger of a coalition, and accepted the plan of the Cleves marriage as
a defensive measure. The marriage was hardly accomplished when a fresh
breach between the rival princes showed that his own view of the danger
had been right. There never was, either in his own time or later, a
Catholic coalition against England. At the same time it is at least a
tenable view that a Protestant union, steadily maintained, might have
had great results; on which it is not uninteresting to speculate, but
the speculation is too much guesswork to be profitable.
Henry’s views, then, on foreign policy, differed from his minister’s,
and it was Henry’s views that prevailed, except in the episode of the
Cleves marriage; and in that particular case, there was so startling an
appearance of a real _rapprochement_ between Francis and Charles that
the king’s deviation along Cromwell’s lines can hardly be attributed
to weakness. And even so he took careful precautions, as long as the
thing was possible, to preserve a loop-hole for his own withdrawal,
however deeply his minister might be committed.
In the ecclesiastical policy also, as it emerges after the definite
breach with Rome, Cromwell was evidently more inclined to encourage
the advanced school than his master. Henry made Cranmer Archbishop,
wanting in that post a man who accepted whole-heartedly the theory
of Royal Supremacy. As long as the reforms proposed were restricted
to dealing with notorious abuses of the kind which Colet had freely
denounced, and to the introduction of an English Bible--which the
Conservatives might regard as dangerous, but could not denounce as
in itself heretical--Henry was prepared to give his sanction; but
whenever doctrines were in question as to which the followers of the
“Old Learning” were in solid agreement, Henry consistently held with
them. Cromwell, on the other hand--not from religious sentiment, but
on purely political grounds--had Lutheran proclivities, owing to his
desire to conciliate Continental Protestantism. He did not, as Cranmer
did, urge the acceptance of views to which Henry objected; but his
influence was always in favour of “advanced” appointments, and of a lax
application of the laws which pressed hardly upon that school. Henry’s
personal affection for Cranmer, a liking for Latimer, and an absence
of any such feeling towards Gardiner and Gardiner’s colleagues, kept
him from active interference in this respect. But he saw to it that
what the law laid down should be unimpeachably orthodox, and every
attempt of Cromwell’s to draw nearer to the Lutherans was countered by
affirmations of a rigid adherence to the Old Faith and denunciation
of innovations: culminating in the Act of the Six Articles. The
differences in the formularies of faith issued from 1536 to 1540 are
all in the direction of increasing definiteness, of leaving fewer
questions open; and the definiteness is always in favour of the old
school. Although the minister officially supported the Six Articles,
while the Archbishop made all the fight possible against it, the Act
was the king’s deliberate work, and the forcing of it through was
without any possible doubt a direct set-back for Cromwell. At the same
time, however, Henry took occasion to impress on his Court, with his
usual vigour, that it would be extremely injudicious for any one to
act on the hypothesis that it involved any diminution of the personal
favour in which Cranmer was held.
In the rest of the domestic policy--Treason Acts, Supremacy Acts, Acts
of Succession, Dissolution of Monasteries, Attainders--there is no
opposition between king and minister. The edifice of absolutism with
the sanction of Parliament is steadily reared, on the ruins of the
ecclesiastical fabric and of the last families round whom any sort of
Yorkist tradition can centre. When at last it had culminated in the
Royal Proclamations Act, Cromwell ceased to be necessary; being no
longer necessary, he offended his master; and, offending him, fell as
Wolsey fell before him.
VII
HENRY’S CLOSING YEARS