was the puppet first of Wolsey and then of Cromwell; or that both were
no more than the instruments of his supreme genius; or that, having
with a light heart delegated all his duties and cares to the Cardinal,
he resolved to rule himself, upset the Cardinal, and used Cromwell as
a tool and scapegoat. Or we may judge that the creative, designing
brains were his ministers’; but that he deliberately made their policy
his own, except when he had a fancy for diverging from it, trusting to
their pilotage just so long as it suited him--that they, not he, were
the pilots, but he was emphatically the captain. We may even believe
that the ministers were responsible only for the mistakes in execution,
the king for the great designs. But when Cromwell is gone no one takes
the vacant place. Gardiner and Norfolk are at the head of the Council,
which becomes a hotbed of intrigues; but it is quite impossible to
attribute the royal policy either to any individual or to any clique.
Hence, in the king’s conduct of affairs during the remaining six and a
half years of his life, we ought to find clues to the nature and extent
of the control he really exercised during the thirty years preceding.
The view here put forward has been, that Wolsey diverted him from his
first merely boyish dreams of martial achievements, to take hold of the
conception of making England stand as the secure arbiter between the
great Powers of the Continent, wooed by all--or both, when only two
were left--and able always to turn the scale if one or other threatened
to preponderate. His brain, however, being somewhat more liable to
inflation than the Cardinal’s, he compelled the latter, in pursuit of
this policy, to diverge from the right path and commit the country to
the French war--possibly, though not on the whole probably, with the
notion that the old grandiose idea of conquering France might become
practicable. Then, just as the blunder was in course of being remedied,
he became obsessed with the determination to divorce Katharine; a
proceeding which could hardly fail to make friendly relations with the
emperor so impossible as to destroy the basis of the balancing scheme,
which demanded that the two European rivals should both be anxious to
court English support. Then Cromwell showed him how to use the divorce
as a piece of the machinery by which the power of the Crown might be
made at least as absolute as any known in European history. He adopted
Cromwell’s plan, but not what Cromwell regarded as its corollary,
the acceptance of the position, and the alliance of the continental
Protestants: endeavouring to hold himself aloof from alliances, and,
after Katharine’s death, to regain the position of balance-holder.
Now it has been argued that the policy of 1522 was Wolsey’s own, not
the king’s policy forced on him, because it was only when Wolsey was
minister that a “spirited foreign policy” was acted upon. It is
therefore to be noted that when Henry was left to himself with neither
Wolsey nor Cromwell to give counsel, he did quite evidently take up
the almost defunct Plantagenet notion of imposing the sovereignty of
England on Scotland--which experience had shown to be no more feasible
than the conquest of France: and he did again find himself drawn into
an Imperial alliance, and actually at war with the French. These facts
do not amount to a proof, but they do afford a presumption that the
talk about recovering the French crown had not been altogether wind,
and that the first fighting alliance with Charles was, like the second,
the doing of the king. Probably Henry’s main motive in going into this
later French war was to compel Francis to withdraw his support from
the Scots. He ought, however, to have known by this time, first, that
France could not afford to stand by while Scotland was robbed of the
independence which was always a practical and valuable asset for France
when she was at war with England: and, secondly, that Charles would
play for his own hand, and would find some excuse for leaving his ally
isolated the moment his own needs were satisfied.
The Scots affair, by the way, supplies another interesting example
of the peculiarities of Henry’s conscience. The head and front of
the party in Scotland who were most bitterly hostile to England was
Cardinal Beton: who was in close alliance with Mary of Guise, the
queen-mother. Henry was ingenious enough to discover that Beton was a
rebel, who had secured himself above the reach of the law, and that
consequently his assassination would be rather commendable. It is not
surprising that the Cardinal was murdered in due course, and that the
murderers looked to England for support.
The history of these later years, in short, lends colour to the view
that the political errors--in foreign affairs--committed in Wolsey’s
days were forced on him by the king: and also that the king himself
did not formulate large political conceptions on his own account.
More than that, it shows him capable of such serious blunders as the
proposal to re-assert the old fable of English suzerainty in Scotland,
and--what was in its own way hardly less short-sighted--the wholesale
debasement of the coinage. It was not till he was left to manage things
with no strong counsellor to aid him that he gave way completely to
this most evil propensity of his last years. The thing did incalculable
mischief, ruining credit, driving up prices, robbing creditors for the
benefit of debtors, and, of course, driving all the sound coins out of
circulation. It is to the credit of Somerset in the next reign that,
in spite of the depleted treasury, he did not carry that disastrous
experiment further: it was left for Northumberland to degrade the
currency even more than Henry had done. And it was Henry who had done
it, not Wolsey or Cromwell or Gardiner. These things would seem to
mean that, left to himself, it was his tendency to resort to paltry
and short-sighted tricks and devices of a kind incompatible with the
higher statesmanship; tricks which seem at the moment to effect their
purpose, but are a mere evasion of the difficulties with which they
pretend to deal. In these years, Henry’s statesmanship makes a poor
display. We may plead on his behalf that physical disease weakened his
intellectual powers, that practically unchecked despotism produced
moral degeneration, that we cannot judge the qualities of a man whose
rule had been--for whatever reason--undeniably powerful for a quarter
of a century, by the mismanagement of the years when he was wearing
into his grave. There is truth in the plea. Yet from the degeneration
we can infer the inherent defects. The man who muddled his Scottish
policy, and left the arrangements for carrying on the government at
his death in a state of chaos, was not he who planned, organised, and
carried out the defiance of the Papal power and the subjection of the
Church; but he may have been perfectly capable of appreciating that
vast scheme, and of playing a formidable part in the execution of it.
On the other hand, had he been merely a vain tyrannical bully, there
was more than one man in his _entourage_ after Cromwell’s fall, who
would have had the wit to make a puppet of him--which no one certainly
succeeded in doing.
VIII
HENRY’S MARRIAGES
A study of Henry’s character, however brief, would be incomplete if it
omitted to touch on his widely varied marital relations. The Blue Beard
legend may by this time be fairly looked upon as exploded. He did not
marry one wife after another to gratify capricious passions, and, when
he was weary of the new toy, cut her head off and get himself another.
Except in the case of Anne Boleyn, and possibly Jane Seymour, passion
can have had very little to say to his various ventures. His Court was
licentious; but the king himself does not appear to have been worse
than his neighbours, even if he was no better. Political intriguers
tried to obtain influence through mistresses; there was certainly
an attempt to supplant Anne Boleyn by this means, and the Earl of
Surrey--who was probably innocent enough of real treason but otherwise
deserves very little of the pity that has been wasted on him--tried
to persuade his own sister to establish herself at the king’s ear in
the same way. There is hardly a shadow of doubt that Anne Boleyn’s
elder sister Mary was Henry’s mistress before he turned his eyes upon
Anne. Rumour declared, though the statement is not substantiated, that
Sir John Perrot, who did good work in Ireland in Elizabeth’s day,
was really Henry’s son. It is probable, however, that there were no
children of his born out of wedlock except the son of Elizabeth Blount,
whom he made Duke of Richmond and was credited with intending to get
legitimised, when there was no likelihood of a legitimate male heir
appearing. The state of the Court was such that Chapuys declined to
believe in the otherwise unimpeached virtue of Jane Seymour, merely
on the general principle that no woman could be supposed virtuous
under the conditions there prevalent--but Chapuys was writing at a
moment when he was feeling particularly hot against the whole Court.
An item in the royal accounts has been supposed to indicate that Henry
kept a sort of harem, but that is based on what is almost certainly a
misinterpretation of the term “mistress.” Henry was licentious enough,
but there is no reason to imagine him as a satyr, or as on the same
plane with Francis I. The kings of the sixteenth century, bad or good,
were not often clean livers. The way to Henry’s favour was never
through the good graces of the favourite of the hour; and except in the
case of Anne Boleyn it never appears that he allowed any passion to
interfere with his politics.
At eighteen, as soon as he ascended the throne, Henry married the
wife secured for him by the diplomacy of Henry VII. and Ferdinand and
the complaisance of the Pope. Katharine was four years the elder,
sufficiently good-looking, capable, and fit to be a queen. She had
already been the bride of the young king’s elder brother, who had died
very shortly after the nuptials: but the Pope had duly provided a
dispensation to permit the second marriage. She and her husband got on
satisfactorily enough for a time. In 1513, when he was displaying his
martial prowess in Picardy, she was occupied in organising the Flodden
campaign and wrote to him in a tone implying that they were excellent
friends: yet it is possible to recognise a certain want of tact, in
the absence of that adroit flattery which Henry’s vain soul loved,
when she dwells on her own achievements instead of praising those of
her lord. Henry soon grew cool--there is no reason to suppose that
he was ever her ardent lover--and already, when babies died or were
still-born, he seems to have turned his mind to a divorce, though he
dropped the idea again. When the princess Mary was born and did _not_
die, the big jovial monarch made a great pet of the child; and though
he was unfaithful to his wife, and had no compunction about it, the
conventional friendliness was maintained. There is no doubt that the
queen exercised active influence to secure England’s favour for her
nephew Charles V.; and critics have found, in the desire of Henry and
Wolsey, a few years later, to break with Charles and form an alliance
with France, one of the leading motives which recommended the divorce
to them.
About 1522, Anne Boleyn came to Court; and from this time, favours
began to flow in the direction of the Boleyn family. The probabilities
are, however, that as yet they were due rather to the complaisance of
the elder sister Mary than to the attractions of the younger. Four
years later, it is clear that Anne had become the object of the king’s
pursuit; but, whether because she was more virtuous or more ambitious
than Mary, Anne would not surrender herself. The king became the
victim of an absorbing passion, which made him determined to procure
the divorce from Katharine at any cost--whether or no it was primarily
responsible for reviving the idea. Once embarked on it, Henry was far
too obstinate to allow anything to divert him. Towards the end of
1532--as soon as Warham was dead--he saw his way. Before the year was
out, Anne had become his mistress or his wife; a marriage ceremony
was performed in January--possibly in November. It is not easy to
believe--though the evidence points that way--that Anne, after holding
out till the prize was actually in reach, would have risked everything
by yielding without insisting on the ceremony first taking place.
The marriage was extremely unpopular; the new queen was spiteful,
flighty, undignified, if nothing worse. In a very short time, Cranmer
was the only friend she had left; she lost her charm for her husband,
and she annoyed him by the same failure to fulfil his expectations
as Katharine. The old idea cropped up again, that on this as on the
previous union the blessing of heaven did not rest. The king found
himself attracted by the somewhat inconspicuous charms and persistent
virtue of Jane Seymour. Charges were brought against Anne, which may
or may not have been true; admissions were made to Cranmer, the nature
of which we can only guess at; on the strength of the former, she was
condemned to death for treason, and on the strength of the latter the
marriage was declared void _ab initio_. The unhappy woman was beheaded;
next day, according to Chapuys, the king married Jane Seymour
privately. The official marriage was ten days later.
Jane appears to have been a pleasing, colourless, irreproachable
person; who, when she had given birth to the much-desired son,
departed to another world without having suffered any estrangement
from her husband. He, however, was wife-hunting again before long--not
because he was attracted by any one, but for purely political ends.
Unfortunately he was not satisfied by the possession of purely
political qualifications on the part of the ladies, but offended their
susceptibilities by wishing to inspect them. At last Cromwell beguiled
him into approving the Cleves marriage; but when Anne came over, and
retreat seemed impossible, he first found that she was not at all to
his taste, and then that the political reasons for wedding her had been
quite inadequate. So the ecclesiastical lawyers set to work again to
discover an excuse for annulling that marriage; and in the meantime the
Duke of Norfolk produced a young niece of his own, Katharine Howard,
who took the king’s more than middle-aged fancy. Being quit of Anne,
he married the girl, who successfully cajoled him for about a year:
after which, the faction opposed to Norfolk discovered and laid before
the unfortunate husband evidence of undoubted immorality before and
probable immorality after her marriage. So Katharine Howard followed
Anne Boleyn to the block. The affair seems to have been a really
complete and very painful surprise to Henry.
By this time, the jibe attributed to the Duchess of Milan when Henry
was thinking of marrying her--“Had I two heads, one should be at his
majesty’s disposal”--would have been quite excusable. Even the ladies
of his own Court were not covetous of the queenly throne. Chapuys, ever
cynical, hinted that an Act passed at this time would quite account
for reluctance on their part: if the king should propose to marry a
subject, she must confess any improprieties of which she had been
guilty; otherwise, if they were subsequently discovered, she would be
held guilty of treason. Still Henry discovered one more lady who was
willing to take the risks--a lady of much conjugal experience, now a
widow for the second time. This was Katharine Parr, whose last husband
had been Lord Latimer. Her virtue, however, was as much above suspicion
as Jane Seymour’s had been; she was sensible, careful, and extremely
tactful; and when an attempt was made to set her husband against her as
a heretic, she satisfied him very easily, and her accuser had to submit
to one of Henry’s ratings. She survived him, and married Admiral Thomas
Seymour.
The marriages with Katharine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves were both
avowedly and professedly political. That with Anne Boleyn was one of
passion; that with Katharine Parr one of inclination. It is extremely
doubtful whether either was effectively promoted by political intrigue.
It is hardly at all doubtful that in the two remaining cases it was
political intrigue which brought both Jane Seymour and Katharine Howard
under the king’s notice; nevertheless, it is not likely that either
of these marriages affected the king’s policy, though the disastrous
termination of the second did so.
IX
HENRY’S CHARACTER
The end of Henry’s life was quite characteristic. For some time
beforehand every one knew that he could not last long; and intrigues
were rife to secure power when he was gone. The Earl of Hertford, Jane
Seymour’s brother, was at the head of that one of the two main factions
whose leading ecclesiastic was Cranmer; they were balanced by Gardiner,
with the old Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Earl of Surrey. A false
move on Surrey’s part gave a handle to the enemy; Surrey was executed;
Norfolk was attainted and his life saved only by Henry’s own death;
Gardiner’s name was excluded from the council of “executors,” which is
supposed to have been intended by the king to balance the two parties.
Henry, left to himself, did not display wisdom in his government, but
he always at the worst held the reins in a fast grip and sat firm in
the saddle. His arrangements for carrying on the government after him
were short-sighted, and his successor in the saddle, Hertford, was
as much his inferior in practical mastery as he was superior in his
ethical aims. The results are discussed in another chapter. Henry was
almost _in articulo mortis_ before any one ventured to tell him that
his hours were numbered. At last he allowed Cranmer to be summoned.
When he arrived, the king was speechless; but being besought to give
some sign that he put his trust in Christ, wrung the Archbishop’s hand.
An hour afterwards, he was dead.
Henry’s career leaves a pretty wide option for forming a judgment of
his character. After making every possible allowance for flattery, we
know that he was exceptionally accomplished, cultured, athletic; he
could hold his own with any one, in an argument or in the tilt-yard.
His physical courage has been impugned, principally because in respect
of infectious diseases he was notoriously a coward. As a young
man, if he was unfaithful to his wife he at any rate observed the
expected courtesies; it is not surprising to find that as the divorce
proceedings went on his manner deteriorated, till his treatment of
Katharine, of his daughter Mary, of Anne Boleyn when she lost her
hold on him, can only be described as blackguardly. No one, perhaps,
would venture to ascribe to him a fervent zeal for religion; but he
was intensely satisfied with the rigidity of his own orthodoxy. It is
one of the many ironies of his career that his religiousness has been
praised exclusively by people whom he would have sent to the stake as
heretics without a moment’s hesitation. If he let Cranmer have his way
about an English Bible, it was not from an enthusiastic admiration of
the Scriptures, but because he knew that some of the clergy thought it
would weaken their influence. The nature of his own creed is conveyed
in the Act of the Six Articles. Of his “morality,” in the restricted
sense of that term, enough has already been said; it was that of his
age and his rank. For his conception of honour, his applications of
the Statute of _Præmunire_, and the return he rendered to Wolsey and
Cromwell and More for their services, are sufficient witness. In the
case of More, by the way, it was characteristic of him that when the
report of the ex-Chancellor’s execution was brought to him, he turned
on Anne Boleyn and told her it was all her doing. For a high-minded
man, his approval of the schemes for getting James Beton kidnapped
when under a safe-conduct, and for the murder of David Beton, seems a
little peculiar; yet in those times, it cannot be denied that similar
schemes found sanction in most unexpected quarters. As far as politics
were concerned, he kept his promises, on the whole, a shade more
loyally than Charles and Francis and their successors. Ferdinand and
Maximilian, of course, had never begun to think that promises could be
looked upon as binding.
As a statesman: we must reject the theory that he was merely a _Roi
Fainéant_ who liked to fancy that he was running the machine while he
was merely dancing to the tune called by cleverer men than himself:
we reject also the theory that the policy followed throughout was his
own creation, and that Wolsey and Cromwell stood in the same relation
to him as Morton and Fox to his father. He was not a far-seeing man
himself, but he knew a far-seeing man when he found one, having an
unfailing instinct for judging other men’s capacities and limitations,
intellectual and moral. He was ready to recognise their insight and
foresight, their organising and administrative powers, to lay the
burden--and the reproach--on their shoulders; but if they did not
convince his judgment, they had to obey his behests, not he theirs. And
yet there is one field wherein credit, and very high credit, attaches
to Henry--credit, moreover, which appears to be entirely his own. As
Wolsey had his hobby, education, so Henry had his hobby, the navy. A
Royal Navy, a fleet whose business was fighting, was practically his
creation. It may very well be that he was much wiser than he knew
himself in this matter--that his ships were to him something of a toy.
But what he did went far to making the glories of his daughter’s reign
possible, as the army of Frederick I. of Prussia made the army of
Frederick II. possible.
Finally; although we have denied him personally the greatest qualities
of statesmanship displayed by his ministers, he did possess in a
very high degree certain essential qualities of a successful ruler.
No mere blustering tyrant would have held England in his grip for
thirty-seven years; the annals of princes of that type may be
terrible, but they are brief. The masses may be held in subjection
by a powerful upper class for an indefinite period; the continued
power of an individual tyrant--of an active and resolutely aggressive
autocratic ruler--depends on his preserving the loyalty of the active
part of his subjects. That loyalty Henry retained; he never had the
smallest difficulty in stamping out every attempt at resistance. Mere
ruthlessness will not account for it; ruthlessness by itself rouses
new enemies: a reign of sheer terror is brief. To the instinct for
gauging men he added the instinct of gauging popular sentiment--a
perception of the line which must not be over-stepped; a knack of
gracious and timely withdrawal if ever he seemed to have passed the
danger-point. Withal, he recognised that the surest method of getting
his own way was to make his subjects believe that it was their way too.
His figure is very, very far from being god-like; it is quite remote
from the heroic; it might, however, have fairly been called Titanic, if
that term did not imply ultimate failure--for he did not fail. Neither
his intellectual nor his moral qualities permit us to love him, to
praise him, or to honour him; and yet, if we have read him aright, it
is impossible not to admire.
PROTECTOR SOMERSET
I
MISCONCEPTIONS