THE CRISIS.
Henry's title as Supreme Head of the Church was incorporated in the
royal style by letters patent of 15th January, 1535,[933] and that
year was mainly employed in compelling its recognition by all sorts
and conditions of men. In April, Houghton, the Prior of the Charterhouse,
a monk of Sion, and the Vicar of Isleworth, were the first victims
offered to the Supreme Head. But the machinery supplied by Parliament
was barely sufficient to bring the penalties of the statute to bear on
the two most illustrious of Henry's opponents, Fisher and More. Both
had been attainted of misprision of treason by Acts of Parliament in
the previous autumn; but those penalties extended no further than to
lifelong imprisonment and forfeiture of goods. Their lives could only
be exacted by proving that they had maliciously attempted to deprive
Henry of his title of Supreme Head;[934] their opportunities in the
Tower for compassing that end were limited; and it is possible (p. 332)
that they would not have been further molested, but for the
thoughtlessness of Clement's successor, Paul III. Impotent to effect
anything against the King, the Pope did his best to sting Henry to
fury by creating Fisher a cardinal on 20th May. He afterwards
explained that he meant no harm, but the harm was done, and it
involved Fisher's friend and ally, Sir Thomas More. Henry declared
that he would send the new cardinal's head to Rome for the hat; and he
immediately despatched commissioners to the Tower to inform Fisher and
More that, unless they acknowledged the royal supremacy, they would be
put to death as traitors.[935] Fisher apparently denied the King's
supremacy, More refused to answer; he was, however, entrapped during a
conversation with the Solicitor-General, Rich, into an admission that
Englishmen could not be bound to acknowledge a supremacy over the
Church in which other countries did not concur. In neither case was it
clear that they came within the clutches of the law. Fisher, indeed,
had really been guilty of treason. More than once he had urged Chapuys
to press upon Charles the invasion of England, a fact unknown,
perhaps, to the English Government.[936] The evidence it had (p. 333)
collected was, however, considered sufficient by the juries which
tried the prisoners; Fisher went to the scaffold on 22nd June, and
More on 6th July. Condemned justly or not by the law, both sought
their death in a quarrel which is as old as the hills and will last
till the crack of doom. Where shall we place the limits of conscience,
and where those of the national will? Is conscience a luxury which
only a king may enjoy in peace? Fisher and More refused to accommodate
theirs to Acts of Parliament, but neither believed conscience to be
the supreme tribunal.[937] More admitted that in temporal matters his
conscience was bound by the laws of England; in spiritual matters the
conscience of all was bound by the will of Christendom; and on that
ground both Fisher and he rejected the plea of conscience when urged
by heretics condemned to the flames. The dispute, indeed, passes the
wit of man to decide. If conscience must reign supreme, all government
is a _pis aller_, and in anarchy the true millennium must be found. If
conscience is deposed, man sinks to the level of the lower creation.
Human society can only be based on compromise, and compromise itself
is a matter of conscience. Fisher and More protested by their death
against a principle which they had practised in life; both they and
the heretics whom they persecuted proclaimed, as Antigone had done
thousands of years before,[938] that they could not obey laws (p. 334)
which they could not believe God had made.
[Footnote 933: _L. and P._, viii., 52; Rymer, xiv.,
549.]
[Footnote 934: The general idea that Fisher and
More were executed for refusing to take an oath
prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically
inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not
till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to
take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was
to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical
officers. The Act under which they were executed
was 26 Henry VIII., c. 13, and the common mistake
arises from a confusion between the oath to the
succession and the oath of supremacy.]
[Footnote 935: _L. and P._, viii., 876.]
[Footnote 936: _L. and P._, iv., 6199; vi., 1164,
1249. He told Chapuys that if Charles invaded
England he would be doing "a work as agreeable to
God as going against the Turk," and suggested that
the Emperor should make use of Reginald Pole "to
whom, according to many, the kingdom would belong"
(Chapuys to Charles, 27th September, 1533). Again,
says Chapuys, "the holy Bishop of Rochester would
like you to take active measures immediately, as I
wrote in my last; which advice he has sent to me
again lately to repeat" (10th October, 1533). Canon
Whitney, in criticising Froude (_Engl. Hist. Rev._,
xii., 353), asserts that "nothing Chapuys says
justifies the charge against Fisher!"]
[Footnote 937: This statement has been denounced as
"astounding" in a Roman Catholic periodical; yet if
More believed individual conscience (_i.e._,
private judgment) to be superior to the voice of
the Church, how did he differ from a Protestant?
The statement in the text is merely a paraphrase of
More's own, where he says that men are "not bound
on pain of God's displeasure to change their
conscience for any particular law made anywhere
_except by a general council or a general faith
growing by the working of God universally through
all Christian nations_" (More's _English Works_, p.
1434; _L. and P._, vii., 432).]
[Footnote 938: [Greek: Ou gar ti moi Zeus en ho
keruxas tade oud he xunoikos ton kato theon Dike.]
Sophocles, _Antigone_, 450.]
It was the personal eminence of the victims rather than the merits of
their case that made Europe thrill with horror at the news of their
death; for thousands of others were sacrificing their lives in a
similar cause in most of the countries of Christendom. For the first
and last time in English history a cardinal's head had rolled from an
English scaffold; and Paul III. made an effort to bring into play the
artillery of his temporal powers. As supreme lord over all the princes
of the earth, he arrogated to himself the right to deprive Henry VIII.
of his kingdom; and he sent couriers to the various courts to seek
their co-operation in executing his judgment. But the weapons of
Innocent III. were rusty with age. Francis denounced the Pope's claim
as a most impudent attack on monarchical dignity; and Charles was
engaged in the conquest of Tunis. Thus Henry was able to take a high
tone in reply to the remonstrances addressed to him, and to proceed
undisturbed with the work of enforcing his royal supremacy. The autumn
was occupied mainly by a visitation of the monasteries and of the
universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas,
Duns Scotus and others were deposed from the seat of authority they
had held for so many centuries, and efforts were made to substitute
studies like that of the civil law, more in harmony with the King's
doctrine and with his views of royal authority.
The more boldly Henry defied the Fates, the more he was favoured by
Fortune. "Besides his trust in his subjects," wrote Chapuys in (p. 335)
1534, "he has great hope in the Queen's death;"[939] and the year
1536 was but eight days old when the unhappy Catherine was released
from her trials, resolutely refusing to the last to acknowledge in any
way the invalidity of her marriage with Henry. She had derived some
comfort from the papal sentence in her favour, but that was not
calculated to soften the harshness with which she was treated. Her
pious soul, too, was troubled with the thought that she had been the
occasion, innocent though she was, of the heresies that had arisen in
England, and of the enormities which had been practised against the
Church. Her last days were cheered by a visit from Chapuys,[940] who
went down to Kimbolton on New Year's Day and stayed until the 5th of
January, when the Queen seemed well on the road to recovery. Three
days later she passed away, and on the 29th she was buried with the
state of a princess dowager in the church of the Benedictine abbey at
Peterborough. Her physician told Chapuys that he suspected poison, but
the symptoms are now declared, on high medical authority, to have been
those of cancer of the heart.[941] The suspicion was the natural
result of the circumstance that her death relieved the King of a
pressing anxiety. "God be praised!" he exclaimed, "we are free from
all suspicion of war;"[942] and on the following day he proclaimed his
joy by appearing at a ball, clad in yellow from head to foot.[943] Every
inch a King, Henry VIII. never attained to the stature of a gentleman,
but even Bishop Gardiner wrote that by Queen Catherine's death (p. 336)
"God had given sentence" in the divorce suit between her and the King.[944]
[Footnote 939: _L. and P._, vii., 83.]
[Footnote 940: _Ibid._, x., 28, 59, 60, 141.]
[Footnote 941: Dr. Norman Moore in _Athenaeum_,
1885, i., 152, 215, 281.]
[Footnote 942: _L. and P._, x., 51.]
[Footnote 943: _Ibid._ Hall only tells his readers
that Anne Boleyn wore yellow for the mourning
(_Chronicle_, p. 818).]
[Footnote 944: _L. and P._, x., 256.]
A week later, the Reformation Parliament met for its seventh and last
session. It sat from 4th February to 14th April, and in those ten
weeks succeeded in passing no fewer than sixty-two Acts. Some were
local and some were private, but the residue contained not a few of
public importance. The fact that the King obtained at last his Statute
of Uses[945] may indicate that Henry's skill and success had so
impressed Parliament, that it was more willing to acquiesce in his
demands than it had been in its earlier sessions. But, if the drafts
in the Record Office are to be taken as indicating the proposals of
Government, and the Acts themselves are those proposals as modified in
one or other House, Parliament must have been able to enforce views of
its own to a certain extent; for those drafts differ materially from
the Acts as finally passed.[946] Not a few of the bills were welcome,
if unusual, concessions to the clergy. They were relieved from paying
tenths in the year they paid their first-fruits. The payment of
tithes, possibly rendered doubtful in the wreck of canon law, was
enjoined by Act of Parliament. An attempt was made to deal with the
poor, and another, if not to check enclosures, at least to extract
some profit for the King from the process. It was made high treason to
counterfeit the King's sign-manual, privy signet, or privy seal; and
Henry was empowered by Parliament, as he had before been by (p. 337)
Convocation, to appoint a commission to reform the canon law. But the
chief acts of the session were for the dissolution of the lesser
monasteries and for the erection of a Court of Augmentations in order
to deal with the revenues which were thus to accrue to the King.
[Footnote 945: This Act has generally been
considered a failure, but recent research does not
confirm this view (see Joshua Williams, _Principles
of the Law of Real Property_, 18th ed., 1896).]
[Footnote 946: _L. and P._, x., 246.]
The way for this great revolution had been carefully prepared during
the previous autumn and winter. In virtue of his new and effective
supremacy, Henry had ordered a general visitation of the monasteries
throughout the greater part of the kingdom; and the reports of these
visitors were made the basis of parliamentary action. On the face of
them they represent a condition of human depravity which has rarely
been equalled;[947] and the extent to which those reports are worthy
of credit will always remain a point of contention. The visitors
themselves were men of doubtful character; indeed, respectable men
could hardly have been persuaded to do the work. Their methods were
certainly harsh; the object of their mission was to get up a case for
the Crown, and they probably used every means in their power to induce
the monks and the nuns to incriminate themselves. Perhaps, too, an
entirely false impression may be created by the fact that in most
cases only the guilty are mentioned; the innocent are often passed
over in silence, and the proportion between the two is not recorded.
Some of the terms employed in the reports are also open to dispute; it
is possible that in many instances the stigma of unchastity (p. 338)
attached to a nun merely meant that she had been unchaste before
entering religion,[948] and it is known that nunneries were considered
the proper resort for ladies who had not been careful enough of their
honour.
[Footnote 947: See the documents in _L. and P._,
vols. ix., x. The most elaborate criticism of the
Dissolution is contained in Gasquet's _Henry VIII.
and the Monasteries_, 2 vols., 4th ed. 1893; some
additional details and an excellent monastic map
will be found in Gairdner's _Church History_,
1902.]
[Footnote 948: "Religion" of course in the middle
ages and sixteenth century was a term almost
exclusively applied to the monastic system, and the
most ludicrous mistakes are often made from
ignorance of this fact; "religiosi" are sharply
distinguished from "clerici".]
On the other hand, the lax state of monastic morality does not depend
only upon the visitors' reports; apart from satires like those of
Skelton, from ballads and from other mirrors of popular opinion or
prejudice, the correspondence of Henry VIII.'s reign is, from its
commencement, full of references, by bishops and other unimpeachable
witnesses, to the necessity of drastic reform. In 1516, for instance,
Bishop West of Ely visited that house, and found such disorder that he
declared its continuance would have been impossible but for his
visitation.[949] In 1518 the Italian Bishop of Worcester writes from
Rome that he had often been struck by the necessity of reforming the
monasteries.[950] In 1521 Henry VIII., then at the height of his zeal
for the Church, thanks the Bishop of Salisbury for dissolving the
nunnery of Bromehall because of the "enormities" practised there.[951]
Wolsey felt that the time for reform had passed, and began the process
of suppression, with a view to increasing the number of cathedrals and
devoting other proceeds to educational endowments. Friar Peto,
afterwards a cardinal, who had fled abroad to escape Henry's anger for
his bold denunciation of the divorce, and who had no possible (p. 339)
motive for cloaking his conscientious opinion, admitted that there
were grave abuses, and approved of the dissolution of monasteries, if
their endowments were used for proper ends.[952] There is no need to
multiply instances, because a commission of cardinals, appointed by
Paul III. himself, reported in 1537 that scandals were frequent in
religious houses.[953] The reports of the visitors, too, can hardly be
entirely false, though they may not be entirely true. The charges they
make are not vague, but very precise. They specify names of the
offenders, and the nature of their offences; and an air of verisimilitude,
if nothing more, is imparted to the condemnations they pronounce
against the many, by the commendations they bestow on the few.[954]
[Footnote 949: _L. and P._, ii., 1733.]
[Footnote 950: _Ibid._, ii., 4399.]
[Footnote 951: _Ibid._, iii., 1863; see also iii.,
77, 533, 567, 569, 600, 693, 1690; iv. 4900.]
[Footnote 952: _D.N.B._, xlv., 89. Chapuys had
stated in 1532 that the Cistercian monasteries were
greatly in need of dissolution (_L. and P._, iii.,
361).]
[Footnote 953: _Cambridge Modern History_, ii.,
643.]
[Footnote 954: Nor, of course, were the symptoms
peculiar to England; it is absurd to attribute the
dissolution of the monasteries solely to Henry
VIII. and Cromwell, because monasteries were
dissolved in many countries of Europe, Catholic as
well as Protestant. So, too, the charges are not
naturally incredible, because the kind of vice
alleged against the monks has unfortunately been
far from unknown wherever and whenever numbers of
men, young or middle-aged, have lived together in
enforced celibacy.]
Probably the staunchest champion of monasticism would acknowledge that
in the reign of Henry VIII. there was at least a plausible case for
mending monastic morals. But that was not then the desire of the
Government of Henry VIII.; and the case for mending their morals was
tacitly assumed to be the same as a case for ending the monasteries.
It would be unjust to Henry to deny that he had always shown himself
careful of the appearance, at least, of morality in the Church; but
it requires a robust faith in the King's disinterestedness to (p. 340)
believe that dissolution was not the real object of the visitation,
and that it was merely forced upon him by the reports of the visitors.
The moral question afforded a good excuse, but the monasteries fell,
not so much because their morals were lax, as because their position
was weak. Moral laxity contributed no doubt to the general result, but
there were other causes at work. The monasteries themselves had long
been conscious that their possession of wealth was not, in the eyes of
the middle-class laity, justified by the use to which it was put; and,
for some generations at least, they had been seeking to make friends
with Mammon by giving up part of their revenues, in the form of
pensions and corrodies to courtiers, in the hope of being allowed to
retain the remainder.[955] It had also become the custom to entrust
the stewardship of their possessions to secular hands; and, possibly
as a result, the monasteries were soon so deeply in debt to the
neighbouring gentry that their lay creditors saw no hope of recovering
their claims except by extensive foreclosures.[956] There had certainly
been a good deal of private spoliation before the King gave the practice
a national character. The very privileges of the monasteries were now
turned to their ruin. Their immunity from episcopal jurisdiction
deprived them of episcopal aid; their exemption from all authority,
save that of the Pope, left them without support when the papal
jurisdiction was abolished. Monastic orders knew no distinction (p. 341)
of nationality. The national character claimed for the mediaeval Church
in England could scarcely cover the monasteries, and no place was
found for them in the Church when it was given a really national garb.
[Footnote 955: See Fortescue, _Governance of
England_, ed. Plummer, cap. xviii., and notes, pp.
337-40.]
[Footnote 956: _E.g._, Christ Church, London, which
surrendered to Henry in 1532, was deeply in debt to
him (_L. and P._, v., 823).]
Their dissolution is probably to be connected with Cromwell's boast
that he would make his king the richest prince in Christendom. That
was not its effect, because Henry was compelled to distribute the greater
part of the spoils among his nobles and gentry. One rash reformer
suggested that monastic lands should be devoted to educational
purposes;[957] had that plan been followed, education in England would
have been more magnificently endowed than in any other country of the
world, and England might have become a democracy in the seventeenth
century. From this point of view Henry spoilt one of the greatest
opportunities in English history; from another, he saved England from
a most serious danger. Had the Crown retained the wealth of the
monasteries, the Stuarts might have made themselves independent of
Parliament. But this service to liberty was not voluntary on Henry's
part. The dissolution of the monasteries was in effect, and probably
in intention, a gigantic bribe to the laity to induce them to
acquiesce in the revolution effected by Henry VIII. When he was gone,
his successors might desire, or fail to prevent, a reaction; something
more permanent than Henry's iron hand was required to support the (p. 342)
fabric he had raised. That support was sought in the wealth of the
Church. The prospect had, from the very opening of the Reformation
Parliament, been dangled before the eyes of the new nobles, the
members of Parliament, the justices of the peace, the rich merchants
who thirsted for lands wherewith to make themselves gentlemen. Chapuys
again and again mentions a scheme for distributing the lands of the
Church among the laity as a project for the ensuing session; but their
time was not yet; not until their work was done were the labourers to
reap their reward.[958] The dissolution of the monasteries harmonised
well with the secular principles of these predominant classes. The
monastic ideal of going out of the world to seek something, which
cannot be valued in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, is abhorrent
to a busy, industrial age; and every principle is hated most at the
time when it most is needed.
[Footnote 957: _The Complaynt of Roderick Mors_
(Early Eng. Text Soc.), pp. 47-52. The author,
Henry Brinkelow (see _D.N.B._, vi., 346), also
suggested that both Houses of Parliament should sit
together as one assembly "for it is not rytches or
autoryte that bringeth wisdome" (_Complaynt_, p.
8). Some of the political literature of the later
part of Henry's reign is curiously modern in its
ideas.]
* * * * *
Intimately associated as they were in their lives, Catherine of Aragon
and Anne Boleyn were not long divided by death; and, piteous as is the
story of the last years of Catherine, it pales before the hideous
tragedy of the ruin of Anne Boleyn. "If I have a son, as I hope shortly,
I know what will become of her," wrote Anne of the Princess Mary.[959]
On 29th January, 1536, the day of her rival's funeral, Anne Boleyn was
prematurely delivered of a dead child, and the result was fatal to
Anne herself. This was not her first miscarriage,[960] and Henry's (p. 343)
old conscience began to work again. In Catherine's case the path of
his conscience was that of a slow and laborious pioneer; now it moved
easily on its royal road to divorce. On 29th January, Chapuys, ignorant
of Anne's miscarriage, was retailing to his master a court rumour that
Henry intended to marry again. The King was reported to have said that
he had been seduced by witchcraft when he married his second queen,
and that the marriage was null for this reason, and because God would
not permit them to have male issue.[961] There was no peace for her
who supplanted her mistress. Within six months of her marriage Henry's
roving fancy had given her cause for jealousy, and, when she complained,
he is said to have brutally told her she must put up with it as her
betters had done before.[962] These disagreements, however, were
described by Chapuys as mere lovers' quarrels, and they were generally
followed by reconciliations, after which Anne's influence seemed (p. 344)
as secure as ever. But by January, 1536, the imperial ambassador and
others were counting on a fresh divorce. The rumour grew as spring
advanced, when suddenly, on 2nd May, Anne was arrested and sent to the
Tower. She was accused of incest with her brother, Lord Rochford, and
of less criminal intercourse with Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris,
William Brereton, and Mark Smeaton. All were condemned by juries to
death for high treason on 12th May. Three days later Anne herself was
put on her trial by a panel of twenty-six peers, over which her uncle,
the Duke of Norfolk, presided.[963] They returned a unanimous verdict
of guilty, and, on the 19th, the Queen's head was struck off with the
sword of an executioner brought for the purpose from St. Omer.[964]
[Footnote 958: "The King," says Chapuys in
September, 1534, "will distribute among the
gentlemen of the kingdom the greater part of the
ecclesiastical revenues to gain their good-will"
(_L. and P._, vii., 1141).]
[Footnote 959: _Ibid._, x., 307.]
[Footnote 960: Anne was pregnant in Feb., 1534,
when Henry told Chapuys he thought he should have a
son soon (_L. and P._, vii., 232; _cf._, vii.,
958).]
[Footnote 961: _Ibid._, x., 199.]
[Footnote 962: _Ibid._, vi., 1054, 1069. As early
as April, 1531, Chapuys reports that Anne "was
becoming more arrogant every day, using words and
authority towards the King of which he has several
times complained to the Duke of Norfolk, saying
that she was not like the Queen [Catherine] who
never in her life used ill words to him" (_ibid._,
v., 216). In Sept., 1534, Henry was reported to be
in love with another lady (_ibid._, vii., 1193,
1257). Probably this was Jane Seymour, as the
lady's kindness to the Princess Mary--a marked
characteristic of Queen Jane--is noted by Chapuys.
This intrigue, we are told, was furthered by many
lords with the object of separating the King from
Anne Boleyn, who was disliked by the lords on
account of her pride and that of her kinsmen and
brothers (_ibid._, vii., 1279). Henry's behaviour
to the Princess was becoming quite benevolent, and
Chapuys begins to speak of his "amiable and cordial
nature" (_ibid._, vii., 1297).]
[Footnote 963: In 1533 Anne had accused her uncle
of having too much intercourse with Chapuys and of
maintaining the Princess Mary's title to the throne
(_L. and P._, vi., 1125).]
[Footnote 964: _Ibid._, x., 902, 910, 919. The
Regent Mary of the Netherlands writes: "That the
vengeance might be executed by the Emperor's
subjects, he sent for the executioner of St. Omer,
as there were none in England good enough"
(_ibid._, x., 965). It is perhaps well to be
reminded that even at this date there were more
practised executioners in the Netherlands than in
England.]
Two days before Anne's death her marriage with Henry had been declared
invalid by a court of ecclesiastical lawyers with Cranmer at its head.
The grounds of the sentence are not stated, but there may have been
two--the alleged precontract with the Earl of Northumberland, which
the Earl denied on oath and on the sacrament, and the previous
affinity between Anne and Henry arising from the King's relations with
Mary Boleyn. The latter seems the more probable. Henry had obtained of
Clement VII. a dispensation from this disability; but the Pope's
power to dispense had since been repudiated, while the canonical (p. 345)
objection remained and was given statutory authority in this very
year.[965] The effects of this piece of wanton injustice were among
the troubles which Henry bequeathed to Queen Elizabeth; the sole
advantage to Henry was that his infidelities to Anne ceased to be
breaches of the seventh commandment. The justice of her sentence to
death is also open to doubt. Anne herself went to the block boldly
proclaiming her innocence.[966] Death she regarded as a relief from an
intolerable situation, and she "laughed heartily," writes the Lieutenant
of the Tower as she put her hands round her "little neck," and thought
how easy the executioner's task would be.[967] She complained when the
day of her release from this world was deferred, and regretted that so
many innocent persons should suffer through her. Of her accomplices,
none confessed but Smeaton, though Henry is said, before Anne's
arrest, to have offered Norris a pardon if he would admit his crime.
On the other hand, her conduct must have made the charges plausible.
Even in those days, when justice to individuals was regarded as dust
if weighed in the balance against the real or supposed interests of
the State, it is not credible that the juries should have found her
accomplices guilty, that twenty-six peers, including her uncle, (p. 346)
should have condemned Anne herself, without some colourable justification.
If the charges were merely invented to ruin the Queen, one culprit
besides herself would have been enough. To assume that Henry sent four
needless victims to the block is to accuse him of a lust for
superfluous butchery, of which even he, in his most bloodthirsty
moments, was not capable.[968]
[Footnote 965: This Act indirectly made Elizabeth a
bastard and Henry's marriage with Anne invalid,
(_cf._ Chapuys to Granvelle _L. and P._, x., 909).
The Antinomian theory of marital relations, which
Chapuys ascribes to Anne, was an Anabaptist
doctrine of the time. Chapuys calls Anne a
Messalina, but he of course was not an impartial
witness.]
[Footnote 966: According to some accounts, but a
Spaniard who writes as an eye-witness says she
cried "mercy to God and the King for the offence
she had done" (_L. and P._, x., 911).]
[Footnote 967: _Ibid._, x., 910.]
[Footnote 968: The execution of Anne was welcomed
by the Imperialists and Catholics, and it is
possible that it was hastened on by rumours of
disquiet in the North. A few days later the nobles
and gentry who were in London were ordered to
return home to put the country in a state of
defence (_L. and P._, x., 1016).]
On the day that his second queen was beheaded, Henry obtained from
Cranmer a special licence to marry a third.[969] He was betrothed on
the morrow and privately married "in the Queen's closet at York Place"
on the 30th of May. The lady of his choice was Jane, daughter of Sir
John Seymour of Wolf Hall in Wiltshire.[970] She was descended on her
mother's side from Edward III., and Cranmer had to dispense with a
canonical bar to the marriage arising from her consanguinity to the
King in the third and fourth degrees. She had been lady-in-waiting to
the two previous queens, and her brother, Sir Edward Seymour, the
future Protector, had for years been steadily rising in Henry's
favour. In October, 1535, the King had paid a visit to Wolf Hall, and
from that time his attentions to Jane became marked. She seems to have
received them with real reluctance; she refused a purse of gold and
returned the King's letters unopened.[971] She even obtained a (p. 347)
promise from Henry that he would not speak with her except in the
presence of others, and the King ejected Cromwell from his rooms in
the Palace in order to bestow them on Sir Edward Seymour, and thus to
provide a place where he and Jane could converse without scandal. All
this modesty has, of course, been attributed to prudential and
ambitious motives, which were as wise as they were successful. But
Jane seems to have had no enemies, except Alexander Aless, who
denounced her to Luther as an enemy to the Gospel, probably because
she extinguished the shining light of Anne Boleyn.[972] Cardinal Pole
described her as "full of goodness,"[973] and she certainly did her
best to reconcile Henry with his daughter the Princess Mary, whose
treatment began to improve from the fall of Anne Boleyn. "She is,"
writes Chapuys, "of middle stature, and no great beauty; so fair that
one would call her rather pale than otherwise."[974] But all agreed in
praising her intelligence. She had neither Catherine's force of
character nor the temper of Anne Boleyn; she was a woman of gentle
spirit, striving always to mitigate the rigour of others; her brief
married life was probably happier than that of any other of Henry's
Queens; and her importance is mainly due to the fact that she bore to
Henry his only legitimate son.
[Footnote 969: _Ibid._ x., 915, 926, 993, 1000.
There is a persistent fable that they were married
on the day or the day after Anne's execution; Dr.
Gairdner says it is repeated "in all histories".]
[Footnote 970: See _Wilts Archaeol. Mag._, vols xv.,
xvi., documents printed from the _Longleat MSS._]
[Footnote 971: _L. and P._, x., 245.]
[Footnote 972: Luther, _Briefe_, v., 22; _L. and
P._, xi., 475.]
[Footnote 973: Strype, _Eccl. Memorials_, I., ii.,
304.]
[Footnote 974: _L. and P._, x., 901.]
The disgrace of Anne Boleyn necessitated the summons of a fresh
Parliament to put the succession to the crown on yet another basis.
The Long Parliament had been dissolved on 14th April; another was
called to meet on the 8th of June. The eighteen acts passed during its
six weeks' session illustrate the parallel development of the (p. 348)
Reformation and of the royal autocracy. The Act of Succession made
Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, a bastard, without declaring Catherine's
daughter, Mary, legitimate, and settled the crown on Henry's
prospective issue by Jane. A unique clause empowered the King to
dispose of the crown at will, should he have no issue by his present
Queen.[975] Probably he intended it, in that case, for the Duke of
Richmond; but the Duke's days were numbered, and four days after the
dissolution of Parliament he breathed his last. The royal prerogative
was extended by a statute enabling a king, when he reached the age of
twenty-four, to repeal by proclamation any act passed during his
minority; and the royal caste was further exalted by a statute making
it high treason for any one to marry a king's daughter, legitimate or
not, his sister, his niece, or his aunt on the father's side, without
royal licence. The reform of clerical abuses was advanced by an act to
prevent non-residence, and by another to obviate the delay in
instituting to benefices practised by bishops with a view to (p. 349)
keeping the tithes of the vacant benefice in their own hands. The
breach with Rome was widened still further by a statute, declaring all
who extolled the Pope's authority to be guilty of _praemunire_,
imposing an oath of renunciation on all lay and clerical officers, and
making the refusal of that oath high treason. Thus the hopes of a
reaction built on the fall of those "apostles of the new sect," Anne
Boleyn and her relatives, were promptly and roughly destroyed.
[Footnote 975: Parliament prefered to risk the
results of Henry's nomination to the risk of civil
war, which would inevitably have broken out had
Henry died in 1536. Hobbes, it may be noted, made
this power of nomination an indispensable attribute
of the sovereign, and if the sovereign be
interpreted as the "King in Parliament" the theory
is sound constitutionalism and was put in practice
in 1701 as well as in 1536. But the limitations on
Henry's power of bequeathing the crown have
generally been forgotten; he never had power to
leave the crown away from Edward VI., that is, away
from the only heir whose legitimacy was undisputed.
The later acts went further, and entailed the
succession upon Mary and Elizabeth unless Henry
wished otherwise--which he did not. The preference
of the Suffolk to the Stuart line may have been due
to (1) the common law forbidding aliens to inherit
English land (_cf. L. and P._, vii., 337); (2) the
national dislike of the Scots; (3) a desire to
intimate to the Scots that if they would not unite
the two realms by the marriage of Edward and Mary,
they should not obtain the English crown by
inheritance.]
Henry's position had been immensely strengthened alike by the death of
Catherine of Aragon and by the fall of Anne Boleyn; and on both
occasions he had expressed his appreciation of the fact in the most
indecent and heartless manner. He was now free to marry whom he liked,
and no objection based on canon or on any other law could be raised to
the legitimacy of his future issue; whether the Pope could dispense or
not, it made no difference to Edward VI.'s claim to the throne. The
fall of Anne Boleyn, in spite of some few rumours that she might have
been condemned on insufficient evidence, was generally popular; for
her arrogance and that of her family made them hated, and they were
regarded as the cause of the King's persecution of Catherine, of Mary,
and of those who maintained their cause. Abroad the effect was still
more striking. The moment Henry heard of Catherine's death, he added a
postscript to Cromwell's despatch to the English ambassadors in
France, bidding them to take a higher tone with Francis, for all cause
of difference had been removed between him and Charles V.[976] The
Emperor secretly believed that his aunt had been poisoned,[977] but
that private grief was not to affect his public policy; and Charles,
Francis, and even the Pope, became more or less eager competitors (p. 350)
for Henry's favour. The bull of deprivation, which had been drawn up
and signed, became a dead letter, and every one was anxious to disavow
his share in its promotion. Charles obtained the suspension of its
publication, made a merit of that service to Henry, and tried to
represent that it was Francis who, with his eyes on the English crown,
had extorted the bull from the Pope.[978] Paul III. himself used words
to the English envoy at Rome, which might be interpreted as an apology
for having made Fisher a cardinal and having denounced his and More's
execution.[979]
[Footnote 976: _L. and P._, x., 54.]
[Footnote 977: _Ibid._, x., 230.]
[Footnote 978: _L. and P._, x., 887.]
[Footnote 979: _Ibid._, x., 977.]
Henry had been driven by fear of Charles in the previous year to make
further advances than he relished towards union with the German
princes; but the Lutherans could not be persuaded to adopt Henry's
views of the mass and of his marriage with Catherine; and now he was
glad to substitute an understanding with the Emperor for intrigues
with the Emperor's subjects.[980] Cromwell and the council were,
indeed, a little too eager to welcome Chapuys' professions of friendship
and to entertain his demands for help against Francis. Henry allowed
them to go on for a time; but Cromwell was never in Wolsey's position,
and the King was not inclined to repeat his own and the Cardinal's
errors of 1521. He had suffered enough from the prostration of France
and the predominance of Charles; and he was anxious now that neither
should be supreme. So, when the imperial ambassador came expecting
Henry's assent, he, Cromwell and the rest of the council were (p. 351)
amazed to hear the King break out into an uncompromising defence
of the French King's conduct in invading Savoy and Piedmont.[981] That
invasion was the third stroke of good fortune which befel Henry in
1536. As Henry and Ferdinand had, in 1512, diverted their arms from
the Moors in order to make war on the Most Christian King, so, in
1536, the Most Christian King and the sovereign, who was at once King
Catholic and the temporal head of Christendom, instead of turning
their arms against the monarch who had outraged and defied the Church,
turned them against one another. Francis had never lost sight of
Milan; he had now recovered from the effects of Pavia; and in the
spring of 1536 he overran Savoy and Piedmont. In April the Emperor
once more visited Rome, and on the 17th he delivered a famous oration
in the papal Consistory.[982] In that speech he denounced neither
Luther nor Henry VIII.; he reserved his invectives for Francis I.
Unconsciously he demonstrated once and for all that unity of faith was
impotent against diversity of national interests, and that, whatever
deference princes might profess to the counsels of the Vicar of
Christ, the counsels they would follow would be those of secular
impulse.
[Footnote 980: _Cf._ Stern, _Heinrich VIII. und der
Schmalkaldische Bund_, and P. Singer, _Beziehung
des Schmalkald. Bundes zu England_. Greifswald,
1901.]
[Footnote 981: _L. and P._, x., 699.]
[Footnote 982: _Ibid._, x., 678, 684, 968.]
* * * * *
Henry was thus left to deal with the great domestic crisis of his
reign without intervention from abroad. The dissolution of the
monasteries inevitably inflicted considerable hardship on a numerous
body of men. It had been arranged that the inmates of the dissolved
religious houses should either be pensioned or transferred to other
monasteries; but, although the pensions were adequate and (p. 352)
sometimes even generous in scale,[983] and although the commissioners
themselves showed a desire to prevent unnecessary trouble by obtaining
licences for many houses to continue for a time,[984] the monks found
some difficulty in obtaining their pensions, and Chapuys draws a
moving picture of their sufferings as they wandered about the country,
seeking employment in a market that was already overstocked with
labour, and endeavouring to earn a livelihood by means to which they
had never been accustomed.[985] They met with no little sympathy from
the commons, who were oppressed with a like scarcity of work, and who
had looked to the monasteries for such relief as charity could afford.
Nowhere were these feelings so strong as in the north of England, and
there the commissioners for dissolving the monasteries were often met
with open resistance. Religious discontent was one of the motives for
revolt, but probably the rebels were drawn mainly[986] from evicted
tenants, deprived of their holdings by enclosures or by the conversion
of land from tillage to pasture, men who had nothing to lose and
everything to gain by a general turmoil. In these men the wandering
monks found ready listeners to their complaints, and there were (p. 353)
others, besides the monks, who eagerly turned to account the prevailing
dissatisfaction. The northern lords, Darcy and Hussey, had for years
been representing to Chapuys the certainty of success if the Emperor
invaded England, and promising to do their part when he came. Darcy
had, at Christmas 1534, sent the imperial ambassador a sword as an
intimation that the time had come for an appeal to its arbitrament;
and he was seeking Henry's licence to return to his house in Yorkshire
in order to raise "the crucifix" as the standard of revolt.[987] The
King, however, was doubtful of Darcy's loyalty, and kept him in London
till early in 1536. It would have been well had he kept him longer.
[Footnote 983: _E.g._, the Prioress of Tarent
received L100 a year, the Abbot of Evesham, L240
(Gasquet, ii., 230, 310); these sums must be
multiplied by ten to bring them to their present
value. Most of these lavish pensions were doubtless
given as bribes or rewards for the surrender of
monasteries.]
[Footnote 984: _L. and P._, xi., 385, 519.]
[Footnote 985: _Ibid._, xi., 42.]
[Footnote 986: The exact proportion is of course
difficult to determine; Mr. E.F. Gay in an
admirable paper (_Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, N.S.,
xviii., 208, 209) thinks that I have exaggerated
the part played by the propertyless class in the
rebellion. They were undoubtedly present in large
numbers; but my remark is intended to guard against
the theory that the grievances were entirely
religious, not to exclude those grievances; and the
northern lords were of course notable examples of
the discontent of the propertied class.]
[Footnote 987: _L. and P._, vii., 1206; viii., 48.]
Towards the end of the summer rumours[988] were spread among the
commons of the North that heavy taxes would be levied on every burial,
wedding and christening, that all cattle would be marked and pay a
fine to the King, and that all unmarked beasts would be forfeit;
churches within five miles of each other were to be taken down as
superfluous, jewels and church plate confiscated; taxes were to be
paid for eating white bread, goose, or capon; there was to be a rigid
inquisition into every man's property; and a score of other absurdities
gained currency, obviously invented by malicious and lying tongues.
The outbreak began at Caistor, in Lincolnshire, on the 3rd of October,
with resistance, not to the commissioners for dissolving the
monasteries, but to those appointed to collect the subsidy granted by
Parliament. The rebels entered Lincoln on the 6th; they could, they
said, pay no more money; they demanded the repeal of religious
changes, the restoration of the monasteries, the banishment of (p. 354)
heretics like Cranmer and Latimer, and the removal of low-born
advisers such as Cromwell and Rich from the council.[989] The
mustering of an army under Suffolk and the denial by heralds and
others that the King had any such intentions as were imputed to him,
induced the commons to go home; the reserves which Henry was
collecting at Ampthill were disbanded; and the commotion was over in
less than a fortnight.
[Footnote 988: _Ibid._, xi., 768, 826[2].]
[Footnote 989: _L. and P._, xi., 786, 1182, 1244,
1246.]
The Lincolnshire rebels, however, had not dispersed when news arrived
of a much more serious rising which affected nearly the whole of
Yorkshire. It was here that Darcy and his friends were most powerful;
but, though there is little doubt that they were the movers, the
ostensible leader was Robert Aske, a lawyer. Even here the rebellion
was little more than a magnified riot, which a few regiments of
soldiers could soon have suppressed. The rebels professed complete
loyalty to Henry's person; they suggested no rival candidate for the
throne; they merely demanded a change of policy, which they could not
enforce without a change of government. They had no means of effecting
that change without deposing Henry, which they never proposed to do,
and which, had they done it, could only have resulted in anarchy. The
rebellion was formidable mainly because Henry had no standing army; he
had to rely almost entirely on the goodwill or at least acquiescence
of his people. Outside Yorkshire the gentry were willing enough;
possibly they had their eyes on monastic rewards; and they sent to
Cambridge double[990] or treble the forces Henry demanded, which (p. 355)
they could hardly have done had their tenants shown any great sympathy
with the rebellion. But transport in those days was more difficult
even than now; and before the musters could reach the Trent, Darcy,
after a show of reluctance, yielded Pomfret Castle to the rebels and
swore to maintain their cause. Henry was forced, much against his
will, to temporise. To pardon or parley with rebels he thought would
distain his honour.[991] If Norfolk was driven to offer a pardon, he
must on no account involve the King in his promise.
[Footnote 990: Surrey to Norfolk, 15th Oct., xi.,
727, 738.]
[Footnote 991: _L. and P._, xi., 864.]
Norfolk apparently had no option. An armistice was accordingly
arranged on the 27th of October, and a deputation came up to lay the
rebels' grievances before the King. It was received graciously, and
Henry's reply was a masterly piece of statecraft.[992] He drew it up
"with his own hand, and made no creature privy thereto until it was
finished". Their complaints about the Faith were, he said, "so general
that hard they be to be answered," but he intended always to live and
to die in the faith of Christ. They must specify what they meant by
the liberties of the Church, whether they were lawful or unlawful
liberties; but he had done nothing inconsistent with the laws of God
and man. With regard to the Commonwealth, what King had kept his
subjects so long in wealth and peace, ministering indifferent justice,
and defending them from outward enemies? There were more low-born
councillors when he came to the throne than now; then there were "but
two worth calling noble.[993] Others, as the Lords Marny and Darcy,
were scant well-born gentlemen, and yet of no great lands till (p. 356)
they were promoted by us. The rest were lawyers and priests.... How
came you to think that there were more noble men in our Privy Council
then than now?" It did not become them to dictate to their sovereign
whom he should call to his Council; yet, if they could prove, as they
alleged, that certain of the Council were subverters of God's law and
the laws of the realm, he would proceed against them. Then, after
denouncing their rebellion and referring to their request for pardon,
he says: "To show our pity, we are content, if we find you penitent,
to grant you all letters of pardon on your delivering to us ten such
ringleaders of this rebellion as we shall assign to you. Now note the
benignity of your Prince, and how easily bloodshed may be eschewed.
Thus I, as your head, pray for you, my members, that God may enlighten
you for your benefit."
[Footnote 992: _Ibid._, xi., 957.]
[Footnote 993: The records of the Privy Council for
the greater part of Henry's reign have disappeared,
and only a rough list of his privy Councillors can
be gathered from the _Letters and Papers_. Surrey,
of course, was one of the two nobles, and probably
Shrewsbury was the other, though Oxford, whose
peerage was older than theirs, seems also to have
been a member of the Privy Council (_L. and P._,
i., 51). The complaint of the rebels applied to the
whole Tudor period; at Henry's death no member of
his Privy Council held a peerage twelve years old.]
A conference was held at Doncaster in December,[994] and towards the
end of the year Aske came at Henry's invitation to discuss the
complaints with him.[995] No one could be more gracious than the King,
when he chose; no one could mask his resentment more completely, when
he had an object to gain. It was important to win over Aske, and
convince him that Henry had the interests of the rebels at heart. So
on Aske were lavished all the royal arts. They were amply (p. 357)
rewarded. In January, 1537, the rebel leader went down to Yorkshire
fully convinced of the King's goodwill, and anxious only that the
commons should observe his conditions.[996] But there were wilder
spirits at work over which he had little control. They declared that
they were betrayed. Plots were formed to seize Hull and Scarborough;
both were discovered.[997] Aske, Constable, and other leaders of the
original Pilgrimage of Grace exerted themselves to stay this outbreak
of their more violent followers; and between moderates and extremists
the whole movement quickly collapsed. The second revolt gave Henry an
excuse for recalling his pardon, and for exacting revenge from all who
had been implicated in either movement. Darcy deserved little pity;
the earliest in his treason, he continued the game to the end; but
Aske was an honest man, and his execution, condemned though he was by
a jury, was a violent act of injustice.[998] Norfolk was sent to the
North on a Bloody Assize,[999] and if neither he nor the King was a
Jeffreys, the rebellion was stamped out with a good deal of superfluous
cruelty. Henry was resolved to do the work once and for all, and he
based his system on terror. His measures for the future government of
the North, now threatened by James V., were, however, wise on the
whole. He would put no more nobles in places of trust; the office of
Warden of the Marches he took into his own hands, appointing three
deputies of somewhat humble rank for the east, middle and west
marches.[1000] A strong Council of the North was appointed to (p. 358)
sit at York, under the presidency of Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, and
with powers almost as extensive as those of the Privy Council at
London; and henceforth Henry had little trouble from disaffection in
England.[1001]
[Footnote 994: _L. and P._, xi., 1244-46.]
[Footnote 995: _Ibid._, xi., 1306.]
[Footnote 996: _L. and P._, XII., i., 20, 23, 43,
44, 46.]
[Footnote 997: _Ibid._, XII., i., 46, 64, 102, 104,
141, 142.]
[Footnote 998: Henry, says Dr. Gairdner, examined
"the evidence sent up to him in the spirit of a
detective policeman" (XII., i., p. xxix.).]
[Footnote 999: _L. and P._, XII., i., 227, 228,
401, 402, 416, 457, 458, 468, 478, 498.]
[Footnote 1000: _L. and P._, XII., i., 594, 595,
636, 667. Norfolk thought Henry's plan was to
govern the North by the aid of thieves and
murderers.]
[Footnote 1001: Much of the correspondence of this
Council found its way to Hamilton Palace in
Scotland, and thence to Germany; it was purchased
for the British Museum in 1889 and now comprises
_Addit. MSS._, 32091, 32647-48, 32654 and 32657
(printed as _Hamilton Papers_, 2 vols., 1890-92).]
With one aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace he had yet to deal. The
opportunity had been too good for Paul III. to neglect; and early in
1537 he had sent a legate _a latere_ to Flanders to do what he could
to abet the rebellion.[1002] His choice fell on Reginald Pole, the son
of the Countess of Salisbury and grandson of George, Duke of Clarence.
Pole had been one of Henry's great favourites; the King had paid for
his education, given him, while yet a layman, rich church preferments,
and contributed the equivalent of about twelve hundred pounds a year
to enable him to complete his studies in Italy.[1003] In 1530 Pole was
employed to obtain opinions at Paris favourable to Henry's divorce,[1004]
and was offered the Archbishopric of York. He refused from
conscientious scruples,[1005] sought in vain to turn the King from his
evil ways, and, in 1532, left England; they parted friends, and Henry
continued Pole's pensions. While Pole was regarding with increasing
disgust the King's actions, Henry still hoped that Pole was on his (p. 359)
side, and, in 1536, in answer to Henry's request for his views, Pole
sent his famous treatise _De Unitate Ecclesiae_. His heart was better
than his head; he thought Henry had been treated too gently, and that
the fulmination of a bull of excommunication earlier in his course
would have stopped his headlong career. To repair the Pope's omissions,
Pole now proceeded to administer the necessary castigation; "flattery,"
he said, "had been the cause of all the evil". Even his friend,
Cardinal Contarini, thought the book too bitter, and among his family
in England it produced consternation.[1006] Some of them were hand in
glove with Chapuys, who had suggested Pole to Charles as a candidate
for the throne; and his book might well have broken the thin ice on
which they stood. Henry, however, suppressed his anger and invited
Pole to England; he, perhaps wisely, refused, but immediately
afterwards he accepted the Pope's call to Rome, where he was made
cardinal,[1007] and sent to Flanders as legate to foment the northern
rebellion.
[Footnote 1002: _L. and P._, XII., i., 367, 368,
779.]
[Footnote 1003: _Ibid._, ii., 3943 (reference
misprinted in _D.N.B._, xlvi., 35, as 3493); iii.,
1544.]
[Footnote 1004: _Ibid._, iv., 6003, 6252, 6383,
6394, 6505.]
[Footnote 1005: _Ibid._, v., 737.]
[Footnote 1006: _L. and P._, x., 420, 426; xi., 72,
93, 156.]
[Footnote 1007: On 22nd December, 1536 (_Ibid._,
xi., 1353).]
He came too late to do anything except exhibit his own and the papal
impotence. The rebellion was crushed before his commission was signed.
As Pole journeyed through France, Henry sent to demand his extradition
as a traitor.[1008] With that request Francis could hardly comply, but
he ordered the legate to quit his dominions. Pole sought refuge in
Flanders, but was stopped on the frontier. Charles could no more than
Francis afford to offend the English King, and the cardinal-legate was
informed that he might visit the Bishop of Liege, but only if he (p. 360)
went in disguise.[1009] Never, wrote Pole to the Regent, had a papal
legate been so treated before. Truly Henry had fulfilled his boast
that he would show the princes of Europe how small was the power of a
Pope. He had obliterated every vestige of papal authority in England
and defied the Pope to do his worst; and now, when the Pope attempted
to do it, his legate was chased out of the dominions of the faithful
sons of the Church at the demand of the excommunicate King. Henry had
come triumphant out of perils which every one else believed would
destroy him. He had carried England through the greatest revolution in
her history. He had crushed the only revolt which that revolution
evoked at home; and abroad the greatest princes of Europe had shown
that they valued as nothing the goodwill of the Pope against that of
Henry VIII.
[Footnote 1008: _Ibid._ XII., i., 760, 939, 987,
988, 996.]
[Footnote 1009: _L. and P._, XII., i., 997, 1061,
1135, 1167, 1174.]
The culminating point in his good fortune was reached in the following
autumn. On the 12th of October, 1537, Queen Jane gave birth to a son.
Henry had determined that, had he a son by Anne Boleyn, the child
should be named Henry after himself, or Edward after his grandfather,
Edward IV. Queen Jane's son was born on the eve of the feast of St.
Edward, and that fact decided the choice of his name. Twelve days
later the mother, who had never been crowned, passed away.[1010] She,
alone of Henry's wives, was buried with royal pomp in St. George's
Chapel at Windsor; and to her alone the King paid the compliment (p. 361)
of mourning. His grief was sincere, and for the unusual space of more
than two years he remained without a wife. But Queen Jane's death was
not to be compared in importance with the birth of Edward VI. The
legitimate male heir, the object of so many desires and the cause of
so many tragedies, had come at last to fill to the brim the cup of
Henry's triumph. The greatest storm and stress of his reign was
passed. There were crises to come, which might have been deemed
serious in a less troubled reign, and they still needed all Henry's
wary cunning to meet; Francis and Charles were even now preparing to
end a struggle from which only Henry drew profit; and Paul was hoping
to join them in war upon England. Yet Henry had weathered the worst of
the gale, and he now felt free to devote his energies to the extension
abroad of the authority which he had established so firmly at home.
[Footnote 1010: The fable that the Caesarean
operation was performed on her, invented or
propagated by Nicholas Sanders, rests upon the
further error repeated by most historians that
Queen Jane died on the 14th of October, instead of
the 24th (see Nichols, _Literary Remains of Edward
VI._, pp. xxiv., xxv.).]