HENRY VIII (vii), 1509-47-ASPECTS OF HENRY'S REIGN
[Sidenote: Ireland, 1509-20]
Affairs in the sister island did not, after the final collapse of Perkin
Warbeck directly affect the course of events in England: so that they lend
themselves more conveniently to summary treatment. Ireland in fact hardly
thrust herself forcibly on English notice until Thomas Cromwell was in
power, and even then she only received incidental attention.
[Sidenote: Surrey in Ireland, 1520]
It appears to be generally recognised that when Gerald Earl of Kildare
finally made up his mind to serve Henry VII. loyally and was for the last
time re-instated as Deputy, he proved himself a capable ruler and kept his
wilder countrymen in some sort of order. In 1513 he was succeeded in the
Deputyship by his son Gerald, who bore a general resemblance to him, but
lacked his exceptional audacity and resourcefulness. It was not long before
the Earl of Ormonde--head of the Butlers, the traditional rivals of the
Fitzgeralds, and chief representative of the loyalist section--was
complaining of disorder and misgovernment; and in course of time, Kildare
was deposed and Surrey [Footnote: The Surrey who became Duke of Norfolk in
1524, and was under attainder when Henry died in 1547.]--son of the victor
of Flodden--was sent over to take matters in hand (1520). Kildare was
summoned to England, where after his father's fashion he made himself
popular with the King whom he accompanied to the Field of the Cloth of
Gold. Surrey was a capable soldier, and took the soldier's view of the
situation. There would be no settled government until the whole country was
brought into subjection; it must be dealt with as Edward I. had dealt with
Wales. The chiefs must be made to feel the strong hand by a series of
decisive campaigns, the whole country must be systematically garrisoned,
and the Englishry must be strengthened by planting settlements of English
colonists. Half-measures would be useless, and he could not carry out his
programme with a less force than six thousand men.
[Sidenote: Irish policy, 1520-34]
Henry however had no inclination to set about the conquest of Ireland. His
own theory, with which it may be assumed that Wolsey, now in the plenitude
of his power, was in accord, was more akin to his father's. Moreover,
Wolsey and the Howards were usually in opposition to each other. Surrey was
instructed to appeal to the reason of the contumacious chiefs; to point out
that obedience to the law is the primary condition of orderly government;
to authorise indigenous customs in preference to imposed statutes where it
should seem advisable. In fact there were two alternatives; one, to govern
by the sword, involving a military occupation of the island; the other to
endeavour to enlist the Irish nobles on the side of law and order and to
govern through them. The first policy, Surrey's, was rejected; the second
was attempted. But the Irish chiefs had no _a priori_ prejudice in
favour of law and order, and something besides rhetoric was needed to
convince them that their individual interests would be advanced by such a
policy. Henry VII. had prospered by reinstating the old Earl of Kildare;
Henry VIII. tried reinstating the young one. But precedents suggested the
unfortunate conclusion that a little treason more or less would hurt no
one, least of all a Geraldine. Things went on very much as before. Kildare
was summoned to London again, rated soundly by Wolsey, suffered a brief
imprisonment, and was again restored. Desmond, his kinsman, intrigued with
the Emperor, who was in a state of hostility to Henry because of the
divorce proceedings; Kildare was accused of complicity, and going to London
a third time in 1534 was thrown into the Tower from which he did not again
emerge. Henry had just burnt his boats in his quarrel with Rome and was by
no means in a placable mood.
[Sidenote: Fitzgerald's revolt, 1534]
Kildare had named his eldest son Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, a young man of
twenty-one, to act as Deputy in his absence; moreover he had so fortified
his castle of Maynooth and otherwise made military preparations, as to give
colour to the idea that he had rebellion in contemplation. Excited by a
report that his father had been put to death, Lord Thomas--known as Silken
Thomas from a badge worn by his men--burst into the Council at Dublin,
threw down the sword of office, and renounced his allegiance; then raised
an insurrection at the head of his friends and followers. Dublin Castle was
soon besieged by a large miscellaneous force; the Archbishop, a leader of
the loyalists, attempted to escape but was taken and foully murdered; bands
of marauders ravaged the Pale. The only effective counter-move was made by
Ormonde who rejected Fitzgerald's overtures, and, in spite of Desmond's
menacing attitude on the South-west, raided the Kildare country, and
brought Silken Thomas back in hot haste to defend his own territories.
[Sidenote: 1535 The revolt quelled]
Fitzgerald's rising began in June. Henry had appointed as Deputy Sir
William Skeffington, an old soldier who had held that office before during
Kildare's last suspension. But his departure from England with his troops
was delayed. Fitzgerald was back before Dublin in September, after a vain
attempt to win over Ormonde who defied him boldly. Again the Kildare lands
were raided, and Lord Thomas had to raise the siege; and now at the end of
October Skeffington succeeded in crossing the channel and securing Dublin,
while the rebels carried fire and sword through the neighbouring
districts. For the rest of the winter Skeffington did nothing but send out
a futile expedition, a detachment of which was ambuscaded: while the
loyalists fumed. In the spring however he shook off some of this
inactivity, whether due to sickness, advancing years, or general
incompetence, and besieged Maynooth which was reputed impregnable. The
fortress fell before long; owing to treachery as tradition relates, but
more probably to the improved siege artillery as the official despatches
affirm. Most of the garrison were promptly hanged; a fatal blow was dealt
to the insurrection. The "pardon of Maynooth" became a proverb.
Skeffington, retaining the deputyship, was replaced in command of the army
by Lord Leonard Grey, Kildare's brother-in-law, son of Lord Dorset; to whom
ultimately Silken Thomas surrendered under a vague half-promise of lenient
treatment. Kildare himself had died in the Tower not long before; Lord
Thomas and his principal kinsmen were executed after a little delay; the
one surviving representative of the great house which had "ruled all
Ireland" was a child, preserved in hiding by loyal friends and
retainers. The Geraldine power was at an end.
[Sidenote: 1535-40 Lord Leonard Grey]
Grey himself was now appointed to the deputyship in place of Skeffington,
Desmond in the south-west and O'Neill in Ulster carried on the resistance,
but were no match for Grey, who followed up his military successes by
attempting to carry out the principles of conciliation which Henry had laid
down--to the bitter indignation of those loyalists who favoured the methods
advocated in the past by Surrey. To this and to Grey's insolent temper were
due violent altercations between him and the Council. A Commission was sent
over to examine and set matters straight, but instead the commissioners
took sides with the Council or with the Deputy. Affairs were complicated by
the application to Ireland of the English theory of ecclesiastical
Reformation as understood by Henry and Cromwell. The suppression of the
monasteries was acquiesced in (though not till 1541); since their condition
was undeniably bad, and the distribution of their property convenient for
the recipients; but the revolt from Rome was antagonistic to Irish
feeling. Disloyalty to England, the natural and normal condition of
three-fourths of the island, received a new authority from the sanction of
loyalty to the Church. Grey persisted in his policy of domineering over the
English party--who would have preferred to do the domineering
themselves--and of laying himself open to the charge of favouring and
fostering rebels, especially of the Geraldine faction. Another rising of
O'Neill and Desmond in 1539 forced him to reassert his authority, but he
again allowed it to appear that he was influenced by his connexion with the
Geraldines; and in 1540 he was recalled, attainted, and
executed. Experience of Henry had taught the conclusion that to fight the
charge of treason was useless; but Grey gained nothing by throwing himself
on the royal clemency, though his admission of guilt is not under the
circumstances very conclusive.
[Sidenote: 1540 St. Leger]
Whatever the extent of his actual guilt, his downfall was due not so much
to his professed policy as to the personal methods adopted which in the end
had excited almost universal distrust and hostility. The proof of this lies
in the fact that St. Leger, his successor as Deputy, carried out the same
nominal policy with very remarkable success, and, it would seem, with
general approval: mainly because he applied the principles impartially
instead of as a partisan. The agent of conciliation was judicious,
clear-headed, and tactful, instead of being injudicious, hot-headed, and
tactless. The new Deputy distributed titles and monastic lands with a
shrewd perception of the value of the services to be purchased thereby;
legal commissioners were appointed who were allowed a due latitude in
applying native customs and relaxing the rigour of English law; a number of
important chiefs were converted into supporters of the Government instead
of its more or less open enemies; the Pale settled down into the condition
of a reasonably well ordered State. In the last years of Henry there is a
complete disappearance of the wonted turmoil. At length he had found a man
capable of administering the policy he had enunciated in 1520. The
Deputyship of St. Leger gave promise of initiating a new era; but it showed
also how completely the working out of the Irish problem would depend on
the character and capacity of the men to whom the task should be
successively entrusted.
[Sidenote: Henry "King of Ireland"]
One significant change remains to be noted. Hitherto the King of England
had borne the title of Lord of Ireland, the theory being that Ireland was
held as a fief from the Pope. As marking a final repudiation of every kind
of papal authority, Henry, after the suppression of the Geraldine rising,
assumed the style of King of Ireland. The fact that the change was needed
has some bearing on the opposed papal and royal claims to Irish
allegiance. Wales, it may be remarked, acquired citizenship when for the
first time she sent representatives to Parliament in 1537.
[Sidenote: Wolsey's work]
Throughout the first half of Henry's reign the figure of the great Cardinal
dominates the political field. In two respects at least his work was the
extension of what Henry VII. initiated. By his efforts, the personal power
of the crown became irresistible; and as the old King raised England from
being almost a negligible quantity on the Continent to become at the lowest
an effective make-weight in European combinations, so Wolsey raised her
still further to a position of equality with the two great Powers which
overshadowed all the rest. This he did by the same method of evading
serious military operations whenever the evasion was possible, and by the
exercise of a diplomatic genius almost unmatched among English
statesmen. After his fall, the King's domestic interests withdrew him from
a like active participation in the quarrels of Charles and Francis,
although in his last years he became involved in a French war.
[Sidenote: The Army]
It is singular however to observe that Wolsey won for England all the
prestige of a great military Power, after a period during which that
ancient reputation of hers had been all but completely lost, without any
single achievement memorable in the annals of war, and without producing
any commander even of the second rank. With the sole exception of Surrey's
victory at Flodden, due rather to the disastrous blunder of James than to
the Earl's exceptional ability, no striking strategical or tactical feats
are recorded, and few remarkable displays even of personal valour: nothing
at all comparable to the brilliant if sometimes hazardous operations of the
great Plantagenets. Nothing more is heard of that once triumphant arm, the
Archery: the English bowmen had not, it would seem, lost their cunning, but
they could no longer overwhelm hostile battalions. Nor does this seem to
have been owing as yet to the displacement of the bow by firearms, though
cannon both for defence and destruction of fortresses were improving--as
exemplified at Maynooth. In the Scots wars, the border moss-troopers fought
after their own fashion: but in the French wars the levies, no longer
fighting in bodies following their own lord's flag, and feeling neither a
personal tie to their leaders nor any particular bond among themselves,
repeatedly displayed mutinous tendencies--as befel in Ireland under Lord
Leonard Grey, and earlier with the entire army commanded by Dorset in 1512
and again with Suffolk's soldiery in 1523. The transition period from the
era of feudal companies to that of disciplined regiments was a long one,
particularly in England. During the whole of that period, English armies
accomplished no distinguished military achievement.
[Sidenote: The Navy]
It was otherwise with English navies. All through the Tudor period, the
nation was steadily realising its maritime capacities. Whether the
strategic meaning of "ruling the seas" was understood or not, the century
witnessed the rise of the English naval power from comparative
insignificance to an actual pre-eminence. The two Henries fostered their
fleets; when Elizabeth was reigning, the sea-faring impulse was past any
need of artificial encouragement. But it is noteworthy that coast defence
and ship-building were almost the only public purposes to which an
appreciable share of the King's ecclesiastical spoils was appropriated. The
King's ships were few, but they were supplemented by an ever-increasing
supply of armed merchant-craft; and in the French war at the end of Henry's
reign is the premonition of the great struggle with Spain, in which one
most characteristic feature was the comparative reliance of England on
sails and of her rivals on oars. As yet however, naval fighting was still
governed by military analogies.
[Sidenote: The New World]
Though Henry was keenly interested in ship-building and naval construction,
in the matter of ocean voyages and the acquisition of new realms Spain and
Portugal still left all competitors far behind. Albuquerque had already
founded a Portuguese Maritime empire in the Indian Ocean when Henry
VIII. ascended the throne, and Spain was established in the West Indies. In
1513, Balboa sighted the Pacific from the Isthmus of Darien. In 1519 Cortes
conquered Mexico; in 1520 Magelhaens passed through the straits [Footnote:
It was still believed that Tierra del Fuego was a vast continent stretching
to the South.] that bear his name, and his ships completed their voyage
round the globe in the course of the next two years; in 1532 Pizarro
conquered Peru; Brazil and the River Plate were already discovered and
appropriated. All that England had done was represented by some Bristol
explorers in the far North, some tentative efforts in the direction of
Africa; and some four voyages to Brazil, the first two under William
Hawkins, father of the more famous Sir John.
[Sidenote: Absolutism]
As Wolsey's policy was a development of that of Henry VII. in the direction
of raising England's international prestige, so it was also in the
concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign: and the process was
carried still further though in a somewhat different way when Wolsey had
fallen. It is curious to note that Henry VII. for the first half of his
reign ruled by a skilful reliance on parliamentary sanctions, in the second
half almost dispensing with parliaments. This order was reversed by his
son. For the first twenty years, there were hardly any parliaments: from
1529 there was no prolonged interval without one. The economies of the old
King sufficed to support the extravagant expenditure of his successor with
only an occasional appeal to the purses of the Commons. It was only the
necessities of a war-budget that involved such an appeal, so that none took
place between 1514 and 1523. Had Wolsey been permitted to maintain his
peace-policy unbroken, there would have been no rebuff from the House of
Commons in 1523, no trouble over the Amicable Loan two years later. The
country, habituated to an absence of parliaments, might have come to accept
a monarchy absolute in form as well as in fact.
[Sidenote: The Parliamentary sanction]
But when Wolsey fell, Henry was embarking on a policy in which he knew that
he must keep the nation on his side; the support of the body representing
the nation must be secured. Whether that support was granted spontaneously,
or was encouraged by manipulation, or spurred by the menace of coercion,
was comparatively unimportant. The powers which the King was resolved to
exercise must ostensibly at least have the sanction of national
approval. The thing was managed with such thoroughness that long before the
close of the reign the royal absolutism was confirmed by the Act which gave
the force of law to the King's proclamations, and by the authorisation for
him to devise the crown by will; and with such skill that Henry's and
Cromwell's critics are obliged to fall back on the alleged subserviency of
the parliaments to account for it, although these same subservient
parliaments were quite capable of offering an obstinate resistance whenever
their own pockets were threatened. Henry was one of those born rulers who
impress their own views on masses of men by force of will. He made the
country believe that it was with him. But behind the dominant force of
will, he possessed the instinctive sense of its limits, besides being
endowed with that final remorseless selfishness which made him ready to
make scape-goats of the most loyal servants, to deny responsibility himself
and to fling the odium upon them, as soon as he found that those limits had
been transgressed.
[Sidenote: Depression of the Nobles]
Alike, then, by his disuse and his use of parliaments, Henry strengthened
the royal power, the initiative of all legislation remaining in his
hands. To the same end he continued to depress the great nobles and to
create a new nobility dependent on royal favour. All who threatened to
display a dangerous ambition, from Buckingham on, were struck down; the
House of Norfolk survived till the end of the reign, when the Duke was
attainted and his son was sent to the block. No ancient House was
represented in the Council of Regency nominated under Henry's will. The men
who served the King were those whom he had himself raised, and could
himself cast down with a word. The edifice of his absolutism was complete,
though it was modified by the conditions under which his son and his two
daughters succeeded to the throne.
[Sidenote: Parliament and the purse]
The theory of absolutism from Richard II. to Wolsey had been that the King
should make it his aim to rule without parliaments; whereas we are
confronted with the apparent paradox that Henry was never more absolute
than when his parliaments were in almost continual session. The explanation
lies in this, that he did not usually call them to ask them for money out
of their own pockets; for the most part he invited them to approve of his
taxing some one else, by confiscations or the conversion of loans received
into free gifts--a much more congenial task. The King had found other
methods of raising revenues than by appealing to the generosity of his
faithful Commons--methods which in effect relieved them of demands which
they would otherwise have been obliged to face. The vast sums wrung from
Convocation or from the Monasteries went to relieve the Commons from
taxes. The parliament of 1523, summoned to grant subsidies, faced Wolsey
with an independence which fully justified the minister in avoiding the
risk of similar rebuffs: the Reformation parliament itself offered a
stubborn resistance to the Bill of Wards, which touched its own pocket.
Independence and resistance vanished when the incentive was withdrawn, and
the diversion of the stream of ecclesiastical wealth into the abysses of
the royal treasury was acquiesced in with a certain enthusiasm. The King
got the credit of the ends secured, his minister the odium for the methods
of obtaining them: and so year by year the crown became more potent.
[Sidenote: The Land]
The economic troubles brought about mainly by the new agricultural
conditions in the reign of the first Tudor were exaggerated in that of the
second, and were further intensified by the dissolution of the
Monasteries. The evils at which More pointed in his _Utopia_, when
Henry VIII. had been but seven years on the throne, showed no diminution
when another thirty years had passed. The new landowners who came into
possession of forfeited estates or of confiscated monastic lands continued
to substitute pasture for tillage, and to dispossess the agricultural
population as well by the reduced demand for labour as by rack-renting and
evictions. The country swarmed with sturdy beggars; and the riotous
behaviour encouraged when religious houses were dismantled or even
"visited" must have tended greatly to increase the spirit of disorder,
evidenced by the frequent popular brawling over the public reading of the
Bible. The usual remedies of punishing vagabondage, and of attempting to
force industry into unsuitable fields and to drive capital into less
lucrative investment in order to provide employment, failed--also as
usual. The landowners did not emulate the monastic practice of dispensing
charity, so that distress went unrelieved. Charity often encourages
un-thrift; but its absence sometimes leads not to industry but to thieving;
and in this reign, crimes of violence were notably abundant. The economic
conditions were therefore in fact unfavourable to thrift. But apart from
economic conditions, the practice of that virtue is apt to be largely
influenced by social standards. An ultra-extravagant court, and the
calculated magnificence of such a minister as Wolsey, went far to induce a
reckless habit of expenditure in the upper classes; and the inordinate
display of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was merely an extreme instance of
the prevalent passion for costly pageantries.
[Sidenote: Finance]
The resulting distress was not compensated in other directions. During the
earlier half of the reign, Commerce did no doubt continue to prosper; but
the King's financial methods were hardly more conducive to public industry
and thrift than his personal example. Wolsey indeed was an able finance
minister. In spite of the enormous expenditure on display, his mastery of
detail prevented mere waste; and until the pressing necessities of a
war-budget arose in 1523, enough money was found by tapping the sources to
which Henry VII. had applied, supplemented by the ample hoards which that
monarch had left behind. In 1523, the Cardinal's scheme of graduated
taxation was sound and scientific in principle, so far as existing methods
of assessment permitted. But for the remaining years of his life, the
process of raising money to meet the King's requirements was exceedingly
difficult and unpopular. After his death, the King discovered an additional
and productive source of revenue in the property of the Church; but even
this did not suffice for his needs.
[Sidenote: The Currency]
Henry therefore resorted to an expedient as disastrous as it was
dishonest--a wholesale debasement of the coinage, which was continued into
the following reign and was remedied only under Elizabeth. The first
experiment was made as early as 1526; but it was the financial
embarrassments of Henry's last years which brought about a debasement that
was almost catastrophic. From 1543 to 1551 matters went from bad to worse
till the currency was in a state of chaos: and the silver coin issued in
the last year contained only one-seventh of the pure metal that went to
that of twenty-five years before.
It followed that the purchasing power of the debased coinage sank--in other
words, prices went up. On the other hand, the new coin remaining legal
tender in England up to any amount, creditors who were paid in it lost
heavily, the Royal debtor--and others--discharging their obligations by
what was practically a payment of a few shillings in the pound. Also as a
matter of course, the better coins, with each fresh debasement, passed out
of the country or at any rate out of circulation, the base coins becoming
the medium of exchange. Thus the foundations of commercial stability were
sapped, while foreign trading operations were thrown into desperate and
ruinous confusion.
Nor did the evil end here. For the influx of silver and gold from the
Spanish possessions in America, though its effects were felt only very
gradually, tended to depreciate the exchange value of the metals
themselves. This depreciation, added to the debasement, further increased
the rise of prices. But while prices went up, money-wages did not rise in
anything like the same proportion; labour being cheapened by the continuous
displacement of the agricultural population, which was not attended by an
equivalent increase of employment in the towns, and by the dissolution of
the monasteries, which at the same time wiped out the sole existing system
of poor-relief. The natural Economic transition that began in the previous
reign, while producing wealth, was also attended by distress: now, for a
vast proportion of the population, Henry's artifical expedients for filling
his own coffers converted distress into grinding want, destitution, and
desperation.
[Sidenote: Learning and Letters]
The earlier half of the reign promised well for Education; but the promise
was not duly fulfilled in the latter portion. The funds which Wolsey would
have devoted to that object were wanted for other purposes. The
Universities discarded the study of the schoolmen, but their attention was
absorbed rather by loud-voiced wrangling than by the pursuit of learning.
Nevertheless, in great families at least, the education of the younger
members was carried to a high pitch. The King, a man of accomplishments
which would have made him remarkable in any station, himself set the
example, and in this respect at least his children were not lacking; the
literary impulse was at work.
[Sidenote 1: The _Utopia_]
[Sidenote 2: Prose and Verse]
[Sidenote 3: Surrey and Wyatt]
Yet the literary achievements of Henry's time can hardly be called
great. One work by an Englishman, More's _Utopia_, alone stands out as
a classic on its own merits: and that was written in Latin, and remained
untranslated till a later reign. In its characteristic undercurrent of
humour, and its audacious idealism, it betrays the student of Plato;
standing almost alone as a product of the dawning culture. Partly by direct
statement, partly by implication, we may gather from it much information as
to the state of England in Henry's early years, much as to the political
philosophy of the finer minds of the day. But that philosophy was choked by
revolution; More himself so far departed from its tenets of toleration as
to become a religious persecutor. Most of the English writing of the reign
took the form of controversial or personal pamphlets in prose or verse;
such as the extravagant _Supplicacyon for the Beggers_, a rabid tirade
against the clergy, or Skelton's rhyme _Why come ye nal to Court_, an
attack chiefly on the Cardinal. The splendid raciness of Hugh Latimer's
sermons belongs to oratory rather than to letters. The exquisite prose of
Cranmer found its perfection in the solemn music of the Prayer-book of
Edward VI. The translations of the Bible made no great advance on
Wiclif. In the realm of verse, John Skelton was a powerful satirist with a
unique manipulation of doggerel which has permanently associated a
particular type of rhyme with his name; an original and versatile writer
was Skelton, but without that new critical sense of style which was to
become so marked a feature of the great literary outburst under
Elizabeth. Herein, two minor poets alone, Surrey and Wyatt, appear as
harbingers of the coming day. A hundred anonymous writers of Gloriana's
time produced verses as good as the best of either Wyatt or Surrey; but
these two at least discovered the way which, once found, became
comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from
Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death)
wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the
successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than
in England, in the persons first of bishop Gawain Douglas--who perhaps
should rather be connected with the previous reign--and later of Sir David
Lyndsay. But doctrinal controversy does not provide the best atmosphere for
artistic expression. The whole literature of the reign, while showing
emphatic signs of reviving intellectual activity, is remarkable not for its
own excellence, for profundity of thought, intensity of passion, or mastery
of form, but as exhibiting the first random and tentative workings of the
new spirit.
[Sidenote: Estimate of Henry VII.]
The most arresting figure of the period is that of Henry himself. No
English King has been presented by historians in more contradictory colours
than he. One has painted him as the Warrior of God who purged the land of
the Unclean Thing: to another he is merely a libidinous tyrant. One
contrasts his honesty and honour with the habitual falsehood of his
contemporaries: to another he appears supreme in treachery. In fact, there
is an element of truth in both estimates, however exaggerated.
[Sidenote: His Morals]
In the matter of personal morality, in the restricted sense, it does not
appear--in spite of his list of wives--that he compares unfavourably with
contemporary princes. He had only one child certainly born out of
wedlock--which cannot be said even of Charles V., [Footnote: It should
perhaps be remarked that whenever Charles had a wife living he appears to
have been faithful to her. His divagations took place in the intervals.]
and contrasts with the unbridled profligacy of Francis, the frequent amours
of his Stewart brother-in-law and nephew. The stories of his relations with
both Anne and Mary Boleyn before the marriage, even if untrue (which is not
probable), would never have been told of a man whose life was clean; but it
is what may be called the accident of his numerous marriages which has
given a misleading prominence to licentious tendencies not perhaps
abnormally developed. With the exception of his passion for Anne Boleyn,
there is no trace of his amours influencing his general conduct: and it is
at least probable that after the death of Jane Seymour he would have
remained a widower, but for the desire to make the succession more
secure. Yet the story of his reign hinges upon the Divorce; and in the
divorce, however much other considerations may have influenced him, the
controlling consideration was the determination to make Anne Boleyn his
wife since she would have him on no other terms. That fact, with the
disastrous termination of the marriage with her, the fiasco of Anne of
Cleves, and the catastrophe of Katharine Howard, is responsible for the
somewhat mythical monster of popular imagination. The man who divorced two
wives and beheaded two more is too suggestive of Bluebeard to be readily
regarded as after all to some extent the victim of circumstance.
[Sidenote: His general character]
While Anne Boleyn was the object of his pursuit, Henry was dominated by his
passion for her: but that passion cooled quickly enough after
possession. Jane Seymour was not his wife long enough to put him to the
test: but it would certainly seem that his affections were short-lived and
easily transferred. This was manifestly the case with men: at least it
never appeared to cause him a moment's compunction to hand over an intimate
to the executioner. While a man was rendering him efficient service the
King was lavish of praises and rewards; when the need for him was past the
services were forgotten. His sentiments were always of the loftiest; it
habitually "consorted not with his honour or his conscience" to do
otherwise than he did; but the correspondence between his honour and
conscience on one side and his personal advantage on the other presents a
unique phenomenon. His conscience permitted him to connive at schemes for
kidnapping the King of Scots or assassinating his ministers, and his honour
permitted him to encourage his own servants in a course of action for which
he had subsequently no hesitation in sending them to the block. He could
give, prodigally; but what he gave had generally been taken from some one
else. He could protest against the cruel burden of the annates, and then
absorb them himself. And with all this, it is not difficult to suppose that
he constantly persuaded himself that he was an honest man beset with
dishonest rogues, since he rarely broke the letter of an engagement except
on the pretext of bad faith made manifest in the other party.
[Sidenote 1: His peculiar abilities]
[Sidenote 2: Intention and achievement]
Henry's ethical standards were thus in no way calculated to hamper his
actions, owing to his happy capacity for colouring his actions in
conformity with them. When he set an end before himself, no influence could
make him waver a hair's-breadth in his pursuit of it, and he spared neither
friend nor foe in the attainment of it. As a statesman he did not lay down
far-seeing designs. But he had the art of maintaining popularity, and a
shrewd eye for a good servant. Thus as a rule he gave Wolsey a free hand
and very vigorous support. But when he elected to order a change of policy,
the Cardinal proved to have been right and the King wrong. His candidature
for the Empire, and his dreams of the French and Scottish thrones show him
capable of indulging in entirely impracticable visions. The vital
achievement of his reign was the severance from Rome; and that was
merely--as far as he was concerned--the accidental outcome of the Pope's
opposition to the Divorce. In the destruction of the ecclesiastical
_imperium in imperio_, the subordination of the Church to the State,
it is difficult to tell how far the policy was his own and how far it was
Cromwell's; but the King never recognised as Cromwell did that the logical
corollary of the whole ecclesiastical policy was a Protestant League. The
defiance of Rome, and the subjection and spoliation of the Church, were
accompanied by a measure in which Cranmer was the moving spirit, and to
which Henry gave full support--the open admission of the Scriptures in the
vernacular--which made it no longer possible for the individual to disclaim
responsibility on the score that the priesthood alone held the key to the
mysteries of religion. This was in truth the keystone of the Reformation,
since it entailed upon every man the _duty_ of private judgment even
though the _right_ continued to be denied; yet this was not the effect
which Henry contemplated. Hence, out of the four points in the
ecclesiastical revolution of the reign: the subordination of the Church to
the State was a constitutional change absolutely Henry's or Cromwell's own;
the spoliation was the same, but reflects no credit on either; the
severance from Rome was an accident; and the creation of the duty, to be
ultimately recognised as the right, of private judgment was
unintentional. And on the kindred subject, the persecution of innovators
labelled as heretics, Henry's policy represented nothing but the
commonplace attitude of Authority in his times.
[Sidenote: A Dominant personality]
We cannot, in short, find in Henry a statesman remarkable for far-sighted
perceptions or ennobling idealism: but he gauged the sentiment of his
subjects and the abilities of his servants acutely and was shrewd enough as
a rule to identify himself with the schemes of those whom he trusted.
Nevertheless he stands out, with all his faults, as a very tyrannical King
yet a very kingly tyrant. If his personal ambitions and desires over-ruled
other considerations, he never forgot the greatness of the country he
ruled, and his personal ambitions at least involved England's
magnification. For good or for evil, his actions were on a great scale. He
knew his own mind, and he never shrank from the risks involved in giving
his will effect. He defied successfully the Power which had brought the
mightiest monarchs to their knees. He had the kingly quality, shared by his
great daughter, of inspiring in his servants a devotion which made them
ready to sacrifice everything for his glorification. Two of the most
powerful ministers known in English history recognised the domination of
his personality whenever he chose to exercise it.
[Sidenote: Summary]
Even when he was most feared he maintained his place in the popular
affection. His parliaments carried out his will, but his will and theirs
were in conformity: while Wolsey ruled, he rarely consulted them, but after
Wolsey's fall they were called upon to ratify all the King's measures, and
were in frequent session. He promoted a revolution, but while he lived he
controlled it; through all the accompanying shocks and upheavals his
mastery remained unshaken. The proof of the man's essential force, the
greatness we may not deny him, is made manifest by the chaos which followed
his death. He was gross; he was cruel; he was a robber; he suborned
traitors and was prepared to suborn assassins; but his selfishness,
flagrant as it was, did not wholly absorb him; behind it there was a sense
of the greatness of his office, a desire to make England great; and
therewith he had the indomitable resolution and the untiring energy for
lack of which statesmen have failed who intellectually and morally stand
far above him, while no monarch has left on the history of England a stamp
more indelible than Henry VIII.