Ten Tudor Statesmen
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Title: Ten Tudor Statesmen
Author: Arthur D. Innes
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TEN TUDOR STATESMEN ***
TEN TUDOR STATESMEN
[Illustration: _HENRY VII._
_From a Painting by an unknown Flemish artist, in the National Portrait
Gallery_]
TEN TUDOR
STATESMEN
_By_ ARTHUR D. INNES
_AUTHOR OF_
“ENGLAND UNDER THE TUDORS”
[Illustration]
LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH
1906
Printed by BALLANTYNE & CO. LIMITED
Tavistock Street, London
PREFATORY
The series of studies contained in this volume is in no way a history
of the Tudor period. My object in preparing it has been first to
form in my own mind and secondly to present to my readers a clear
and consistent conception of the character of sundry persons, who in
their own day either exercised an effective influence on the course of
politics, or embodied political ideas which have influenced succeeding
generations. The events narrated are considered not in the light
of their intrinsic importance, but as they bear on the particular
character under investigation.
To arrive at a fair estimate of any man’s character, the primary
necessity is to endeavour to realise his point of view, to appreciate
his preconceptions. If we require of him that his preconceptions shall
coincide with our own, we may reconstruct an interesting dramatic
figure, but we shall not discover the man as he really was. And if we
do succeed in placing ourselves at his point of view, we shall almost
inevitably find that the man who ultimately emerges is different
from, and probably somewhat better than, the man as we had previously
conceived him.
Concerning these ten figures, two curious points may be noted. Eight of
them may be described as ministers: not one of the eight was actually
of noble birth, two were not even of gentle birth. That fact emphasises
the change in the political centre of gravity which accompanied the
establishment of the Tudor Dynasty. Secondly, of those eight, four
perished on the scaffold and one at the stake: a sixth was in custody
under accusation of treason when death released him. That illustrates
not less emphatically the distance at which we stand from the Tudors
to-day.
A. D. I.
CONTENTS
I
HENRY VII
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 3
II. HENRY’S EARLY YEARS, ACCESSION, AND ESTABLISHMENT
OF THE DYNASTY 5
III. THE TUDOR ABSOLUTION AND THE EXCHEQUER 11
IV. COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY 16
V. JUDICATURE 21
VI. FOREIGN POLICY 23
VII. CHARACTER 27
II
CARDINAL WOLSEY
I. APPRECIATIONS 35
II. CARDINALIS PACIFICATOR 38
III. WOLSEY AND THE FRENCH WAR 46
IV. DOMESTIC POLICY 48
V. THE DIVORCE 53
VI. WOLSEY AND THE REFORMATION 62
VII. WOLSEY’S FALL AND CHARACTER 67
III
SIR THOMAS MORE
I. INTRODUCTORY 75
II. UNDER HENRY VII 77
III. THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII 82
IV. THE “UTOPIA” 85
V. MORE IN PUBLIC LIFE 94
VI. INDIGNATIO PRINCIPIS 103
VII. CHARACTER AND DEATH 106
IV
THOMAS CROMWELL
I. THOMAS CROMWELL 115
II. EARLIER CAREER AND RISE TO POWER 117
III. PLANNING THE CAMPAIGN 125
IV. CONTRA ECCLESIAM 130
V. THE FABRIC OF DESPOTISM 135
VI. CROMWELL AND PROTESTANTISM 146
VII. CROMWELL’S FALL 151
V
HENRY VIII
I. APPRECIATIONS 157
II. THE CARDINAL RULES 159
III. WAR 167
IV. THE DIVORCE 170
V. THE NEW POLICY 177
VI. DIVERGENCES BETWEEN HENRY AND CROMWELL 182
VII. HENRY’S CLOSING YEARS 187
VIII. HENRY’S MARRIAGES 192
IX. HENRY’S CHARACTER 198
VI
PROTECTOR SOMERSET
I. MISCONCEPTIONS 205
II. THE PROTECTOR AND HIS PROBLEMS 207
III. SOMERSET AND SCOTLAND 212
IV. SOMERSET’S RELIGIOUS POLICY 217
V. SOMERSET AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 222
VI. THE LORD ADMIRAL 225
VII. THE EX-PROTECTOR 230
VII
ARCHBISHOP CRANMER
I. INTRODUCTORY 237
II. CRANMER AT CAMBRIDGE 239
III. RISE TO THE ARCHBISHOPRIC 244
IV. HENRY’S PRIMATE 248
V. CRANMER AND SOMERSET 258
VI. THE FLOWING TIDE OF PROTESTANTISM 263
VII. DE PROFUNDIS 267
VIII
WILLIAM CECIL (LORD BURGHLEY)
I. THE MINISTERS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH 279
II. CECIL UNDER EDWARD VI. AND MARY 281
III. FOREIGN AFFAIRS AT ELIZABETH’S ACCESSION 288
IV. DOMESTIC AND SCOTTISH POLICY 296
V. CECIL AND PROTESTANTISM 303
VI. ELIZABETH’S SECOND PERIOD 307
VII. THE WAR WITH SPAIN 315
VIII. AN APPRECIATION 319
IX
SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM
I. WALSINGHAM’S CHARACTER 325
II. WALSINGHAM’S RISE 328
III. AMBASSADOR AT PARIS 332
IV. ENTANGLEMENTS 339
V. DETECTIVE METHODS 348
VI. THE END 355
X
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
I. CHARACTER 361
II. RALEIGH’S RISE 363
III. VIRGINIA 369
IV. AFTER THE ARMADA 376
V. FAVOUR AND FALL 381
VI. CAPTIVE AND VICTIM 387
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
HENRY VII. _Frontispiece_
_From a Painting by an unknown Flemish artist, in the
National Portrait Gallery_
_To face page_
CARDINAL WOLSEY 36
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the collection at Christ
Church, Oxford_
SIR THOMAS MORE 76
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the National Portrait
Gallery_
THOMAS CROMWELL, 1ST EARL OF ESSEX 116
_By_ HOLBEIN, _from an Engraving by Houbraken in the
British Museum_
HENRY VIII. 158
_From a Portrait by_ JOST VAN CLEEF _in the Royal
Collection at Hampton Court Palace_
PROTECTOR SOMERSET 206
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN
THOMAS CRANMER 238
_From a Painting by_ G. FLICCIUS _in the National
Portrait Gallery_
WILLIAM CECIL (LORD BURGHLEY) 280
_From a Portrait by_ MARC GHEERAEDTS (?) _in the
National Portrait Gallery_
SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM 326
_From an engraving by_ G. VERTUE _after the picture by
Holbein, in the British Museum_
SIR WALTER RALEIGH 362
_From the Painting by_ FEDERIGO ZUCCARO _in the
National Portrait Gallery_
HENRY VII
I
INTRODUCTORY
“This King, to speak of him in terms equal to his deserving, was one
of the best sort of wonders, a wonder for wise men.” In those words
Francis Bacon summed up Henry VII., a hundred years after the first
Tudor king had been laid in his grave. Bacon’s history still is,
and is likely to remain, the classic narrative. Not that he was a
“contemporary,” or that he had access to any extraordinary sources
of information; but because being at once a practical politician, a
student of political theory, and a literary artist, any historical work
from his pen could hardly have failed to be of the highest interest,
and the subject he actually chose was--to him--peculiarly sympathetic.
It is in fact quite evident that Henry was held in the very highest
estimation by his biographer. The history is addressed to Prince
Charles, and it can hardly be doubted that in calling his hero “the
English Solomon,” Bacon had in mind the reigning king’s description as
the “Scottish Solomon”; the direct suggestion of a parallel (repeated
in other terms in the Preface) must have been meant to be looked
upon as a compliment by James. Henry was at least to be accounted
the shrewdest ruler amongst the very astute princes who were more or
less his contemporaries. Yet, for all the impression of shrewdness,
Bacon fails to win our sympathy for Henry, perhaps because those
two minds had too close kinship. Bacon, except in the case of a few
enthusiasts, does not inspire affection. Pope’s summary is too accurate
an expression of what is at least the popular conception; and Henry
is judged to have been not quite so bright, nearly but not quite
so wise--and still more mean. English history provides examples of
monarchs whom every one actively hates like King John, or scorns like
Edward II.; other monarchs too, who, if they had evil qualities, yet
display something of the heroic; towards whom our feelings, if mixed,
are still warm. But Henry VII. inspires almost universally a strong
sentiment of cold dislike, such as no one else creates.
There is justice in that impression, but there is also injustice. In
his latter years, it is hardly too much to call him detestable. He had
reigned for fourteen years before he committed the one commonplace
crime of tyrants which stains his record, the execution of Warwick.
From that time a kind of degeneration seems to have come upon him,
accelerated by the deaths first of his wisest counsellor Morton,
then, two years later, of the son he loved, and then of his wife. To
these years belongs nearly every story which tells seriously to his
discredit. But during the earlier and longer half of his reign, his
record is remarkably free from blemish, and shows an enlightenment
which under happier conditions might have won him a place not only
among the kings who have deserved well of the State--that, at least
in the historian’s eyes, he did achieve--but among those whose memory
posterity have cherished.
II
HENRY’S EARLY YEARS, ACCESSION, AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DYNASTY
After the death of Henry V., his widow accepted in marriage the hand
of a Welsh knight of ancient lineage, Owen Tudor. In 1456, their son
Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took to himself a very youthful bride,
the Lady Margaret Beaufort, the representative of John of Gaunt’s
family by Katherine Swynford, legitimatised by Act of Parliament in
the reign of Richard II. On January 28, 1457, Margaret gave birth to a
son, Henry, some weeks after Edmund himself had died; the charge of the
boy devolving mainly upon Edmund’s brother Jasper, Earl of Pembroke.
During the next fourteen years, the great Earl of Warwick was playing
see-saw with the fortunes of the rival houses of York and Lancaster.
In 1461, the Yorkists won the upper hand; but Jasper held out in
Wales for Lancaster, for nearly seven years. Then Harlech Castle was
surrendered, and young Henry was placed in charge of its captor, the
new Earl of Pembroke, and was well enough treated. Then Lancaster had
a turn of success, but the party was crushed at the battles of Barnet
and Tewkesbury, and the line was quenched by the deaths of Henry VI.
and his son. Yorkists and Lancastrians alike fixed upon young Henry
Tudor as being now the representative of John of Gaunt; England was
too dangerous a habitation for a possible claimant to the throne; and
the boy in his fifteenth year was successfully shipped off by his
friends to Brittany, where for twelve years he abode under the Duke’s
protection.
If the dynasty of York had established itself in regular fashion--if
Edward IV. had been followed by an Edward V. as Henry IV. had been
followed by Henry V.--there would have been little enough to fear. But
Edward’s brother usurped the throne by a particularly foul murder, and
being on it proved himself a tyrant. Men’s eyes turned to the one scion
of the Plantagenets whom it was possible to set up as a claimant to the
crown. If he could be set on the throne with Edward’s daughter at his
side, the rival factions of York and Lancaster might be stilled. The
first attempt to challenge the usurper failed completely. Buckingham’s
plan of campaign was ruined by the flooding of the Severn, and by a
storm which scattered the fleet wherewith Richmond sailed from Brittany
to co-operate. Henry, returning thither, had to flee very soon after
to safer shelter in France. But it was not long before the attempt was
renewed, this time with success. On Bosworth field Richard was slain,
and Henry declared King of England.
The victor was a young man of eight-and-twenty. For fourteen years he
had lived in England, amidst civil broils and perpetual alarms. For
fourteen more he had lived mainly in Brittany, conscious that he was in
perpetual danger of being surrendered into the hands of those who might
at any time find his destruction convenient. All his life he had been
in an atmosphere of suspicion, of possible treachery, encompassed with
deeds of blood. He had learned to study others and to trust himself. He
had learned that his life might depend on alertness and self-restraint.
And he had been able to see that Louis XI. was incomparably the most
successful master of state-craft of his generation. These were lessons
calculated to kill all youthful qualities, and at twenty-eight Henry
might as well have been forty.
This was the man who had grasped a sceptre to which it was impossible
to establish for him a legal title. In plain truth, he was King of
England because he was the only man of the blood-royal who was able to
challenge the usurper who was wearing the crown. As far as right of
inheritance went, if Edward IV.’s daughters were barred by their sex,
the son of Clarence was indubitably the heir of Edward III., whether
descent through the female line were admitted or no. Henry might marry
Elizabeth of York and claim the crown in her right; but then her death
would leave him in a highly anomalous position; it was imperative that
he should be accepted himself as the lawful king in his own person.
The marriage might make matters perfectly safe for a son, but not for
him. Hence even the semblance of depending on his wife’s title must be
avoided.
He had won the realm by the sword; that was the first step. The second
was to commit the representatives of the nation to affirm that he
was the lawful sovereign: this was effected by a Declaratory Act in
Parliament, which judiciously abstained from naming the grounds on
which his claim rested. After that was to come the marriage, which
should muzzle the partisans of York. This took place in the following
January; but it is easy to see that the king had good reason for not
proceeding to his wife’s coronation at least till a son should be
born. Not long after that son was born, the Simnel plot was brewing;
the coronation under those circumstances might have taken the colour
of a defensive measure. Consequently the ceremony was not performed
until Elizabeth had been his wife for very nearly two years, being thus
emphasised as a mere act of grace.
No doubt if, by marrying the Plantagenet princess, Henry could have
appropriated the Yorkist title to himself personally whether his queen
lived or died, he would have been able to do without repressing the
heads of the Yorkist faction at all. But, as things stood, that could
not be risked. Warwick, Clarence’s young son, was imprisoned in the
Tower, and some of the last king’s principal supporters were attainted.
Being thus kept dissatisfied, it was a long time before active Yorkist
plots ceased. The Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, Margaret, sister of
Edward IV., made her Court a regular centre of anti-Tudor intrigue; nor
did Henry ever feel really safe till the myth of a surviving Richard of
York was finally exploded and the actual Edward Plantagenet, Earl of
Warwick, had been done to death. The course which Henry took involved
a certain degree of injustice--but _Fiat Justitia, Ruat Cælum_, is
a maxim that princes with an uncertain title are rarely, if ever,
disposed to adopt without reservation. One is disposed to wonder rather
that Warwick was allowed to live so long than that Henry ultimately
yielded to the temptation to slay him.
This plain business of securing himself on the throne was necessarily
the first consideration. Only an established dynasty could restore
steady government in a country which within a hundred years had seen
four kings slain and the great bulk of her ancient baronage wiped
out. Between foreign wars, successful or the reverse, and a wild
warfare of armed factions at home, stability had been destroyed.
The prolonged reign of strong rulers maintaining one policy was an
absolute condition of recuperation. The way in which Henry secured it
was entirely characteristic and entirely successful. The sword, the
poniard, and the headman’s axe or the dungeon, were normally relied on
by rulers whose seat was uncertain. Henry acted on a strictly original
scheme. When he took the field against rebels, he sent before him
proclamations of pardon to those who would come in; and he kept his
word. He did not massacre the routed foe: he spared them, seizing only
their leaders. He was responsible for no murders. A Lambert Simnel or
a Perkin Warbeck when captured was not hanged out of hand, but sent to
join the scullions, or set in the stocks as an impostor. Executions
were singularly rare; rebels who might become powerful merely had their
claws clipped by fines and confiscations--very efficiently clipped, no
doubt. Where imprisonment was resorted to, the confinement was seldom
harsh; and the king never had qualms about restoring a quondam rebel
to favour and authority, if he judged that his man would show himself
worthy of the faith reposed in him. When Surrey’s gaoler offered to let
him go free, Surrey refused to escape; the king had put him in ward,
and the king alone should release him. The king did so, and gave him a
command of the highest trust. Kildare set authority at defiance when
he was Deputy in Ireland, and when he was deposed, “All Ireland cannot
rule this man,” said his enemies. “Then let this man rule all Ireland,”
quoth Henry, and restored him to the Deputyship. Neither Surrey nor
Kildare gave him cause for repentance.
Such a record would have entitled Henry to praise as a prince of
unparalleled magnanimity, but for its common-sense accompaniment
of fines and confiscations. But in fact, to penalise rebellion in
some sort was an absolute necessity; not to have done so would have
jeopardised the throne. The method adopted might not be heroic, but it
was supremely practical; inasmuch as it wrought the minimum of positive
injury to the punished, while at once depriving them of power to harm
and supplying the king himself with the sinews of government, of which
he was sorely in need. It was dictated quite as much by policy as by
magnanimity, but the mere fact that Henry recognised it from the outset
as sounder policy than any precedents, recent at any rate, suggested,
is testimony to the acuteness of his moral perceptions as well as to
the keenness of his intelligence. Nor is it fair to deprive Henry of
the credit of magnanimity, merely because the magnanimity paid. To
realise that it did pay and prove completely successful, we have only
to observe that after the battle of Stoke there was no baronial rising
in England. Warbeck got all his support either from the exiles or from
foreign courts: when he tried to raise the West of England on his own
account, he collapsed ignominiously. It is true that an army of Cornish
insurgents had marched to Blackheath just before, and had there been
broken up; but that was a purely popular rising in protest against
taxation, and its chiefs were a blacksmith and a lawyer.
III
THE TUDOR ABSOLUTISM AND THE EXCHEQUER
It was not sufficient, however, merely to secure the sceptre in the
hands of a strong king; it was necessary further to establish a strong
system. For half a century the great power and estates of individual
barons had enabled them to keep the country in perpetual turmoil.
The idea of universal obedience to the established government simply
because it was established had vanished from the military and political
classes: the idea even of concerted government by one class, guided by
its interests as a class, had disappeared; it was only the personal
factor, personal interests, that counted. Below the baronage, the
gentry who bordered on the baronage, and their retainers, townsfolk and
country folk stood aloof from the fighting, and lived as peacefully
as they might--all things considered, with a wonderful freedom from
disturbance. But standing aloof from the fighting, they had perforce
stood aloof also from the business of government, which fell to the
military faction that happened for the time being to have the upper
hand. They were in short ready to support and profit by a government
which gave promise of peace and stability, order and justice; but
they were not ready to organise such a government for themselves, or
to take a prominent part in conducting it. Under such conditions, the
Yorkists had established a despotism, as the only workable form of
government. But their despotism was one that rested almost exclusively
on the personal forcefulness of the ruler. It was Henry’s task to keep
the effective power concentrated in the King’s hands, but to give it
a constitutional colour--to make the nation feel it as a government
by consent. It was therefore necessary to eliminate factors which
naturally tended to disturbance--in other words, to deprive the
individual barons of the power of aggressive self-assertion; and at the
same time, so to treat the naturally orderly elements of society as to
keep them on the side of the government.
This was the root-principle of the Tudor Absolutism, devised and put
into practice by the first Tudor king, and systematically carried
out by his son and grand-daughter. The system carried England to the
first place among the nations. But it broke down when the Stuarts
ignored its fundamental principle, and so treated the naturally orderly
elements of society as to turn them against the government. For under
the system, those elements acquired the power of organisation and
self-protection, as the accompaniment of the prosperity they enjoyed
increasingly; and it followed that the system could only remain stable
so long as there was essential harmony and sympathy between the monarch
and his subjects.
For the concentration of power, effective power, in the king’s hands,
money was essential; while to keep the general population contented, it
was necessary that their purses should not be subjected to too severe
exactions, which must fall elsewhere. Henry directed them against the
nobility. The nation at large had no objection; the king’s treasury was
filled and the power of the nobles curtailed by the same operation.
Thus the king eliminated the disturbing factor, or allowed it to
eliminate itself. When noblemen got themselves mixed up with treasons,
they could not complain if their lives were spared and their goods paid
the forfeit. They had been wont to maintain great households, every man
having in his service the nucleus of an army. These crowds of retainers
were forbidden by law, as being, for obvious reasons, a public danger.
If noblemen, accustomed to over-ride the law, chose to keep up their
households in despite of it, they could not expect sympathy when they
were called upon to pay in cash the penalty of breaking the law. These
measures were not only thoroughly defensible as being entirely free
from any taint of injustice; they also served directly to relieve
taxation, to fill the royal coffers, and to make wanton insurrection
difficult.
Yet, while keeping within what might be called legitimate bounds, as he
habitually did while Morton was alive, the king undoubtedly permitted
himself to apply methods which savoured of trickery. He made great
parade of a war with France, appealing to national patriotism to supply
the funds. The appeal was successful, but there was no corresponding
expenditure on the campaign. Excellent reasons for inactivity were of
course forthcoming, but it is none the less certain that no activity
was ever contemplated. All that was intended was a demonstration which
might induce the French monarch to buy the English king off with
solid cash--as he eventually did. The whole transaction was eminently
profitable, but Henry had certainly got his money out of his own
subjects by false pretences. The same plea was resorted to, to get
benevolences authorised, when the famous dilemma traditionally--but
as it would seem quite unjustly--attributed to Cardinal Morton
was applied. People who lived handsomely could obviously afford a
contribution by curtailing their extravagance; people who did not live
handsomely must have wealth laid by. In either case, there could be
no inability to serve the king’s need. The spirit which prompted the
invention of that dilemma is illustrated in a story reported by Bacon
as traditional. Henry paid a visit to the Earl of Oxford at Henningham,
where he was sumptuously entertained, and on his departure passed
out through a lane of the earl’s retainers drawn up to do him honour.
“These, no doubt, are your menial servants,” observed the king. The
earl demurred; they were not menials, but retainers, who had turned out
to do him credit when he had so distinguished a guest. Whereupon “The
king started a little, and said, ‘By my faith, my lord, I thank you for
my good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my sight.
My attorney must speak with you.’ And it is part of the report that the
earl compounded for no less than fifteen thousand marks.” It is obvious
that such a story might have been developed out of some really quite
justifiable incident; but it is tolerably certain that it was not only
in his closing years that Henry displayed what we may call an unkingly
acquisitiveness.
In passing, however, it may be remarked that this was a family trait.
Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s prejudice against spending a
shilling that could be kept in her purse, or neglecting any plausible
pretext for attracting coin into it. She also inherited his business
principle of repaying every loan he contracted with unfailing
punctuality. Henry VIII. did not indeed practise economy, but he could
haggle over a money bargain as keenly as his father or his daughter,
and his generosity, when he indulged it, was usually at the expense of
another pocket than his own. The art of appropriating in the public
eye credit to which he was not in the least entitled, was one of which
he was a past master; it was one the value of which his father, who
certainly neglected any efforts to make himself personally popular,
somewhat underrated. Thrift is a virtue; for Henry VII., a particularly
necessary virtue; but it is not one that under any circumstances helps
to make him who exercises it attractive. When it assumes a sordid
aspect, it becomes definitely repellent.
That did not trouble Henry; he wanted money, and during the greater
part of his reign he got it without flagrant extortion; with such
success, too, that in his later years he was able almost entirely to
work without calling Parliament: the skill with which he conducted his
foreign negotiations on the same cash principles contributing not a
little to this result.
IV
COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY
It was characteristic of Henry, and somewhat unfortunate for his
reputation, that he cared nothing at all about investing his policy
with any showiness unless some specific end was to be gained thereby.
The objects his government had in view were essentially prosaic:
commonplace they cannot be called, because in a mediæval monarch they
were eminently original. It was customary for kings to interfere in
commercial affairs chiefly when they saw their way to collect by so
doing contributions to the exchequer, or when it seemed worth while
to make enactments in favour of capital as against labour. Henry has
the credit of being the first English king who clearly recognised
commercial development as a primary care of government: which hitherto
only the oligarchical city-states of Italy and the German free-towns
had done. It is true that he was quite ready to subordinate the
commercial to a political end; to attack those who sheltered his
enemies, not with pikes and culverins but with commercial restrictions
only less injurious to English trade than to that of the antagonist.
He did so without suffering from the illusion that the loss of the
foreign merchant was the gain of the English. In these cases he
weighed the economic loss against the political gain. In mediæval
practice, the economic consideration would have counted for practically
nothing in the scale. In the eyes of some politicians to-day, no
political advantage would be worth counting as against an economic
inconvenience--and it is usually extremely difficult to show that a
political advantage will accompany an economic inconvenience. But Henry
was only just emerging from mediæval conceptions. The remarkable thing
is that he realised commerce as an object of policy at all, not that
he rated its importance lower than Adam Smith: that he relaxed the
mediæval theory, not that he did not discard it altogether.
This argument is not to be misunderstood. It has nothing to do with
the rightness or wrongness of any economic theory, but only with the
place of economics in the whole scheme of government. Henry thought it
worth while, as every king before him would have done, almost to cut
off England from her best market for her most paying product, wool,
if he could thereby force the archduke’s government to withdraw its
effective countenance from Perkin Warbeck. But he made it a constant
object of his policy to negotiate the opening of fresh markets for that
commodity, and when he came to terms with the archduke, the commercial
benefits to be secured by the treaty known as the _Intercursus Magnus_
were his first care.
As Henry was the first to give commercial considerations a leading
place in his system, so he is to be distinguished for the attention he
gave to shipping; on which head Bacon has a rather remarkable note, to
the effect that he deserves praise for perceiving that in this instance
it was worth while to diminish commerce for the sake of developing
the marine--to subordinate the economic loss to the political gain.
If Bacon read Henry’s mind aright, he was not under the delusion
that the protection of English shipping interests by his successive
Navigation Acts was of direct economic advantage; but he did see that
it was worth while to pay the price in order to give England such a
mercantile navy as in Bacon’s own day enabled her to win the supremacy
of the seas. Those Acts, restricting the importation of foreign goods
to English ships, raised the price of imports without benefiting any
English industry at all except that of the shippers; but the impetus
given to shipping provided the country with a fighting force at sea
which ultimately enabled her to challenge the might of Spain. The naval
development of England was the work of the Tudor dynasty, though Edward
I., Edward III., and Henry V., had ideas. Whether the Navigation Acts
really did give the impetus attributed to them--as to which economists
may dispute--the intention is unmistakable, and the foresight which
deliberately set up naval development as an end to be pursued is a very
clear mark of Henry’s statesmanship. The creation of the English navy
is generally credited either to King Alfred or to Henry VIII.; but the
latter certainly inherited the conception from his father.
It is matter for regret, but hardly for reproach, that the king did not
apply his ideas of maritime expansion more actively in another field,
that of oceanic exploration. Portugal and Spain were allowed to take
the lead. Yet it was so well known that the English king was favourable
to such enterprises that it appears only to have been an accident which
placed Christopher Columbus in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella
instead of in Henry’s. How history might have been affected if the
West Indies had fallen in the first instance to England instead of to
Spain, is an interesting subject of speculation. But Spain won the
prize. The sailors who put out from Bristol port tried their chance in
more northerly latitudes; the territories they discovered were very
unpromising; and after the outset the Genoese (or Venetian) Cabots,
sailing in command of English crews, naturally enough got little
support from the king. But at the outset--that is, before it seemed
probable if not certain that Spain and Portugal, by right of priority
backed by a Papal Bull, had, so to speak, staked out a claim to
all that was worth having--Henry gave material encouragement to the
exploring spirit.
There was, indeed, one important economic problem--with
concomitants--at grappling with which no serious attempt was made. This
was the growing agricultural depression: due in part to legitimate and
in part to illegitimate action on the part of landowners. There was a
very large demand for English wool for foreign looms. Sheep-breeding
was seen to be highly lucrative, whereas tillage was not. The landowner
saw no sufficient reason why he should be called upon to provide
employment for a quantity of labour which brought him in a small
return, when the employment of a very little labour over the same area
would bring him a large return. Therefore he converted his arable
lands into pasture for sheep. Economic history abounds in cases of
the displacement of labour by the decay, temporary or permanent, of
some industry which is ceasing to be lucrative: it abounds also with
examples of legislative attempts to maintain the decaying industries,
and to compel some one or other to provide employment for the displaced
labour. Such attempts appear to be doomed to failure. No remedy has
yet been found except the development of fresh industries which in
course of time absorb that displaced labour. Even in the twentieth
century, that is a process which might take years to accomplish; in
the period which we are considering, the rural displacement took a
century to remedy. Political altruists, like More or Somerset, tried
to set legislation to work, but with the usual want of success. The
encouragement of commercial enterprise which begets new industries
was the only hopeful direction to work in, and to that Henry’s policy
tended; but it was not till Elizabeth’s government pursued the same
policy that the industrial situation was appreciably affected.
Legislation did a little towards checking the rapidity with which small
holdings were being absorbed into great estates, and great estates were
being converted into sheep-runs, but it never amounted to more than a
very feeble brake. The problem is one which still awaits a satisfactory
solution.
V
JUDICATURE
Bacon enumerates with applause a variety of good laws enacted by Henry.
He was not in fact remarkable as a legislator, but his modifications
of the law were all save one in the nature of removal of abuses. There
are, however, two of his enactments which demand special attention. The
first of these was the Act of 1487, which gave statutory recognition
to judicial functions which had for some time been exercised by the
Privy Council or a committee thereof, sitting in a room known as the
Star Chamber. In later days, this Court of Star Chamber was perverted
into an instrument of tyranny; in Henry’s time, it was the only
judicial body which was out of reach of the fear or suspicion of being
terrorised by a powerful noble. It had come into being because the
Sanction of the ordinary law was inadequate to deal with barons who
chose to over-ride the law. The Privy Council could make and enforce
its decrees without fear. Under these conditions, the powers it had
assumed were necessary to the assertion of the royal authority against
offenders who contemned the normal Courts.
Without the confident maintenance of the king’s authority against such
offenders, the recurrence of the anarchy of the last fifty years would
have constantly threatened; but it is obvious that the powers needed
to that end might be misused for the ends of tyranny. Yet for more
than a century the Court exercised its functions unmistakably for the
public weal. Henry’s Act is notable, not as creating the Court, but as
formally recognising and regulating its duties; a sound step, tending
to prevent its abuse, not to introduce its use.
The other Act, however, that of 1495, is not capable of any such
defence. It was abused from the beginning, and was the great instrument
of those exactions by the notorious Empson and Dudley, which so stain
the record of the latter half of Henry’s reign. Its repeal was one
of the first and most popular acts of his successor. It is to be
remembered, however, that though Empson and Dudley were not slow in
getting to their evil work, their grosser activities were exercised in
the last decade of the reign after Cardinal Morton’s decease. Henry
was never generous; but the thrift and “nearness” of his earlier
days took some time in developing into the grasping sordidness of
his later years. More than half his reign had passed before the term
extortionate could be applied to him without exaggeration. The Act,
when it was passed, purported to be, and probably was, intended to
prevent offenders against the law from escaping justice through lack
of an accuser. It permitted judges to institute in their own Courts,
on information laid by a resident in the district, proceedings for
offences not involving penalties affecting the life or limb of
the guilty party. Such men as Empson and Dudley, however, had no
difficulty--with partial if not complete connivance from the king--in
procuring information which would enable them under colour of law to
impose extortionate fines for the king’s benefit and incidentally to
extract from the victims very handsome perquisites for themselves.
VI
FOREIGN POLICY
The reign of Henry V. had made the English king as powerful a monarch
as any in Europe. The sixty-three years that intervened between his
death and the accession of Henry VII. saw England lose her pride of
place among the nations. On the other hand, the attempt of Charles
the Bold to create a central Burgundian kingdom had failed, while,
partly on the wreck of his schemes, Louis XI. had consolidated the
French monarchy, and the kingdom he left to Charles VIII. required
for its completion only the effective absorption of Brittany. The
union of Aragon and Castile by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella
had raised Spain to a new position, which in like manner lacked but
one thing, the conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada, for its
complete establishment. Maximilian, “King of the Romans,” heir to
Austria and practically heir to the Imperial crown, had strengthened
his own position by marrying the Duchess of Burgundy, Charles the
Bold’s daughter, and thus acquiring a paramount interest in the wealthy
Netherlands. England, with her internal turmoils and her lost military
prestige, had for the moment lost all weight in the counsels of Europe.
Even had the immediate termination of civil discord been assured, she
was too much exhausted to recover her place by force of arms; and as
long as there was a Yorkist Pretender at large, civil discord could not
be regarded as conclusively at an end. Nevertheless, even during the
years while his dynasty was threatened, the king’s diplomatic skill
completely changed the relations of England and the Continental Powers;
while his policy towards Scotland kept the normal hostility of the
Northern kingdom in check, and bore ultimate fruit in the union of the
crowns, a century afterwards. He did not, like Wolsey--his disciple as
far as methods were concerned--achieve or aim at a dominant position;
but when English interests were concerned, the voice of England could
not in his later years be neglected, as at the beginning of the reign.
He worked not by exploits in the stricken field but by diplomacy,
therein illustrating his modernity. He sent armies into Brittany
and Picardy, but they were intended to threaten, not to strike. He
found a kindred spirit in Ferdinand of Aragon: of whom Louis XII. in
later years complained that he had once cheated him. “He lies,” said
Ferdinand, with pride; “I have cheated him three times.” Ferdinand’s
respect was reserved for Henry, whom he could not cheat at all, or even
out-wit, which is not quite the same thing. Henry did not cheat--that
is, he did not break faith; but his engagements were always so
carefully hedged that the smallest evasion on the part of an ally could
be made an adequate ground for complete evasion on his own. He could
not prevent the absorption of Brittany; but the French king, as soon as
he turned his ambitions towards Italy, found that Henry could hamper
him so seriously that he willingly bought him off. Maximilian remained
impecunious--harmless, therefore, unless he could persuade some one
else to finance him--since the Netherlands declined to recognise his
authority. As for Ferdinand, Henry fought him with his own weapons; and
evenly matched as they were, the Englishman did not prove less adept
than the Spaniard. Their first treaty seemed a very one-sided affair;
but Henry in fact won by it that recognition which was of the first
importance to him at that early stage, while he appeared to render in
return a great deal more than he actually gave. In 1495, the Spanish
sovereigns attached so much value to his alliance that in spite of
haggling they were obliged next year to concede him his own terms,
which, though not extravagant, were much higher than they liked, and
very much higher than he would have ventured even to propose six or
seven years earlier. But they could still regard the betrothal of their
daughter Katherine to the Prince of Wales as something of an act of
grace on their part. Four years later, it is evident that they thought
Henry could better afford to break that marriage off than they could
themselves: and again a little later, when Prince Arthur died, they
were not a whit less desirous than Henry himself of betrothing the
young widow to the new Prince of Wales. This restoration of status
Henry achieved at the cost of nothing more than some military parade
which was very much more than recouped out of the French treasury.
The key to Henry’s success is to be found just in the fact that the
most astute of his rivals was quite unable to trick him; secondly, in
his skilful avoidance of any measures which committed him to a position
from which he could not retreat without loss of prestige. His value
to Spain lay chiefly in his ability to hamper France. Presently Spain
awoke to his capacity for restricting the hampering process precisely
within the limits which were convenient to himself, which might be very
much narrower than suited her. Presently again it appeared that he
might find it still more convenient to join hands with France, which
would minimise the use to be made of Maximilian. Instead of Henry being
in need of assistance against France, which might be doled out at the
convenience of Spain, Spain had to supply inducements to keep England
on her side. As a matter of fact, Henry to the last needed Ferdinand
quite as much as Ferdinand needed him, but succeeded in giving a
different impression.
VII
CHARACTER
Our survey so far seems to show conclusively that for some two-thirds
of his reign Henry conducted the business which had devolved upon
him not only with remarkable practical success but without at
all justifying the sinister impression of his character which is
indubitably prevalent. Yet, even without the record of his later years,
as to which something remains to be said, this unattractive impression
is not unnatural. We feel that a great ruler of a great nation ought to
have something about him, majestic, splendid, heroic. We even forgive a
man for evil deeds done in a grand style; we do not feel our admiration
stirred even by good deeds done in a pedestrian style. Magnanimity
loses its flavour when we scent policy in it. We are offended with
a king who is not kingly, and kingliness demands those Aristotelian
virtues which are generally rendered as Magnanimity and Magnificence.
They are attributes in which the seventh Henry is conspicuously
deficient.
A phrase at the beginning of the foregoing paragraph was employed
with definite intention. Henry treated kingship as a business. He
entered upon it very much as a new managing director might enter upon
the conduct of a great concern which demands re-organisation. He knows
that the retention of his position depends on his successfulness; that
success is possible only if he has a free hand, while his board likes
to think that it is exercising the real control. He has to establish
confidence in himself within, and to re-establish confidence in the
house without. He avoids palpable injustice; no one can call him
dishonest; he knows exactly how far he can trust clients, and rely
on the co-operation of other establishments in a joint policy; and
he makes that business a distinct success--but he is not very likely
to make himself personally popular, or in any sense an object of
enthusiasm. For that, something is needed over and above a strict and
capable attention to business; and the something over and above was
wanting in Henry Tudor. In keenness of intelligence, he was more than
a match for the most astute of living statesmen. The general rectitude
of his aims was commendable; the moderation of his methods was
meritorious. He did good service to the nation over which he ruled. He
was not cruel; he was not capricious; he was never guided by prejudice
or passion; but he remains hopelessly and irredeemably unsympathetic.
Yet had he died within a year or two of his best minister, his portion
would have been cold praise, but still praise. He outlived Morton by
nearly nine years, whose baleful shadow is over his whole career,
turning a negative into a positive dislike. For in those years every
baser quality of which there is any hint in the earlier days becomes
intensified.
He had always treated marriage primarily as an affair of politics,
as was natural and inevitable, but with a sufficient respect for its
moral aspects to keep him faithful to his own wife. Yet when his son
died, the idea of joining the widow to his second son had for him
none of that repulsion which it excited almost universally in his
day. It is even said that when his own queen died he contemplated
marrying Katherine himself. It is quite certain that he contemplated
marrying Katherine’s sister Joanna of Castile, although he knew her
to be mentally deranged. His economy degenerated into niggardliness;
his politic scheming to fill his treasury developed into a griping
greed for gold. Empson and Dudley carried on their nefarious work of
extortion with his knowledge and sanction. He grew vindictive, and when
Thomas More opposed a subsidy in the Parliament of 1504, he sought an
excuse for fining the father, and the “beardless boy” himself had to
retire into private life, lest a worse thing should befall him. He had
always considered himself at liberty to break the spirit of a promise
provided that he kept the letter; but, if tradition does not wrong him,
when the Earl of Suffolk was surrendered on promise that he would not
put him to death, he took care to suggest to the Prince of Wales that
the promise would not bind his heir when his time came.
The man revealed to us in these later years is ugly, sordid, very
unlovely. But this man does not truly or fairly present to us the
real Henry who restored order in England, and recovered for her a
respectable position among the nations; holding his own in a singularly
difficult situation and keeping at bay the onslaughts of an embittered
faction at the cost of a quite astonishingly small amount of bloodshed,
and with the minimum of anything that could reasonably be called
injustice towards antagonists. This at least England owes to him, that
he did more than any of his predecessors to lay the foundations of her
commercial greatness; that he recognised more clearly than any of them
the benefit of her maritime development.
The man moreover was not altogether lacking in some finer qualities
which seem to have withered when his degeneration set in. He who
seems almost an incarnation of chill-blooded, unemotional craftiness
was capable of very human and very tender feeling. A record from the
hand of an anonymous contemporary, when his son Arthur died, has been
transcribed before, and is worth transcribing again.
“In the year of our Lord God 1502, the second day of April, in the
castle of Ludlow, deceased Prince Arthur, first begotten son of our
sovereign Lord, King Henry the Seventh, and in the 17th year of his
reign. Immediately after his death Sir Richard Poole his Chamberlain,
with other of his Council, wrote and sent letters to the King and
Council to Greenwich, where his Grace and the Queen’s lay, and
certified them of the Prince’s departure. The which Council discreetly
sent for the King’s ghostly father, a friar observant, to whom they
showed this most sorrowful and heavy tidings, and desired him in his
best manner to show it to the King. He in the morning of the Tuesday
following, and somewhat before the time accustomed, knocked at the
King’s chamber door; and when the King understood that it was his
Confessor, he commanded to let him in. The Confessor then commanded all
those there present to avoid, and after one salutation began to say _Si
bona de Manu Domini suscipimus, mala autem quare non sustineamus?_ and
so showed his Grace that his dearest son was departed to God. When his
Grace understood that sorrowful heavy tidings he sent for the Queen,
saying that he and his Queen would take the painful sorrows together.
After that she was come, and saw the King her lord and that natural and
painful sorrow, as I have heard say, she with full great and constant
comfortable words, besought his Grace that he would, first after God,
remember the weal of his own noble person, the comfort of his realm
and of her. She then said that my lady his mother had never no more
children but him only, and that God by his grace had ever preserved him
and brought him where that he was; over that, how that God had left
him yet a fair prince, two fair princesses; and that God is where he
was, and we are both young enough; and that the prudence and wisdom of
his Grace sprung over all Christendom, so that it should please him
to take this accordingly thereunto. Then the King thanked her of her
good comfort. After that she was departed and come to her own chamber,
natural and motherly loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart, that
those that were about her were fain to send for the King to comfort
her. Then his Grace, of true, gentle, and faithful love, in good haste
came and relieved her, and showed her how wise counsel she had given
him before; and he for his part would thank God for his son, and would
she should do in like wise.”
That story, obviously derived from an actual witness, gives a fine
impression of Elizabeth; but it no less obviously implies a very
genuine affection subsisting between her and Henry, and a very
sincere devotion in both to their son. Henry, however, was by nature
a reserved and somewhat lonely man, and Elizabeth’s death not long
after deprived him of the last softening influence. His whole life
had been a tremendous strain. His boyhood and early manhood aged him
prematurely. From the day that he landed in England to wrest the
sceptre from Richard, the strain had never relaxed; the bow had never
been slackened. At five-and-forty, he may well have been as much worn
out as are men less severely tried twenty-five years later in life.
The work he had to do was anything but inspiriting; he did it with
dogged patience. The task was thankless, and he got little thanks. It
was accomplished ungraciously, and he receives no grace in return. A
dreary life, and a dreary reign; yet the reign is not without admirable
qualities, nor the life without gleams of nobility.
CARDINAL WOLSEY
I
APPRECIATIONS
He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
Tied all the kingdom: simony was fair-play:
His own opinion was his law: i’ the presence
He would say untruths and be ever double,
Both in his words and meaning. He was never,
But when he meant to ruin, pitiful:
His promises were, as he then was, mighty:
But his performance, as he is now, nothing.
In these words, Shakespeare or another has summed up the character of
the great Cardinal as it presented itself to his enemies. As Katharine
painted him, posterity has for the most part regarded him. Men who have
risen from the ranks, and in their prosperity assume the state and
splendour appropriate to hereditary position, are rarely popular. When
they are so, it is because they have identified their names in some
sort with popular causes. Of all the statesmen who for a long term of
years controlled or seemed to control the destinies of England, not one
perhaps has found apologists so few as Thomas Wolsey.
Of recent years, however, there has been a change. It has hardly
yet made its way into popular accounts; but the attitude of serious
historians has been at least largely modified by the publication of the
State Papers under the editorship of the late Dr. Brewer, and of his
Introductions to those volumes. The doctrine used to be that Wolsey was
a man of exceeding arrogance who acquired a pernicious mastery over the
mind of Henry VIII., and whose political achievement consisted mainly
in a miserably fruitless meddling with foreign affairs in which England
had no concern, dictated by an insatiable ambition for the Papal crown.
Whereas Dr. Brewer and Bishop Creighton after him have laid it down
that Wolsey raised England from the position of a third or fourth-rate
Power to an equality with the greatest nations in Europe.
During the years of his power, it is at least clear that Wolsey did
achieve for England such a position among the nations as she had not
held, at any rate since the days of Henry V.; and that he did this,
not, like Henry V., by aggressive militarism, but by diplomatic skill:
that he sought to be, and to a great extent succeeded in being, the
pacificator of Europe as well as the aggrandiser of England. In his
aim and method, however, he followed in the footsteps of Henry VII.,
and his policy was a natural development, though a vast extension, of
that laid down by that astute monarch. And in the second aspect of his
policy, he was again developing that of the old king, in striving to
make the power of the Crown independent alike of the old nobility and
of Parliament.
[Illustration: _CARDINAL WOLSEY_
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the collection at Christ Church,
Oxford_]
But a recent biographer[A] has ventured so far as to declare that
“Wolsey stands out as the greatest statesman England has ever produced;
and it is not going beyond what records reveal if we say his was the
master-mind of his age”--the age of Erasmus and Luther.
[A] Taunton, “Thomas Wolsey, Legate and Reformer,” p. 3.
That is unfortunately a species of criticism which excites the spirit
of hostility. Wolsey was of that type of politicians, rare in England,
who have made foreign affairs their first interest: also he was, what
probably no other Englishman ever has been, beyond all comparison the
ablest diplomatist among his contemporaries. Diplomacy is a field in
which the reputation of England does not stand high. But one asks
at once--What in fact did his diplomacy achieve? And, diplomacy
apart, the great upheaval which issued in the Reformation was in full
activity when Wolsey was at the height of his power and influence. The
master-mind of his age therefore could hardly have failed to leave his
mark on the Reformation. What did Wolsey accomplish--nay, what did he
even attempt to accomplish--in that connexion?
II
CARDINALIS PACIFICATOR
Thomas Wolsey was born probably in 1471. His father was a citizen of
Norwich--a grazier. The popular voice calls him a butcher. The boy was
sent very young to Oxford, taking his degree when he was only fourteen
years old, and otherwise achieving high distinction. At Magdalen he
remained, fulfilling various college functions till the end of 1499.
Before that date, John Colet, five years his senior, had commenced his
famous course of lectures, introducing a new style of scholarship and
a new type of biblical criticism. Thomas More, seven years his junior,
had finished his University career. Erasmus had paid Oxford a flying
visit. There is no trace of any personal association between Wolsey and
these lights of the new school: yet there is no doubt whatever that
as an educationist he was in close sympathy with them. The facts are
therefore the more significant of some incompatibility of temperament:
for we should naturally have expected scholars, agreed upon an
innovating theory, to have been drawn together.
Acting at this time in a tutorial capacity to the sons of the
Marquess of Dorset, Wolsey was rewarded by a living at Limington: and
the ex-bursar of Magdalen was in a very short time a quite notable
pluralist, and in close personal relations with various important
personages, culminating in his appointment as Chaplain to Henry VII.
in 1506. The king, whose only living rival in diplomatic astuteness
was Ferdinand of Spain, was prompt to discern the kindred abilities of
his new servant, who within a year or two was successfully employed to
carry through important negotiations both in Flanders and in Scotland.
In April 1509 the old king died. His successor was hailed with
acclamation on all hands. Of splendid physique, and glowing with
martial ardour as was natural in a healthy boy of eighteen, the
military section of society saw in him promise of a revival of the
glories of Agincourt. The scholars too claimed their part in him,
as he joyously claimed fellowship with them. The populace shouted
applause when the detested Empson and Dudley were sent to the block.
The veterans who occupied the chief thrones of Europe dreamed that the
innocent youth would be to them as clay in the hands of the potter.
Every one was satisfied.
For a little while all went merrily. The English nobles thirsted
for war with France: Ferdinand and Maximilian had no difficulty in
persuading the young monarch that in alliance with them he might
achieve the laurels for which he hankered. He was to begin the
fighting, they were to play at supporting him, and if by good luck
something more substantial than laurels should be achieved, that of
course would go to his partners.
Wolsey’s old pupil the Marquess of Dorset was sent to Spain in command
of the expedition which was to begin the war, with the conquest of
Guienne in view. Dorset’s army wanted beer: they could only get wine,
which they considered thin. In effect they went on strike, and insisted
on coming home again. The marquess brought them back ignominiously,
without so much as a laurel-leaf.
Fox, Bishop of Winchester, perhaps the best of the old king’s surviving
ministers, had been pressed into the background by the warlike nobles;
but he had succeeded in introducing into the Council the man who was
to sweep the nobles themselves into the background. Wolsey was nobody
in particular, but he was a very clever man with immense organising
ability and an infinite capacity for detail and for hard work. The
fiasco was not repeated. In 1513, the army of invasion went to its
proper field, Picardy. It was not a haphazard picnic party, and it
captured Terouenne and Tournai. In the meantime, Surrey was shattering
the Scots army at Flodden. A few months later, Henry had discovered
that Ferdinand and Maximilian were using him as a cat’s-paw. Again a
few months passed, and Wolsey had beaten them at their own game. France
and England were in alliance. Then the uncontrollable changed the face
of things. King Louis died: Francis I. succeeded. But the brief dream
of the old kings had been finally dissipated: Henry was going to be
nobody’s cats-paw. He had found a minister more than worthy to follow
in his father’s footsteps.
In 1515 Wolsey was fully established not as the king’s chief adviser,
but in effect as his sole minister. In 1513 he was not yet guiding
the king’s policy: his work was mainly administrative. In 1514
the distinctive principle of his policy comes into full play. The
anti-Gallic theory is discarded. Thenceforth, the hand of England is
not against any Power in particular. As Foreign Minister, Wolsey’s
business is to see that the balance of power is maintained; that no
one prince shall be too far aggrandised; that each of them shall be a
check on the aggression of others; that all shall maintain a habitual
attitude of concession to England for the sake of her support; and that
this is to be effected without involving England in actual warfare.
Ferdinand dies in 1516; Maximilian in 1519. Charles V. succeeds both to
Spain and to the Empire. In the latter year, the destinies of Europe
are in the hands of three monarchs not one of whom is thirty years
old. Wolsey during the following years remains in effect the arbiter
of Europe till his hand is forced by Henry, and he finds himself
compelled to overt hostility with France. After the disaster of Pavia,
the blunder becomes manifest; his own policy is again allowed free
play, and the old domination is all but recovered when the affair of
the divorce wipes all other questions out of the field. The king’s
will must be carried out at all costs. Failing therein, the Cardinal
falls--irretrievably.
Two leading facts emerge. First: so long as Wolsey is allowed a free
hand to carry out his own policy, he does it with complete success.
Second: if the king elects to lay down a different policy, the Cardinal
has to carry that policy through as best he may. The idea that he ruled
the king is entirely fallacious. For some years, the king had the
wisdom to recognise that his minister’s views were sound. Then his
anti-Gallic leanings dominated him. Then he perceived his error, and
reverted to his minister’s policy; till again a purely personal motive
intervened, and policy again went to the winds. Since the personal
motive could not be satisfied without a revolution, Henry conducted
the revolution himself. The _rôle_ the king required of his minister
was one demanding other abilities than those of the Cardinal, and the
Cardinal was thrown to the wolves.
Effectively then it is true to say that while Wolsey held sway in
England, he was the arbiter of Europe. Whether it was for the good
of England that she should concern herself with being the arbiter of
Europe is another matter. It may be argued that the less she has to do
with Europe the better for her. But the theory of splendid isolation
for Great Britain is not the same thing as that theory applied to
England when Scotland was an independent nation in habitual alliance
with France, and always ready for hostilities. Even after Flodden the
menace on the Northern Border had to be taken into perpetual count.
Moreover, the advocates of that doctrine must still recognise that the
opposite view is legitimately maintainable; and it follows that the
statesman who, acting on the opposite view, successfully upheld English
predominance without plunging the country into sanguinary wars, is
entitled to a very high meed of praise.
Yet this does not express the whole of Wolsey’s achievement: for, when
he began to guide England’s policy, he had to win position for her,
not merely to maintain a position already held--a hard enough task
in itself. To say that she was no more than a third or fourth-rate
Power is an exaggeration. It was true in 1485: it had ceased to be
true in 1500. Long before the close of his reign, the first Tudor had
made himself a person of very considerable importance, whom none of
the continental Powers dreamed of ignoring, and with whom they treated
on something very like equal terms. This, however, was in no small
degree a matter of personal prestige. Henry’s reputation for astuteness
stood so high, not to speak of his credit for accumulated wealth, that
the Courts of the continent paid England’s king an amount of respect
which they would not have rendered to the power of England. With the
removal of his personality, England dropped to a lower plane, but
certainly did not become a negligeable quantity. If there was a brief
disposition to regard her not as negligeable but as futile, that was
due merely to the hastily formed conclusion that the young king was
a tender innocent. The old Henry’s position was recovered the moment
that Wolsey’s abilities were recognised. The marriage of the young
princess Mary to the old King of France in 1514, was precisely the kind
of stroke which Henry VII. would have made. It marked the fact that in
any leagues or combinations which foreign princes might contemplate, an
England thoroughly alive to her own interests, and thoroughly capable
of safe-guarding them, must be reckoned with. In producing this result,
Wolsey’s administrative ability as well as his diplomatic skill had
played no small part; since to that was owing, in a great degree, the
successes which attended the English arms in 1513; successes which were
effective reminders that what English troops had done before they might
learn to do again.
So far, however, what Wolsey had done was little if at all more than
to restore the position of 1508; though this was accompanied by a
suggestion that English interference in Continental affairs might be
of a less purely defensive order than it had been under the late king.
The suggestion was very soon to be turned into fact; and for some
years kings and emperors and popes were to find that, whatever designs
they might have in hand, they would have no chance of carrying them
out beyond the point which Wolsey might be induced to sanction. The
distinguishing feature of Wolsey’s method was his reliance on purely
diplomatic action, to which end he had the aid of a particularly
capable subordinate in Richard Pace. The Cardinal habitually posed as
an arbitrator, composing the differences of Christendom and maintaining
that general peace which it was theoretically the special function of
the Roman Pontiff to secure.
For Ferdinand of Aragon, the leading idea was always to find an ally
who could be inveigled into doing his fighting for him without any
return. For Maximilian, the leading idea was to find an ally who would
subsidise him to do the fighting while he could evade his own part of
the bargain. Wolsey, by his alliance with Louis XII., turned the tables
on both of them. The alliance itself was practically terminated by the
accession of Francis in January 1515. France reaped the immediate
profit, for neither Spain nor the emperor would risk a course which
depended for success on a mutual fulfilment of obligations. Ferdinand
became friendly to Francis, but without any intention of giving him
effective support. When the latter’s progress in Italy seemed likely
to be too rapid, Wolsey entered into relations with Maximilian which
served as a check on Francis without filling the emperor’s purse. When
Ferdinand died, Charles, his successor, was only sixteen, and though
his counsellors were well disposed to France, being mainly Flemings,
there was no present prospect of vigorous intervention on his behalf.
Active hostility on the part of England would be dangerous, and when
Maximilian in turn died, both Charles and Francis were suitors for the
favour of the supreme minister in England. The turn of the wheel had
made them inevitable rivals. The imperial election went in favour of
Charles, that being less dangerous than the success of Francis would
have been, and it was now Wolsey’s policy to hold the balance between
the two. An era of universal peace was inaugurated; Charles and Francis
did not join in formal alliance, but England united with each of them.
III
WOLSEY AND THE FRENCH WAR
The inauguration of an era of universal peace is usually the prelude
to a war. A year after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Charles and
Francis were on the verge of hostilities. Wolsey negotiated with both,
ostensibly to bring about an accord. But in fact, England was committed
to support Charles: and the responsibility was with the Cardinal.
The conclusion to which the circumstances point is that the pressure
was too great for him to resist. Popular sentiment in England was
opposed to the French alliance. The queen was a warm adherent of her
young kinsman. The king was personally jealous of the achievements
of Francis, and had visions of the French crown or at least of the
recovery of Guienne. Wolsey probably felt that if he tried to maintain
his own policy he would alienate Henry, and if he alienated Henry--who
had just annihilated Buckingham--he would meet Buckingham’s fate amid
universal applause, and the anti-French policy would triumph in any
case. He elected to carry out the anti-French policy and remain at the
helm. Hostile critics would suggest that he was actuated by the desire
of obtaining the support of the emperor when the Papacy should become
vacant. Charles failed to keep his promise when Leo died, and gave his
support to another candidate; but neither then nor in the following
year when Clement VII. was elected--again with the support of
Charles--did Wolsey show any sign of changing his policy in consequence.
The English people had wanted the war; when they got it they paid for
it at first cheerfully. But no advantage accrued, not even appreciable
glory, and they tired of it. After Pavia, Henry thought the opportunity
had come to strike for the French crown; but such an effort demanded
more money. The business of getting it of course devolved on the
Cardinal. There was no hope of obtaining it legitimately from a
Parliament; Wolsey tried illegitimate methods--and failed. There was
no alternative but to drop the war policy. Wolsey made an advantageous
peace, and Charles promptly found himself obliged to come to terms with
Francis. But it is clear that from this moment Wolsey’s position with
his master became painfully uncertain.
Here then is the practical termination of Wolsey’s great period.
After this, the king is absorbed by the divorce, and the minister,
willy-nilly, must devote himself to that object--his own ruin being
the alternative. His diplomatic labours achieved no permanent result,
because the position won for England could only be maintained by
continuity of diplomatic effort and diplomatic skill. After her own
very different fashion, Elizabeth fifty years later was balancing
continental forces, and manipulating them to her own ends, in a manner
much less impressive and often indeed singularly undignified, but
certainly not less successful. And with her, the result was that the
England which Philip of Spain had hoped to make an appanage of his
own established herself as the indisputable mistress of the seas. The
change in the relative position of England between 1558 and 1588 was
far greater than between 1508 and 1528.
But Elizabeth worked with a perfectly free hand. Wolsey worked for a
master, who was quite capable of wrecking the minister’s schemes for
a purely personal end. He had to persuade that master to sanction
a policy which he never adopted with enthusiasm. He had to carry
it through in spite of the hostility of the governing classes, the
ill-will of the queen--who was still on terms of accord with her
husband--and his own extreme unpopularity with the mob. That is, he
had to work single-handed amidst extremely adverse conditions; and all
the circumstances being taken together, it may fairly be said that he
displayed a diplomatic genius unique among English statesmen.
IV
DOMESTIC POLICY
In the field of foreign affairs Wolsey’s policy and his methods were
both derived from Henry VII.: or perhaps it would be more accurate to
say he applied the same methods to a development of the same policy.
The invaluable make-weight was converted into the inevitable arbiter:
the means, a process of peaceful bargain-driving. The bargains were
usually in both cases profitable for England. Incidentally, they
generally contained unwritten clauses which were profitable also to the
Cardinal. There is no reason to suppose that any case occurred in which
Wolsey permitted essentials to be in the slightest degree affected by
considerations of his own gain. But he himself would never have thought
of disputing that he accumulated great profits out of his diplomatic
transactions.
The first objective then of Wolsey’s policy was the establishment of
England not merely as an important factor but as the dominant factor
in European politics: therein going beyond anything that Henry VII.
had contemplated, but still acting on lines laid down by him. In his
second objective, he was still a disciple of the old king. This was the
establishment of the Crown as a practical autocracy.
The primary condition of an absolutist government was a full treasury;
and here Wolsey had the immense advantage of the great hoards
accumulated during the last reign. In spite of the heavy expenditure
involved in ministering to the king’s pleasures, and on such pageantry
as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, government in Wolsey’s hands was
economically conducted. The great revenues which fell into his own
hands not merely from the numerous preferments he held in England,
but also from foreign sources, enabled him to defray the magnificence
of his own establishment, public as well as private: and there were
indirect methods of throwing much of the cost of the Court upon private
persons. It was not till 1523 that the Cardinal found himself forced
to look to the country for supplies by the necessities of a war budget.
For very nearly ten years he had carried on the government without
calling Parliament, although it had hardly been summoned during the
preceding decade; under a continuance of the same _régime_, England
might have become accustomed to doing almost without Parliament.
The second principle in establishing absolutism was the further
depression of the nobility, who--again, as in the days of Henry
VII.--were steadily kept from offices of State. Even the Howards
exercised no control; and the most powerful of all, the Duke of
Buckingham, was suddenly brought to the block. In that, as in
everything the king did that was unpopular, the minister was charged
with being the moving spirit, and his determination to destroy all
rivals was accounted the moving cause. As a matter of fact, the duke’s
execution fitted in with the Cardinal’s policy: but there is no direct
ground for supposing that he had any active share in the matter. On the
whole, there is no evidence that he was particularly vindictive. Still,
personal ambition apart, since none of the nobles would willingly
have been associated with him as a colleague it was necessary to the
carrying out of his policy that his rivals should have their talons
pared as far as possible; and also of course that there should be none
powerful enough to form a disaffected party. Wolsey knew that, except
for one or two ecclesiastics who had already in effect retired from the
political arena, he stood practically alone. He had to make himself
necessary to the king, and, since he could not be loved by the nobles,
it undoubtedly suited him that they should fear him. In the result he
succeeded so completely in destroying all possibility of opposition to
Henry’s will that there was no man in the kingdom whom the king could
not destroy if he chose merely to raise a finger.
Successful as he was in building up the power of the Crown, he was
still apparently at the height of his own influence when he learnt
that the power of the purse still lay elsewhere; and the king learnt
a very important lesson at the same time--a lesson which he was to
turn to account before very long--the importance of conciliating
popular sentiment. Money was needed for the French war. Wolsey would
have treated the Parliament, called to provide it, as a mere passive
instrument for carrying out the royal behest. Had the House of Commons
in 1523 suffered itself to be brow-beaten, it would have virtually
surrendered its place in the Constitution. The House refused to be
brow-beaten: it refused point-blank to discuss or to vote in the
Cardinal’s presence. When he retired in wrath, a substantial sum was
voted, but as a free grant to the king, not obligatory. Two years
later, more money was wanted. Wolsey did not dare to ask a Parliament
for it. He resorted to Benevolences, and found the citizens of London
obstinate in their assertion that Benevolences were illegal. However
willing Parliaments or burgesses might be to leave measures to the king
and his minister, they were absolutely determined to provide nothing
out of their own pockets unless their own consent had first been
obtained through strictly constitutional channels.
In this thing Henry was quick to prove himself shrewder than the
Cardinal. Like his daughter after him, he had an intuitive perception
of the national temper, and lost no time in repudiating the idea of
coercion. His personal popularity was doubled, and all the odium for
the attempt fell upon the minister. But the scheme towards which he was
strongly predisposed had been foiled, and Wolsey, though the result
favoured his own views, knew that it would be fatal to him if he failed
a second time to give effect to the king’s desires.
Therefore the Cardinal now gave himself up to the effort to meet his
master’s demands in the matter on which he had set his heart, the
separation from Katharine. But in this one matter, success for him was
sufficiently improbable from the outset, and as time went on events
which he was wholly unable to control made it a sheer impossibility. He
failed, and the failure spelt his ruin. Giving himself utterly to the
king’s service, his compliance did not save him. Hitherto he had been
a statesman, pursuing ends which certainly magnified both his country
and his sovereign with extraordinary ability and amazing success, by
methods certainly not more unscrupulous than were sanctioned by the
universal practice of the time. Now he devoted himself to an object
wholly unworthy, which he must have felt to be utterly unrighteous. The
king for whom he degraded himself served him--characteristically. Did
the fallen man feel that his punishment was just, even while the hand
that dealt it was supremely unjust? It would seem so. The sentiment, if
not the words, which Shakespeare put in his mouth is authentic:
O Cromwell, Cromwell!
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.
V
THE DIVORCE
The whole story of the divorce is an ugly one; no amount of sophistry
will ever make it anything else. Mr. Froude succeeded in persuading
himself that pure unsullied patriotism was Henry’s ruling motive: and
brings himself, apparently with some difficulty, to grant a qualified
pardon to Katharine for her resistance, on the ground that after all
she was a woman, and weak. If Henry had acted as some others have done,
and had taken up definitely the position that by hook or by crook the
legalisation of a new marriage for him was a national necessity, in
order that a male heir to the throne might be born, the issue would
have been a plain one. If bigamy could be justified on the grounds of
national expediency, there was a decently good case for authorising
a bigamous union. To provide a technical trick for evading the form
of bigamy would no doubt have made the process easier, not affecting
the ethics of it one way or other. But it followed logically that
national interests alone were first to be taken into consideration in
the selection of the new spouse. The fact that in that choice Henry was
guided by passion and no other consideration whatever is sufficient
proof that the actuating motive with him was not _salus populi suprema
lex_. The grotesque nemesis by which later on Henry found himself with
three acknowledged children of his body of whom two were born in what
was supposed to be wedlock, both in virtue of marriages which the
Courts had subsequently declared void, while the third, a boy, had no
pretensions to legitimate birth--that nemesis is really a _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the whole position.
If on the other hand the awakening of Henry’s conscientious scruples
had not coincided with a violent passion for another woman it would
have been easier to believe that they were genuine, and that all he
really wanted--as he frequently affirmed--was to have those scruples
allayed. A genuine doubt would assuredly have demanded an authoritative
pronouncement. Unfortunately, he made it perfectly clear that no
authority could allay the scruples; he was absolutely determined that
the Pope and the Cardinal between them must see to it that the doubts
should be confirmed.
The precise stage at which Henry discovered that the weal of his people
required a male heir of his body at any cost; at which his conscience
began to question the validity of the dispensation under which he had
married Katharine; at which he determined that Anne Boleyn should
supplant the queen: all these are matter of some doubt. It is fairly
clear that in 1526--certainly in 1527--if not before, Wolsey had been
made aware that the king was desirous of exchanging Katharine for Anne;
that Wolsey on his knees entreated the king to think better of it; that
he found the king obdurate. There is no sign at all that the ethics of
the divorce troubled Wolsey in any way; on the other hand no one has
ever questioned that the Boleyn marriage was a thing hateful to him
from every point of view. But he had to choose between lending himself
to the king’s desire and rushing on his own ruin. Perhaps there are
not many men who would have dared to take the nobler course; Wolsey,
_deteriora secutus_, none the less fell.
It would seem that Wolsey first set himself to discover some legal
expedient for nullifying the marriage, hit upon the idea that the
dispensation granted by Julius was invalid, and tried more than one
scheme with a view to its being pronounced invalid--hoping, it may
be, that the law’s delays would give the king time to get over his
infatuation for Anne, and that when--if ever--he should be legally free
to take a new wife, the new wife would be a more fitting person.
First of all then, Wolsey, as Papal Legate, took steps for holding a
Legatine Court in England before which the issue should be tried. But
this plan contained a material flaw. Katharine might appeal to the
Pope against the decision of the Legatine Court, and Wolsey, in the
event of such appeal, would become a mere party in the suit instead
of a judge. The Pope therefore must be induced either to give a
favourable pronouncement on his own account, or to appoint a Legatine
Court _ad hoc_--a Court whose judgment would be final. A very difficult
matter; for precisely at this time the recent misfortunes of France
were bearing their fruit: the emperor became entirely predominant in
Italy, and obtained complete control of Clement--and the emperor was
Katharine’s most affectionate nephew. So the hapless Pope, who was
very anxious to keep friends with Henry but was naturally even more
anxious not to offend Charles, desired above everything to evade giving
a decision himself. On the other hand, Wolsey felt that there must be
no pretext for subsequently questioning the legality of the process
by which the dispensation was to be quashed, and therefore it was
imperative that in form that process should convey the Papal sanction.
Besides this, he had a very powerful personal reason for insisting on
it. In England the Boleyn connection, who knew perfectly well what were
Wolsey’s views about Anne, were working hard and not without success
to destroy the king’s trust in the Cardinal, who saw his influence
tottering. Failure to procure the divorce would certainly mean for him
destruction; success, followed by the Boleyn marriage, would place more
power in the hands of the most hostile faction, and he would be left
absolutely alone to bear the whole obloquy of an extremely unpopular
measure, unless the ultimate responsibility could be forced on the
reluctant Pope.
As far as Wolsey was concerned, Clement won the game after apparently
yielding. A Legatine Commission was appointed, but Campeggio was
associated with Wolsey as judge: he managed to spend the best part
of a year in reaching England; it was in fact fifteen months after
the appointment that the Court began its sittings. A few weeks later,
the Pope revoked the case to Rome. For all practical purposes, the
revocation sealed the Cardinal’s fate.
For two years past Wolsey’s position, for all that it seemed to the
world so assured, had been extremely precarious. The king had sent
one agent to Rome behind his minister’s back. The agent’s mission
failed ignominiously, but the thing was significant. Wolsey had gone
to France on a diplomatic errand; on his return, instead of being
summoned to a confidential meeting with the king, he found Anne Boleyn
in the presence. He had been soundly rated by the king because, in
appointing an abbess to Wilton, he had rejected a most unsuitable
_protégée_ of the Boleyns. He knew the stake for which he was playing:
he can hardly have doubted, from the beginning of what was called “The
King’s Affair,” that his fate was bound up with success or failure.
The illusion that he ruled the king was one from which it does not
appear that he ever suffered himself. All he did was to rule England
and English policy precisely so long as he retained the personal
favour of the king, and his policy did not clash with any of the royal
predilections.
In this matter of the “divorce,” Wolsey has found an earnest apologist
in Father Taunton. In his view, it would seem that the Cardinal was
justified, because he believed that there really was a technical flaw
in the form of the dispensation as granted by Pope Julius: if there
was such a flaw, the king was entitled to the benefit of it: and its
existence would enable the Pope to quash the dispensation, without so
much as raising the question whether the granting of it at all was
_ultra vires_ for any Pope. Now the ingenuity of the lawyer who wins
his client’s case on a technical quibble may be admired--in a way: the
ingenuity of the ecclesiastic, who would have provided the Pope with a
golden bridge for evading an awkward question, is also to be admired.
But in presenting these grounds for admiration, the last possibility of
a _moral_ defence is given away. Persons honestly believing that the
relation between Henry and Katharine was by the moral law incestuous,
and could not be otherwise, despite any possible Papal dispensation,
were entitled to urge the dissolution of their union. But if that
relation was not inherently immoral, and was capable of being made
legal as well, then the barest sense of justice demanded, that no
dubious point of law should be brought in, in order to engineer a
dissolution.
The whole case for Wolsey, according to Father Taunton, rests precisely
on this very dubious point of law. The dispensation was formally
drawn to make the marriage between Henry and Katharine lawful even
if affinity had been contracted. But in the ordinary course, as the
law stood, a woman being not married but fully betrothed to a man
might not--although no actual marriage had taken place--marry that
man’s brother, her doing so being against “public honesty.” Since the
greater includes the less, and the whole includes the part, it would
seem obvious that a dispensation covering the actual marriage _ipso
facto_ covered the pre-contract. Yet the apologist would have it that
the Cardinal was satisfied to rest the _whole_ case for nullifying the
marriage on the position that the dispensation was technically invalid
because it did not specifically refer to “public honesty” as well as to
affinity. Such was the contemptible quibble by which the “master-mind
of his age” was prepared to procure a pronouncement that Katharine was
no wife--so that the Papacy might escape an awkward dilemma.
It is at least intelligible to maintain that circumstances may arise
under which, for the public safety, flagrant injustice towards an
individual may be and ought to be committed. That is undoubtedly the
feeling at the bottom of Mr. Froude’s argument. Possibly also it was
at the back of Father Taunton’s mind; but he does not put it forward.
If the doctrine itself be admitted, a loyal son of the Roman Church
is perhaps entitled to hold that it was right to sacrifice Katharine
in order to avoid raising a question extremely inconvenient to the
Papacy. Perhaps also that view is the excuse least derogatory to Wolsey
which can be offered. A review, however, of the entire context of the
documents which Father Taunton cites in part points rather to the
conclusion that the Cardinal did mean to argue that--dispensation or
no dispensation--affinity was an absolute bar; and intended to fall
back on the quibble only as a last desperate resort if the contraction
of affinity were disproved; that he at least wished to find the moral
ground for nullity maintained, but, if that should prove impossible,
was prepared to surrender the extreme Papal claim.
The view of the whole business resulting from a consideration of all
the facts so far as they can be certainly ascertained is entirely
consistent with the rest of the Cardinal’s career. Ambition made him
desire power; like other men of great intellect and strong will, he
knew himself fitted to hold it; like many other statesmen, and with
a good deal more reason than some, he imagined himself the only safe
guide for the State; and he knew that if he once fell there would
be for him no recovery. About 1526, when for a dozen years he had
been the greatest figure in the eyes of the Western world, he found
himself presented with a dilemma. He must execute the king’s will in a
particular matter--or fall.
The king’s will would at least serve the State well in one respect if
it issued in providing a male heir to the throne. Also, if the marriage
were really contrary to the moral law and outside the dispensing power,
it would be in the interest of public morals that the fact should be
declared. So far, no one could possibly be blamed for maintaining the
king’s case. That was the line subsequently taken by Cranmer. But
for Wolsey the situation was much more difficult than for Cranmer,
because for Wolsey it was a _sine qua non_ that the Pope’s official
authority should be maintained. He could not, therefore, adopt any
course which ignored that authority even so far as by not requiring its
open sanction: much less could he, like Cranmer, defy it. Whether, for
the sake of preserving that authority the more rigidly, he intended
to ignore the one moral defence for the desired measure and content
himself with pleading a legal quibble, is a question that can be
argued; but it is quite clear that he was prepared to do so in the last
resort. In short, if the only way to avoid his own downfall was by
sacrificing an innocent victim, the innocence of the victim should not
save her. He would have preferred, no doubt, that the sacrifice should
not be made, but, under the circumstances, he did not hesitate. His
moral plane was too conventionally low for the alternative course. More
or Fisher would have acted otherwise. But the successful statesman who
is ready to commit political suicide rather than actively participate
in an unrighteous deed which he cannot prevent, is not often to be
met with. And Wolsey had the further excuse that he hoped to save
the Church, as he conceived it, from the disastrous results which he
foresaw if the matter fell into other hands.
VI
WOLSEY AND THE REFORMATION
From the attitude of Wolsey to the Papacy in the matter of the divorce,
we are naturally led to a consideration of his whole position in
matters ecclesiastical and religious.
The great revolution which we call the Reformation had two main
aspects. Employing the term “the Church” as representing not the whole
body of professing Christians but the clerical organisation: the
Reformation in the first place changed everywhere, though in varying
degrees, the relation of the secular governments to the Church within
their borders; in the second place it changed the relations of the
various geographical sections of the Church to the whole Catholic body
of which they were members. Thus the State in England assumed a new
attitude to the Church in England, and the Church in England as well as
the State was placed in a new relation to the Roman pontificate. These
changes were essentially political.
In its second aspect, the Reformation was a religious revolution; a
revision of ethical standards; a revival of that ardour of sentiment
and of conviction whereof martyrs are born; a spiritual movement,
accompanied by a doctrinal upheaval. That portion of Christendom which
adhered to the Roman pontificate, confining its doctrinal modifications
within the limits set by the Council of Trent, arrogated to itself
the title of Catholic. The rest arrogated to themselves the title
of the Reformed Churches, accepting the general label of Protestants
originally appropriate only to the Lutheran section. Like all political
labels, all three of these terms were incorrect, “Protestant” being
improperly extended, while the “Reformed” Churches might be Catholic,
and the “Catholic” Church was itself reformed. Perhaps it would be of
advantage rather to treat the doctrinal Reformation as a third aspect,
and to distinguish the great actors by the parts they played in the
political, the religious, and the doctrinal Reformations respectively,
whether in restraining or in promoting change. Thus, religion did not
enter into the programme of Henry VIII.; as to doctrine he certainly
was not a reformer; politically, he emerged as a revolutionary. Men
like More and Colet were ardent reformers of religion; in theology and
on the political side, they were conservative. Luther, Calvin and Knox
were of the advanced party in each case. But it must be definitely laid
down that of the three aspects of the Reformation the most vital was
the religious, not the political or the theological; and the men who,
whether Catholic or Protestant, were the religious leaders, are on a
higher plane of greatness than the rest; it is amongst them that we
must look for the “master-minds” of the age.
Now it does not appear that in any single one of these three aspects
Wolsey as a matter of fact influenced the great movement, already
fairly under weigh, in any appreciable degree. Had he, instead of
Clement, occupied the Papal throne, the political power of the Papacy
would indubitably have been for the time greatly advanced. Had his own
power in England survived the divorce business, the secular onslaught
on the ecclesiastical body conducted by Cromwell would not have taken
place. It is conceivable that under modified circumstances he might
have evolved a _modus vivendi_ for Church and State more favourable
to the Church than that which emerged from the thirty tempestuous
years which followed his death. But in fact the whole manner of the
Cardinal’s life, his immersion in secular politics, the magnificence
of his household, his many benefices, his vast accumulation of wealth,
the arrogance of his demeanour, typified and flaunted before the public
eye precisely those shortcomings of the clergy at large on which the
anti-clerical spirit of the laity was battening. The Cardinal might
have strengthened the Church’s power of resistance; he certainly was
in no small degree the cause of the animosity of her assailants. In
the eyes of the whole world, he was essentially a man of the world,
worldly; and in worldliness, far more than in the temptations of the
Flesh or the Devil, the best of the reformers found the Church’s
besetting sin.
No political skill, no state-craft, no loyalty to his order, could
have gone to the root of the matter by removing the moral grounds of
hostility to the ecclesiastical organisation. A moral enthusiasm of
which--to put it mildly--no hint whatever is to be found in the great
minister, was absolutely essential for any man who was either to
renovate the prestige of the clergy so that the people should follow
them or so to inspire the people that the clergy should follow the
popular movement. In England there arose no prophet, but for that
much-needed _rôle_ Wolsey was about as little fitted as any imaginable
leader.
Nevertheless, something he did and more he was willing to do. There
were specific grievances which up to a certain point he sought to
remedy. Without surrendering any of the privileges of his order, he
made in his own Legatine Courts a vast improvement on the practice of
the ordinary Ecclesiastical Courts. He did away with a considerable
number of small religious Houses whose condition was more or less of
a scandal. His visitations brought about improved discipline in many
of the larger Houses; some of his appointments, as to the Abbey at
Glastonbury, were notably admirable; in rejecting an unworthy abbess
for Wilton he braved the anger of the king at a time when he ran an
exceptionally heavy risk in doing so. Above all, he was fully alive
to the necessity of educating a new generation of clergy up to a high
standard; and to that end he created his great foundations of Ipswich
and Cardinal College (Christ Church), Oxford, carrying out on a much
more extensive scale what Dean Colet and Bishop Fox had set themselves
to do before him. His college was crippled and his school was wrecked
when he fell; but in this at least he deserves to be honoured by the
side of William of Wickham. Yet the name of William is hardly to be
coupled with those of Luther or Loyola. Wolsey was a real and sincere
patron of education; he had a sufficiently keen sense of order and
public decency to be a just judge and something of a disciplinarian;
but much more than this would have been required to make him a potent
moral force; and without being that he could not, even had he become
Pope, have affected the Reformation in a permanent manner, though he
might have modified its political course. He was the consummation
of the old school of political ecclesiastics. Probably he was never
so much as conscious that a moral revolution was in progress. What
he did know was that the political position of the Holy See, and of
the whole ecclesiastical system, was threatened, and his legatine
and Papal ambitions may fairly be attributed as much to a belief in
his own fitness to pilot the ship as to selfishly personal motives.
But the mere fact that, with the powers he did acquire and the vast
abilities he possessed, he yet accomplished practically nothing either
as a reformer or as a bulwark of the old order, is fairly conclusive
proof that he was neither the “greatest of English statesmen” nor “the
master-mind of his age.”
VII
WOLSEY’S FALL AND CHARACTER
The Legatine Court was suspended, and the question of the divorce
advoked to Rome, in July 1529. The signs of Wolsey’s doom were quick to
gather. His master practically ceased to hold personal communication
with him. It was evident, when writs for a Parliament were issued in
September, that the Cardinal was no longer directing the king: for he
had consistently aimed so far as possible at the suppression of the
functions of Parliament. Campeggio was hardly out of the country when
his colleague was indicted under the Statute of Præmunire for having
exercised the legatine office contrary to the law. The Dukes of Norfolk
and Suffolk deprived him of the Great Seal which he held as Chancellor.
Ill and despairing, he retired to his house at Esher, shorn of all
his offices. He was attainted in the House of Peers, and the Bill was
passed. In the Commons, however, the vigorous opposition to it made
by Cromwell, and a feeling that the king was not unfavourable to its
rejection, resulted in its being thrown out.
Probably Henry had not yet thoroughly made up his mind as to his course
of action, and wished to preserve a possibility of recalling his
minister to his counsels. He was told that he might be permitted to
discharge some of his pastoral functions, and was allowed to retire in
the spring to York, to take up the duties of the Archbishopric; and in
spite of the immense fines imposed on him, he was by no means stripped
bare of this world’s goods. York was fixed on as being more remote from
the neighbourhood both of Henry and of the Continent than Winchester.
He threw himself into the unaccustomed _rôle_ with apparent zest, and
seemed on the verge of achieving an unexpected reputation for pastoral
piety and devotion, when a fresh blow fell. He was summoned to London
on a charge of treason. He had been unwise enough to write to Francis I
and pray for his intercession with Henry; he was also accused, though
groundlessly, of having made really treasonous proposals to the Pope.
Already ill when he started, he became rapidly worse on his journey
south, and having reached the Abbey of Leicester, was unable again to
rise from his bed. There he passed away, pathetically forlorn; but at
least spared the last undeserved ignominy of a traitor’s doom.
On the high road to success and in the height of his power, Wolsey
extorts an admiration which is still somewhat reluctant. His figure
cannot be called attractive. Over the business of the divorce it is
difficult not to feel him positively repellent. But in his fall he rose
to moral heights of which his previous career gives no warning. What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
Here, it would seem, was one who--not voluntarily surrendering but
forcibly bereft of the world, when he had gained it--found thereby his
soul’s salvation. Through tears and tribulation, pain of the worn-out
body, anguish of the spirit, he won it. In the day of his triumph, his
countrymen hated him while they could not but admire; hated him with a
rare bitterness which made even Thomas More ungenerous; save some few
of his own household, none felt a touch of sympathy, unless perhaps the
king, who condescended to send him one or two kindly messages to salve
his own royal conscience while he was stripping his most loyal servant
of everything he possessed. Yet in the months of his retirement,
while, in his diocese of York, he devoted himself to the care of his
spiritual flock, the fallen Cardinal won on all hands a passionate
affection bestowed only upon men and women who can forget themselves in
their thought for others. At bottom there must have been in the man an
essential sweetness and loveableness repressed--dried up in the fires
of ambition, parched in the sunshine of prosperity, welling forth in
the shadow of adversity. Gone was the power that swayed the politics of
a continent; gone the gorgeous pomp, the insolent state, that stirred
the impotent malice of the lesser men he had overshadowed. But with
their loss, the hidden best that was in the fallen minister found free
play.
Wolsey’s chroniclers have been against him. Those who wished to
magnify the king pointed to the Cardinal as the evil genius who had
prompted every ill-judged deed. The nobility hated him as an insolent
and upstart foe to their order. Katharine’s party hated him, because
he was credited not only with anti-Spanish policy but with being the
prime mover of the divorce. The Boleyn party hated him, because they
knew that he loathed the Boleyn marriage. He had no sympathy from
the Protestants, since he stood for the old ecclesiastical order;
none from the later Catholics, since his attitude to the Papacy was
misunderstood; none from the populace, because he embodied the most
unpopular characteristics of ecclesiasticism. Even Cavendish, who
admired him, is careful in his record to point the moral that pride
goeth before a fall, lest his praise of the Cardinal’s demeanour in his
last year of life should be regarded as unduly laudatory. From Skelton
to Fox the martyrologist, every man had some motive for throwing a
stone at him.
But if Shakespeare--or another--has summed up for us the libels of his
enemies, the same hand has shaped the far truer eulogium pronounced by
the “honest chronicler” Griffith in the same play. By his own talents
he had made himself great: in his high station, if in some respects he
abused his power, yet in the main he worked for the glory of England.
It is inconceivable that when he fell, when the world slipped from
the grasp of one who had been the very type of worldliness, he should
have kissed the rod with perfect resignation, and found no taste of
bitterness in the cup allotted to him. Yet there was at least a solid
proportion of truth in the pious words of Griffith:
His overthrow heaped happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little;
And, to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.
No amount of historical inquiry will ever suffice to displace in the
public mind a portrait bearing Shakespeare’s signature. The Wolsey of
the play is not easy to reconcile with the Wolsey Griffith described
after his disappearance from the stage: but these words are still a
part of the Shakespearean portrait.
SIR THOMAS MORE
I
INTRODUCTORY
Reverence for tradition is not inconsistent with a belief in progress.
History yields us abundant instances of great minds which have combined
a keen appreciation of the ideas of liberty and equality with a strong
predilection in favour of time-honoured institutions. Sometimes, but
rarely, the conservative instinct predominates in youth, and gives
way to the liberal instinct as time goes on. Sometimes, not rarely,
the liberalism of youth yields to the conservatism of later life. In
either case, we are presented with the apparent paradox of the man who,
maintaining the complete consistency of his own career, is found to be
at one period of his life on the side of the reformers, and at another
period on the side of the reactionaries. When political movements are
comparatively slow, these paradoxes do not obtrude themselves: but when
revolutions are in the air, they become conspicuous. There are two eras
which are particularly fruitful in such phenomena; those, namely, of
the Reformation and of the French Revolution.
Each of those periods presents us in England with one political
thinker of the highest rank whose utterances before the great
change are cited in authority by progressives, while their later
pronouncements or actions are cited with approbation by the opposing
forces. There is nothing surprising about the change in political
attitude which unexpected events produce in a Stephen Gardiner or a
William Pitt; it is merely a divergence from the earlier course. But
Burke and More give a _prima facie_ impression of a complete reversal
of principle. “Miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes
of the vicissitudes of Thomas More’s career”; so Mr. Sidney Lee has
very recently written of him; as other critics have fallen back on the
theory that Burke’s intellect went to pieces. Both these great men
did, in fact, misinterpret the very startling events of which they
were witness, partly because actual facts was misrepresented to them.
Neither believed that a work-a-day world with established institutions
could be accommodated to ideal polities where those institutions had
never grown up. They had in practice to adapt their ideals to what they
saw as hard facts. Hence they condemned in the concrete what they would
have approved in the abstract. Yet both were close and acute reasoners,
and probably neither would have admitted for a moment that he had
deserted in later life a single principle which he had maintained at an
earlier stage.
[Illustration: _SIR THOMAS MORE_
_From a Painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the National Portrait Gallery_]
But whether critics differ in their attempts to reconcile the More
who wrote the “Utopia” with the Lord Chancellor More, or give up the
attempt to explain the paradox as hopeless, the attractiveness and
nobility of the man stand unchallenged, as his intellectual eminence
is indisputable. It is impossible not to love and admire him. Of the
other nine men treated in this volume, all have apologists more or less
enthusiastic, but all have bitterly or contemptuously hostile critics.
More is one of the few men that have left their mark on our history,
who has won the tribute of universal affection and esteem.
II
UNDER HENRY VII
Thomas More was born in London in 1478, seven years after Thomas
Wolsey, and about the same length of time before Thomas Cromwell. There
is a rather curious prevalence of the name Thomas among prominent men
at this time, Cranmer being a fourth, and the youngest of the quartet.
More’s father was a barrister, who later became a judge; a gentleman
with a pleasant humour, a turn for economy, and conservative views.
John More was married thrice, and seems to have been comfortably wived,
being responsible for a witticism on the subject of matrimony such
as usually emanates from men whose personal experience contradicts
it. “Taking a wife,” said he, “is like putting your hand into a bag
containing a number of snakes and one eel. You _may_ lay hold of the
eel.” His son was not warned off the experiment, either by the jest or
by his experience of step-mothers.
Young Thomas was a lad of parts; his father was a person of distinction
in the great city. Morton, Archbishop and Lord Chancellor, and
subsequently a Cardinal, the wise counsellor of Henry VII. throughout
the first half of his reign, took the boy into his service, and
evidently found much satisfaction in cultivating and encouraging his
remarkable intelligence and wit; prophesying “marvellous things”
of him. The great man’s kindness was repaid by the very attractive
portrait which his _protégé_ has given us in the first book of the
“Utopia.” By Morton’s influence, Thomas, at fourteen, was sent to
Oxford--not an unusual age. Cranmer too was sent to Cambridge at
fourteen: while Wolsey’s youth was exceptional, for he took his degree
at the same age. More’s undergraduate career, however, was brief. He
was intended by his father to follow the profession of the law, and
John More took alarm when he found that his son was being beguiled into
an enthusiasm for the recently introduced study of Greek. There was
no connexion between law and Greek; besides, Greek was unsettling: it
seemed to put new-fangled and heterodox ideas into folk’s heads. So
after two years, More was withdrawn from Oxford, entered at New Inn
to study the law, and in February, 1496, was admitted a student at
Lincoln’s Inn: just about the time when John Colet was returning from
Italy.
There is every probability that Colet and his younger contemporary
had already foregathered at Oxford, in listening to the teaching of
Grocyn: otherwise it is not very easy to account for the warm intimacy
which arose between the Oxford Divinity Lecturer and the young student
of Lincoln’s Inn: though the fact that both their fathers were men of
such eminence in London, that the families may easily have been brought
into contact, must not be forgotten. In any case, the names of Colet,
Erasmus and More became closely associated between 1496 and 1500.
Erasmus paid a flying visit to England in 1498. Colet’s discourses were
already famous, and the Dutchman and the Englishman were introduced to
each other by Prior Charnock of the College of St. Mary the Virgin: to
their great mutual satisfaction. As the story runs, Colet told Erasmus
of the surprising genius of his young friend Thomas More, and told More
of the amazing endowments of his new acquaintance. The two, unknown
to each other, met at the same table, and fell into a dialectical
discussion which neither could resist; till at last the elder, putting
two and two together, exclaimed “Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus,” the
younger promptly responding “Aut tu es Erasmus, aut Diabolus.” Whether
the tale be true or not, the acquaintance was made, and ripened
rapidly into the warmest of friendships. In those days, complimentary
epithets between scholars were nearly as cheap and meant nearly as
little, as vituperative ones; but there is no mistake about the genuine
and spontaneous character of the terms in which Erasmus wrote to
and of Thomas More. He is always _dulcissimus_, _iucundissimus_, or
something equally endearing. Erasmus had superlatives for other people
too, but there is no one else on whom he lavishes the same wealth of
playful affection. It was to Robert Fisher that the scholar about
this time wrote his classic appreciation of his young friend--_Thomae
Mori ingenio quid unquam finxit natura vel mollius, vel dulcius, vel
felicius?_ “What hath nature ever fashioned more tender, more charming,
more happy, than the character of Thomas More?”
It was during this visit that More played a characteristic trick
on Erasmus, one which shows how well the quondam page of Cardinal
Morton (who had just entered on the last year of his life) stood in
distinguished quarters. Erasmus was staying at Greenwich with his
patron Lord Mountjoy. Thither came More, with a friend, to see him
and carry him off for a walk, in the course of which they came to a
handsome building, where More said he wished to pay his respects.
Somewhat to his dismay, Erasmus found on entering that they were
invading a royal domain, and that their visit was to Prince Henry and
his brother and sisters who wanted him there and then to produce them
a poem. He demurred, but was let off on condition of his promising to
send them one--a promise faithfully carried out.
More shared with his older friend a capacity for perceiving the
humorous side of things which stood him in good stead all his life. But
he had a deeper vein of seriousness, and to him--as to Colet--religion
meant a great deal more than it did to the cosmopolitan scholar. The
profession for which he was still training--he was not yet called
to the Bar--was one to which his abilities were eminently adapted,
and his intimacy with Colet did not prevent him from loyally devoting
his time and his studies to that training, as his father desired.
But as soon as he was duly called, he began to give his natural
predilections freer play, and we find him delivering in the City a
course of lectures on Augustine’s _De Civitate Dei_: to the admiration
of his old master Grocyn and others. Not, however, to the neglect of
his legal pursuits, for he was appointed Reader at Furnivall’s Inn;
or of larger ambitions, for, young as he was, he appeared as a member
of Henry VII.’s Parliament of 1504. The story of the “beardless boy”
persuading that assembly to reject a royal demand for cash, as told by
his son-in-law William Roper, is familiar; and even if not altogether
accurately reported, leaves no doubt that he did so offend Henry that
he felt it advisable to retire into political obscurity--the king
characteristically taking his revenge by extracting a fine from his
father.
It may have been this episode which gave him a temporary inclination to
betake himself to a monastic life: but this did not last. Investigation
did not lead to the conclusion that life in a monastery was quite the
same in practice as in theory, and a _penchant_ for asceticism could be
indulged without entering the cloister. Moreover, this summer Colet was
in London, probably to commence work at St. Paul’s, where he had just
been nominated to the Deanery; and Colet was not the man to counsel
such a step. On the contrary, he advised his friend to marry, and the
advice was taken next year.[B] The story is quaintly characteristic.
Visiting “one Mr. Colte a gentleman of Essex,” he was attracted by the
three daughters of the house. The second being the prettiest, took
his fancy, but he thought it would be hard on the elder sister if the
younger got a husband first, so he “of a certayne pittie framed his
fancie towardes her” instead--with excellent results.
[B] Roper’s chronology is not very intelligible. He says
that--after being called to the Bar--More was three
years a Reader at Furnivall’s Inn, and then passed four
years in the Charterhouse without taking the vows. The
other evidence, however, points pretty conclusively to
1505 as the date of his marriage.
On the whole it does not look as if More went in any very great fear
of the old king’s wrath. Mr. Colte would not have been in a hurry to
bestow his daughter in marriage on a young man whom Henry was seeking
occasion to slay: and probably More himself would have hesitated to
give hostages to fortune under those conditions.
III
THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII
Whatever reason he may have had to fear ill-will from Henry VII.--who
seldom wasted vindictive sentiments on people whose punishment could
not be substantially expressed in terms of hard cash--More could count
on the goodwill of his young successor. More than one of the princes of
those days ranked among the most accomplished men of their times; and
like his brother-in-law of Scotland, Henry would have more than held
his own in any company, intellectual or athletic. As yet, the world did
not know that his abilities were matched by a ruthless selfishness. He
seemed a brilliant and charming boy, frank-hearted and open-handed,
with just the carelessness becoming to his age: the very reverse of
the old king as men thought of him in his later years, sordid, crafty,
griping. The reign of Empsons and Dudleys was at an end; the approach
to the new king’s favour was to be through very different avenues. To
have been in the black books of Henry VII. was no reason for fearing
Henry VIII.
More prospered rapidly in his profession, and had no desire to be drawn
to Court or into the whirl of politics. He was very soon appointed to
the important office of Under-Sheriff in the City, and his private
practice was ere long bringing him a very substantial income. Also, to
his great satisfaction, the expectation of a more cheerful _régime_
in England was bringing Erasmus back again--there had been one flying
visit in the interval--to write the _Encomium Moriae_ under More’s
own roof, and still further to enrich and stimulate that congenial
intellectual society in which More himself had been living ever since
Colet had taken up his duties as Dean of St. Paul’s.
But however little ambitious More might be, his talents were too
conspicuous to permit of his being left alone. In 1515, the commercial
war with Flanders--an outcome of the foreign complications in which
Henry VIII. had become involved--was embarrassing both countries so
much that there was a strong desire for adjustment. An embassy was to
be sent, with Cuthbert Tunstall at its head. The merchants of London
desired to be represented; they wanted More to represent them; Wolsey,
now supreme, acceded; More was attached to the embassy, and the
abilities he displayed marked him out as a man fitted for the king’s
service. For a time More resisted; but his masterly conduct of a case
in which he was appointed as counsel for the Pope (in respect of a
ship which the Crown claimed as forfeit) caused Henry to put renewed
pressure on him. In 1518, he had become a courtier in his own despite.
This, by the way, may have some bearing on the fact that in that year
his father was elevated to the judicial Bench.
Some years earlier, More’s domestic life had suffered: his first wife
dying in 1512 and leaving him with four little children on his hands.
To provide the orphans with a mother, he took to himself a second wife,
some years older than himself; a kindly conventional soul, as it would
seem, who quite understood that her husband was a very clever man,
but was eternally puzzled by his disregard of worldly considerations,
and hopelessly confused by the whimsical irony with which he loved to
meet her “Tilly vally, Sir Thomas,” when he had been doing something
peculiarly exasperating from her point of view. She mothered his
children, and himself as much as he would let her; and never succeeded
in disturbing his humorous equanimity, though her own must have been
everlastingly ruffled.
The embassy to the Netherlands sealed More’s fate, by forcing him into
political life. It is also intimately associated with the one great
original literary work produced in England in the first half of the
sixteenth century: a work which established the fame of its author as
a political thinker of the highest rank, in spite of the intentionally
fantastic form in which it was cast.
IV
THE UTOPIA
Throughout More’s life, revolutionary forces had been at work in the
political, the intellectual, and the religious world; but as yet they
had not concentrated in any volcanic explosion. At present, More’s
most intimate associates stood in the very forefront of the most
advanced school, and his “Utopia” was to make his position beside
them as conspicuous to the world as it was assured in fact. He had
taken to Greek, in spite of his anxious parent, like a duck to water:
his affinity to the Platonic Socrates is obvious. John Colet was his
guide, philosopher and friend; and the downright reactionaries, like
the Bishop of London, had vain hankerings to suppress Colet as a
dangerous heretic. He was the chosen intellectual mate of Erasmus, who
had done or was doing more than any man living, to rid men’s minds
of the shackles of the old scholastic formalism. The grosser popular
superstitions, the worship of the letter and neglect of the spirit,
the pursuit of worldly advancement by the successors of the apostles,
were constant subjects for pulpit castigations by the one friend, and
the lively and scathing mockery of the other. The mediæval theory that
war is a pastime for the ambitions of princes was vigorously denounced
by both. In all these things More was with them heart and soul; and
he had already given audacious indication of his belief that the
function of government is to seek the good not of the governors but of
the governed, when he incurred the displeasure of Henry VII. in 1504.
This progressive attitude of mind found its complete expression in the
fantasy of Utopia.
The notion of constructing an imaginary Commonwealth under ideal
conditions on ideal lines was of course derived straight from Plato’s
Republic. That any existing State could be reformed into the semblance
of such a Commonwealth by the fiat of legislators, neither Plato nor
More ever dreamed. Neither the Republic nor the Utopia is in the
nature of one of those paper Constitutions whose devisers would fain
impose them in all their logical perfection upon recalcitrant nations.
They aim at setting forth those fundamental principles which must
indeed lie at the root of all healthy forms of government, but must
also inevitably materialise into different shapes under differing
conditions. The reproach that such schemes are not practical, which
is damning to a paper Constitution, is here wholly irrelevant. They
were never meant to be practical. Sir Galahad is not a practical model
for the British citizen, who would take warning from the career of the
Knight of La Mancha. Yet the conception of Sir Galahad is worthy of
serious contemplation by the British citizen, who may therefrom derive
not a little practical direction in the conduct of his life. To condemn
the presentation of avowed ideals as unpractical, is merely to display
a complete misapprehension of the meaning and use of ideals.
More, however, did not derive his method from Plato. The Athenian
started by looking for the logical principles on which a State should
be constructed, and built it, storey by storey. The Englishman imagined
his State already complete and expounded the finished structure; taking
example by other myths than the Republic. With happy ingenuity, he
made use of a suggestion from the records of the voyages of Amerigo
Vespucci to locate his dream-city in realms which some of that
eminent traveller’s company might have visited, alone of Europeans.
In similarly happy vein, he utilised his embassy to the Netherlands
to provide an introduction, the form of which was doubtless suggested
by Platonic precedent, though it is in no sense an imitation. The
characterisation of the persons whose conversation is reported is not
unworthy of the master.
The work is in two parts: the account of Utopia itself, and this
preliminary book, which introduces the traveller Hythloday, with his
criticisms on European politics in general, and the state of England
in particular. This, More would have us believe, is the way in which
a foreign Odysseus having “viewed the cities and marked the ways of
many a People” would judge the institutions on which the Englishman
prided himself. The suggestion that he wished to make himself safe
by attributing those criticisms to some one else is hardly tenable.
It does not appear that any one ever suspected Hythloday of having
had a more material existence than Lemuel Gulliver after him. The
intention is simply to dispose the reader’s mind so as to accept the
verisimilitude of what he knows to be a fiction; the intention of every
dramatic artist. Reason tells you that you are sitting in a theatre
and watching actors behind the footlights. Imagination tells you that
real events are going on before your eyes. If imagination fails,
tragedy becomes burlesque, and comedy silliness. The description of
Utopia appeals with tenfold force when your imagination accepts it as a
place which a real human traveller has seen; and the illusion is only
possible when the real human traveller has been convincingly presented.
Raphael Hythloday is as real as Robinson Crusoe. But there is no
reason to suppose that More wanted any one to think that Hythloday
had an address in Antwerp--as Peter Giles says, “Some ... for that
his minde and affection was altogether set and fixed upon Utopia, say
that he hathe taken his voyage thetherwards agayne.” “No-where land”
is the unsubstantial resting-place of the non-material but convincing
traveller.
Similarly, by putting his criticisms on English affairs into the
mouth of a foreign observer, from whose lips they come with a perfect
fitness, the artist procures for them an attention and consideration
which would be refused if they were being thought of as the criticisms
of an Englishman vilifying his own country. Again, the illusion is
needed only till the required effect is produced, namely, recognition
of the validity of the criticism.
The illusion is created with subtle skill. More relates how he was sent
on the Netherlands embassy, with various references to his associates,
and the actual facts of that episode in his career, and tells how
his (real) friend, Peter Giles of Antwerp, introduced the traveller
Hythloday--an interesting person who had voyaged to those lands of
which Europeans as yet knew exceedingly little and imagined an infinite
deal. More draws him out, and extracts from him his impression of
England, where he had visited Cardinal Morton, of the state of Europe
in general, and finally, by way of contrast, of that remote and unknown
State of Utopia, which has opened his eyes to what lies at the root
of so much that is unsatisfactory in the realms of Christendom. Thus
More is enabled to win interested attention to his own criticism of
the social and political conditions prevalent, and his own political
philosophy. Whatever the latter may be, the former is as practical as
possible.
The picture given of the world in which men were actually living and
moving, and pursuing their business or their pleasure, is vivid and
impressive. Moreover, its truth is borne out by all other evidence.
It is the work of a keen and humorous observer; and the analysis of
the causes of the pervading evils is unerring. It was no doubt wise of
More to antedate the description by a score or so of years, referring
it to Cardinal Morton’s days; but in 1515, every evil depicted had
become even more marked--and, it may be said, continued to increase
progressively until the reign of Elizabeth, the same causes continuing
to operate, with the addition of others which intensified the effects.
Every rising in the reigns of Henry VIII., of Edward VI., and of Mary,
whatever its ostensible ground, bears unmistakeable signs that the
agricultural depression with its attendant evils was a secondary, if
not the primary cause.
It would be too much to expect that the remedies More recommended
should have been equally above criticism. Economic science was in its
earliest infancy; in spite of experience, no one had begun to suspect
the inefficacy of legislation in certain directions, and there are
plenty of people who still believe that natural forces can be regulated
by statute. In no single respect was any thinker of his times in
advance of Sir Thomas More in these matters. But in many respects he
was in advance not only of the foremost of his contemporaries, but even
of current opinion and practice three hundred years later.
Thus, after describing the prevalence of thieving and robbery, he
points to idleness as its cause, but dwells emphatically on the
distinction between the idleness which is of choice and that which
is enforced by lack of employment. Half the thieves would be honest
labourers if they had the chance. The maintenance or development of
industries which provide employment would be an effective cure; but
instead of seeking a cure, the authorities fall back on punishment. But
the severity of the law, instead of checking the minor misdemeanours,
converts the pickpocket into a dangerous robber who--having no worse
penalty to fear for the graver offence--resorts to violence without
hesitation: so that the system regularly manufactures the worst
ruffianism.
The instability and disorganisation of industry produced by what
we now call “corners,” has its prototype in the “engrossing” and
“forestalling,” by which wealthy men make themselves monopolists. The
inevitable tendency of capital to flow in dividend-producing, not
philanthropic, channels, is foreshadowed by the steady conversion by
wealth-seeking landlords of arable land into sheep-runs; a process
which left much of the rural population without work, wages, food, or
home. Incidentally it may be noted that, while modern historians are
disposed rather to dwell on the substitution of greedy laymen for the
monasteries as landlords as one of the later causes of this particular
trouble, More expressly includes “certeyn abbottes, holy men no doubt,”
in his denunciation thereof. He may, however, mean no more than that
even the Church was not exempt from this reproach. In dealing with this
economic tendency for capital to seek the most lucrative channel, More
made the universal mistake of his day in believing that it could be
effectively restrained by Acts of Parliament.
In a vein no less practical, and no less opposed to the conventional
ideas of the time, and with a still more playful seriousness, the
traveller discourses of high politics and finance as they were debated
in the Cabinets of Europe, with the aggrandisement and enrichment of
monarchs as the one end in view. “‘This myne advyce, maister More,’
says he, ‘how think you it would be harde and taken?’ ‘So God helpe me,
not very thankefully’ quod I.’”
By this discussion, the way is prepared for Hythloday to favour his
company with an account of the remarkable polity which he found in
Utopia (a State as to the whereabouts of which More subsequently writes
in anxious inquiry to Peter Giles, who answers in the like vein of
pretended regret at being unable to answer the question). This account
occupies the second book, forming about two-thirds of the whole work.
In this fantasy, practicality vanishes at the outset. Such are the
defences, natural or artificial, of this most favoured island, that any
would-be invader is doomed to certain destruction, while the country
produces everything that man requires for comfort. It needs no army and
no navy, self-defence and self-assertion being equally superfluous: its
relations with foreign States are purely complimentary. The Utopians
make no foreign leagues. Where the bonds of goodwill are not sufficient
to maintain friendly relations, nations enter upon leagues, but only
to desert them at the first call of interest. Such is the strange
conviction of the Utopians, though they had not themselves experienced
the kaleidoscopic permutations and combinations of Ferdinand the
Catholic, Maximilian, Louis XII., Henry VII., Julius II., and the
Venetians. If by any chance they find it necessary to go to war, there
is a convenient breed of fighting men in a country not too far away,
who can always be hired for the purpose.
Being thus preserved from the creation of a military caste, while
universal education has prevented knowledge from being concentrated in
a priestly caste, it has been easy to prevent the development of any
sort of privileged class through the accumulation of private property,
which is prohibited. Hence, in Utopia, communism is practicable, and
the whole system is as a matter of course communistic, though the
principle is not extended to the relations between the sexes. Having
arrived at their religion not through the Christian Revelation, but
by Reason, any religious views are tolerated which are not manifestly
anti-social. It is a corollary of these conditions that government is
in the hands of elected magistrates, who have neither class interests
nor personal interests to deflect them from their proper function
of ruling with a single eye to the interests of the whole people.
The possibility that sectarian interests might have developed as a
disturbing factor does not seem to have presented itself; perhaps,
where no religious views might be aggressively expressed or repressed,
no strife of sects was to be feared.
In every direction, of course, the manners and customs of the Utopians
suggest that the manners and customs of the English are susceptible of
improvement. They take a philosophic view of the pleasures of life,
reckoning the gratification of animal appetites exceedingly low in
practice as well as in theory. They have no lust of gold and jewels.
They have no craving for display, for gambling, for the baser forms
of sport. On the other hand, they appreciate the value of sanitation.
There is no idleness, since every one is required to do his share of
work, but there is ample leisure for all; instead of one half of the
population having too much, and the other half too little, to do. Thus
they can enjoy in abundance those rational pleasures in which they take
a true delight, abiding in health and wealth.
V
MORE IN PUBLIC LIFE
It should be sufficiently clear that no one was more thoroughly aware
than Sir Thomas More himself that the Utopian conditions could not be
produced in a European State, and that Utopian institutions could only
exist under Utopian conditions. Of that fact he was destined to give
practical demonstration when called upon to discharge the functions of
a practical ruler.
In 1518 More became a Privy Councillor, and probably his influence
may be detected in the efforts, renewed about this time, to check
the conversion of arable land into pasture, and the evil practice of
enclosures. But Martin Luther’s activity was just beginning, and its
results were to make the contrast between Utopia and England even more
marked than previously. Before entering, however, on More’s attitude to
this new phase of the Reformation, we have to note some other points in
this stage of his career.
More stood in high favour. He had not climbed to a great position by
arduous effort; greatness, worthy of it as he was, had been thrust upon
him. His advancement was promoted by Wolsey, who was seldom vindictive
except towards rivals whose power might make them dangerous. In 1521
he was knighted. When Parliament was summoned in 1523 he was made
Speaker, by no means at his own desire, but chiefly at that of the
King and the Cardinal. The result was probably not quite what Wolsey
had anticipated. On his appointment, he had implied very clearly,
though in diplomatic terms, that he meant to uphold freedom of speech
in the House. But the business on hand was the voting of money, and
Wolsey made the mistake of attempting to overawe the Commons by coming
down to the House himself. The Members declined to speak or vote in
his presence; the Cardinal’s demands were received with dead silence.
Wolsey turned on the Speaker. The Speaker made it perfectly clear that
the House could not give way on the question of privilege. When Wolsey
withdrew, Parliament demonstrated its loyalty by making a substantial
grant.
According to More’s son-in-law, this incident brought More into the
black books of the Cardinal, who with ill intent tried to get him sent
on an embassy to Spain, under colour of complimenting him. If Wolsey
really meant evil by him, his designs came to nothing, for there was no
sign of any diminution in the royal favour. Already, however, in 1525,
Wolsey’s position was becoming precarious, though to all appearance
he was as dominant as ever. More’s next advancement was to the
Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1526; and from this time
Henry’s personal demands on his time and his society became exceedingly
pressing. A year later, the whole of the king’s real interest was
absorbed in the divorce question, which was to seal Wolsey’s fate
directly, and More’s indirectly. Henry consulted him about it, and More
then as always told his master honest truth--he did not see how the
marriage with Katharine could lawfully be voided. From that position
he never swerved. The king could respect conscientious scruples on the
part of a favourite, and did so as long as More remained a favourite.
More, however, had no illusions about the king’s constancy. “If my
head,” he told Roper, “would win him a castle in France, it should not
fail to go.” But when Henry decided that Wolsey could no longer serve
his turn, it was More whom he selected to fill the office of Lord
Chancellor, in spite of his views of the divorce.
During these years, the uprising of Luther had developed into a
widespread religious revolt. Henry, having no quarrel with Pope Leo,
and proud of his own attainments as a theologian, chose to enter the
lists for the demolition of Luther; producing an apologia for the
Papacy which earned him the title of “Defender of the Faith.” Before
publishing this work he showed it to More, who warned him, with shrewd
foresight, that, if ever he did come to have a quarrel with the Pope,
he would find it very difficult to get over his own argument, which
proved too much in support of Papal authority. Henry, however, would
not modify the view then expressed, and succeeded in satisfying his
counsellor that it was sound. In due course the prophecy came true:
Henry repudiated the position he had formerly defended. Unhappily for
More, however, the king had finally convinced him, and he declined to
surrender his conviction: with fatal consequences.
Viewed even exclusively as a religious movement, Luther’s revolt
would not have attracted More’s sympathies. He had never doubted any
of the dogmas of the Church, though he had a plentiful contempt for
many prevailing corruptions which were recognised as such by men to
whom heresy was never imputed by their bitterest enemy. He believed
with conviction a great deal that Erasmus accepted merely _pro forma_.
Luther not only propounded views on specific dogmas which More regarded
as heretical, he challenged the whole authority of Rome; and More
believed in the authority of Rome. But beyond all this the Lutheran
revolt was very soon followed by the German Peasant revolt, which
deluged half Europe with blood. The Peasants’ War was completely
misapprehended in England, where the agricultural troubles, bad as
they were, could bear no comparison with the oppression from which the
German peasants suffered; but its leadership fell, naturally enough,
into the hands of men as fanatical in their zeal for religious as for
social reform. The overthrow of all authority and the universal triumph
of sheer anarchy appeared to be their goal; and the world believed,
or was taught to believe, that it was Luther who had started the
conflagration. The heretical pamphlets which issued from Germany and
Switzerland--lumped together, by those who did not know the facts, as
Lutheran--gave colour to this belief by the virulence of their attacks
on the Papacy and the clergy; and it is small wonder that many of the
most liberal-minded men could anticipate nothing but stark ruin, the
coming of chaos, unless the torrent were stayed. The threatening crash
of all reverence, of all authority save such as could be enforced
by push of pike, seemed to be brought measurably closer, when, in
1527, the Imperial armies sacked Rome in emulation of Alaric, and the
representative of St. Peter was held a prisoner by the representative
of Caesar Augustus.
In the abstract, and under Utopian conditions, More was singularly
alive to the beauty of the principle of practically universal
toleration. But Europe and England were presenting a problem which
could never have arisen in Utopia at all. Even in Utopia, it was
recognised that certain negations were directly anti-social, and that
the propagation of them must be repressed. Here in Europe, it seemed
as if every negation of a received dogma was to be turned into an
anti-social engine. Under the conditions, the toleration of any heresy,
certainly of all such as palpably involved an attack on authority,
tended to anarchy. The conclusion that what was good unreservedly in
Utopia would not be good in England is obvious. We can all see now,
of course, that More misinterpreted the facts. The anarchism was an
accident of the religious movement, which it shed of itself, not an
inherent part of it: the Church lost as much ground by the action of
her own zealots as by the attacks of her most fanatical opponents. But
for a man who interpreted the facts as More did, there was nothing
inconsistent in declaring for toleration in Utopia, but in England
repression.
There is another point, too, which is generally unnoticed. The Utopians
arrived at their religion by reason; they had no way of ascertaining
truth except through reason; hence, for one man to condemn another for
holding a different “doxy” would be in itself irrational. Christendom,
in More’s view, was in a different position. It had received Truth by
direct Revelation, and an Exponent of Truth by Divine appointment.
What the Church had definitely pronounced to be heterodox was to be
regarded finally and conclusively as false. To permit the preaching
of doctrine known to be false was quite different from permitting the
discussion or inculcation of divergent opinions on which there was no
authority qualified to pronounce absolutely. Even at the moment when
More was describing the religion of Utopia, before he had ever heard
the name of Luther, he might with perfect consistency have held that
heresy ought to be repressed in Christian countries. The argument, of
course, has nothing to do with the wisdom or unwisdom of a repressive
policy; it is concerned merely with the “inconsistency” of More’s
Utopian theory and his Catholic practice. Those who found the Divine
Revelation not in the voice of the Church but in the text of Scripture,
were equally convinced that deviation from indisputable Truth should be
punished by the strong hand.
Broadly, the suggestion here put forward is that the Utopian religions
are philosophies: that all philosophies are matter of argument; that
intolerance of opinions which are matter of argument is irrational. On
the other hand (to More), Catholic Christianity is not a philosophy,
but is revealed truth; not therefore matter of argument, except so
far as details have not been defined; that suppression of doctrines
subversive of Catholic truth is certainly legitimate, and may be
necessary.
However that may be, it is undeniable that More appears in the least
favourable light as a Catholic controversialist; losing balance and
tone, he writes _currente calamo_, without restraint, with lapse of
dignity, and with only an occasional redeeming turn of humour. That is
to say, he drops to the normal level of contemporary controversialists
on both sides, instead of abiding in that serene atmosphere which
otherwise distinguishes him. The aggressive bellicosity of princes
grieved him, and the king’s divorce business vexed him: but the spread
of heresy was the one thing which upset his equanimity. “I pray God,”
said he to Roper, “that some of us, as heigh as we seeme to sitt upon
the mountaines, treadinge heretickes under our feete like annts, live
not the day that we gladly would wish to be at leagge and composition
with them, to let them have their Churches quietly to themselves; soe
that they would be content to lett us have ours quietly to our selves.”
Similarly, the one and only ground of reproach against his conduct in
any public matter is that as Chancellor he may have sanctioned putting
heretics to the torture, and did during the last six months of his
office--not before--send certain heretics to the stake. It is true that
the only men in England, in those days, who, having the opportunity,
did not send a single heretic to the fire, were the much-abused
Protector Somerset and the still more abused Wolsey. But we would fain
have had Thomas More an exception. Still, it can at least be affirmed
positively that the penalty was only inflicted when all hope was over
of persuading the “heretics” to recognise their error, and save their
bodies as well as their souls; and that every effort was made to give
them the opportunity of doing so. Given More’s premises, the conclusion
that their death would tend to the salvation of other souls was
irresistible.
It was towards the end of 1529 that Wolsey was struck down, and More,
very much against his will, was elevated to the Chancellorship.
For a commoner and a layman to receive the appointment was almost
revolutionary--at least it was a very signal mark of the depression of
the nobility, although it was many a year since any but an ecclesiastic
had held the office. In everything, More proved himself a notably
admirable occupant of the post, dealing out justice with unprecedented
despatch; not only without allowing himself to be corrupted, in which
he was not unique, but also without accepting those substantial
compliments from suitors which less rigidly scrupulous judges were
in the habit of profiting by, even when they did not allow their
decisions to be affected. No personal or professional considerations
were ever permitted by him to interfere with the ends of justice, the
most exact that it was in his power to achieve. But his tenure of the
Chancellorship was brief. More was unique in many respects, and in his
own day he was unique in refusing to retain office when he could no
longer do so without violating his conscience--without making himself
a party to a policy which he held to be wrong. Other men shifted the
responsibility on to the king; More felt that the responsibility could
not be shifted, and in 1532 he resigned.
The cause of the resignation was Henry’s ecclesiastical policy; its
immediate occasion, the submission of the clergy. The fall of Wolsey
was simultaneous with the summoning of the famous “Seven Years” or
“Reformation” Parliament of Henry VIII. The king had given no sort of
sign of any disposition to relax the severity of his attitude towards
heresy; but as the months and years passed, it became increasingly
evident that his rigid orthodoxy was to be accompanied by a prolonged
anti-clerical and anti-Papal campaign, the meaning whereof was to be
revealed only by degrees. A twelvemonth had barely passed when the
clergy were suddenly notified that they had as a body been guilty of a
breach of _Præmunire_ in accepting the Legatine authority of Wolsey,
and this was followed up by requiring Convocation to affirm that the
king was sole and Supreme Protector and Head of the Church. No new
authority was directly claimed for the Crown--without reading between
the lines; though it was tolerably clear that a good deal more might
be read into the declaration. The clergy yielded. Then the Commons
presented their supplication against the ordinaries. The subsequent
operations showed that the Royal Supremacy was to be applied after
quite a new fashion. The clergy yielded to the logic of force, and made
their “submission.” More, holding that no layman, king or not, could
by any possibility be rightfully head of the Church in this new sense,
concluded that he had no alternative but to retire into private life.
VI
INDIGNATIO PRINCIPIS
The divorce was Henry’s first objective; it was duly pronounced by
the new Archbishop in the following spring. The step, however, was
intensely unpopular. The more clearly this was brought home to the
king’s mind, the more anxious he became to have the avowed support
of every one whose opinion carried weight. Irritation reached its
climax over the affair of the “Nun of Kent,” a young woman named
Elizabeth Barton, who had for some little time been posing as a
sort of prophetess. How far she believed in her own imposture it is
not possible to tell, but she was certainly exploited by fanatical
adherents of the Papacy, and when she took to denouncing the wrath of
God against the king for the divorce, there was a real risk that the
superstition of the day would make her ravings dangerous. There were
two men whom no persuasions had prevailed upon to pronounce in favour
of the Boleyn marriage--Fisher of Rochester and Sir Thomas More. It
was found that both had had some sort of dealings with the nun. Henry
determined that they should both suffer as her accomplices, unless
they would openly range themselves with his supporters. But the case
against More was so hopelessly futile that the king’s advisers warned
him that the ex-Chancellor’s inclusion in the Bill of Attainder could
only result in the Bill itself being thrown out. His name was therefore
removed, to the great rejoicing of his friends. More saw farther into
the king’s mind than they did. “_Quod defertur non aufertur_,” he said
to his daughter.
He was right. The king and Cromwell were ready to go to the last
extremity to force the two recalcitrants into line. An Act had been
passed, fixing the succession to the throne on the children of Anne
Boleyn. The ratification of the marriage had led him to remark to
Roper: “God give grace, son, that these matters be not in a while
confirmed with oaths.” The Act of Succession carried with it authority
to impose an oath to maintain it; but the oath subsequently formulated
was so worded as to bind the subscriber to the admission of the
invalidity of the marriage with Katharine, and the denial of the Papal
authority. The oath was proffered to More and Fisher; both refused it,
though both were ready to maintain the succession. Both were sent to
the Tower.
It was in fact more than doubtful whether the Act warranted the
imposition of the oath in the prescribed form. The imprisonment of the
culprits without trial was in any case illegal, and every attempt to
persuade them to yield failed. The King always preferred to have the
letter of the law on his side; and it was impossible to pretend that
the refusal to subscribe involved treason. To give their destruction a
legal colour, a fresh Act of Succession was passed at the end of the
year (1534), expressly confirming the form of the oath; and this was
accompanied by an Act of Supremacy, making it treason to refuse to
affirm the Royal Supremacy. After that, it was simple enough to send
More and Fisher to their doom. To deny the Supremacy was one thing;
More had abstained from that. To refuse to affirm it was another; More
had always done so. He maintained his position, and was condemned to
death as a traitor, under the law which had been framed expressly
to enmesh him. His defence was only that the law itself was invalid
as being against the law of Christendom, and the liberties of the
Church as affirmed in _Magna Charta_; which of course the judges
could not admit. A week later, on July 6--the Eve of St. Thomas (of
Canterbury)--1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded.
VII
CHARACTER AND DEATH
Thanks mainly to the charm of the biography by his son-in-law, William
Roper, the private life and character of Thomas More are among the
most familiar to us in history. It is a life good to dwell upon, sweet
and wholesome. Even in its public aspects there is but the single
note that jars, his harshness--_molestia_ he called it--towards the
heretics, whom he classed with homicides and robbers: in its domestic
aspects it is wholly charming. In his private capacity he could love
even a heretic. Roper himself, the sympathetic husband of his favourite
daughter Margaret, was bitten with Lutheran doctrines, which even the
persuasiveness of his revered father-in-law could not induce him to
relinquish. To the error, as he deemed it, which was not accompanied by
propagandism, More was as tender as could be desired. “Meg,” he said to
Mistress Roper, “I have borne long with thy husband; I have reasoned
long time with him, and still given him my fatherly counsel; but I
perceive none of this can call him home again. And therefore, Meg, I
will no longer dispute with him, nor yet will I give him over, but I
will go another way to work, and get me to God and pray for him.”
There we have the natural Thomas More, obeying the kindly dictates of
his own heart, which held no rancour towards any one who had not in
some sort constituted himself an enemy of the “weal publick.” Personal
hostility to himself he held of no account. Shortly before he was made
Lord Chancellor, an old servant of his came to him in great indignation
against some merchants who had been “liberally rayling” at More.
Would he not, seeing what his favour was with the king, punish these
scurrilous people as they deserved? But More’s reply was a very sound
piece of philosophy in his usual humorous vein--“Would you have me
punish them by whome I receave more benefitt than by you all that be my
friends? Lett them a God’s name speake as lewedly as they list of me,
and shoote never soe many arrowes at me, so long as they do not hitt
me, what am I the worse? But if they should once hitt me, then would it
a little trouble me. Howbeit, I trust by Gode’s helpe, there shall none
of them all be able once to touch me. I have more cause, I assure thee,
to pittie them than to be angrie with them.”
We are told much of his simple piety and faith. The same ardently
reverent spirit, which made him cling to the Church and uphold her
authority, at one time very nearly sent him into the cloister, and did
cause him to retain so much of the ascetic tradition that he wore a
hair-shirt next his skin all his days; though it was only by accident
that any one save his beloved “Meg,” Margaret Roper, became aware of
the fact. His subjugation of the flesh was free from its too common
accompaniment of arrogant or morbid austerity. It was little more than
an avoidance of insidious and apparently harmless temptations, an
appreciation of the unimportance of gratifying physical appetites. He
reaped his reward. The sudden descent from ample wealth to a narrow
income, involved in his resignation of the Chancellorship, had no
terrors for him. He had tried hard fare at Oxford, less hard at New
Inn, something better at Lincoln’s Inn. He and his family could very
well live by the Lincoln’s Inn standard. If they found that too high
for the reduced exchequer, there was the New Inn standard to fall back
on, and after that the Oxford standard. And even after that “May we
yeat with bagges and walletts go a-begging togither ... and soe still
keepe companie merrily together.” A cheery philosophy.
Two of Roper’s anecdotes show, in the dramatic touches which bring a
very living Duke of Norfolk before us, how the son-in-law profited
by his father-in-law’s example; besides illustrating More’s quaint
combination of seriousness and humour. The duke went to see him about
his resignation, at Chelsea, and found him singing in the Church choir.
“To whome after service, as they went home togither arme in arme, the
duke said, ‘God body, God body, my Ld. Chancellor, a parish Clarke, a
parish Clarke, you dishonour the King and his office.’ ‘Nay,’ quoth Sir
Thomas Moore smilinge upon the Duke, ‘your Grace may not thinke, that
the Kinge your Master and myne, will with me for serving God his Master
be offended, or thereby count his office dishonoured.’” And again,
when he had escaped the Bill of Attainder: “The Duke sayd unto him,
‘By the masse, Mr. Moore, it is perillous strivinge with Princes, and
therefore I would wish you somewhat to inclyne to the Kinge’s pleasure.
For by Gode’s body Mr. Moore _Indignatio principis mors est_.’ ‘Ys that
all, my Lord?’ quoth he. ‘Is there in good fayth noe more difference
betweene your Grace and me but that I shall dye to day and you
tomorrow?’”
But in the last days, the never-failing humour has an exquisitely
pathetic setting.
The worthy wife, “somewhat worldlie too,” comes to see her husband in
the Tower; she cannot understand why he is so silly as to stop there,
when he might so easily recover the king’s goodwill by doing “as all
the Busshopps and best learned of this realm have done.” He listens
placidly to the outburst, then: “I pray thee, good Mistress Alice, tell
me one thing: is not this house as nighe heaven as mine own?” We are
reminded of the last words Humphrey Gilbert was heard to utter before
the _Squirrel_ foundered: “We are as near God by sea as by land.” But
there was no one to reply to Gilbert as “shee, after her accustomed
fashion, not likeinge such talke, answeared _Tille valle, tille
valle_.” The good soul has no patience for such incomprehensible folly.
Margaret Roper visits him, the darling daughter, of all his children
the likest to him in wit and in person; with her he is sure of perfect
sympathy. She knows that his doom is absolutely certain, nor is she one
to dissuade him from following the dictates of his conscience. After
the sentence in Westminster Hall, she is waiting at the Tower wharf for
the last fond farewell, the parting blessing. Heedless of spectators,
she darts through the press of halberdiers guarding the prisoner, to
fling herself on his neck, pour out her tears and her love on his
breast. He soothes her with words of tender counsel and affection. At
last she tears herself away, but overcome with the passion of devotion,
“suddenlye turned back againe, and rann to him as before, tooke him
about the necke, and divers times togeather most lovingely kissed him,
and at last with a full heavie harte was fayne to separate from him:
the behouldinge whereof was to manye of them that were present thereat
soe lamentable that it made them for very sorrow to mourne and weepe.”
Shall we wonder at such love for the man who on receiving sentence
could say to his judges, as reported by Anthony St. Leger, “I verily
trust and right heartily pray that though your lordships have now in
earth been Judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven
merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation”; whose spirit
was so imperturbable in its serenity, that it looked upon death as a
mere casual episode which in no wise ruffled his habitual humour. “I
pray you, Mr. Lieutenant,” he said, with his foot on the scaffold,
noticing how ill it had been put together, “see me safe up. For my
coming down, let me shift for myself”: and as he laid his neck on
the block, moving his beard aside, “Pity that should be cut; it hath
committed no treason.”
His head, according to custom, was set on Temple Bar, but Margaret
Roper, she “who clasped in her last trance her murdered father’s head,”
was allowed to obtain possession of it, and preserved it in spices till
her own death. The news of the execution was conveyed to Charles V.
His comment is endorsed by posterity--“If we had been master of such a
servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than
have lost such a worthy Councillor.”
THOMAS CROMWELL
I
THOMAS CROMWELL
For six years, Thomas Cromwell was palpably and unmistakably the
ruler of England--subject to the approval of the king. For the four
years preceding, it is practically certain that he both suggested
and organised Henry’s policy. England has never known a statesman so
irresistible, so relentless, while his power lasted; nor one whose
downfall was more sudden or so universally applauded. He is the most
terrifying because he is the most passionless figure in our history.
He wrought like fate, with a perfect disregard of all human sentiment
and emotion; a scourge of God. Not, however, a mere scourge like
the earthquake and the pestilence; not a mere destroyer; for, while
he shattered, he built. But for Cromwell, it may be doubted whether
Elizabeth’s England could have come into being.
For a second time Henry VIII. found the man most consummately fitted
to minister to his own ambition; to plan, to organise, to smite--and
to be smitten. As Wolsey, having accomplished his work, fell because
he failed to engineer his master’s matrimonial projects, so Cromwell,
having accomplished his work, fell in attempting to engineer a
matrimonial project which displeased his master. Both the great
ministers were men of humble birth at the best: popular report gave
out that the father of the one was a butcher, that of the other a
blacksmith. The one mounted to power, the last and perhaps the greatest
product of the old relation between Church and State; the other was
the first layman who, lacking even gentle blood, achieved the highest
position in the State, and shattered her old relation with the Church.
The reign of Henry VIII. abounds in huge ironies: it is not perhaps the
least of them that the Hammer of the Monks passed into the service of
the king from the service of the Cardinal.
[Illustration: _THOMAS CROMWELL 1st EARL OF ESSEX_
_By_ HOLBEIN, _from an Engraving by Houbraken in the British Museum_]
Diversities in the judgments passed on Thomas Cromwell are less
marked than in the case of most of the statesmen portrayed in this
volume. There is no possibility of questioning the utter absence
of moral scruple in the methods by which he pursued his ends, the
completeness with which he subordinated every other consideration to
their achievement, the vast organising power he displayed. That he
was actuated by a moral repulsion to the Roman system, or a religious
enthusiasm for the purity of the Gospel, is a view that can only
be put forward on the sweeping assumption that everybody concerned
in the Reformation at all was so actuated, except feeble or wicked
bigots who clung to the old order. Cromwell as a Protestant Martyr is
very much like Frederic the Great as Protestant Hero. Every one who
believes that it was good for England to reject the Papal authority
and to subordinate the Church in England to the State, is bound
to consider that the man who did these things for England rendered
his country a great service. Every one who holds the contrary view as
to the Papacy and the Church must hold that he rendered her almost
immeasurable dis-service. But these are judgments not on the man but on
the circumstances.
Yet there is one very curious fact about Thomas Cromwell. Although he
set his mark indelibly on the history of his country, and in spite
of the exceptionally dramatic course of his career, his name seems
to convey very little to most Englishmen--save as the secretary whom
Wolsey charged to “fling away ambition.” Oliver looms so large that it
is difficult to grasp the idea that another person of the same name
also loomed large a hundred years earlier. No playwright or novelist
has made him a central figure in drama or novel. Yet it may at least be
argued that of the ten characters here examined, his personality was
the one which most decisively influenced the course of history.
II
EARLIER CAREER AND RISE TO POWER
In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there was dwelling in
Putney one Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, who appears to have been a
brewer, smith, and armourer, and incidentally to have been a very
troublesome person with a taste for breaking the law in minor matters.
There is no doubt that Walter was the father of Thomas: whose birth
conjecture places about 1485. Down to 1512, the accounts of Cromwell’s
life rest entirely on later gossip, sometimes professedly derived
from remarks which he himself let fall. All reports, however, agree
in saying that he went to Italy when very young--“fleeing from his
father,” one of them avers. It needs no evidence to show that he had
a remarkably enterprising and self-reliant spirit, and if he did
run away from a turbulent parent to seek his fortune by his wits,
it was a course thoroughly consonant with his subsequent career.
The reports state further that he served as a man-at-arms under an
Italian nobleman, and with the French in 1503. Allowing for presumable
inaccuracies of detail, there is no reason to doubt that he tried his
hand as a trader of sorts in the Low Countries and in Italy. There is,
however, definite ground for believing that he returned to England
about 1512, and married the next year. If Mistress Elizabeth Wykeys did
not bring something fairly handsome in the way of a fortune, Thomas
Cromwell must have strangely forgotten himself. For some years, it
may be affirmed with confidence that he took part in business as a
wool-merchant or “shearman,” combining this trade with practice as an
attorney. Documentary evidence puts it effectively beyond doubt that he
was professionally known as a man of law to Wolsey in 1520. In 1523 he
sat in the House of Commons as a Member of that Parliament which, under
Sir Thomas More’s Speakership, declined to discuss the voting of a
subsidy in the Cardinal’s presence.
By this time we are getting away from the region of conjecture,
anecdote, and hearsay, into that of definite records. What we know of
Cromwell’s share in this Parliament is derived from two documents;
one, a letter of his own, in which he gibes at his fellow members for
having babbled at large about everything under the sun without doing
anything. “I have endured,” he says, “a Parliament which continued by
the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace,
strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury,
truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity,
activity, force, temperance, treason, murder, felony, and also how a
commonwealth might be edified and continued within our realm. Howbeit,
in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do;
that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.’ If
Carlyle had lighted upon that, how his heart would have rejoiced! The
second document, however, suggests that if Cromwell, like Carlyle, had
no great opinion of talkers, he meant his own voice to be heard: since
it is almost certainly the MS. draft of a speech which he prepared for
delivery in that same Parliament. The speech is exceedingly clever, and
most diplomatically expressed--but is dead against Wolsey’s subsidy.
Perhaps he thought better of it, and kept it in MS. If not, it was an
audacious speech to make, for a man who was getting in touch with the
Cardinal, from whose good graces much might be hoped. Still, a like
audacity paid him well some six years later. It may have been carefully
calculated in both instances; but in both there were big risks.@
At any rate, his favour with the great minister increased. He dropped
his wool-business, extended his private legal practice, was entrusted
with much legal work by the Cardinal, and became known as the person
through whom suitors to Wolsey might find it advisable to make their
applications. It was not long before he found, in his capacity as a
man of law, congenial employment in the suppression of small religious
Houses, and the appropriation of their endowments to Wolsey’s colleges
at Ipswich and Oxford. This business he did to the entire satisfaction
of his master; and since he never at any time hesitated to accept or
extract material contributions to his private exchequer from any one
concerned, his accumulations grew _pari passu_ with his favour. So
also, incidentally, did his unpopularity, for which he cared absolutely
nothing. His confidential relations with the apparently all-powerful
minister made him a person of considerable though unofficial
importance; bringing him in contact with people of high position. Thus
in 1527 he was well-known to Reginald Pole (afterwards Cardinal),
whom he counselled to drop high-flown ideas, and learn the practical
business of a politician by studying Machiavelli’s “Prince”--a work of
which he must have obtained a MS. copy, as it had not yet been printed,
though written probably as early as 1513.
But the toils of the divorce business were already enmeshing Cromwell’s
patron; as the year 1529 advanced, clouds, lightning-charged, were
gathering over his head, and the secretary knew that the hour was about
to strike when he himself must either “make or mar.”
We have seen that practically nothing is known with absolute certainty
as to Cromwell’s early years; we have seen also that the reports
about that period of his life are sufficiently consistent with each
other and with his later career to warrant us in assuming that they
were tolerably well grounded. It would be difficult to conceive of
any man thus trained, turning out otherwise than a cynic. At home, we
have the father, a man in a respectable position, who is, however,
eternally being summonsed for some breach of the law. The clever and
independent youngster quarrels with his father, and takes himself off
to foreign parts. He makes for Italy--the land of all others where
brains counted most; the land also where morals counted least; the
land _par excellence_ of poison and poniards; the land where every
one was formally orthodox, and hardly any one--least of all the
priests--believed anything much. Only a religious enthusiast could
pass through the ordeal of life in Italy--at the age of twenty or
thereabouts--without becoming a sceptic. That a Cromwell should have
passed through it without conceiving a most heart-felt contempt for the
whole Roman system would be incredible; but it is hardly more credible
that he should have been converted into a cold, stern moralist. If he
was, he kept the cold, stern morality pretty thoroughly in abeyance
until it found vent in the destruction of the monasteries.
After a brief experience of life in camp and in the guard-room, the
young man is apparently for some ten years knocking about from Venice
to Antwerp, acquiring a sound knowledge of trade and a mastery of the
ways of traders. Then he returns to England and turns his knowledge
to account, combining with it a lucrative practice, as a presumably
somewhat unscrupulous but amazingly clever attorney. Always it is the
seamy side of life which concerns him; and at any rate, after he has
sown his wild oats and acquired experience, he adds to the conviction
that most men would be knaves if they could, the certainty that, at
least in comparison with Thomas Cromwell, most of them are fools. This
consciousness makes him ambitious. He manages to attract the great
Cardinal’s attention by his abilities. The summoning of a Parliament
gives him an opportunity. He prepares a speech for it, which will
certainly make him a man of some mark if it is delivered--and a clever
speech in opposition, as many parliamentarians learned when Parliament
had become a real power, is not always an obstacle to government
favour. Cromwell is still a man of the people, and the speech is on the
people’s side. Whether he made that speech pay him by delivering it or
by suppressing it remains uncertain--either is possible. Anyhow, from
that date his favour and his prosperity advanced rapidly; his thorough
knowledge of law, of business, and of character, and his immense
mastery of detail, making him a quite invaluable servant. And he who
has become invaluable to the first minister of the Court may become
invaluable to the Court itself.
Now what would be the natural political attitude of such a man?
Had there been room for a career as a demagogue when he sat in the
Parliament of 1523, he might have adopted that _rôle_: aiming, of
course, at a dictatorship. But there was no opening. To such a man,
however, it is quite certain that the absolute rule of one man would
present itself as the sole really strong form of government. Absolutism
was taking the place of the old Feudalism all over Europe; Henry VII.
had laid sure foundations for it in England; Wolsey had carried on
the work; it would be the business of Wolsey’s successor to complete
it. The political theory of Machiavelli was not in itself novel; it
must have been familiar, as a latent theory, to every one who knew
anything of the Italy of the Medicis and the Borgias. The novelty
lay in stating it boldly in the open. That, even the author of the
“Prince” had not done as yet: he had merely formulated it for private
circulation. Publication was deferred. But the Machiavellian creed
had reached the hands of Wolsey’s secretary, who had adopted it with
complete appreciation. Its central tenets are the complete divorce
between ethical considerations and political methods, and the complete
concentration of all power under the control of one will. The “Prince”
became Cromwell’s political text-book, whose principles and maxims
he was prepared to apply with appalling thoroughness if ever the
opportunity offered.
It was remarked that before the appointment of Sir Thomas More in 1529,
no one had held the office of Lord Chancellor unless he was either of
noble birth or an ecclesiastic. More, however, was of gentle blood. It
required a yet more violent departure from precedent for the king to
take as his own most confidential adviser a layman of plebeian origin;
and some considerable time elapsed before Cromwell held openly the
position which in effect had already long been his. The story of his
elevation will occupy the section now following: here we have attempted
to present the figure of the man who in the autumn of 1529 was nothing
more than the confidential secretary of a minister who was on the very
verge of the historic “farewell to all his greatness.” The secretary
presents in many respects a very marked contrast to his master, but the
contrast with his master’s successor in the Chancellorship is still
more striking. England never knew a statesman whose politics were so
entirely ethical as More; never one who ignored ethics so completely as
Cromwell. With the one, conscience stood unmistakeably first; with the
other it was non-existent, as far as state-craft was concerned. That is
not to say that the man himself was without conscience or moral sense;
just as Machiavelli, his master, was the last statesman in Italy who
could be called a scoundrel. Cromwell held with Machiavelli that the
political end justifies any means; the only question for the statesman
is, whether in the particular instance a flagrantly immoral method
may frustrate the end sought instead of furthering it, by shocking
sentiments which require to be conciliated. The Italian would not
personally practise all that he preached: his English disciple went
farther. Both doctrine and practice were the direct contradictions of
the doctrine and practice of Thomas More.
III
PLANNING THE CAMPAIGN
The blow fell: the Cardinal was struck suddenly down. What did Cromwell
do? In effect, we have two authorities--Cavendish, Wolsey’s honest
but not over astute biographer, and Foxe, honest too, but ready to
believe whatever chimed in best with his own theories. On Hallowmass
Day, November 1, Cavendish found the secretary in the Great Chamber at
Esher, whither the fallen Cardinal had retired; in much perturbation
of spirit over the prospect of his own ruin for his faithful service
to Wolsey, and resolved, in his own phrase, to go up to London, and
“make or mar.” He did not desert his master, but he went up to London
and made haste to commend himself to the other side. He played his
cards boldly, bidding directly for the favour of Norfolk, with whose
approbation he forthwith entered the newly-called Parliament as member
for Taunton. In fact, he had the wit to recognise that by skilful
management he could be loyal to Wolsey and push his own prospects at
the same time. The move was audacious, and successful. He had three
possible courses. A baser or a less astute man would have tried to win
favour with his master’s enemies by turning and rending his master. A
less daring one would have carefully dropped out of sight, taking his
chance of being able some day to retrieve his position. Cromwell was
bold enough to take up the cudgels openly in defence of the Cardinal,
thereby winning much credit for courage and loyalty: at the same time,
retaining the fallen minister’s confidence. Thus he was also enabled to
manœuvre for Wolsey, and to mollify some of his enemies by judicious
presents, bestowed under his advice and direction--and passing through
his hands. There is no need to discredit either the loyalty or the
courage displayed, but there is no denying that in displaying it he
served his own interests better than he could have done in any other
way.
Cromwell’s public defence of the Cardinal did not in fact mean much
more than active opposition in Parliament to the Bill of Attainder;
and Henry, at any rate, was not thirsting for Wolsey’s blood. It was
probably some time before he quite made up his mind that he could do
better without the man who had done so much for him. It is not unlikely
that what ultimately decided him was the growing perception that he
could make the combination of Cromwell and Cranmer serve his turn
more effectively. He had just caught from the Cambridge Doctor the
idea of discarding the Papal jurisdiction in the divorce in favour of
the National Ecclesiastical Courts supported by the opinion of the
qualified University doctors of Europe. There is very little doubt that
one of the first steps taken by Cromwell was to obtain an interview
with the king, nominally to defend himself against the malice of the
Cardinal’s enemies; and that he turned the interview to account by
hinting pretty openly that he could work out for the king a policy
which would not only ensure the divorce, but bring him much profit in
other ways, making him “the richest king that ever was in England,”
says Chapuys, the emperor’s ambassador.
Now Henry’s was not the type of mind which invents large and
far-reaching schemes of political action; but it was the type which
can appreciate and appropriate a big scheme designed by some one
else. Hitherto, until he became awake to the idea that Clement, under
pressure from the emperor, might actually deny him the divorce, there
is no reason to suppose that he had ever dreamt of quarrelling with the
Papacy as an institution, or with the ecclesiastical body in England.
Recently things had looked as if there might be a serious personal
quarrel with Clement, of a kind for which there were precedents,
and Stephen Gardiner had used distinctly threatening expressions in
that sense to his Holiness. Wolsey’s difficulties had been largely
due to his anxiety lest the divorce should lead to something still
more serious; but that had been all. Now, however, Wolsey was hardly
displaced when the first moves were made in what was revealed later
as a huge campaign, directed in the first instance against clerical
abuses, extending to privileges, and finally absorbing property; in
the course of which every pretension of the Holy See to jurisdiction,
authority or tribute in the realm of England was flatly and decisively
repudiated.
The whole thing worked out in its successive stages with such
systematic precision that there is no room for doubt of its having
been completely planned from a very early stage. Throughout, Henry
identified himself with it thoroughly. But it is almost inconceivable
that he should have had any such plan in his head when he was making
Sir Thomas More his Chancellor, and Norfolk to all appearance his
principal counsellor. On the other hand, the scheme is precisely such
a one as would have formed in the brain of the student of Machiavelli
who felt himself to be the one man who was able and willing to carry
it out in the king’s service. The old Baronage was already hardly
dangerous; a very few judicious blows would make it utterly incapable
of organised resistance; but if the English ecclesiastical body, with
its great corporate wealth, worked in harmonious accord with the
Papacy, under skilful leadership, in opposition to the Crown, the
Crown might not get the best of the conflict. With the Church brought
to heel in England, itself severed from the Papacy, and its wealth in
the grip of the sovereign, the royal will would be irresistible. To
suggest this new policy to the king, with himself as the instrument to
put it in execution, not perhaps all at once, but enough at a time to
carry the king along with him, would be a stroke which could hardly
fail of success; especially as, in enumerating the advantages the
policy offered, the certainty of getting the desired divorce could be
placed in the forefront. Henry could be perfectly relied upon to see
his own advantage in the proposal; he was equally certain to recognise
in the designer of the scheme the qualities needed for carrying it out.
Everything points to Cromwell, not Henry, as the deviser. The only
alternative is, that Henry had already made his plan, but only began to
regard it as practicable after he had guessed at and tested Cromwell’s
capacities as an instrument; a very much less probable hypothesis on
the face of it. Moreover, it is quite certain that neither before 1529
nor after 1540 did Henry show any power of creating out of his own
head a deeply considered and far-reaching policy. When he was left to
himself, or when he went counter to Wolsey or Cromwell, he never showed
himself a statesman who naturally took “long views.”
Cromwell, then, is to be regarded not as the able and unscrupulous
instrument chosen by Henry to carry out his own preconceived design
of revolutionising the relations between the secular sovereign, the
Church in England, and the Papal authority. Henry had the ability to
appreciate and to adopt the plan, but the brain which both conceived
and organised it, as well as the hand which executed it, belonged not
to the king but to the minister.
IV
CONTRA ECCLESIAM
It does not in effect militate against this view, that before Cromwell
could have set any agency in motion, Parliament did itself lead the way
by attacking certain minor and universally recognised abuses, without
waiting for Convocation to deal with them. It needed nothing in the
way of a campaign to ensure reforms being demanded and approved where
the clergy themselves admitted that the existing state of things was
scandalous. The first real blow was struck some months after Cromwell
had obtained the king’s ear, when Convocation, towards the close of
1530, was startled by a message that the whole of the clergy had
offended against the Statute of Præmunire in admitting the Legatine
authority of the deceased Cardinal. That authority had of course been
sanctioned by the approval of the king; but the fact that it was
illegal was not thereby altered. Technically, there was no possibility
of evading the charge. The clergy had broken the law; they must pay the
penalty. They did, fining themselves to the tune of a million or so
of our money. If they had not been perfectly helpless, the impudence
of the demand, coming from the king, would have been simply colossal:
but a demand which cannot be gainsaid can hardly be called impudent.
Wolsey, of course, had been penalised for exercising the authority, but
then there was the superficial excuse that he had obtained his master’s
sanction by beguiling his unsuspecting innocence. Here the king could
not even produce that flimsy excuse.
This financial operation, however, struck the keynote of the
Cromwellian policy. Wolsey had over-ridden the law in procuring the
Legatine appointment: he had sought to do so by demanding Benevolences:
he had sought to do so by overawing Parliament. Now, everything was
to be done under form of law. Even if--unwittingly of course--the
authorities transgressed their legal powers, the transgression was
to be regularised by a statute _ad hoc_. The principle was equally
agreeable to the tender conscience of Henry and the legal proclivities
of his minister.
The huge fine, however, did not satisfy the requirements. Convocation,
in passing the Bill, was compelled to pass also a clause acknowledging
the king as the “Only Supreme Head” of the Church, though it was
allowed to introduce the qualifying phrase “so far as the law of Christ
permits.” Except as an ingenious salve to clerical consciences, the
qualification was futile, since, in the exercise of his supremacy,
Henry would certainly not admit that he was going farther than those
laws permitted, and he would also be the _de facto_ judge on the
question if any one should dare to raise it. The whole clause might be
interpreted as meaning everything, or as meaning nothing--but the king
would be the interpreter.
The Bill, with the clause, was passed in 1531. Again the campaign
rested for about a year. So far, apart from a slight rectification of
abuses, nothing more--in form--had been done than to exact from the
clergy a penalty to which they had rendered themselves technically
liable, and to demand from them the formal admission of what was
asserted to be already the constitutional position of the Crown in
relation to them. In theory there had been nothing in the nature of
innovation. Now, it was time for innovation; so Parliament had to be
called in, as against the Church. But the innovation was to threaten
the Papal claims, so the Church must share the responsibility. Thus a
fresh phase of the campaign opened with the beginning of 1532.
Again there were in the first place obvious abuses which were dealt
with under Acts concerning mortmain and benefit of clergy. These,
of themselves, implied nothing in particular. But it was a very
different thing with the Annates Act: the first direct and manifest
challenge of a Papal claim. Rome had claimed from every bishop on his
appointment to a See the whole of the first year’s revenue. This, as
the Act pointed out, was a very grievous burden on the bishops, for
whose relief this system was to be stopped. Until quite recently, it
has never been disputed that this Bill was introduced in response
to the actual petition of Convocation. That idea was based on the
existence of a document which--closer examination leaves no doubt--did
not proceed from Convocation at all, as had hitherto been supposed.
Chapuys reported at the time that the bishops opposed the measure.
By this time, doubtless, the supremacy business had awakened their
alarm, and others besides Fisher were beginning to dread a rupture
with the Papacy. There are however, two special features which
demand our attention. The Bill was framed ostensibly for the relief
of the clergy, implying that the Crown, not the Papacy, was the true
protector of their interests, and emphasising an antagonism between
English Churchmen and the Pope. Also, it was not required to be put
in immediate execution, but was to be held in suspense during the
king’s pleasure. A double purpose was served thereby, though the
intention was masked. Clement could buy the withdrawal of the measure
by conceding the divorce: while if he should elect to close that door
to reconciliation, it would not be too late to divert the annates into
the king’s pocket, instead of abolishing the impost. The clergy would
be none the better in either event, but the trick would have helped to
keep them on the king’s side till it was too late to change. Henry was
still playing for a divorce with the Papal sanction; he had not come
to regard a final breach with the Papacy as an end desirable _per se_.
Cromwell, we may assume, took a different view, but of course could not
dream of forcing Henry’s hand: what he could do was to have everything
in thorough order for a decisive breach, if and when the moment should
come.
There was something more, however, for Parliament to do, namely its
presentation of the Supplication against the Ordinaries. There is no
doubt at all that in every essential this was Cromwell’s personal
handiwork. It was a double-barrelled attack, from the popular point
of view, on the way in which the Church exercised its jurisdiction;
from the sovereign’s point of view, on the authority of the Church’s
legislation. The whole intention of it was to force the clergy as a
body to admit that their authority, whether as individuals or as a
corporate body, was subordinate to that of the sovereign. Its object
was attained with entire success: it resulted in what was known as the
“Submission of the Clergy,” virtually a complete surrender. The defeat
was practically the death-blow of the aged Archbishop Warham; while the
Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, found himself so totally opposed to
the principle involved that he resigned office and went into retirement.
Warham’s death at this juncture was most convenient. The old man had
not been sufficiently stout of heart to offer a stubborn resistance to
the new policy, but he had yielded with much misgiving and soreness
of spirit. He had been restive enough to make it doubtful whether in
the last resort he might not decline to pronounce a judgment against
Katharine in defiance of the Pope. By appointing Cranmer to the
Archbishopric, Henry made sure of a primate who would have no qualms
on the point. This security made him ready to precipitate the crisis
which the Pope was craving to postpone or evade. The simple truth was
that Clement felt himself to be completely in the grip of the emperor,
and no conceivable threats from England could have extracted the
desired verdict from him. The fact was unmistakeably revealed by the
publication, in February, of what was in effect an order to Henry to
re-instate Katharine on pain of excommunication. The reply was the Act
in Restraint of Appeals--in form an Act declaratory of the existing
law of England, in effect an announcement of independence--immediately
followed by Cranmer’s judicial pronouncement invalidating the marriage
with Katharine _ab initio_. Until Clement retorted by declaring
Cranmer’s judgment void, Henry abstained from confirming either the Act
in Restraint of Appeals or the Annates Act; their confirmation was his
rejoinder. After that, there might be talk of reconciliation, but the
practical possibility was gone past recall.
V
THE FABRIC OF DESPOTISM
The year 1533 may be regarded as marking the irreparable breach with
the Papacy, though it was not till 1534 that Clement gave his own
formal judgment in favour of Katharine, and Convocation issued its
own declaration that the “Bishop of Rome” derives from Scripture no
more jurisdiction in England than “any other foreign bishop”--two
sentences which may perhaps be regarded as merely bolting an already
locked door. The purpose of Cromwell’s anti-clerical campaign was
so far achieved that the clergy had been driven out of their main
strongholds by their “submission,” and had next been cut off from the
aid of a Papal alliance. These were the preliminary measures to the
assertion in very concrete guise of the untrammelled supremacy of
the Crown in things ecclesiastical and temporal alike, which was the
aim of the policy we have ascribed primarily to Cromwell rather than
his master. An additional reason for so ascribing it is to be found
in the strong presumption afforded by the evidence that Henry himself
did not wish to cast off the Papal allegiance utterly, until he found
that he could get the divorce in no other way. Apart from his fixed
resolution to make Anne Boleyn his wife at all costs, it may be doubted
if he reckoned that the complication of foreign relations involved in
a final repudiation of the Pope’s authority would be compensated by
the more unqualified control of ecclesiastical matters at home. For
him the divorce turned the scale: and since he could not escape the
disadvantages of revolting, he meant to have every scrap of advantage
that could be reaped from it too. The differences which presently arose
between the king and his minister on the conduct of foreign affairs
will be found to have some bearing on this view of the case.
At any rate, the breach being made, Henry was as ready as Cromwell for
aggression; and Cromwell was let loose to carry out his policy--within
the realm--to the uttermost: no longer working in the background, but
in a position as openly dominant as Wolsey himself had occupied.
The first business was to confirm formally the positions already taken
up, in a fresh series of Acts of Parliament, in the early session of
1534; embodying the recent measures, but generally carrying them a step
further. Thus “Peter Pence” were abolished as well as Annates. An
appeal to the King’s Court of Chancery from the Ecclesiastical Courts
was substituted for the Appeal to Rome abolished by the Restraint of
Appeals. The “submission of the clergy” was extended so as to bring the
whole instead of a part only of the canon law under the purview of the
commission to be appointed for its examination. The corollary of the
Boleyn marriage was an Act of Succession in favour of the offspring of
Anne: but the Act carried with it a murderous sting. “I pray that these
things be not confirmed with oaths,” More had said when the marriage
was ratified. His anticipation was justified. An oath of obedience to
the Act was to be administered.
In this affair of the oath, we as usual find Henry and Cromwell in
perfect accord as to policy, but not actuated by precisely the same
motive. The thing in Cromwell’s mind is the Royal Supremacy; he is
determined to be rid of conditions which check the activities of the
Crown, and of men whose influence tends to keep alive doubts as to
the Crown’s legitimate powers. Henry’s point of view is the personal
one. He has done a very unpopular thing in divorcing Katharine and
marrying Anne, and is determined to make every one admit that he was
entirely in the right. Now, there was in England no ecclesiastic so
universally esteemed for probity and saintliness as Fisher, the Bishop
of Rochester; there was no layman who could compare for intellectual
eminence and beauty of character with Thomas More. It was known to the
world that both these men held that Katharine’s marriage had been
valid, and that both disapproved the recent anti-Papal developments. So
also it was known that in the Houses of Religion which stood highest
in reputation for sincerity and austerity, and were untouched by the
breath of scandal, the divorce and the revolt were regarded with
horror. To force these recalcitrants openly to declare in favour of the
divorce and the Royal Supremacy, would be a great triumph. On the other
hand, nothing would so terrorise opposition as the smiting down, before
the horrified eyes of the world, of victims so distinguished. Cromwell
therefore drafted the oath of obedience to the Act of Succession in
such terms that the subscriber would have to swear not only loyalty to
the provisions of the Act, but acceptance of the divorce as right, and
of the Royal Supremacy as theoretically sound. More, Fisher, and some
of the monks to whom the oath was administered, refused to desert their
principles. They would swear to maintain the succession as laid down,
since it lay within the function of the State to order the succession;
but they would not take the oath as it stood. Thereupon they were sent
to prison.
It may readily be believed that the minister, as reported, swore a
great oath when he hea
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