Chapter VI: The Tudor Despotism and the Beginnings of the Reformation

(1497-1528)

Commercial treaties.

The last twelve years of the reign of Henry VII. present in most respects a complete contrast to the earlier period, 1485-1497. There were no more rebellions, and--as we have already seen--no more plots that caused any serious danger. Nor did the king indulge his unruly subjects in foreign wars, though he was constantly engaged in negotiations with France, Scotland, Spain and the emperor, which from time to time took awkward turns. But Henry was determined to win all that he could by diplomacy, and not by force of arms. His cautious, but often unscrupulous, dealings with the rival continental powers had two main ends: the first was to keep his own position safe by playing off France against the Empire and Spain; the second was to get commercial advantages by dangling his alliance before each power in turn. Flanders was still the greatest customer of England, and it was therefore necessary above all things to keep on good terms with the archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian, who on coming of age had taken over the rule of the Netherlands from his father. The king's great triumphs were the conclusion of the _Intercursus Magnus_ of 1496 and the _Intercursus Malus_ (so called by the Flemings, not by the English) of 1506. The former provided for a renewal of the old commercial alliance with the house of Burgundy, on the same terms under which it had existed in the time of Edward IV.; the rupture which had taken place during the years when Maximilian was backing Perkin Warbeck had been equally injurious to both parties. The _Malus Intercursus_ on the other hand gave England some privileges which she had not before enjoyed--exemption from local tolls in Antwerp and Holland, and a licence for English merchants to sell cloth retail as well as wholesale--a concession which hit the Netherland small traders and middlemen very hard. Another great commercial advantage secured by Henry VII. for his subjects was an increased share of the trade to the Scandinavian countries. The old treaties of Edward IV. with the Hanseatic League had left the Germans still in control of the northern seas. Nearly all the Baltic goods, and most of those from Denmark and Norway, had been reaching London or Hull in foreign bottoms. Henry allied himself with John of Denmark, who was chafing under the monopoly of the Hansa, and obtained the most ample grants of free trade in his realms. The Germans murmured, but the English shipping in eastern and northern waters continued to multiply. Much the same policy was pursued in the Mediterranean. Southern goods hitherto had come to Southampton or Sandwich invariably in Venetian carracks, which took back in return English wool and metals. Henry concluded a treaty with Florence, by which that republic undertook to receive his ships in its harbours and to allow them to purchase all eastern goods that they might require. From this time forward the Venetian monopoly ceased, and the visits of English merchant vessels to the Mediterranean became frequent and regular.

English navigators.

Nor was it in dealing with old lines of trade alone that Henry Tudor showed himself the watchful guardian of the interests of his subjects. He must take his share of credit for the encouragement of the exploration of the seas of the Far West. The British traders had already pushed far into the Atlantic before Columbus discovered America; fired by the success of the great navigator they continued their adventures, hoping like him to discover a short "north-west passage" to Cathay and Japan. With a charter from the king giving him leave to set up the English banner on all the lands he might discover, the Bristol Genoese trader John Cabot successfully passed the great sea in 1497, and discovered Newfoundland and its rich fishing stations. Henry rewarded him with a pension of L20 a year, and encouraged him to further exploration, in which he discovered all the American coastline from Labrador to the mouth of the Delaware--a great heritage for England, but one not destined to be taken up for colonization till more than a century had passed.

Foreign policy of Henry VII.

Henry's services to English commerce were undoubtedly of far more importance to the nation than all the tortuous details of his foreign policy. His chicanery need not, however, be censured over much, for the princes with whom he had to deal, and notably Ferdinand and Maximilian, were as insincere and selfish as himself. Few diplomatic hagglings have been so long and so sordid as that between England and Spain over the marriage treaty which gave the hand of Catherine of Aragon first to Henry's eldest son Arthur, and then, on his premature death in 1502, to his second son Henry. The English king no doubt imagined that he had secured a good bargain, as he had kept the princess's dowry, and yet never gave Ferdinand any practical assistance in war or peace. It is interesting to find that he had for some time at the end of his reign a second Spanish marriage in view; his wife Elizabeth of York having died in 1503, he seriously proposed himself as a suitor for Joanna of Castile, the elder sister of Catherine, and the widow of the archduke Philip, though she was known to be insane. Apparently he hoped thereby to gain vantage ground for an interference in Spanish politics, which would have been most offensive to Ferdinand. Nothing came of the project, which contrasts strangely with the greater part of Henry's sober and cautious schemes.

Marriage of James IV. of Scotland and Margaret Tudor.

On the other hand a third project of marriage alliance which Henry carried out in 1503 was destined to be consummated, and to have momentous, though long-deferred, results. This was the giving of the hand of his daughter Margaret to James IV. of Scotland. Thereby he bought quiet on the Border and alliance with Scotland for no more than some ten years. But--as it chanced--the issue of this alliance was destined to unite the English and the Scottish crowns, when the male line of the Tudors died out, and Henry, quite unintentionally, had his share in bringing about the consummation, by peaceful means, of that end which Edward I. had sought for so long to win by the strong hand.

Character of Henry's internal rule.

All the foreign politics of the reign of Henry VII. have small importance compared with his work within the realm. The true monument of his ability was that he left England tamed and orderly, with an obedient people and a full exchequer, though he had taken it over wellnigh in a state of anarchy. The mere suppression of insurrections like those of Simnel and Warbeck was a small part of his task. The harder part was to recreate a spirit of order and subordination among a nation accustomed to long civil strife. His instruments were ministers of ability chosen from the clergy and the gentry--he seems to have been equally averse to trusting the baronage at the one end of the social scale, or mere upstarts at the other, and it is notable that no one during his reign can be called a court favourite. The best-known names among his servants were his great chancellor, Archbishop Morton, Foxe, bishop of Winchester, Sir Reginald Bray, and the lawyers Empson and Dudley. These two last bore the brunt of the unpopularity of the financial policy of the king during the latter half of his reign, when the vice of avarice seems to have grown upon him beyond all reason. But Henry was such a hard-working monarch, and so familiar with all the details of administration, that his ministers cannot be said to have had any independent authority, or to have directed their master's course of action.

The Star Chamber.

The machinery employed by the first of the Tudors for the suppression of domestic disorder is well known. The most important item added by him to the administrative machinery of the realm was the famous Star Chamber, which was licensed by the parliament of 1487. It consisted of a small committee of ministers, privy councillors and judges, which sat to deal with offences that seemed to lie outside the scope of the common law, or more frequently with the misdoings of men who were so powerful that the local courts could not be trusted to execute justice upon them, such as great landowners, sheriffs and other royal officials, or turbulent individuals who were the terror of their native districts. The need for a strong central court directly inspired by the king, which could administer justice without respect of persons, was so great, that the constitutional danger of establishing an autocratic judicial committee, untrammelled by the ordinary rules of law, escaped notice at the time. It was not till much later that the nation came to look upon the Star Chamber as the special engine of royal tyranny and to loathe its name. In 1500 it was for the common profit of the realm that there should exist such a court, which could reduce even the most powerful offender to order.

Suppression of livery and maintenance.

One of the most notable parts of the king's policy was his long-continued and successful assault on the abuse of "livery and maintenance," which had been at its height during the Wars of the Roses. We have seen the part which it had taken in strengthening the influence of those who were already too powerful, and weakening the ordinary operation of the law. Henry put it down with a strong hand, forbidding all liveries entirely, save for the mere domestic retainers of each magnate. His determination to end the system was well shown by the fact that he heavily fined even the earl of Oxford, the companion of his exile, the victor of Bosworth, and the most notoriously loyal peer in the realm, for an ostentatious violation of the statute. Where Oxford was punished, no less favoured person could hope to escape. By the end of the reign the little hosts of badged adherents which had formed the nucleus for the armies of the Wars of the Roses had ceased to exist.

Personal rule.

Edward IV., as has been already remarked, had many of the opportunities of the autocrat, if only he had cared to use them; but his sloth and self-indulgence stood in the way. Henry VII., the most laborious and systematic of men, turned them to account. He formed his personal opinion on every problem of administration and intervened himself in every detail. In many respects he was his own prime minister, and nothing was done without his knowledge and consent. A consistent policy may be detected in all his acts--that of gathering all the machinery of government into his own hands. Under the later Plantagenets and the Lancastrian kings the great check on the power of the crown had been that financial difficulties were continually compelling the sovereign to summon parliaments. The estates had interfered perpetually in all the details of governance, by means of the power of the purse. Edward IV., first among English sovereigns, had been able to dispense with parliaments for periods of many years, because he did not need their grants save at long intervals. Henry was in the same position; by strict economy, by the use of foreign subsidies, by the automatic growth of his revenues during a time of peace and returning prosperity, by confiscation and forfeitures, he built himself up a financial position which rendered it unnecessary for him to make frequent appeals to parliament. Not the least fertile of his expedients was that regular exploitation of the law as a source of revenue, which had already been seen in the time of his father-in-law. This part of Henry's policy is connected with the name of his two extortionate "fiscal judges" Empson and Dudley, who "turned law and justice into rapine" by their minute inquisition into all technical breaches of legality, and the nice fashion in which they adapted the fine to the wealth of the misdemeanant, without any reference to his moral guilt or any regard for extenuating circumstances. The king must take the responsibility for their unjust doings; it was his coffers which mainly profited by their chicane. In his later years he fell into the vice of hoarding money for its own sake; so necessary was it to his policy that he should be free, as far as possible, from the need for applying to parliament for money, that he became morbidly anxious to have great hoards in readiness for any possible day of financial stress. At his death he is said to have had L1,800,000 in hard cash laid by. Hence it is not strange to find that he was able to dispense with parliaments in a fashion that would have seemed incredible to a 14th-century king. In his whole reign he only asked them five times for grants of taxation, and three of the five requests were made during the first seven years of his reign. In the eyes of many men parliament lost the main reason for its existence when it ceased to be the habitual provider of funds for the ordinary expenses of the realm. Those who had a better conception of its proper functions could see that it had at any rate been stripped of its chief power when the king no longer required its subsidies. There are traces of a want of public interest in its proceedings, very different from the anxiety with which they used to be followed in Plantagenet and Lancastrian times. Legislation, which only incidentally affects him, is very much less exciting to the ordinary citizen than taxation, which aims directly at his pocket. It is at any rate clear that during the latter years of his reign, when the time of impostures and rebellions had ended, Henry was able to dispense with parliaments to a great extent, and incurred no unpopularity by doing so. Indeed he was accepted by the English people as the benefactor who had delivered them from anarchy; and if they murmured at his love of hoarding, and cursed his inquisitors Empson and Dudley, they had no wish to change the Tudor rule, and were far from regarding the times of the "Lancastrian experiment" as a lost golden age. The present king might be unscrupulous and avaricious, but he was cautious, intelligent and economical; no one would have wished to recall the regime of that "crowned saint" Henry VI.

Henry VIII.

Nevertheless when the first of the Tudors died, on the 21st of April 1509, there were few who regretted him. He was not a monarch to rouse enthusiasm, while much was expected from his brilliant, clever and handsome son Henry VIII., whose magnificent presence and manly vigour recalled the early prime of Edward IV. Some years later England realized that its new king had inherited not only the physical beauty and strength of his grandfather, but also every one of his faults, with the sole exception of his tendency to sloth. Henry VIII. indeed may be said, to sum up his character in brief, to have combined his father's brains with his grandfather's passions. Edward IV. was selfish and cruel, but failed to become a tyrant because he lacked the energy for continuous work. Henry VII. was unscrupulous and untiring, but so cautious and wary that he avoided violent action and dangerous risks. Their descendant had neither Edward's sloth nor Henry's moderation; he was capable of going to almost any lengths in pursuit of the gratification of his ambition, his passions, his resentment or his simple love of self-assertion. Yet, however far he might go on the road to tyranny, Henry had sufficient cunning, versatility and power of cool reflection, to know precisely when he had reached the edge of the impossible. He had his father's faculty for gauging public opinion, and estimating dangers, and though his more venturous temperament led him to press on far beyond the point at which the seventh Henry would have halted, he always stopped short on the hither side of the gulf. It was the most marvellous proof of his ability that he died on his throne after nearly forty years of autocratic rule, during which he had roused more enmities and done more to change the face of the realm than any of the kings that were before him.

But it was long before the nation could estimate all the features of the magnificent but sinister figure which was to dominate England from 1509 to 1547. At his accession Henry VIII. was only eighteen years of age, and, if his character was already formed, it was only the attractive side of it that was yet visible. His personal beauty, his keen intelligence, his scholarship, his love of music and the arts, his kingly ambition, were all obvious enough. His selfishness, his cruelty, his ingratitude, his fierce hatred of criticism and opposition, his sensuality, had yet to be discovered by his subjects. A suspicious observer might have detected something ominous in the first act of his reign--the arrest and attainder of his father's unpopular ministers, Empson and Dudley, whose heads he flung to the people in order to win a moment's applause. Whatever their faults, they had served the house of Tudor well, and it was a grotesque perversion of justice to send them to the scaffold on a charge of high treason. A similar piece of cruelty was the execution, some time later, of the earl of Suffolk, who had been languishing long years in the Tower; he was destroyed not for any new plots, but simply for his Yorkist descent. But in Henry's earlier years such acts were still unusual; it was not till he had grown older, and had learnt how much the nation would endure, that judicial murder became part of his established policy.

Continental projects of Henry VIII.

Treaty of Etaples.

Henry's first outburst of self-assertion took the form of reversing his father's thrifty and peaceful policy, by plunging into the midst of the continental wars from which England had been held back by his cautious parent. The adventure was wholly unnecessary, and also unprofitable. But while France was engaged in the "Holy War" against the pope, Venice, the emperor, and Ferdinand of Spain, Henry renewed the old claims of the Plantagenets, and hoped, if not to win back the position of Edward III., at least to recover the duchy of Aquitaine, or some parts of it. He lent an army to Ferdinand for the invasion of Gascony, and landed himself at Calais with 25,000 men, to beat up the northern border of France. Little good came of his efforts. The Spanish king gave no assistance, and the northern campaign, though it included the brilliant battle of the Spurs (August 16th, 1513), accomplished nothing more than the capture of Tournai and Therouanne. It was soon borne in upon King Henry that France, even when engaged with other enemies, was too strong to be overrun in the old style. Moreover, his allies were giving him no aid, though they had eagerly accepted his great subsidies. With a sudden revulsion of feeling Henry offered peace to France, which King Louis XII. gladly bought, agreeing to renew the old pension or tribute that Henry VII. had received by the treaty of Etaples. Their reconciliation and alliance were sealed by the marriage of the French king to Henry's favourite sister Mary, who was the bridegroom's junior by more than thirty years. Their wedlock and the Anglo-French alliance lasted only till the next year, when Louis died, and Mary secretly espoused an old admirer, Charles Brandon, afterwards duke of Suffolk, King Henry's greatest friend and confidant.

War with Scotland. Battle of Flodden.

While the French war was still in progress there had been heavy fighting on the Scottish border. James IV., reverting to the traditionary policy of his ancestors, had taken the opportunity of attacking England while her king and his army were overseas. He suffered a disaster which recalls that of David II. at Neville's Cross--a fight which had taken place under precisely similar political conditions. After taking a few Northumbrian castles, James was brought to action at Flodden Field by the earl of Surrey (September 9th, 1513). After a desperate fight lasting the greater part of a day, the Scots were outmanoeuvred and surrounded. James IV.--who had refused to quit the field--was slain in the forefront of the battle, with the greater part of his nobles; with him fell also some 10,000 or 12,000 of his men. Scotland, with her military power brought low, and an infant king on the throne, was a negligible quantity in international politics for some years. The queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, aided by a party that favoured peace and alliance with England, was strong enough to balance the faction under the duke of Albany which wished for perpetual war and asked for aid from France.

Thomas Wolsey.

With the peace of 1514 ended the first period of King Henry's reign. He was now no longer a boy, but a man of twenty-three, with his character fully developed; he had gradually got rid of his father's old councillors, and had chosen for himself a minister as ambitious and energetic as himself, the celebrated Thomas Wolsey, whom he had just made archbishop of York, and who obtained the rank of cardinal from the pope in the succeeding year. Wolsey was the last of the great clerical ministers of the middle ages, and by no means the worst. Like so many of his predecessors he had risen from the lower middle classes, through the royal road of the church; he had served Henry VII.'s old councillor Foxe, bishop of Winchester, as secretary, and from his household had passed into that of his master. He had been an admirable servant to both, full of zeal, intelligence and energy, and not too much burdened with scruples. The young king found in him an instrument well fitted to his hand, a man fearless, ingenious, and devoted to the furtherance of the power of the crown, by which alone he had reached his present position of authority. For fourteen years he was his master's chief minister--the person responsible in the nation's eyes for all the more unpopular assertions of the royal prerogative, and for all the heavy taxation and despotic acts which Henry's policy required. It mattered little to Henry that the cardinal was arrogant, tactless and ostentatious; indeed it suited his purpose that Wolsey should be saddled by public opinion with all the blame that ought to have been laid on his own shoulders. It was convenient that the old nobility should detest the upstart, and that the commons should imagine him to be the person responsible for the demands for money required for the royal wars. As long as his minister served his purposes and could execute his behests Henry gave him a free hand, and supported him against all his enemies. It was believed at the time, and is still sometimes maintained by historians, that Wolsey laid down schemes of policy and persuaded his master to adopt them; but the truth would appear to be that Henry was in no wise dominated by the cardinal, but imposed on him his own wishes, merely leaving matters of detail to be settled by his minister. Things indifferent might be trusted to him, but the main lines of English diplomacy and foreign policy show rather the influence of the king's personal desires of the moment than that of a statesman seeking national ends.

It has often been alleged that Henry, under the guidance of Wolsey, followed a consistent scheme for aggrandizing England, by making her the state which kept the balance of power of Europe in her hands. And it is pointed out that during the years of the cardinal's ascendancy the alliance of England was sought in turn by the great princes of the continent, and proved the make-weight in the scales. This is but a superficial view of the situation. Henry, if much courted, was much deceived by his contemporaries. They borrowed his money and his armies, but fed him with vain promises and illusory treaties. He and his minister were alternately gulled by France and by the emperor, and the net result of all their activity was bankruptcy and discontent at home and ever-frustrated hopes abroad. It is hard to build up a reputation for statecraft for either Henry or Wolsey on the sum total of English political achievement during their collaboration.

Henry VIII. and the rivalry of Francis I. and Charles V.

Failure of Henry's diplomacy.

During the first few years of the cardinal's ascendancy the elder race of European sovereigns, the kings with whom Henry VII. had been wont to haggle, disappeared one after the other. Louis of France died in 1515, Ferdinand of Aragon in 1516, the emperor Maximilian--the last survivor of his generation--in 1519. Louis was succeeded by the active, warlike and shifty Francis I.; the heritage of both Ferdinand and Maximilian--his maternal and paternal grandfathers--fell to Charles of Habsburg, who already possessed the Netherlands in his father's right and Castile in that of his mother. The enmity of the house of Valois and the house of Habsburg, which had first appeared in the wars of Charles VIII. and Maximilian, took a far more bitter shape under Francis I. and Charles V., two young princes who were rivals from their youth. Their wars were almost perpetual, their peaces never honestly carried out. Their powers were very equally balanced; if Charles owned broader lands than Francis, they were more scattered and in some cases less loyal. The solid and wealthy realm of France proved able to make head against Spain and the Netherlands, even when they were backed by the emperor's German vassals. Charles was also distracted by many stabs in the back from the Ottoman Turks, who were just beginning their attack on Christendom along the line of the Danube. To each of the combatants it seemed that the English alliance would turn the scale in his own favour. Henry was much courted, and wooed with promises of lands to be won from the other side by his ally of the moment. But neither Charles nor Francis wished him to be a real gainer, and he himself was a most untrustworthy friend, for he was quite ready to turn against his ally if he seemed to be growing too powerful, and threatened to dominate all Europe; the complete success of either party would mean that England would sink once more into a second-rate power. How faithless and insincere was Henry's policy may be gauged from the fact that in 1520, after all the pageantry of the "Field of the Cloth of Gold" and his vows of undying friendship for Francis, he met Charles a few weeks later at Gravelines, and concluded with him a treaty which pledged England to a defensive alliance against the king's "good brother" of France. Such things happened not once nor twice during the years of Wolsey's ministry. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, if Henry's allies regularly endeavoured to cheat him out of his share of their joint profits. What use was there in rewarding a friend who might become an enemy to-morrow? The greatest deception of all was in 1522, when Charles V., who had made the extraordinary promise that he would get Wolsey made pope, and lend Henry an army to conquer northern France, failed to redeem his word in both respects. He caused his own old tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, to be crowned with the papal tiara, and left the English to invade Picardy entirely unassisted. But this was only one of many such disappointments.

Beginnings of parliamentary resistance.

Execution of the duke of Buckingham.

The result of some twelve years of abortive alliances and ill-kept treaties was that Henry had obtained no single one of the advantages which he had coveted, and that he had lavished untold wealth and many English lives upon phantom schemes which crumbled between his fingers. His subjects had already begun to murmur; the early parliaments of his reign had been passive and complaisant; but by 1523 the Commons had been goaded into resistance. They granted only half the subsidies asked from them, pleading that three summers more of such taxation as the cardinal demanded for his master would leave the realm drained of its last penny, and reduced to fall back on primitive forms of barter, "clothes for victuals and bread for cheese," out of mere want of coin. Fortunately for the king his subjects laid all the blame upon his mouthpiece the cardinal, instead of placing it where it was due. On Wolsey's back also was saddled the most iniquitous of Henry's acts of tyranny against individuals--the judicial murder of the duke of Buckingham, the highest head among the English nobility. For some hasty words, amplified by the doubtful evidence of treacherous retainers, together with a foolish charge of dabbling with astrologers, the heir of the royal line of Thomas of Woodstock had been tried and executed with scandalous haste. His only real crime was that, commenting on the lack of male heirs to the crown--for after many years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon Henry's sole issue was one sickly daughter--he had been foolish enough to remark that if anything should happen to the king he himself was close in succession to the crown. The cardinal bore the blame, because he and Buckingham had notoriously disliked each other; but the deed had really been of the king's own contriving. He was roused to implacable wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the succession question.

Question of the king's divorce.

In the later years of Wolsey's ascendancy, nevertheless, that same question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry's own mind it was never long absent; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing tired of his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid. Somewhere about the end of 1526 those who were in the king's intimate confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce--a thing not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But Henry's doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had become enamoured of another lady--the beautiful, ambitious and cunning Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of becoming merely the king's mistress, but aspired to be his consort.

England and the Reformation.

The question of the king's divorce soon became inextricably confused with another problem, whose first beginnings go back to a slightly earlier date. What was to be the attitude of England towards the Reformation? It was now nearly ten years since Martin Luther had posted up his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and since he had testified to his faith before the diet of Worms. All Germany was now convulsed with the first throes of the revolt against the papacy, and the echoes of the new theological disputes were being heard in England. King Henry himself in 1521 had deigned to write an abusive pamphlet against Luther, for which he had been awarded the magnificent title of _Fidei Defensor_ by that cultured sceptic Pope Leo X. About the same time we begin to read of orders issued by the bishops for the discovery and burning of all Lutheran books--a clear sign that they were reaching England in appreciable quantities. Hitherto it had been only the works of Wycliffe that had merited this attention on the part of inquisitors. In the Wycliffite remnant, often persecuted but never exterminated, there already existed in England the nucleus of a Protestant party. All through the reign of Henry VII. and the early years of Henry VIII. the intermittent burning of "heretics," and their far more frequent recantations, had borne witness to the fact that the sect still lingered on. The Wycliffites were a feeble folk, compelled to subterraneous ways, and destitute of learned leaders or powerful supporters. But they survived to see Luther's day, and to merge themselves in one body with the first English travelling scholars and merchants who brought back from the continent the doctrines of the German Reformation. The origins of a Protestant party, who were not mere Wycliffites, but had been first interested in dogmatic controversy by coming upon the works of Luther, can be traced back to the year 1521 and to the university of Cambridge. There a knot of scholars, some of whom were to perish early at the stake, while others were destined to become the leaders of the English Reformation, came together and encouraged each other to test the received doctrines of contemporary orthodoxy by searching the Scriptures and the works of the Fathers. The sect spread in a few years to London, Oxford and other centres of intellectual life, but for many years its followers were not numerous; like the old Lollardy, Protestantism took root only in certain places and among certain classes--notably the lesser clergy and the merchants of the great towns.

King Henry and those who wished to please him professed as great a hatred and contempt for the new purveyors of German doctrines as for the belated disciples of Wycliffe. But there was another movement, whose origins went back for many centuries, which they were far from discouraging, and were prepared to utilize when it suited their convenience. This was the purely political feeling against the tyranny of the papacy, and the abuses of the national church, which in early ages had given supporters to William the Conqueror and Henry II., which had dictated the statutes of Mortmain and of Praemunire. Little had been heard of the old anti-clerical party in England since the time of Henry IV.; it had apparently been identified in the eyes of the orthodox with that Lollardy with which it had for a time allied itself, and had shared in its discredit. But it had always continued to exist, and in the early years of Henry VIII. had been showing unmistakable signs of vitality. The papacy of the Renaissance was a fair mark for criticism. It was not hard to attack the system under which Rodrigo Borgia wore the tiara, while Girolamo Savonarola went to the stake; or in which Julius II. exploited the name of Christianity to serve his territorial policy in Italy, and Leo X. hawked his indulgences round Europe to raise funds which would enable him to gratify his artistic tastes. At no period had the official hierarchy of the Western Church been more out of touch with common righteousness and piety. Moreover, they were sinning under the eyes of a laity which was far more intelligent and educated, more able to think and judge for itself, less the slave of immemorial tradition, than the old public of the middle ages. In Italy the Renaissance might be purely concerned with things intellectual or artistic, and seem to have little or no touch with things moral. Beyond the Alps it was otherwise; among the Teutonic nations at least the revolt against the scholastic philosophy, the rout of the obscurantists, the eager pursuit of Hellenic culture, had a religious aspect. The same generation which refused to take thrice-translated and thrice-garbled screeds from Aristotle as the sum of human knowledge, and went back to the original Greek, was also studying the Old and New Testaments in their original tongues, and drawing from them conclusions as unfavourable to the intelligence as to the scholarship of the orthodox medieval divines. Such a discovery as that which showed that the "False Decretals," on which so much of the power of the papacy rested, were mere 9th-century forgeries struck deep at the roots of the whole traditional relation between church and state.

The first English scholars of the Renaissance, like Erasmus on the continent, did not see the logical outcome of their own discoveries, nor realize that the campaign against obscurantism would develop into a campaign against Roman orthodoxy. Sir Thomas More, the greatest of them, was actually driven into reaction by the violence of Protestant controversialists, and the fear that the new doctrines would rend the church in twain. He became himself a persecutor, and a writer of abusive pamphlets unworthy of the author of the _Utopia_. But to the younger generation the irreconcilability of modern scholarship and medieval formulae of faith became more and more evident. One after another all the cardinal doctrines were challenged by writers who were generally acute, and almost invariably vituperative. For the controversies of the Reformation were conducted by both sides, from kings and prelates down to gutter pamphleteers, in language of the most unseemly violence.

But, as has been already said, the scholars and theologians had less influence in the beginning of the English Reformation than the mere lay politicians, whose anti-clerical tendencies chanced to fit in with King Henry's convenience when he quarrelled with the papacy. It is well to note that the first attacks of parliament on the church date back to two years before Luther published his famous theses. The contention began in 1515 with the fierce assault by the Commons on the old abuse of benefit of clergy, and the immunity of clerical criminals from due punishment for secular crimes--a question as old as the times of Henry II. and Becket. But the discussion spread in later years from this particular point into a general criticism of the church and its relations to the state, embracing local grievances as well as the questions which turned on the dealings of the papacy with the crown. The old complaints which had been raised against the Church of England in the days of Edward I. or Richard II. had lost none of their force in 1526. The higher clergy were more than ever immersed in affairs of state, "Caesarean" as Wycliffe would have called them. It was only necessary to point to the great cardinal himself, and to ask how far his spiritual duties at York were properly discharged while he was acting as the king's prime minister. The cases of Foxe and Morton were much the same; the former passed for a well-meaning man, yet had been practically absent from his diocese for twenty years. Pluralism, nepotism, simony and all the other ancient abuses were more rampant than ever. The monasteries had ceased to be even the nurseries of literature; their chronicles had run dry, and secular priests or laymen had taken up the pens that the monks had dropped. They were wealthier than ever, yet did little to justify their existence; indeed the spirit of the age was so much set against them that they found it hard to keep up the numbers of their inmates. Truculent pamphleteers like Simon Fish, who wrote _Beggars' Supplication_, were already demanding "that these sturdy boobies should be set abroad into the world, to get wives of their own, and earn their living by the sweat of their brows, according to the commandment of God; so might the king be better obeyed, matrimony be better kept, the gospel better preached, and none should rob the poor of his alms." It must be added that monastic scandals were not rare; though the majority of the houses were decently ordered, yet the unexceptionable testimony of archiepiscopal and episcopal visitations shows that in the years just before the Reformation there was a certain number of them where chastity of life and honesty of administration were equally unknown. But above all things the church was being criticized as an _imperium in imperio_, a privileged body not amenable to ordinary jurisdiction, and subservient to a foreign lord--the pope. And it was true that, much as English churchmen might grumble at papal exactions, they were generally ready as a body to support the pope against the crown; the traditions of the medieval church made it impossible for them to do otherwise. That there would in any case have been a new outbreak of anti-clerical and anti-papal agitation in England, under the influence of the Protestant impulse started by Luther in Germany, is certain. But two special causes gave its particular colour to the opening of the English Reformation; the one was that the king fell out with the papacy on the question of his divorce. The other was that the nation at this moment was chafing bitterly against a clerical minister, whom it (very unjustly) made responsible for the exorbitant taxation which it was enduring, in consequence of the king's useless and unsuccessful foreign wars. The irony of the situation lay in the facts that Henry was, so far as dogmatic views were concerned, a perfectly orthodox prince; he had a considerable knowledge of the old theological literature, as he had shown in his pamphlet against Luther, and though he was ready to repress clerical immunities and privileges that were inconvenient to the crown, he had no sympathy whatever with the doctrinal side of the new revolt against the system of the medieval church. Moreover, Wolsey, whose fall was to synchronize with the commencement of the reforming movement, was if anything more in sympathy with change than was his master. He was an enlightened patron of the new learning, and was inclined to take vigorous measures in hand for the pruning away of the abuses of the church. It is significant that his great college at Oxford--"Cardinal's College" as he designed to call it, "Christ Church" as it is named to-day--was endowed with the revenues of some score of small monasteries which he had suppressed on the ground that they were useless or ill-conducted. His master turned the lesson to account a few years later; but Henry's wholesale destruction of religious houses was carried out not in the interests of learning, but mainly in those of the royal exchequer. (C. W. C. O.)