Chapter V: Part 5

In the whole of his record, so far as we have at present reviewed it, there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that Henry’s Vicar-General ever cared a straw about any properly religious question at all. We can be tolerably sure, no doubt, as to some of the things he did _not_ believe in. He did not believe that the Pope was the holder of the keys to heaven. He did not believe that the clergy were the divinely appointed channel through whom alone salvation must be obtained. He did not believe in the effectual sanctity of relics. Such beliefs would at least have been impossible to reconcile with his anti-Papal and anti-clerical campaigns. But it would be exceedingly difficult to find any positive dogma to which it would be possible to point as an article of faith with him. On the other hand, every circumstance of his life before 1529, known or surmised, was calculated to produce and to foster scepticism on the intellectual and carelessness on the emotional side of religion, generating a hardened materialism. The resulting attitude towards men who were actuated by strong religious convictions would be regulated entirely by policy.

Obviously, then, doctrines which weakened the hold of the Papacy, the priesthood, and the monks, on the popular imagination, would recommend themselves to his mind--not as particularly credible or true, but as deserving encouragement, weakening the spell of the great organisation whose power he desired, for reasons of policy, to reduce to the uttermost. Hence, it would be his wish to be at least on friendly terms with the reformers who were defying the Pope and setting ecclesiastical conventions at naught. More particularly, he would find the most dangerous opponents of his political design in that school of English Churchmen, headed by the Bishop of Winchester, who were determined to employ every instrument of intrigue to retain as much power as possible for the clergy, and he would seek as natural allies the men like Cranmer who were unqualified advocates of the Royal Supremacy. Further, he foresaw the ultimate necessity of a political understanding, if not the actual alliance which he would have preferred, with Continental Protestantism. On the other hand, he was thoroughly aware that the king plumed himself on his theological learning and orthodoxy; and it was no part of his scheme to run counter to the king. Hence, it became his business so far as he could to influence Henry in favour of the respectable reformers--not, of course, those who were tainted with Anabaptism or the suspicion thereof. But there is no hint anywhere in his conduct that he thought of the actual tenets of any reformers as in themselves worth any sacrifice. The king took a keen interest in theological controversies on their merits; his minister did not.

This view of his attitude, or of what we should have expected his attitude to be, tallies precisely with what we know of his actions. When called upon to intervene in clerical controversies, he habitually backed up Cranmer as against Gardiner, working in concert with him, except when he perceived that Cranmer wanted to go farther than Henry was willing to accompany him. Cranmer was a useful ally, who never lost his place in the royal favour: and the archbishop’s greatest enemy was his own also. But when the Six Articles Act was introduced, and he knew the king’s mind on the subject, he promptly left his ally in the lurch; though no doubt his influence was exerted, when it had been passed, to check its active enforcement. The passing of the Act--the crack of the “whip with six strings”--sufficiently served Henry’s immediate purpose, which was to make a display of rigid orthodoxy for the benefit of the emperor and King Francis. Cromwell, who had just committed himself to the Lutherans too deeply to retract, must have viewed the Act itself with painful feelings; but he could not afford to resist. Compliance offered the one chance of bringing his master round.

VII

CROMWELL’S FALL

The Act of the Six Articles, the Royal Proclamations Act, and that for the final suppression of the monasteries, were all passed in the early summer--May or June--of 1539, when Cromwell was already fully involved in his scheme for creating a matrimonial bond between Henry and the German Protestants. In 1538, when peace between Charles and Francis seemed imminent, he had succeeded in persuading Henry to invite a visit from the Lutherans with a view to arriving at a mutual understanding on the theological questions: but even the reconciliation of the French king and the emperor failed to make the English king at all cordial, and the envoys went back to Germany in the autumn with nothing accomplished. As the year drew to a close, however, there were ominous signs of a league being formed to threaten England--which perhaps was one of Cromwell’s incentives to the destruction of Exeter and the Poles, by way of a hint to the Continental Powers that the government was far too strong to be endangered by any domestic discontents. The warnings from abroad had their effect on Henry, who began to think that a counter-alliance might be really necessary. Thus, immediately after the New Year, Cromwell opened negotiations with the intention of obtaining Anne of Cleves, sister of the young duke, as a bride for King Henry. Yet even this concession to his policy was only, so to speak, a half-loaf: since Cleves was not actually in the League of Schmalkald, or irrevocably bound to Lutheranism, though the duke happened to have his own quarrel with the emperor.

In April, another embassy from the League was in England; but so also was an ambassador from France, bent on placating Henry--and about the same time, intelligence arrived that the emperor and the League had come to terms. So very cold water was poured on the Lutheran envoys, to whom the Six Articles Act was virtually a direct snub: as it was to Cromwell, whose policy it signified that Henry meant to desert.

Yet once more the prospect seemed to right itself for the minister. It appeared that the king had been deluded by the diplomatists, and that after all the chance of a coalition against England was by no means dissolved. Before the summer was fairly over, the politest of overtures were passing between Francis and Charles; while the Duke of Cleves, who had been to some degree holding off, again became urgent for the marriage, being, like Henry, threatened with danger from the restoration of amity between the two great rivals. Henry was beguiled into believing that the lady of his minister’s choice would make him a charming and attractive spouse; negotiations were pushed forward apace, and in the last days of December, Anne of Cleves landed in England. On January 6 the marriage was celebrated.

But fate was against Cromwell. In the first place, the king took a violent antipathy to his bride: and though, for an adequate political end, he would have accepted the situation, his soul was wroth with the man who had brought him into it. Moreover, so far as concerned domestic affairs, the minister had done all that Henry needed of him. He had so handled the Church that she lay defenceless under the king’s hand. He had brought to the block every one who could be made a figure-head for insurrection, and had made organised rebellion an impossibility. He had done all that there was to be done in the way of despoiling the king’s subjects for the king’s benefit. Finally, he had just placed in the king’s hand the last administrative instrument of despotism in the Royal Proclamations Act, as he had before provided an irresistible weapon in the Treasons Act. He was not required for any further religious reforms, since his master had already gone as far as he meant to travel in that direction. There was left only one reason why the royal anger should be restrained--a demonstration that his foreign policy was right; that he was needed as foreign minister. And ere many weeks were passed, conclusive reasons appeared for judging that the theory to which Henry had endeavoured to cling was right after all, that a lasting coalition between Francis and Charles was a mere bugbear, that there had never been any need for the Cleves marriage. Moreover, the demonstration was effected by one of Cromwell’s two most determined rivals, the Duke of Norfolk, who at any rate got the credit for bringing about the open rupture which promptly succeeded the fraternal embraces of the emperor and the French king. At last the game was in the hands of Gardiner and Norfolk. On June 10 the bolt fell. Absolutely without warning, Cromwell was arrested for treason at the Council, and sent forthwith to the Tower. His own weapons were turned against him, his own interpretation of treason, his own favourite process of attainder. Like Wolsey, he had served his master only too well; and his master rewarded him as pitilessly as he had rewarded the Cardinal. The only man in England who dared to plead on his behalf was--Cranmer. On July 28, Cromwell’s head was hacked from his shoulders. With what measure he meted, it had been measured to him again.

HENRY VIII

I

APPRECIATIONS

Of both More and Cromwell it has been observed that historians do not greatly vary in their estimates, when a reasonable allowance is made for Protestant and anti-Protestant bias. That remark does not hold good of King Henry. The popular idea of him is more intimately associated with that of Bluebeard than of any other hero of fiction or history. Mr. Froude has created a legend of his own, wherein the only doubt seems to be whether Henry quite passed the dividing line between the mere hero and the demi-god. Most commonly, he appears as a brutal tyrant. Among the best informed living authorities in England on the sixteenth century, one distinguishes him as the most remarkable man who ever sat on the English throne, and another has characterised him as a weak-willed bully, always depending for support on some stronger will than his own; yet neither the one nor the other shows signs of having been led to his conclusion by any marked bias. The data for his reign, in the form of documents calendared with exceptional skill, are peculiarly ample; but the opportunities for drawing divergent inferences therefrom are extensive. It would be too much to call them unique, in a century which gave birth also to Elizabeth and to Mary Queen of Scots.

_From a Portrait by_ JOST VAN CLEEF _in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court Palace_]

About the fourth year of Henry’s reign, Thomas Wolsey came to the front and remained there for sixteen years. For another ten years, Thomas Cromwell was in the king’s service. During this period of something exceeding a quarter of a century, did Henry or his ministers control policy? Great events happened. Did he, in dealing with them, show himself a great statesman? Or did he merely play the part of a selfish and greedy libertine? One can only express a personal opinion. The view which seems most consonant with the facts may be broadly stated thus. Like his daughter Elizabeth, he had a keen eye for character and ability; he could appreciate statesmanship in a servant, and he knew how to get the utmost value out of the men he chose to trust. In the main, he let them carry out their designs in their own way; but he remained watchful, and saw to it that if he happened to want anything not included in their programme, the programme should be altered. He did not initiate, but he did adopt and make his own, the principles of Wolsey’s foreign and Cromwell’s domestic policy. A time came when he wanted from Wolsey something which his minister’s genius was not adapted to provide; and Wolsey vanished. By slow degrees Cromwell emerged. A time came when Cromwell had given him all that he could give, and was seeking to draw his master into paths he did not choose to tread. Cromwell went to the scaffold. In his remaining years, the king showed no power of striking out for himself a strong policy for good or for evil; he had no minister whom he trusted to pilot the ship; his own pilotage proved crude, and left to the succeeding government a crop of difficulties with which it was quite incompetent to cope. His father’s policy had been his own creation; his ministers had never been much more than clerks. The eighth Henry chose ministers to create and carry out a policy for him, but always under his own control. The peculiarity of the Tudor genius, which he shared with his father and his daughter, lay in the unfailing skill with which they judged men, and their intuitive appreciation of popular feeling, which kept them from passing the bounds of acquiescence. Hence, whatever we may think of their policy itself or of particular acts, whether our moral judgment condemns or applauds, whether we account their measures far-sighted or short-sighted, they stand out as great rulers, accomplishing what they meant to accomplish, and displaying their activities on a great scale.

II

THE CARDINAL RULES

Henry was his father’s second son. Tradition says that his sire, ever thoughtful of economy, destined him for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and had him educated accordingly. As the boy, however, became, through his elder brother’s death, heir apparent to the throne at the age of eleven, the remarkable theological erudition which he displayed in later years can hardly be attributed to his early school-room studies--even if the tradition had any more basis of fact than that it was at least _ben trovato_. Whatever career was anticipated for him, the utmost pains were bestowed on his education, and he learnt to take a keen interest in intellectual pursuits. Erasmus gives an agreeable picture of him at the age of nine, and remarks on the extraordinary intelligence of his letters a little later--an intelligence which made the learned man believe that the boy’s tutor wrote or revised them, till ocular demonstration convinced him of the contrary. Intellectual pursuits, however, did not absorb the Prince of Wales. His father was not endowed with any very striking physique, but the boy rather took after his grandfather Edward IV., being decidedly handsome, of very athletic frame, and excelling in the sports of vigorous and healthy youth.

Two months before Henry completed his eighteenth year, his father’s death placed him on the throne of England--successor to a king whose later years had been conspicuously sordid and gloomy. Spring with its pulsing, generous life, followed the sapless dreariness of winter. So men dreamed, and so probably Henry reckoned, himself. Ugly things like Empson and Dudley were to vanish into limbo; the king would celebrate his marriage royally--and follow that up by some splendid martial achievement. It was still permitted to dream mediæval dreams; might not the Crescent be once more rolled back before the advancing Cross? Still, at eighteen there was no great hurry about that, and meanwhile life might be very much enjoyed. Kings have servants about them to take the dull drudgery of politics off their hands.

A most excellent state of things, in the eyes of the veterans Ferdinand and Maximilian. The old king’s martial ardour had resolved itself into occasional campaigns on which no money was wasted, and in which no blood was shed, but which somehow had a trick of resulting in the transfer of hard cash from somebody’s pocket to that of the English monarch. But surely this open-hearted boy could be persuaded that Henry V. set a more attractive precedent than Henry VII., and that France was a good deal nearer than Constantinople. To simplify matters he had beside him a comely and capable wife, devoted to the Spanish interest, and all the more likely to influence him, at his age, for being a few years the elder: and no young prince could have an adviser half so shrewd as his quite disinterested father-in-law of Aragon. So the unsophisticated Henry was carefully manœuvred into war with France. From which he learned two lessons: one that there was frequently a very marked difference between the words of kings and their deeds; the other, that military glory or political success cannot be achieved without close attention to detail. Incidentally, the young king made another discovery; namely that the comparatively insignificant ecclesiastic whom old Bishop Fox had introduced into the Council was as sharp-witted as Ferdinand himself, could do the work of ten ordinary men, and always knew what he was about.

Before the end of 1514, Ferdinand and Maximilian were made painfully aware that Henry was not going to be anybody’s tool, by the unexpected alliance of England and France. The diplomatist who had beaten them with their own weapons had won the English king’s entire confidence, and there was only one possible rival to him, in the person of Henry’s brother-in-arms, Charles Brandon, newly created Duke of Suffolk; nor was it long before it became patent that the brother-in-arms, having made himself brother-in-law into the bargain by marrying the princess Mary, might remain the favourite companion in the hunting field, and the favourite antagonist in the tournament, but would have very little to say to the king’s politics. Wolsey had not only thoroughly impressed his master by his immense administrative ability, his capacity for hard work, and his astuteness; he had also succeeded in giving a new turn to the king’s ambitions, making them political rather than martial. The campaigns of 1513 had restored the prestige of English soldiers at least in a respectable degree; the outwitting of the craftiest prince in Europe next year showed that there was a worthy successor to Henry VII.; that monarch was reputed to have left in the royal coffers wealth so enormous as to be almost inexhaustible; Scotland had suffered such a blow at Flodden that she could not, for the time at least, hamper English action. Henry therefore could now hold the balance between the potentates of Europe, and become the controlling factor in international affairs. Such a position was much better worth working for than reconquests of French soil, or even the recovery of the French crown, which Henry V. had won but had not lived long enough to wear. As for crusades, Henry was old enough now to know that in the eyes of a practical politician they were out of date.

Schemes for dominating Europe were much affected by the fact that in 1514 many important changes in the personality of the rulers were obviously impending. Henry, twenty-three years old, was the only young man among them. But on the next New Year’s Day, France was to pass from Louis XII. to young Francis of Angoulême, aged twenty. In 1516, Ferdinand was to be succeeded by his grandson Charles, aged sixteen. In 1519, Maximilian was to disappear; and, inasmuch as the Empire was not technically hereditary, much would depend on the Imperial election, in which, however, the chances were that Ferdinand’s heir would prove to be Maximilian’s heir also.

From 1514, the figure of Wolsey--very shortly to become a Cardinal--completely dominated English politics. The king resigned himself wholly to his guidance, and for many years there was no more talk of Henry leading victorious armies over the Continent. The rival ambitions of Francis, Maximilian, and others, chiefly concerned with the annexation of Italian States by one potentate or another, the playing off of rivals, the paying and withholding of subsidies, were the main business in hand till the demise of the emperor, early in 1519, opened the great question, who was to wear the Imperial crown?

Young Charles was already king of all Spain, and lord of the Burgundian heritage. He was also heir to the Austrian and other German possessions of Maximilian, who, like Ferdinand, had been his grandfather. For some time, Habsburg had followed Habsburg as emperor. There was no other of the princes of Germany strong enough territorially to bear the weight of empire, and Frederic of Saxony, _capax imperii_, had no mind for the undertaking. If Charles were elected he would wield enormous powers. The French king, ambitious, and dreading the further aggrandisement of a rival whose dominions were already so great, came forward as a candidate: his success would mean an accession of power to France even more dangerous to the European balance than that of Charles. Under these circumstances, it is not incredible that Henry really meant business in taking steps with a view to obtaining the Imperial crown for himself. At twenty-eight, he was quite young enough to believe that the thing was really practicable: and if practicable, it would be a magnificent fulfilment of his ambitions along the very lines on which Wolsey had directed them. It is not, however, credible that the Cardinal should have taken that view; whether the king was or was not merely playing with the idea, his minister must have known that it was chimerical. The agent, Richard Pace, very soon made it quite clear that it would be sheer waste of energy and money for Henry to enter seriously for the stakes, and Cuthbert Tunstal was careful to point out that in burdening himself with the responsibilities of the Empire, he would be losing for the sake of a shadow the solid substance of his power as King of England. Henry’s candidature was withdrawn, and no one was any the worse.

The episode, however, suggests certain conclusions. It is almost impossible to doubt that the idea of the candidature was Henry’s own; it is difficult to doubt that he did contemplate it seriously. It was consistent--in intention--with the conception of political predominance as a more substantial object of ambition than military laurels. It was of a grandiosity which appealed to the imagination, but not to the practical judgment of a far-sighted statesman. That Henry should have taken it up is entirely consistent with his character as we have conceived it. On the other hand, if he had been merely a monarch who allowed himself to be habitually managed, but broke out in occasional fits of obstinacy--as weak men do--he would have struggled to the last for that election. In fact, he did interfere with Wolsey the moment he thought he could better the minister’s plans, but when he saw he had made a mistake, but could retire without loss of dignity, he did so without losing his temper. Later in life he might have made himself unpleasant to somebody, under like conditions. That would have depended very much on how far he had set his heart on the particular object he found himself called upon to surrender. In the present case, Wolsey had ostensibly done everything possible to make the scheme succeed. He may never have attempted dissuasion, relying on the inherent impracticability of the whole thing to prevent any really awkward consequences. At any rate, Henry’s confidence was in no way diminished.

There was indeed little enough reason to be dissatisfied. Western Europe was in the hands of three young men, of whom the eldest, Henry, was twenty-eight, and the youngest, Charles, was not twenty. If Charles had the widest dominion, his task was also the most complicated. He could only pass to his Teutonic from his Spanish territories by sea; French territory was continuous. If Charles and Francis quarrelled, each would want the friendship of England: for her enmity to Charles would mean immense injury to the trade of Flanders, and her enmity to France would mean serious military embarrassments in the direction of Picardy. So for some time to come both were eagerly seeking an English alliance, while Wolsey’s skill was sufficiently tasked, but not _over_-tasked, to keep the pair of them in play; and to keep them at peace, since if they once went to war it might prove exceedingly difficult to avoid embroiling England.

In 1520 the competition between emperor and king for English favour--which both took to mean the Cardinal’s favour--was particularly lively, with the result that the great meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold took place, designed to signalise the enthusiastic amity of Henry and Francis. Wolsey, however, had manœuvred a less magnificent meeting in England, only just before, between Henry and the emperor; and no one could say that either of the rivals had really won a lead over the other. But it became increasingly difficult to prevent a collision between them, and a year later, when Wolsey was ostensibly making a great effort at the Conference of Calais to effect a reconciliation, he was in reality coming privately to terms with Charles. If England was to be dragged into a war, she would be on the Imperial side.

III

WAR

Why did England go to war with France, instead of resolutely holding aloof? The Cardinal cannot have seriously thought of the war as a means to the recovery of the French crown: nor can he have held it good for England that France should be crippled, and the Emperor magnified. If he went into the war of his own free will, if he urged it on Henry, it can only have been with the purely personal object of so binding Charles to him as to ensure his own election to the Papacy at the next vacancy. Yet at the time of the Calais Conference there was no immediate likelihood of the reigning Pope’s death; Wolsey was surely the last man to count on the gratitude of princes for past favours as an effective motive, and Charles had already shown a thorough appreciation of the doctrine that promises are made to be evaded. Moreover, so shrewd a man as the Cardinal would presumably have felt extremely doubtful whether the Papacy--with Charles master of Europe--would be much worth having. The only remaining suggestion is, that Wolsey foresaw great domestic troubles, and took the time-honoured course of trying to divert attention by plunging the country in war. The obvious objection to that is that there were no pressing signs of disturbance at all.

The mere fact that the war was a regular reversal of the methods Wolsey had hitherto followed, points to its having been undertaken against his judgment. But is it unreasonable to suppose that it was not against the king’s judgment? That Henry for the second time indicated the course which his minister was to follow, and the minister obeyed rather than resign? In those days, ministers did not resign, unless they were exceptional people with consciences, like Thomas More: and for Wolsey--whose political existence, if not his life, depended entirely on the king’s favour--to resign would have meant virtual suicide. On the other hand, there were influences which would affect Henry in favour of the war, intelligibly enough. To him, the conquest of France with the help of Charles may not have seemed absurd, and he was not ashamed to avow it as his object to Parliament, when asking for money. Apart from that, there was always a military party headed by men who felt themselves much more likely to achieve honour and fame on the battlefield than in the Cardinal’s ante-room: and if there was to be war at all, there was a sort of standing sentiment in favour of fighting the French. Lastly, the king was still on good terms with his wife, and his wife was a most determined advocate of her nephew’s interests. Henry was even now only just thirty, and the glamour of military achievement might still tempt him. It certainly seems the most reasonable conclusion that it was not Wolsey who dragged the king into war, but the king who forced war on Wolsey.

As a matter of fact, events proved that there was very little to be made out of the war. After eight years, Wolsey found himself compelled to call a Parliament again, in order to get money--whereas it had been his consistent policy to dispense with Parliament altogether. The war was at any rate not sufficiently unpopular to prevent the voting of a substantial subsidy; but as time passed, such favour as it had found with the public faded; the Cardinal did not venture, when more money was needed, to ask Parliament for it again, and when he tried to raise what was called an Amicable loan, the response was cold. The disaster of Francis at Pavia, though it suggested more talk about recovering the Crown of France, offered no opportunity for material advantage to Henry, and it very soon became evident that Charles was so much the master of Europe that his career would only be held in check by an Anglo-French alliance, which it became the Cardinal’s business to contract in 1527.

IV

THE “DIVORCE”

This was precisely the time at which there is no doubt that the question of divorcing Katharine of Aragon was very much on the minds both of king and Cardinal. In discussing that subject in the preceding study of Wolsey, nothing was said of the theory most adverse to Wolsey--that the idea originated with him, and that he suggested it with the specific intention of breaking the alliance with Charles and substituting a French marriage, a French alliance being now his object. On this theory it is argued that the king’s intention of using the divorce to marry Anne Boleyn was sprung on the Cardinal as something quite new, on his return from the French embassy; his absence having been turned to account by his enemies, with the simple object of wrecking his policy and ruining him. The fact that Henry afterwards publicly acquitted Wolsey of having instigated the divorce may not count for much as evidence of his innocence; but there is another grave objection to the theory. If Henry told him that the divorce must be managed somehow, he would doubtless have considered that the least injurious result would be a French marriage; but it is not easy to imagine that he would himself have sought to bring about a step which would have made so permanent a breach between Henry and Charles. His own policy was to keep it always in the power of England to shift from one side to the other--to trim the balance between Charles and Francis. The theory is put forward to square with a particular view of Henry’s character--that he was managed by any one who could get at him. But it makes the Cardinal himself somewhat unintelligible--or unintelligent.

The view advanced in these pages is, that for the third time the king laid down a policy of his own for the Cardinal to carry out. In the first place he had two personal reasons for wanting the divorce--a superstitious impression that the failure of Katharine to supply him with a male heir was Heaven’s punishment for a marriage which the Pope ought never to have sanctioned; and a passion for Anne Boleyn. In the second place, the policy of alliance with Charles against Francis had worked out badly, and a rupture with Charles must come in any case. Wolsey should manage it, or should help: and if he began with a belief that a French marriage might be the outcome, there would be no harm done. The policy, as before, was a deviation from Wolsey’s, but did not seem superficially to run counter to the broad principle on which it was based, that England was to prove her effective predominance by throwing her weight into the French or the Imperial scale as circumstances might demand. But, as before, the method was short-sighted. On the other hand, we find Wolsey behaving also precisely as he did before. If the king did elect to lay down a policy, he must be the instrument through which it should be carried out. He could not prevent it; he must make the best of it, and as far as possible neutralise the bad effects by skilful handling. He made his attempt, failed, and fell. It would have been better for his credit if he had fallen in open instead of in covert opposition.

It remains in any case impossible to dogmatise; the whole thing is a tangle, and there are difficulties in the way of accepting each solution. To the theory that the divorce was primarily a plan of Wolsey’s in order to facilitate a French alliance, there is a further objection that a negotiation was already on foot for marrying the Princess Mary to Henry of Orleans, the French king’s second son, who afterwards became Henry II. The substitution of the marriage of the king himself to a French princess would have hardly been in itself a closer bond; yet we should be compelled to believe that Wolsey deliberately, with no greater advantage in view, sought to make this change at the cost of a probably irreparable breach with the emperor. The political motive is inadequate. Whereas, for the king, who had a powerful non-political motive thrown in, the plan becomes intelligible enough. The divorce should be so managed that Mary’s legitimacy should still be secured, the marriage with Orleans could go forward, and he himself would get the wife he wanted. That in 1527 his passion for Anne was a very powerful motive is not to be disputed--the love-letters, uncertain as their dates are, cannot be attributed to a still later time.

It is also tolerably clear that the king meant to have the divorce in any case, whether it upset foreign relations or not. Moreover, if the plan was Wolsey’s, he would have been satisfied to leave the Cardinal to work it out, which he was not. From the beginning he appears to have suspected--if there was not more than a suspicion--that his minister disliked the whole idea, and would be only too pleased if it were shelved; and he employed other agents to get the thing done, behind Wolsey’s back. Wolsey was very much in the position of a lawyer whose client, with whom he cannot afford to quarrel, insists on his adopting a certain course in defiance of his own judgment. He devised ingenious expedients; he tried to make his case as safe as possible; he gave nothing away to the other side; but he was reluctant throughout, while the king was invincibly obstinate.

Assuming then that it was Henry, not Wolsey, who from the commencement sought the divorce, the Cardinal’s consistency is restored. So far also the consistency of Henry’s character is maintained. He never laid out a great political scheme, calculating for the future; but when Wolsey formulated a large design, he readily recognised its merits, and recognised Wolsey himself as the man to carry it through. But three times he was moved with a desire to obtain a particular end, without realising that to do so would overturn the main scheme; on each occasion the minister formally and officially obeyed his master’s behest. Over the divorce, however, Henry’s behaviour presents an interesting psychological study.

There have been many statesmen, successful in varying degree, who have quite deliberately ignored moral considerations in their policy. They have not admitted that unrighteous action as such carries any penalty attached to it. Crime which shocks public sentiment violently they may avoid; not because it is criminal, but because public sentiment cannot be ignored. The mere fact that a particular course of action involves injustice or cruelty, or otherwise over-rides the moral law, is not permitted to weigh at all in judging of its expediency. Such a one was Thomas Cromwell. There have been others who would never allow any claim of mere expediency to countervail against the dictates of conscience. Such a one was Thomas More.

The average man is content to compromise: not drawing the line very high, but still drawing it somewhere. Henry belonged to the class who would never violate conscience; but, when any particular course presented itself to his mind as expedient or desirable, he had a quite unique power of convincing himself not only that the thing would not be wrong, but that conscience positively clamoured that it must be done: nothing was so monstrous that he could not solemnly persuade himself that it was a sad duty. There are men who are made that way. They will rob the widow and swindle the orphan, but they must and do first trick themselves into an amazing belief that in so doing they are serving heaven or society. Henry was much more dangerous than a commonplace hypocrite who assumes a mask to deceive the world, since he had to begin by making the deception convincing to himself.

Thus it was in the matter of the divorce. It was of real urgent importance that he should have a male heir, and there was no hope of his wife giving him one; he wanted very much to marry Anne, and he could not do so while his wife was living; but with what conscience could he get rid of that wife? Henry’s conscience gave him the answer he wanted, pat: it always did. Conscience pointed out that the children of the marriage, except one girl, all came to grief--were still-born, or died in a few weeks. Surely, here was Heaven’s judgment on a sinful union. True, the contracting parties had sinned with a Pope’s benediction, and thinking there was nothing wrong. But clearly the Pope must have erred. Conscience therefore did not merely excuse, it demanded, the dissolution of the unholy bond. Conscience permitted Henry to declare fervently that nothing would please him so much as to find that his scruples were groundless; but nothing would ever have persuaded him that they were so except perhaps the death of Anne Boleyn. Having once thoroughly satisfied himself that the divorce was a duty, whatever any one might say to the contrary, it followed that some legal method of accomplishing it must exist. If the Pope did not see the thing in the same light, there must be something defective in the Papal authority after all. The scruple of conscience gradually assumed an axiomatic character to Henry; and the repudiation of Clement, who regarded it as an extremely questionable postulate, followed logically.

Until Clement revoked the cause to Rome--a practical demonstration that he would not sanction a verdict objectionable to the emperor--nothing demanding revolutionary measures had occurred. That event, however, changed the situation. There would have to be a fight with the Papacy, which could not be conducted under the Cardinal’s captaincy. The Cardinal had failed badly; his behaviour had been suspicious. It did not take the conscientious monarch long to discover that advantage had been taken of his own generous trustfulness, that he had been warming a viper in his bosom. Wolsey was thrown to the wolves. It is curiously characteristic of Henry that the instrument by which he shattered Wolsey was the charge of a breach of _Præmunire_ in accepting and exercising the legatine authority. The mere fact that this had been done with the king’s own licence, almost at his instigation, would have checked any other monarch. Henry found in it an additional cause of offence. The Cardinal had not only broken the law--he, whose business it was to see that the king did not accidentally transgress, had actually inveigled the king into transgression. A just man, tricked by his own familiar friend into committing an act of injustice, feels righteous indignation against the friend. Such was the indignation of the king against the Cardinal, as of Adam against Eve.

V

THE NEW POLICY

The fall of Wolsey marks, as the beginning of the divorce proceedings really commences, the second stage of Henry’s career. Had he died before 1529, the Bluebeard legend would never have been applied to him, and his connexion with the Reformation would have been in effect limited to a controversial pamphlet in favour of the extreme Papal claims, directed against Luther. This was all that the uprising of the great Reformer had evoked from the prince who was expected to be the royal champion of the Intellectuals. No one would have called him a tyrant. It is true that Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, had been put to death at the beginning of the reign--as tradition says, in fulfilment of the advice of Henry VII. It is true also that Buckingham had been executed, not so much because he had committed any treason as because he was thought dangerous; but the world would have been content to leave that as one of the charges against Wolsey. Henry would have passed with posterity as a pleasure-loving monarch with a great taste for extravagance, who cheerfully left the government of the country to an able and unscrupulous minister, and did absolutely nothing personally in the twenty years of his reign to justify the high hopes with which his accession was hailed. The reign would have been recorded as the reign of the Cardinal, and our ideas of the king himself would have been conveyed mainly in the anecdotes of his personal vanity and love of pageantry and popularity. It is the forcefulness, energy, and resolution--or the violence, fickleness, and obstinacy--displayed in the second period which make us revise our judgment of the first, and set us seeking therein for some appearance of these same characteristics, and discovering in them the explanation of some puzzles in the Cardinal’s policy.

The new stage of Henry’s career presents us with a problem at the outset. Hitherto, he had followed Wolsey’s counsels; very shortly, the Machiavellian maxims of Cromwell guided his course; but there is no one to bridge the gap between Wolsey and Cromwell. Sir Thomas More succeeded the Cardinal as Chancellor, but not as first minister--he never made any secret, to the king, of his conviction that the marriage with Katharine could not and should not be invalidated. Nothing points to Norfolk or Suffolk as guiding policy. The newly discovered Cranmer had suggested a principle for dealing with the divorce, but his appearance is merely in the character of a University doctor, not of a statesman. Precisely at this moment, before he knew anything of Cromwell, with Wolsey, so to speak, hanging on the very verge of the precipice, a Parliament is called suddenly, which remains undissolved until its seventh year. Since 1515 there had been only one Parliament, that of 1523-1524. Between 1500 and 1515 Parliaments had been rare. Henry VII., when he no longer felt the need of constant Parliamentary sanction, and Wolsey after him, had gone steadily on the rule of accustoming the country to have the government carried on almost without Parliaments, and of establishing absolutism on those lines. From this moment that attitude towards Parliament disappears. For the rest of the reign, there is no prolonged interval without one; Parliament itself is converted into the instrument and the buttress of despotism.

In the preceding study of Thomas Cromwell the view was adopted that he was the real author of what was one comprehensive design for establishing the royal power high over everything else, including therein the repudiation of Papal rivalry, and the subordination of the clerical organisation; while the method, of deliberately choosing to make Parliament share the responsibility, was his also. Yet the calling of this Parliament in 1529, and its initial measures of ecclesiastical reform, cannot be attributed to him. Henry did it out of his own head. It will be found, however, that the apparent contradictions are easily reconcilable.

Henry found, in 1529, that his determination to have a divorce would involve either a fight with the Papacy or a struggle to secure Papal support in despite of the emperor. Also he felt that the Cardinal was not to be depended on as the manager of that struggle. He had no one ready to take the Cardinal’s place, though Stephen Gardiner might have done so had he been a layman. He had formulated no plan of campaign beyond that of sending the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn’s father, with Cranmer in his train, on an embassy to Bologna. But he might find himself impelled to do more or less questionable things; the precedent of his father’s first years suggested that in that case it would be useful to be able to say that he had acted with the sanction of Parliament; and he had the Tudor instinct of appreciating the value of conciliating popular sentiment. Nothing would conciliate popular sentiment so much as inducing his subjects to believe that it was their interests and their opinions he was consulting. So he summoned Parliament.

Thus, Henry called the Parliament: Henry authorised clerical reform: Henry meditated a possible quarrel with the Pope. But it was Cromwell who co-ordinated Henry’s ideas--clever enough as far as they went, but not going far--into a single far-reaching scheme, wherein the things his master had thought of were nicely adjusted, gaps were filled in, consequences calculated, and a systematic evolution arranged in which every step should seem the corollary of what had already been accomplished. How far individual steps were invented by Henry, and how far by Cromwell, it is not possible to gauge. Cromwell never assumed the pose of Wolsey--the pose which the Cardinal did indubitably adopt, although it was erroneously inferred from the famous if legendary phrase, _Ego et rex meus_. He was always ostensibly the king’s instrument. In Wolsey’s time a question had once arisen whether in sending certain official despatches the full information should be sent to him, and only general remarks to the king, or _vice versa_. That would not have happened with Thomas Cromwell. The full official despatch would have gone to the king as a matter of course--but Cromwell might have had a private unofficial commentary. Henry, during the Cromwell _régime_, was in constant evidence as the ruler of the country. During Wolsey’s _régime_, he ostentatiously left the management in Wolsey’s hands. But during both periods we can at any rate form a shrewd guess at the points on which king and minister were in harmony, and those where the minister had to yield to the king.

Beyond minor reforms of abuses, and the movement for taking the opinion of the Universities on the divorce, there was no immediate sign, after the Cardinal’s fall, of a definitely anti-clerical or anti-Papal policy. The first blow--the demand for a ransom from the clergy under the _Præmunire_--would have been entirely characteristic of either the king or Cromwell: the idea was after all merely a very much more audacious application of the method adopted towards Wolsey. Whoever hit upon the notion, it was made the first step in the systematic grinding down of the clergy between the upper and the nether millstones of financial spoliation and political subjection. The Supplication against the Ordinaries in Parliament, the Submission of the Clergy, forced upon Convocation as the clause of the “Supreme Head” had been, appear to be more decisively Cromwell’s handiwork. There is no adequate reason to suppose that Parliament had these measures thrust down its throat: anti-clericalism was not a new idea, and was usually popular; and if the Supplication included matters about which the general public cared very little, such as the right of ecclesiastical legislation exercised by Convocation, it also carefully embodied popular grievances, though they may not have been as flagrant as was represented. But on the other hand, if the Supplication emanated from any one but Cromwell, it implies an elaboration of organised action among private members which there is nothing to corroborate. It must have been what may be called a Government measure, which on the whole had the support--possibly the enthusiastic support--of the House. The Annates Act, opposed by the bishops, was not enthusiastically adopted by the Commons--not so much because they objected to depriving the Pope of the impost as because they saw no reason why the clergy should be relieved of it. They did not realise that the king and Cromwell had no intention of allowing it to become an effective measure of relief at all.

VI

DIVERGENCES BETWEEN HENRY AND CROMWELL

In short, down to the pronouncement of the divorce, Henry and Cromwell are clearly working in perfect accord--whether minister or king devised the programme: Convocation is being steadily compelled, very much against its will, to endorse the propositions of the Crown, and Parliament is at any rate acquiescent. We may, however, suspect that Henry, up to this point at least if not for nearly a year more, inclined to hope that the Pope might yet give way; whereas in the overtures to the Lutheran Princes in 1533 we may see Cromwell working to make doubly sure the assurance of complete severance from Rome. The Lutheran alliance was unquestionably a favourite scheme of Cromwell’s, but the king never did more than dally with it. In his pet character of theologian he could never bring himself to accept the Augsburg Confession, or any compromise which would have satisfied the Protestants.

Cromwell was always possessed with the belief that a combination of Powers favourable to the Papacy would be formed sooner or later for the destruction of England and the Protestants on the Continent: the coalition of Charles and Francis was his bugbear. On the other hand, he saw no hope of an effective union between England and France; while he fancied that, if the bar between Henry and Charles, irremovable while Katharine lived, were once annulled by her death, the emperor--whose troops had sacked Rome in 1527, and who had in many respects evinced very little real regard for the Pope’s authority--might be brought over to the anti-Papal side. Therefore, whenever he thought there was a prospect of effecting an Imperial alliance, he let the idea of the Protestant alliance go; whenever the Imperial alliance seemed hopeless, the Protestant alliance re-appeared on his programme.

Henry, however, was not at one with Cromwell. He looked askance at the idea of a Protestant alliance because he did not consider himself a Protestant; on the contrary, he accounted Lutheranism as heresy, and himself as a pattern of orthodoxy. From his point of view, the only quarrel with Rome lay in the Pope’s assertion of usurped claims to jurisdiction, which either Charles or Francis might find themselves ready to repudiate in their own dominion at any convenient moment. He remembered Wolsey’s doctrine. Francis and Charles had so many antagonistic interests that they could never co-operate for long. The business of England was to make each desire her alliance; to avoid the mistake of committing herself too deeply to either. For a short time--in 1539--he began to think that Cromwell might be right about the danger of a coalition, and accepted the plan of the Cleves marriage as a defensive measure. The marriage was hardly accomplished when a fresh breach between the rival princes showed that his own view of the danger had been right. There never was, either in his own time or later, a Catholic coalition against England. At the same time it is at least a tenable view that a Protestant union, steadily maintained, might have had great results; on which it is not uninteresting to speculate, but the speculation is too much guesswork to be profitable.

Henry’s views, then, on foreign policy, differed from his minister’s, and it was Henry’s views that prevailed, except in the episode of the Cleves marriage; and in that particular case, there was so startling an appearance of a real _rapprochement_ between Francis and Charles that the king’s deviation along Cromwell’s lines can hardly be attributed to weakness. And even so he took careful precautions, as long as the thing was possible, to preserve a loop-hole for his own withdrawal, however deeply his minister might be committed.