TEN TUDOR STATESMEN

HENRY VII.

From a Painting by an unknown Flemish artist, in the National Portrait Gallery

TEN TUDOR
STATESMEN
By ARTHUR D. INNES
AUTHOR OF
“ENGLAND UNDER THE TUDORS”

LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH
1906

Printed by Ballantyne & Co. Limited
Tavistock Street, London

PREFATORY

The series of studies contained in this volume is in no way a history of the Tudor period. My object in preparing it has been first to form in my own mind and secondly to present to my readers a clear and consistent conception of the character of sundry persons, who in their own day either exercised an effective influence on the course of politics, or embodied political ideas which have influenced succeeding generations. The events narrated are considered not in the light of their intrinsic importance, but as they bear on the particular character under investigation.

To arrive at a fair estimate of any man’s character, the primary necessity is to endeavour to realise his point of view, to appreciate his preconceptions. If we require of him that his preconceptions shall coincide with our own, we may reconstruct an interesting dramatic figure, but we shall not discover the man as he really was. And if we do succeed in placing ourselves at his point of view, we shall almost inevitably find that the man who ultimately emerges is different from, and probably somewhat better than, the man as we had previously conceived him.

Concerning these ten figures, two curious points may be noted. Eight of them may be described as ministers: not one of the eight was actually of noble birth, two were not even of gentle birth. That fact emphasises the change in the political centre of gravity which accompanied the establishment of the Tudor Dynasty. Secondly, of those eight, four perished on the scaffold and one at the stake: a sixth was in custody under accusation of treason when death released him. That illustrates not less emphatically the distance at which we stand from the Tudors to-day.

A. D. I.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

HENRY VII

I
INTRODUCTORY

“This King, to speak of him in terms equal to his deserving, was one of the best sort of wonders, a wonder for wise men.” In those words Francis Bacon summed up Henry VII., a hundred years after the first Tudor king had been laid in his grave. Bacon’s history still is, and is likely to remain, the classic narrative. Not that he was a “contemporary,” or that he had access to any extraordinary sources of information; but because being at once a practical politician, a student of political theory, and a literary artist, any historical work from his pen could hardly have failed to be of the highest interest, and the subject he actually chose was—to him—peculiarly sympathetic.

It is in fact quite evident that Henry was held in the very highest estimation by his biographer. The history is addressed to Prince Charles, and it can hardly be doubted that in calling his hero “the English Solomon,” Bacon had in mind the reigning king’s description as the “Scottish Solomon”; the direct suggestion of a parallel (repeated in other terms in the Preface) must have been meant to be looked upon as a compliment by James. Henry was at least to be accounted the shrewdest ruler amongst the very astute princes who were more or less his contemporaries. Yet, for all the impression of shrewdness, Bacon fails to win our sympathy for Henry, perhaps because those two minds had too close kinship. Bacon, except in the case of a few enthusiasts, does not inspire affection. Pope’s summary is too accurate an expression of what is at least the popular conception; and Henry is judged to have been not quite so bright, nearly but not quite so wise—and still more mean. English history provides examples of monarchs whom every one actively hates like King John, or scorns like Edward II.; other monarchs too, who, if they had evil qualities, yet display something of the heroic; towards whom our feelings, if mixed, are still warm. But Henry VII. inspires almost universally a strong sentiment of cold dislike, such as no one else creates.

There is justice in that impression, but there is also injustice. In his latter years, it is hardly too much to call him detestable. He had reigned for fourteen years before he committed the one commonplace crime of tyrants which stains his record, the execution of Warwick. From that time a kind of degeneration seems to have come upon him, accelerated by the deaths first of his wisest counsellor Morton, then, two years later, of the son he loved, and then of his wife. To these years belongs nearly every story which tells seriously to his discredit. But during the earlier and longer half of his reign, his record is remarkably free from blemish, and shows an enlightenment which under happier conditions might have won him a place not only among the kings who have deserved well of the State—that, at least in the historian’s eyes, he did achieve—but among those whose memory posterity have cherished.

II
HENRY’S EARLY YEARS, ACCESSION, AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DYNASTY

After the death of Henry V., his widow accepted in marriage the hand of a Welsh knight of ancient lineage, Owen Tudor. In 1456, their son Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took to himself a very youthful bride, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, the representative of John of Gaunt’s family by Katherine Swynford, legitimatised by Act of Parliament in the reign of Richard II. On January 28, 1457, Margaret gave birth to a son, Henry, some weeks after Edmund himself had died; the charge of the boy devolving mainly upon Edmund’s brother Jasper, Earl of Pembroke. During the next fourteen years, the great Earl of Warwick was playing see-saw with the fortunes of the rival houses of York and Lancaster. In 1461, the Yorkists won the upper hand; but Jasper held out in Wales for Lancaster, for nearly seven years. Then Harlech Castle was surrendered, and young Henry was placed in charge of its captor, the new Earl of Pembroke, and was well enough treated. Then Lancaster had a turn of success, but the party was crushed at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, and the line was quenched by the deaths of Henry VI. and his son. Yorkists and Lancastrians alike fixed upon young Henry Tudor as being now the representative of John of Gaunt; England was too dangerous a habitation for a possible claimant to the throne; and the boy in his fifteenth year was successfully shipped off by his friends to Brittany, where for twelve years he abode under the Duke’s protection.

If the dynasty of York had established itself in regular fashion—if Edward IV. had been followed by an Edward V. as Henry IV. had been followed by Henry V.—there would have been little enough to fear. But Edward’s brother usurped the throne by a particularly foul murder, and being on it proved himself a tyrant. Men’s eyes turned to the one scion of the Plantagenets whom it was possible to set up as a claimant to the crown. If he could be set on the throne with Edward’s daughter at his side, the rival factions of York and Lancaster might be stilled. The first attempt to challenge the usurper failed completely. Buckingham’s plan of campaign was ruined by the flooding of the Severn, and by a storm which scattered the fleet wherewith Richmond sailed from Brittany to co-operate. Henry, returning thither, had to flee very soon after to safer shelter in France. But it was not long before the attempt was renewed, this time with success. On Bosworth field Richard was slain, and Henry declared King of England.

The victor was a young man of eight-and-twenty. For fourteen years he had lived in England, amidst civil broils and perpetual alarms. For fourteen more he had lived mainly in Brittany, conscious that he was in perpetual danger of being surrendered into the hands of those who might at any time find his destruction convenient. All his life he had been in an atmosphere of suspicion, of possible treachery, encompassed with deeds of blood. He had learned to study others and to trust himself. He had learned that his life might depend on alertness and self-restraint. And he had been able to see that Louis XI. was incomparably the most successful master of state-craft of his generation. These were lessons calculated to kill all youthful qualities, and at twenty-eight Henry might as well have been forty.

This was the man who had grasped a sceptre to which it was impossible to establish for him a legal title. In plain truth, he was King of England because he was the only man of the blood-royal who was able to challenge the usurper who was wearing the crown. As far as right of inheritance went, if Edward IV.’s daughters were barred by their sex, the son of Clarence was indubitably the heir of Edward III., whether descent through the female line were admitted or no. Henry might marry Elizabeth of York and claim the crown in her right; but then her death would leave him in a highly anomalous position; it was imperative that he should be accepted himself as the lawful king in his own person. The marriage might make matters perfectly safe for a son, but not for him. Hence even the semblance of depending on his wife’s title must be avoided.

He had won the realm by the sword; that was the first step. The second was to commit the representatives of the nation to affirm that he was the lawful sovereign: this was effected by a Declaratory Act in Parliament, which judiciously abstained from naming the grounds on which his claim rested. After that was to come the marriage, which should muzzle the partisans of York. This took place in the following January; but it is easy to see that the king had good reason for not proceeding to his wife’s coronation at least till a son should be born. Not long after that son was born, the Simnel plot was brewing; the coronation under those circumstances might have taken the colour of a defensive measure. Consequently the ceremony was not performed until Elizabeth had been his wife for very nearly two years, being thus emphasised as a mere act of grace.

No doubt if, by marrying the Plantagenet princess, Henry could have appropriated the Yorkist title to himself personally whether his queen lived or died, he would have been able to do without repressing the heads of the Yorkist faction at all. But, as things stood, that could not be risked. Warwick, Clarence’s young son, was imprisoned in the Tower, and some of the last king’s principal supporters were attainted. Being thus kept dissatisfied, it was a long time before active Yorkist plots ceased. The Dowager Duchess of Burgundy, Margaret, sister of Edward IV., made her Court a regular centre of anti-Tudor intrigue; nor did Henry ever feel really safe till the myth of a surviving Richard of York was finally exploded and the actual Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, had been done to death. The course which Henry took involved a certain degree of injustice—but Fiat Justitia, Ruat Cælum, is a maxim that princes with an uncertain title are rarely, if ever, disposed to adopt without reservation. One is disposed to wonder rather that Warwick was allowed to live so long than that Henry ultimately yielded to the temptation to slay him.

This plain business of securing himself on the throne was necessarily the first consideration. Only an established dynasty could restore steady government in a country which within a hundred years had seen four kings slain and the great bulk of her ancient baronage wiped out. Between foreign wars, successful or the reverse, and a wild warfare of armed factions at home, stability had been destroyed. The prolonged reign of strong rulers maintaining one policy was an absolute condition of recuperation. The way in which Henry secured it was entirely characteristic and entirely successful. The sword, the poniard, and the headman’s axe or the dungeon, were normally relied on by rulers whose seat was uncertain. Henry acted on a strictly original scheme. When he took the field against rebels, he sent before him proclamations of pardon to those who would come in; and he kept his word. He did not massacre the routed foe: he spared them, seizing only their leaders. He was responsible for no murders. A Lambert Simnel or a Perkin Warbeck when captured was not hanged out of hand, but sent to join the scullions, or set in the stocks as an impostor. Executions were singularly rare; rebels who might become powerful merely had their claws clipped by fines and confiscations—very efficiently clipped, no doubt. Where imprisonment was resorted to, the confinement was seldom harsh; and the king never had qualms about restoring a quondam rebel to favour and authority, if he judged that his man would show himself worthy of the faith reposed in him. When Surrey’s gaoler offered to let him go free, Surrey refused to escape; the king had put him in ward, and the king alone should release him. The king did so, and gave him a command of the highest trust. Kildare set authority at defiance when he was Deputy in Ireland, and when he was deposed, “All Ireland cannot rule this man,” said his enemies. “Then let this man rule all Ireland,” quoth Henry, and restored him to the Deputyship. Neither Surrey nor Kildare gave him cause for repentance.

Such a record would have entitled Henry to praise as a prince of unparalleled magnanimity, but for its common-sense accompaniment of fines and confiscations. But in fact, to penalise rebellion in some sort was an absolute necessity; not to have done so would have jeopardised the throne. The method adopted might not be heroic, but it was supremely practical; inasmuch as it wrought the minimum of positive injury to the punished, while at once depriving them of power to harm and supplying the king himself with the sinews of government, of which he was sorely in need. It was dictated quite as much by policy as by magnanimity, but the mere fact that Henry recognised it from the outset as sounder policy than any precedents, recent at any rate, suggested, is testimony to the acuteness of his moral perceptions as well as to the keenness of his intelligence. Nor is it fair to deprive Henry of the credit of magnanimity, merely because the magnanimity paid. To realise that it did pay and prove completely successful, we have only to observe that after the battle of Stoke there was no baronial rising in England. Warbeck got all his support either from the exiles or from foreign courts: when he tried to raise the West of England on his own account, he collapsed ignominiously. It is true that an army of Cornish insurgents had marched to Blackheath just before, and had there been broken up; but that was a purely popular rising in protest against taxation, and its chiefs were a blacksmith and a lawyer.

III
THE TUDOR ABSOLUTISM AND THE EXCHEQUER

It was not sufficient, however, merely to secure the sceptre in the hands of a strong king; it was necessary further to establish a strong system. For half a century the great power and estates of individual barons had enabled them to keep the country in perpetual turmoil. The idea of universal obedience to the established government simply because it was established had vanished from the military and political classes: the idea even of concerted government by one class, guided by its interests as a class, had disappeared; it was only the personal factor, personal interests, that counted. Below the baronage, the gentry who bordered on the baronage, and their retainers, townsfolk and country folk stood aloof from the fighting, and lived as peacefully as they might—all things considered, with a wonderful freedom from disturbance. But standing aloof from the fighting, they had perforce stood aloof also from the business of government, which fell to the military faction that happened for the time being to have the upper hand. They were in short ready to support and profit by a government which gave promise of peace and stability, order and justice; but they were not ready to organise such a government for themselves, or to take a prominent part in conducting it. Under such conditions, the Yorkists had established a despotism, as the only workable form of government. But their despotism was one that rested almost exclusively on the personal forcefulness of the ruler. It was Henry’s task to keep the effective power concentrated in the King’s hands, but to give it a constitutional colour—to make the nation feel it as a government by consent. It was therefore necessary to eliminate factors which naturally tended to disturbance—in other words, to deprive the individual barons of the power of aggressive self-assertion; and at the same time, so to treat the naturally orderly elements of society as to keep them on the side of the government.

This was the root-principle of the Tudor Absolutism, devised and put into practice by the first Tudor king, and systematically carried out by his son and grand-daughter. The system carried England to the first place among the nations. But it broke down when the Stuarts ignored its fundamental principle, and so treated the naturally orderly elements of society as to turn them against the government. For under the system, those elements acquired the power of organisation and self-protection, as the accompaniment of the prosperity they enjoyed increasingly; and it followed that the system could only remain stable so long as there was essential harmony and sympathy between the monarch and his subjects.

For the concentration of power, effective power, in the king’s hands, money was essential; while to keep the general population contented, it was necessary that their purses should not be subjected to too severe exactions, which must fall elsewhere. Henry directed them against the nobility. The nation at large had no objection; the king’s treasury was filled and the power of the nobles curtailed by the same operation. Thus the king eliminated the disturbing factor, or allowed it to eliminate itself. When noblemen got themselves mixed up with treasons, they could not complain if their lives were spared and their goods paid the forfeit. They had been wont to maintain great households, every man having in his service the nucleus of an army. These crowds of retainers were forbidden by law, as being, for obvious reasons, a public danger. If noblemen, accustomed to over-ride the law, chose to keep up their households in despite of it, they could not expect sympathy when they were called upon to pay in cash the penalty of breaking the law. These measures were not only thoroughly defensible as being entirely free from any taint of injustice; they also served directly to relieve taxation, to fill the royal coffers, and to make wanton insurrection difficult.

Yet, while keeping within what might be called legitimate bounds, as he habitually did while Morton was alive, the king undoubtedly permitted himself to apply methods which savoured of trickery. He made great parade of a war with France, appealing to national patriotism to supply the funds. The appeal was successful, but there was no corresponding expenditure on the campaign. Excellent reasons for inactivity were of course forthcoming, but it is none the less certain that no activity was ever contemplated. All that was intended was a demonstration which might induce the French monarch to buy the English king off with solid cash—as he eventually did. The whole transaction was eminently profitable, but Henry had certainly got his money out of his own subjects by false pretences. The same plea was resorted to, to get benevolences authorised, when the famous dilemma traditionally—but as it would seem quite unjustly—attributed to Cardinal Morton was applied. People who lived handsomely could obviously afford a contribution by curtailing their extravagance; people who did not live handsomely must have wealth laid by. In either case, there could be no inability to serve the king’s need. The spirit which prompted the invention of that dilemma is illustrated in a story reported by Bacon as traditional. Henry paid a visit to the Earl of Oxford at Henningham, where he was sumptuously entertained, and on his departure passed out through a lane of the earl’s retainers drawn up to do him honour. “These, no doubt, are your menial servants,” observed the king. The earl demurred; they were not menials, but retainers, who had turned out to do him credit when he had so distinguished a guest. Whereupon “The king started a little, and said, ‘By my faith, my lord, I thank you for my good cheer, but I may not endure to have my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must speak with you.’ And it is part of the report that the earl compounded for no less than fifteen thousand marks.” It is obvious that such a story might have been developed out of some really quite justifiable incident; but it is tolerably certain that it was not only in his closing years that Henry displayed what we may call an unkingly acquisitiveness.

In passing, however, it may be remarked that this was a family trait. Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s prejudice against spending a shilling that could be kept in her purse, or neglecting any plausible pretext for attracting coin into it. She also inherited his business principle of repaying every loan he contracted with unfailing punctuality. Henry VIII. did not indeed practise economy, but he could haggle over a money bargain as keenly as his father or his daughter, and his generosity, when he indulged it, was usually at the expense of another pocket than his own. The art of appropriating in the public eye credit to which he was not in the least entitled, was one of which he was a past master; it was one the value of which his father, who certainly neglected any efforts to make himself personally popular, somewhat underrated. Thrift is a virtue; for Henry VII., a particularly necessary virtue; but it is not one that under any circumstances helps to make him who exercises it attractive. When it assumes a sordid aspect, it becomes definitely repellent.

That did not trouble Henry; he wanted money, and during the greater part of his reign he got it without flagrant extortion; with such success, too, that in his later years he was able almost entirely to work without calling Parliament: the skill with which he conducted his foreign negotiations on the same cash principles contributing not a little to this result.

IV
COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL POLICY

It was characteristic of Henry, and somewhat unfortunate for his reputation, that he cared nothing at all about investing his policy with any showiness unless some specific end was to be gained thereby. The objects his government had in view were essentially prosaic: commonplace they cannot be called, because in a mediæval monarch they were eminently original. It was customary for kings to interfere in commercial affairs chiefly when they saw their way to collect by so doing contributions to the exchequer, or when it seemed worth while to make enactments in favour of capital as against labour. Henry has the credit of being the first English king who clearly recognised commercial development as a primary care of government: which hitherto only the oligarchical city-states of Italy and the German free-towns had done. It is true that he was quite ready to subordinate the commercial to a political end; to attack those who sheltered his enemies, not with pikes and culverins but with commercial restrictions only less injurious to English trade than to that of the antagonist. He did so without suffering from the illusion that the loss of the foreign merchant was the gain of the English. In these cases he weighed the economic loss against the political gain. In mediæval practice, the economic consideration would have counted for practically nothing in the scale. In the eyes of some politicians to-day, no political advantage would be worth counting as against an economic inconvenience—and it is usually extremely difficult to show that a political advantage will accompany an economic inconvenience. But Henry was only just emerging from mediæval conceptions. The remarkable thing is that he realised commerce as an object of policy at all, not that he rated its importance lower than Adam Smith: that he relaxed the mediæval theory, not that he did not discard it altogether.

This argument is not to be misunderstood. It has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of any economic theory, but only with the place of economics in the whole scheme of government. Henry thought it worth while, as every king before him would have done, almost to cut off England from her best market for her most paying product, wool, if he could thereby force the archduke’s government to withdraw its effective countenance from Perkin Warbeck. But he made it a constant object of his policy to negotiate the opening of fresh markets for that commodity, and when he came to terms with the archduke, the commercial benefits to be secured by the treaty known as the Intercursus Magnus were his first care.

As Henry was the first to give commercial considerations a leading place in his system, so he is to be distinguished for the attention he gave to shipping; on which head Bacon has a rather remarkable note, to the effect that he deserves praise for perceiving that in this instance it was worth while to diminish commerce for the sake of developing the marine—to subordinate the economic loss to the political gain. If Bacon read Henry’s mind aright, he was not under the delusion that the protection of English shipping interests by his successive Navigation Acts was of direct economic advantage; but he did see that it was worth while to pay the price in order to give England such a mercantile navy as in Bacon’s own day enabled her to win the supremacy of the seas. Those Acts, restricting the importation of foreign goods to English ships, raised the price of imports without benefiting any English industry at all except that of the shippers; but the impetus given to shipping provided the country with a fighting force at sea which ultimately enabled her to challenge the might of Spain. The naval development of England was the work of the Tudor dynasty, though Edward I., Edward III., and Henry V., had ideas. Whether the Navigation Acts really did give the impetus attributed to them—as to which economists may dispute—the intention is unmistakable, and the foresight which deliberately set up naval development as an end to be pursued is a very clear mark of Henry’s statesmanship. The creation of the English navy is generally credited either to King Alfred or to Henry VIII.; but the latter certainly inherited the conception from his father.

It is matter for regret, but hardly for reproach, that the king did not apply his ideas of maritime expansion more actively in another field, that of oceanic exploration. Portugal and Spain were allowed to take the lead. Yet it was so well known that the English king was favourable to such enterprises that it appears only to have been an accident which placed Christopher Columbus in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella instead of in Henry’s. How history might have been affected if the West Indies had fallen in the first instance to England instead of to Spain, is an interesting subject of speculation. But Spain won the prize. The sailors who put out from Bristol port tried their chance in more northerly latitudes; the territories they discovered were very unpromising; and after the outset the Genoese (or Venetian) Cabots, sailing in command of English crews, naturally enough got little support from the king. But at the outset—that is, before it seemed probable if not certain that Spain and Portugal, by right of priority backed by a Papal Bull, had, so to speak, staked out a claim to all that was worth having—Henry gave material encouragement to the exploring spirit.

There was, indeed, one important economic problem—with concomitants—at grappling with which no serious attempt was made. This was the growing agricultural depression: due in part to legitimate and in part to illegitimate action on the part of landowners. There was a very large demand for English wool for foreign looms. Sheep-breeding was seen to be highly lucrative, whereas tillage was not. The landowner saw no sufficient reason why he should be called upon to provide employment for a quantity of labour which brought him in a small return, when the employment of a very little labour over the same area would bring him a large return. Therefore he converted his arable lands into pasture for sheep. Economic history abounds in cases of the displacement of labour by the decay, temporary or permanent, of some industry which is ceasing to be lucrative: it abounds also with examples of legislative attempts to maintain the decaying industries, and to compel some one or other to provide employment for the displaced labour. Such attempts appear to be doomed to failure. No remedy has yet been found except the development of fresh industries which in course of time absorb that displaced labour. Even in the twentieth century, that is a process which might take years to accomplish; in the period which we are considering, the rural displacement took a century to remedy. Political altruists, like More or Somerset, tried to set legislation to work, but with the usual want of success. The encouragement of commercial enterprise which begets new industries was the only hopeful direction to work in, and to that Henry’s policy tended; but it was not till Elizabeth’s government pursued the same policy that the industrial situation was appreciably affected. Legislation did a little towards checking the rapidity with which small holdings were being absorbed into great estates, and great estates were being converted into sheep-runs, but it never amounted to more than a very feeble brake. The problem is one which still awaits a satisfactory solution.

V
JUDICATURE

Bacon enumerates with applause a variety of good laws enacted by Henry. He was not in fact remarkable as a legislator, but his modifications of the law were all save one in the nature of removal of abuses. There are, however, two of his enactments which demand special attention. The first of these was the Act of 1487, which gave statutory recognition to judicial functions which had for some time been exercised by the Privy Council or a committee thereof, sitting in a room known as the Star Chamber. In later days, this Court of Star Chamber was perverted into an instrument of tyranny; in Henry’s time, it was the only judicial body which was out of reach of the fear or suspicion of being terrorised by a powerful noble. It had come into being because the Sanction of the ordinary law was inadequate to deal with barons who chose to over-ride the law. The Privy Council could make and enforce its decrees without fear. Under these conditions, the powers it had assumed were necessary to the assertion of the royal authority against offenders who contemned the normal Courts.

Without the confident maintenance of the king’s authority against such offenders, the recurrence of the anarchy of the last fifty years would have constantly threatened; but it is obvious that the powers needed to that end might be misused for the ends of tyranny. Yet for more than a century the Court exercised its functions unmistakably for the public weal. Henry’s Act is notable, not as creating the Court, but as formally recognising and regulating its duties; a sound step, tending to prevent its abuse, not to introduce its use.

The other Act, however, that of 1495, is not capable of any such defence. It was abused from the beginning, and was the great instrument of those exactions by the notorious Empson and Dudley, which so stain the record of the latter half of Henry’s reign. Its repeal was one of the first and most popular acts of his successor. It is to be remembered, however, that though Empson and Dudley were not slow in getting to their evil work, their grosser activities were exercised in the last decade of the reign after Cardinal Morton’s decease. Henry was never generous; but the thrift and “nearness” of his earlier days took some time in developing into the grasping sordidness of his later years. More than half his reign had passed before the term extortionate could be applied to him without exaggeration. The Act, when it was passed, purported to be, and probably was, intended to prevent offenders against the law from escaping justice through lack of an accuser. It permitted judges to institute in their own Courts, on information laid by a resident in the district, proceedings for offences not involving penalties affecting the life or limb of the guilty party. Such men as Empson and Dudley, however, had no difficulty—with partial if not complete connivance from the king—in procuring information which would enable them under colour of law to impose extortionate fines for the king’s benefit and incidentally to extract from the victims very handsome perquisites for themselves.

VI
FOREIGN POLICY

The reign of Henry V. had made the English king as powerful a monarch as any in Europe. The sixty-three years that intervened between his death and the accession of Henry VII. saw England lose her pride of place among the nations. On the other hand, the attempt of Charles the Bold to create a central Burgundian kingdom had failed, while, partly on the wreck of his schemes, Louis XI. had consolidated the French monarchy, and the kingdom he left to Charles VIII. required for its completion only the effective absorption of Brittany. The union of Aragon and Castile by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had raised Spain to a new position, which in like manner lacked but one thing, the conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada, for its complete establishment. Maximilian, “King of the Romans,” heir to Austria and practically heir to the Imperial crown, had strengthened his own position by marrying the Duchess of Burgundy, Charles the Bold’s daughter, and thus acquiring a paramount interest in the wealthy Netherlands. England, with her internal turmoils and her lost military prestige, had for the moment lost all weight in the counsels of Europe. Even had the immediate termination of civil discord been assured, she was too much exhausted to recover her place by force of arms; and as long as there was a Yorkist Pretender at large, civil discord could not be regarded as conclusively at an end. Nevertheless, even during the years while his dynasty was threatened, the king’s diplomatic skill completely changed the relations of England and the Continental Powers; while his policy towards Scotland kept the normal hostility of the Northern kingdom in check, and bore ultimate fruit in the union of the crowns, a century afterwards. He did not, like Wolsey—his disciple as far as methods were concerned—achieve or aim at a dominant position; but when English interests were concerned, the voice of England could not in his later years be neglected, as at the beginning of the reign.

He worked not by exploits in the stricken field but by diplomacy, therein illustrating his modernity. He sent armies into Brittany and Picardy, but they were intended to threaten, not to strike. He found a kindred spirit in Ferdinand of Aragon: of whom Louis XII. in later years complained that he had once cheated him. “He lies,” said Ferdinand, with pride; “I have cheated him three times.” Ferdinand’s respect was reserved for Henry, whom he could not cheat at all, or even out-wit, which is not quite the same thing. Henry did not cheat—that is, he did not break faith; but his engagements were always so carefully hedged that the smallest evasion on the part of an ally could be made an adequate ground for complete evasion on his own. He could not prevent the absorption of Brittany; but the French king, as soon as he turned his ambitions towards Italy, found that Henry could hamper him so seriously that he willingly bought him off. Maximilian remained impecunious—harmless, therefore, unless he could persuade some one else to finance him—since the Netherlands declined to recognise his authority. As for Ferdinand, Henry fought him with his own weapons; and evenly matched as they were, the Englishman did not prove less adept than the Spaniard. Their first treaty seemed a very one-sided affair; but Henry in fact won by it that recognition which was of the first importance to him at that early stage, while he appeared to render in return a great deal more than he actually gave. In 1495, the Spanish sovereigns attached so much value to his alliance that in spite of haggling they were obliged next year to concede him his own terms, which, though not extravagant, were much higher than they liked, and very much higher than he would have ventured even to propose six or seven years earlier. But they could still regard the betrothal of their daughter Katherine to the Prince of Wales as something of an act of grace on their part. Four years later, it is evident that they thought Henry could better afford to break that marriage off than they could themselves: and again a little later, when Prince Arthur died, they were not a whit less desirous than Henry himself of betrothing the young widow to the new Prince of Wales. This restoration of status Henry achieved at the cost of nothing more than some military parade which was very much more than recouped out of the French treasury.

The key to Henry’s success is to be found just in the fact that the most astute of his rivals was quite unable to trick him; secondly, in his skilful avoidance of any measures which committed him to a position from which he could not retreat without loss of prestige. His value to Spain lay chiefly in his ability to hamper France. Presently Spain awoke to his capacity for restricting the hampering process precisely within the limits which were convenient to himself, which might be very much narrower than suited her. Presently again it appeared that he might find it still more convenient to join hands with France, which would minimise the use to be made of Maximilian. Instead of Henry being in need of assistance against France, which might be doled out at the convenience of Spain, Spain had to supply inducements to keep England on her side. As a matter of fact, Henry to the last needed Ferdinand quite as much as Ferdinand needed him, but succeeded in giving a different impression.

VII
CHARACTER

Our survey so far seems to show conclusively that for some two-thirds of his reign Henry conducted the business which had devolved upon him not only with remarkable practical success but without at all justifying the sinister impression of his character which is indubitably prevalent. Yet, even without the record of his later years, as to which something remains to be said, this unattractive impression is not unnatural. We feel that a great ruler of a great nation ought to have something about him, majestic, splendid, heroic. We even forgive a man for evil deeds done in a grand style; we do not feel our admiration stirred even by good deeds done in a pedestrian style. Magnanimity loses its flavour when we scent policy in it. We are offended with a king who is not kingly, and kingliness demands those Aristotelian virtues which are generally rendered as Magnanimity and Magnificence. They are attributes in which the seventh Henry is conspicuously deficient.

A phrase at the beginning of the foregoing paragraph was employed with definite intention. Henry treated kingship as a business. He entered upon it very much as a new managing director might enter upon the conduct of a great concern which demands re-organisation. He knows that the retention of his position depends on his successfulness; that success is possible only if he has a free hand, while his board likes to think that it is exercising the real control. He has to establish confidence in himself within, and to re-establish confidence in the house without. He avoids palpable injustice; no one can call him dishonest; he knows exactly how far he can trust clients, and rely on the co-operation of other establishments in a joint policy; and he makes that business a distinct success—but he is not very likely to make himself personally popular, or in any sense an object of enthusiasm. For that, something is needed over and above a strict and capable attention to business; and the something over and above was wanting in Henry Tudor. In keenness of intelligence, he was more than a match for the most astute of living statesmen. The general rectitude of his aims was commendable; the moderation of his methods was meritorious. He did good service to the nation over which he ruled. He was not cruel; he was not capricious; he was never guided by prejudice or passion; but he remains hopelessly and irredeemably unsympathetic.

Yet had he died within a year or two of his best minister, his portion would have been cold praise, but still praise. He outlived Morton by nearly nine years, whose baleful shadow is over his whole career, turning a negative into a positive dislike. For in those years every baser quality of which there is any hint in the earlier days becomes intensified.

He had always treated marriage primarily as an affair of politics, as was natural and inevitable, but with a sufficient respect for its moral aspects to keep him faithful to his own wife. Yet when his son died, the idea of joining the widow to his second son had for him none of that repulsion which it excited almost universally in his day. It is even said that when his own queen died he contemplated marrying Katherine himself. It is quite certain that he contemplated marrying Katherine’s sister Joanna of Castile, although he knew her to be mentally deranged. His economy degenerated into niggardliness; his politic scheming to fill his treasury developed into a griping greed for gold. Empson and Dudley carried on their nefarious work of extortion with his knowledge and sanction. He grew vindictive, and when Thomas More opposed a subsidy in the Parliament of 1504, he sought an excuse for fining the father, and the “beardless boy” himself had to retire into private life, lest a worse thing should befall him. He had always considered himself at liberty to break the spirit of a promise provided that he kept the letter; but, if tradition does not wrong him, when the Earl of Suffolk was surrendered on promise that he would not put him to death, he took care to suggest to the Prince of Wales that the promise would not bind his heir when his time came.

The man revealed to us in these later years is ugly, sordid, very unlovely. But this man does not truly or fairly present to us the real Henry who restored order in England, and recovered for her a respectable position among the nations; holding his own in a singularly difficult situation and keeping at bay the onslaughts of an embittered faction at the cost of a quite astonishingly small amount of bloodshed, and with the minimum of anything that could reasonably be called injustice towards antagonists. This at least England owes to him, that he did more than any of his predecessors to lay the foundations of her commercial greatness; that he recognised more clearly than any of them the benefit of her maritime development.

The man moreover was not altogether lacking in some finer qualities which seem to have withered when his degeneration set in. He who seems almost an incarnation of chill-blooded, unemotional craftiness was capable of very human and very tender feeling. A record from the hand of an anonymous contemporary, when his son Arthur died, has been transcribed before, and is worth transcribing again.

“In the year of our Lord God 1502, the second day of April, in the castle of Ludlow, deceased Prince Arthur, first begotten son of our sovereign Lord, King Henry the Seventh, and in the 17th year of his reign. Immediately after his death Sir Richard Poole his Chamberlain, with other of his Council, wrote and sent letters to the King and Council to Greenwich, where his Grace and the Queen’s lay, and certified them of the Prince’s departure. The which Council discreetly sent for the King’s ghostly father, a friar observant, to whom they showed this most sorrowful and heavy tidings, and desired him in his best manner to show it to the King. He in the morning of the Tuesday following, and somewhat before the time accustomed, knocked at the King’s chamber door; and when the King understood that it was his Confessor, he commanded to let him in. The Confessor then commanded all those there present to avoid, and after one salutation began to say Si bona de Manu Domini suscipimus, mala autem quare non sustineamus? and so showed his Grace that his dearest son was departed to God. When his Grace understood that sorrowful heavy tidings he sent for the Queen, saying that he and his Queen would take the painful sorrows together. After that she was come, and saw the King her lord and that natural and painful sorrow, as I have heard say, she with full great and constant comfortable words, besought his Grace that he would, first after God, remember the weal of his own noble person, the comfort of his realm and of her. She then said that my lady his mother had never no more children but him only, and that God by his grace had ever preserved him and brought him where that he was; over that, how that God had left him yet a fair prince, two fair princesses; and that God is where he was, and we are both young enough; and that the prudence and wisdom of his Grace sprung over all Christendom, so that it should please him to take this accordingly thereunto. Then the King thanked her of her good comfort. After that she was departed and come to her own chamber, natural and motherly loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart, that those that were about her were fain to send for the King to comfort her. Then his Grace, of true, gentle, and faithful love, in good haste came and relieved her, and showed her how wise counsel she had given him before; and he for his part would thank God for his son, and would she should do in like wise.”

That story, obviously derived from an actual witness, gives a fine impression of Elizabeth; but it no less obviously implies a very genuine affection subsisting between her and Henry, and a very sincere devotion in both to their son. Henry, however, was by nature a reserved and somewhat lonely man, and Elizabeth’s death not long after deprived him of the last softening influence. His whole life had been a tremendous strain. His boyhood and early manhood aged him prematurely. From the day that he landed in England to wrest the sceptre from Richard, the strain had never relaxed; the bow had never been slackened. At five-and-forty, he may well have been as much worn out as are men less severely tried twenty-five years later in life. The work he had to do was anything but inspiriting; he did it with dogged patience. The task was thankless, and he got little thanks. It was accomplished ungraciously, and he receives no grace in return. A dreary life, and a dreary reign; yet the reign is not without admirable qualities, nor the life without gleams of nobility.

CARDINAL WOLSEY

I
APPRECIATIONS

He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that by suggestion
Tied all the kingdom: simony was fair-play:
His own opinion was his law: i’ the presence
He would say untruths and be ever double,
Both in his words and meaning. He was never,
But when he meant to ruin, pitiful:
His promises were, as he then was, mighty:
But his performance, as he is now, nothing.

In these words, Shakespeare or another has summed up the character of the great Cardinal as it presented itself to his enemies. As Katharine painted him, posterity has for the most part regarded him. Men who have risen from the ranks, and in their prosperity assume the state and splendour appropriate to hereditary position, are rarely popular. When they are so, it is because they have identified their names in some sort with popular causes. Of all the statesmen who for a long term of years controlled or seemed to control the destinies of England, not one perhaps has found apologists so few as Thomas Wolsey.

Of recent years, however, there has been a change. It has hardly yet made its way into popular accounts; but the attitude of serious historians has been at least largely modified by the publication of the State Papers under the editorship of the late Dr. Brewer, and of his Introductions to those volumes. The doctrine used to be that Wolsey was a man of exceeding arrogance who acquired a pernicious mastery over the mind of Henry VIII., and whose political achievement consisted mainly in a miserably fruitless meddling with foreign affairs in which England had no concern, dictated by an insatiable ambition for the Papal crown. Whereas Dr. Brewer and Bishop Creighton after him have laid it down that Wolsey raised England from the position of a third or fourth-rate Power to an equality with the greatest nations in Europe.

During the years of his power, it is at least clear that Wolsey did achieve for England such a position among the nations as she had not held, at any rate since the days of Henry V.; and that he did this, not, like Henry V., by aggressive militarism, but by diplomatic skill: that he sought to be, and to a great extent succeeded in being, the pacificator of Europe as well as the aggrandiser of England. In his aim and method, however, he followed in the footsteps of Henry VII., and his policy was a natural development, though a vast extension, of that laid down by that astute monarch. And in the second aspect of his policy, he was again developing that of the old king, in striving to make the power of the Crown independent alike of the old nobility and of Parliament.

CARDINAL WOLSEY

From a Painting by Holbein in the collection at Christ Church, Oxford

But a recent biographer[A] has ventured so far as to declare that “Wolsey stands out as the greatest statesman England has ever produced; and it is not going beyond what records reveal if we say his was the master-mind of his age”—the age of Erasmus and Luther.

[A] Taunton, “Thomas Wolsey, Legate and Reformer,” p. 3.

That is unfortunately a species of criticism which excites the spirit of hostility. Wolsey was of that type of politicians, rare in England, who have made foreign affairs their first interest: also he was, what probably no other Englishman ever has been, beyond all comparison the ablest diplomatist among his contemporaries. Diplomacy is a field in which the reputation of England does not stand high. But one asks at once—What in fact did his diplomacy achieve? And, diplomacy apart, the great upheaval which issued in the Reformation was in full activity when Wolsey was at the height of his power and influence. The master-mind of his age therefore could hardly have failed to leave his mark on the Reformation. What did Wolsey accomplish—nay, what did he even attempt to accomplish—in that connexion?

II
CARDINALIS PACIFICATOR

Thomas Wolsey was born probably in 1471. His father was a citizen of Norwich—a grazier. The popular voice calls him a butcher. The boy was sent very young to Oxford, taking his degree when he was only fourteen years old, and otherwise achieving high distinction. At Magdalen he remained, fulfilling various college functions till the end of 1499. Before that date, John Colet, five years his senior, had commenced his famous course of lectures, introducing a new style of scholarship and a new type of biblical criticism. Thomas More, seven years his junior, had finished his University career. Erasmus had paid Oxford a flying visit. There is no trace of any personal association between Wolsey and these lights of the new school: yet there is no doubt whatever that as an educationist he was in close sympathy with them. The facts are therefore the more significant of some incompatibility of temperament: for we should naturally have expected scholars, agreed upon an innovating theory, to have been drawn together.

Acting at this time in a tutorial capacity to the sons of the Marquess of Dorset, Wolsey was rewarded by a living at Limington: and the ex-bursar of Magdalen was in a very short time a quite notable pluralist, and in close personal relations with various important personages, culminating in his appointment as Chaplain to Henry VII. in 1506. The king, whose only living rival in diplomatic astuteness was Ferdinand of Spain, was prompt to discern the kindred abilities of his new servant, who within a year or two was successfully employed to carry through important negotiations both in Flanders and in Scotland.

In April 1509 the old king died. His successor was hailed with acclamation on all hands. Of splendid physique, and glowing with martial ardour as was natural in a healthy boy of eighteen, the military section of society saw in him promise of a revival of the glories of Agincourt. The scholars too claimed their part in him, as he joyously claimed fellowship with them. The populace shouted applause when the detested Empson and Dudley were sent to the block. The veterans who occupied the chief thrones of Europe dreamed that the innocent youth would be to them as clay in the hands of the potter. Every one was satisfied.

For a little while all went merrily. The English nobles thirsted for war with France: Ferdinand and Maximilian had no difficulty in persuading the young monarch that in alliance with them he might achieve the laurels for which he hankered. He was to begin the fighting, they were to play at supporting him, and if by good luck something more substantial than laurels should be achieved, that of course would go to his partners.

Wolsey’s old pupil the Marquess of Dorset was sent to Spain in command of the expedition which was to begin the war, with the conquest of Guienne in view. Dorset’s army wanted beer: they could only get wine, which they considered thin. In effect they went on strike, and insisted on coming home again. The marquess brought them back ignominiously, without so much as a laurel-leaf.

Fox, Bishop of Winchester, perhaps the best of the old king’s surviving ministers, had been pressed into the background by the warlike nobles; but he had succeeded in introducing into the Council the man who was to sweep the nobles themselves into the background. Wolsey was nobody in particular, but he was a very clever man with immense organising ability and an infinite capacity for detail and for hard work. The fiasco was not repeated. In 1513, the army of invasion went to its proper field, Picardy. It was not a haphazard picnic party, and it captured Terouenne and Tournai. In the meantime, Surrey was shattering the Scots army at Flodden. A few months later, Henry had discovered that Ferdinand and Maximilian were using him as a cat’s-paw. Again a few months passed, and Wolsey had beaten them at their own game. France and England were in alliance. Then the uncontrollable changed the face of things. King Louis died: Francis I. succeeded. But the brief dream of the old kings had been finally dissipated: Henry was going to be nobody’s cats-paw. He had found a minister more than worthy to follow in his father’s footsteps.

In 1515 Wolsey was fully established not as the king’s chief adviser, but in effect as his sole minister. In 1513 he was not yet guiding the king’s policy: his work was mainly administrative. In 1514 the distinctive principle of his policy comes into full play. The anti-Gallic theory is discarded. Thenceforth, the hand of England is not against any Power in particular. As Foreign Minister, Wolsey’s business is to see that the balance of power is maintained; that no one prince shall be too far aggrandised; that each of them shall be a check on the aggression of others; that all shall maintain a habitual attitude of concession to England for the sake of her support; and that this is to be effected without involving England in actual warfare. Ferdinand dies in 1516; Maximilian in 1519. Charles V. succeeds both to Spain and to the Empire. In the latter year, the destinies of Europe are in the hands of three monarchs not one of whom is thirty years old. Wolsey during the following years remains in effect the arbiter of Europe till his hand is forced by Henry, and he finds himself compelled to overt hostility with France. After the disaster of Pavia, the blunder becomes manifest; his own policy is again allowed free play, and the old domination is all but recovered when the affair of the divorce wipes all other questions out of the field. The king’s will must be carried out at all costs. Failing therein, the Cardinal falls—irretrievably.

Two leading facts emerge. First: so long as Wolsey is allowed a free hand to carry out his own policy, he does it with complete success. Second: if the king elects to lay down a different policy, the Cardinal has to carry that policy through as best he may. The idea that he ruled the king is entirely fallacious. For some years, the king had the wisdom to recognise that his minister’s views were sound. Then his anti-Gallic leanings dominated him. Then he perceived his error, and reverted to his minister’s policy; till again a purely personal motive intervened, and policy again went to the winds. Since the personal motive could not be satisfied without a revolution, Henry conducted the revolution himself. The rôle the king required of his minister was one demanding other abilities than those of the Cardinal, and the Cardinal was thrown to the wolves.

Effectively then it is true to say that while Wolsey held sway in England, he was the arbiter of Europe. Whether it was for the good of England that she should concern herself with being the arbiter of Europe is another matter. It may be argued that the less she has to do with Europe the better for her. But the theory of splendid isolation for Great Britain is not the same thing as that theory applied to England when Scotland was an independent nation in habitual alliance with France, and always ready for hostilities. Even after Flodden the menace on the Northern Border had to be taken into perpetual count. Moreover, the advocates of that doctrine must still recognise that the opposite view is legitimately maintainable; and it follows that the statesman who, acting on the opposite view, successfully upheld English predominance without plunging the country into sanguinary wars, is entitled to a very high meed of praise.

Yet this does not express the whole of Wolsey’s achievement: for, when he began to guide England’s policy, he had to win position for her, not merely to maintain a position already held—a hard enough task in itself. To say that she was no more than a third or fourth-rate Power is an exaggeration. It was true in 1485: it had ceased to be true in 1500. Long before the close of his reign, the first Tudor had made himself a person of very considerable importance, whom none of the continental Powers dreamed of ignoring, and with whom they treated on something very like equal terms. This, however, was in no small degree a matter of personal prestige. Henry’s reputation for astuteness stood so high, not to speak of his credit for accumulated wealth, that the Courts of the continent paid England’s king an amount of respect which they would not have rendered to the power of England. With the removal of his personality, England dropped to a lower plane, but certainly did not become a negligeable quantity. If there was a brief disposition to regard her not as negligeable but as futile, that was due merely to the hastily formed conclusion that the young king was a tender innocent. The old Henry’s position was recovered the moment that Wolsey’s abilities were recognised. The marriage of the young princess Mary to the old King of France in 1514, was precisely the kind of stroke which Henry VII. would have made. It marked the fact that in any leagues or combinations which foreign princes might contemplate, an England thoroughly alive to her own interests, and thoroughly capable of safe-guarding them, must be reckoned with. In producing this result, Wolsey’s administrative ability as well as his diplomatic skill had played no small part; since to that was owing, in a great degree, the successes which attended the English arms in 1513; successes which were effective reminders that what English troops had done before they might learn to do again.

So far, however, what Wolsey had done was little if at all more than to restore the position of 1508; though this was accompanied by a suggestion that English interference in Continental affairs might be of a less purely defensive order than it had been under the late king. The suggestion was very soon to be turned into fact; and for some years kings and emperors and popes were to find that, whatever designs they might have in hand, they would have no chance of carrying them out beyond the point which Wolsey might be induced to sanction. The distinguishing feature of Wolsey’s method was his reliance on purely diplomatic action, to which end he had the aid of a particularly capable subordinate in Richard Pace. The Cardinal habitually posed as an arbitrator, composing the differences of Christendom and maintaining that general peace which it was theoretically the special function of the Roman Pontiff to secure.

For Ferdinand of Aragon, the leading idea was always to find an ally who could be inveigled into doing his fighting for him without any return. For Maximilian, the leading idea was to find an ally who would subsidise him to do the fighting while he could evade his own part of the bargain. Wolsey, by his alliance with Louis XII., turned the tables on both of them. The alliance itself was practically terminated by the accession of Francis in January 1515. France reaped the immediate profit, for neither Spain nor the emperor would risk a course which depended for success on a mutual fulfilment of obligations. Ferdinand became friendly to Francis, but without any intention of giving him effective support. When the latter’s progress in Italy seemed likely to be too rapid, Wolsey entered into relations with Maximilian which served as a check on Francis without filling the emperor’s purse. When Ferdinand died, Charles, his successor, was only sixteen, and though his counsellors were well disposed to France, being mainly Flemings, there was no present prospect of vigorous intervention on his behalf. Active hostility on the part of England would be dangerous, and when Maximilian in turn died, both Charles and Francis were suitors for the favour of the supreme minister in England. The turn of the wheel had made them inevitable rivals. The imperial election went in favour of Charles, that being less dangerous than the success of Francis would have been, and it was now Wolsey’s policy to hold the balance between the two. An era of universal peace was inaugurated; Charles and Francis did not join in formal alliance, but England united with each of them.

III
WOLSEY AND THE FRENCH WAR

The inauguration of an era of universal peace is usually the prelude to a war. A year after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Charles and Francis were on the verge of hostilities. Wolsey negotiated with both, ostensibly to bring about an accord. But in fact, England was committed to support Charles: and the responsibility was with the Cardinal.

The conclusion to which the circumstances point is that the pressure was too great for him to resist. Popular sentiment in England was opposed to the French alliance. The queen was a warm adherent of her young kinsman. The king was personally jealous of the achievements of Francis, and had visions of the French crown or at least of the recovery of Guienne. Wolsey probably felt that if he tried to maintain his own policy he would alienate Henry, and if he alienated Henry—who had just annihilated Buckingham—he would meet Buckingham’s fate amid universal applause, and the anti-French policy would triumph in any case. He elected to carry out the anti-French policy and remain at the helm. Hostile critics would suggest that he was actuated by the desire of obtaining the support of the emperor when the Papacy should become vacant. Charles failed to keep his promise when Leo died, and gave his support to another candidate; but neither then nor in the following year when Clement VII. was elected—again with the support of Charles—did Wolsey show any sign of changing his policy in consequence.

The English people had wanted the war; when they got it they paid for it at first cheerfully. But no advantage accrued, not even appreciable glory, and they tired of it. After Pavia, Henry thought the opportunity had come to strike for the French crown; but such an effort demanded more money. The business of getting it of course devolved on the Cardinal. There was no hope of obtaining it legitimately from a Parliament; Wolsey tried illegitimate methods—and failed. There was no alternative but to drop the war policy. Wolsey made an advantageous peace, and Charles promptly found himself obliged to come to terms with Francis. But it is clear that from this moment Wolsey’s position with his master became painfully uncertain.

Here then is the practical termination of Wolsey’s great period. After this, the king is absorbed by the divorce, and the minister, willy-nilly, must devote himself to that object—his own ruin being the alternative. His diplomatic labours achieved no permanent result, because the position won for England could only be maintained by continuity of diplomatic effort and diplomatic skill. After her own very different fashion, Elizabeth fifty years later was balancing continental forces, and manipulating them to her own ends, in a manner much less impressive and often indeed singularly undignified, but certainly not less successful. And with her, the result was that the England which Philip of Spain had hoped to make an appanage of his own established herself as the indisputable mistress of the seas. The change in the relative position of England between 1558 and 1588 was far greater than between 1508 and 1528.

But Elizabeth worked with a perfectly free hand. Wolsey worked for a master, who was quite capable of wrecking the minister’s schemes for a purely personal end. He had to persuade that master to sanction a policy which he never adopted with enthusiasm. He had to carry it through in spite of the hostility of the governing classes, the ill-will of the queen—who was still on terms of accord with her husband—and his own extreme unpopularity with the mob. That is, he had to work single-handed amidst extremely adverse conditions; and all the circumstances being taken together, it may fairly be said that he displayed a diplomatic genius unique among English statesmen.

IV
DOMESTIC POLICY

In the field of foreign affairs Wolsey’s policy and his methods were both derived from Henry VII.: or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he applied the same methods to a development of the same policy. The invaluable make-weight was converted into the inevitable arbiter: the means, a process of peaceful bargain-driving. The bargains were usually in both cases profitable for England. Incidentally, they generally contained unwritten clauses which were profitable also to the Cardinal. There is no reason to suppose that any case occurred in which Wolsey permitted essentials to be in the slightest degree affected by considerations of his own gain. But he himself would never have thought of disputing that he accumulated great profits out of his diplomatic transactions.

The first objective then of Wolsey’s policy was the establishment of England not merely as an important factor but as the dominant factor in European politics: therein going beyond anything that Henry VII. had contemplated, but still acting on lines laid down by him. In his second objective, he was still a disciple of the old king. This was the establishment of the Crown as a practical autocracy.

The primary condition of an absolutist government was a full treasury; and here Wolsey had the immense advantage of the great hoards accumulated during the last reign. In spite of the heavy expenditure involved in ministering to the king’s pleasures, and on such pageantry as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, government in Wolsey’s hands was economically conducted. The great revenues which fell into his own hands not merely from the numerous preferments he held in England, but also from foreign sources, enabled him to defray the magnificence of his own establishment, public as well as private: and there were indirect methods of throwing much of the cost of the Court upon private persons. It was not till 1523 that the Cardinal found himself forced to look to the country for supplies by the necessities of a war budget. For very nearly ten years he had carried on the government without calling Parliament, although it had hardly been summoned during the preceding decade; under a continuance of the same régime, England might have become accustomed to doing almost without Parliament.

The second principle in establishing absolutism was the further depression of the nobility, who—again, as in the days of Henry VII.—were steadily kept from offices of State. Even the Howards exercised no control; and the most powerful of all, the Duke of Buckingham, was suddenly brought to the block. In that, as in everything the king did that was unpopular, the minister was charged with being the moving spirit, and his determination to destroy all rivals was accounted the moving cause. As a matter of fact, the duke’s execution fitted in with the Cardinal’s policy: but there is no direct ground for supposing that he had any active share in the matter. On the whole, there is no evidence that he was particularly vindictive. Still, personal ambition apart, since none of the nobles would willingly have been associated with him as a colleague it was necessary to the carrying out of his policy that his rivals should have their talons pared as far as possible; and also of course that there should be none powerful enough to form a disaffected party. Wolsey knew that, except for one or two ecclesiastics who had already in effect retired from the political arena, he stood practically alone. He had to make himself necessary to the king, and, since he could not be loved by the nobles, it undoubtedly suited him that they should fear him. In the result he succeeded so completely in destroying all possibility of opposition to Henry’s will that there was no man in the kingdom whom the king could not destroy if he chose merely to raise a finger.

Successful as he was in building up the power of the Crown, he was still apparently at the height of his own influence when he learnt that the power of the purse still lay elsewhere; and the king learnt a very important lesson at the same time—a lesson which he was to turn to account before very long—the importance of conciliating popular sentiment. Money was needed for the French war. Wolsey would have treated the Parliament, called to provide it, as a mere passive instrument for carrying out the royal behest. Had the House of Commons in 1523 suffered itself to be brow-beaten, it would have virtually surrendered its place in the Constitution. The House refused to be brow-beaten: it refused point-blank to discuss or to vote in the Cardinal’s presence. When he retired in wrath, a substantial sum was voted, but as a free grant to the king, not obligatory. Two years later, more money was wanted. Wolsey did not dare to ask a Parliament for it. He resorted to Benevolences, and found the citizens of London obstinate in their assertion that Benevolences were illegal. However willing Parliaments or burgesses might be to leave measures to the king and his minister, they were absolutely determined to provide nothing out of their own pockets unless their own consent had first been obtained through strictly constitutional channels.

In this thing Henry was quick to prove himself shrewder than the Cardinal. Like his daughter after him, he had an intuitive perception of the national temper, and lost no time in repudiating the idea of coercion. His personal popularity was doubled, and all the odium for the attempt fell upon the minister. But the scheme towards which he was strongly predisposed had been foiled, and Wolsey, though the result favoured his own views, knew that it would be fatal to him if he failed a second time to give effect to the king’s desires.

Therefore the Cardinal now gave himself up to the effort to meet his master’s demands in the matter on which he had set his heart, the separation from Katharine. But in this one matter, success for him was sufficiently improbable from the outset, and as time went on events which he was wholly unable to control made it a sheer impossibility. He failed, and the failure spelt his ruin. Giving himself utterly to the king’s service, his compliance did not save him. Hitherto he had been a statesman, pursuing ends which certainly magnified both his country and his sovereign with extraordinary ability and amazing success, by methods certainly not more unscrupulous than were sanctioned by the universal practice of the time. Now he devoted himself to an object wholly unworthy, which he must have felt to be utterly unrighteous. The king for whom he degraded himself served him—characteristically. Did the fallen man feel that his punishment was just, even while the hand that dealt it was supremely unjust? It would seem so. The sentiment, if not the words, which Shakespeare put in his mouth is authentic:

O Cromwell, Cromwell!
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.

V
THE DIVORCE

The whole story of the divorce is an ugly one; no amount of sophistry will ever make it anything else. Mr. Froude succeeded in persuading himself that pure unsullied patriotism was Henry’s ruling motive: and brings himself, apparently with some difficulty, to grant a qualified pardon to Katharine for her resistance, on the ground that after all she was a woman, and weak. If Henry had acted as some others have done, and had taken up definitely the position that by hook or by crook the legalisation of a new marriage for him was a national necessity, in order that a male heir to the throne might be born, the issue would have been a plain one. If bigamy could be justified on the grounds of national expediency, there was a decently good case for authorising a bigamous union. To provide a technical trick for evading the form of bigamy would no doubt have made the process easier, not affecting the ethics of it one way or other. But it followed logically that national interests alone were first to be taken into consideration in the selection of the new spouse. The fact that in that choice Henry was guided by passion and no other consideration whatever is sufficient proof that the actuating motive with him was not salus populi suprema lex. The grotesque nemesis by which later on Henry found himself with three acknowledged children of his body of whom two were born in what was supposed to be wedlock, both in virtue of marriages which the Courts had subsequently declared void, while the third, a boy, had no pretensions to legitimate birth—that nemesis is really a reductio ad absurdum of the whole position.

If on the other hand the awakening of Henry’s conscientious scruples had not coincided with a violent passion for another woman it would have been easier to believe that they were genuine, and that all he really wanted—as he frequently affirmed—was to have those scruples allayed. A genuine doubt would assuredly have demanded an authoritative pronouncement. Unfortunately, he made it perfectly clear that no authority could allay the scruples; he was absolutely determined that the Pope and the Cardinal between them must see to it that the doubts should be confirmed.

The precise stage at which Henry discovered that the weal of his people required a male heir of his body at any cost; at which his conscience began to question the validity of the dispensation under which he had married Katharine; at which he determined that Anne Boleyn should supplant the queen: all these are matter of some doubt. It is fairly clear that in 1526—certainly in 1527—if not before, Wolsey had been made aware that the king was desirous of exchanging Katharine for Anne; that Wolsey on his knees entreated the king to think better of it; that he found the king obdurate. There is no sign at all that the ethics of the divorce troubled Wolsey in any way; on the other hand no one has ever questioned that the Boleyn marriage was a thing hateful to him from every point of view. But he had to choose between lending himself to the king’s desire and rushing on his own ruin. Perhaps there are not many men who would have dared to take the nobler course; Wolsey, deteriora secutus, none the less fell.

It would seem that Wolsey first set himself to discover some legal expedient for nullifying the marriage, hit upon the idea that the dispensation granted by Julius was invalid, and tried more than one scheme with a view to its being pronounced invalid—hoping, it may be, that the law’s delays would give the king time to get over his infatuation for Anne, and that when—if ever—he should be legally free to take a new wife, the new wife would be a more fitting person.

First of all then, Wolsey, as Papal Legate, took steps for holding a Legatine Court in England before which the issue should be tried. But this plan contained a material flaw. Katharine might appeal to the Pope against the decision of the Legatine Court, and Wolsey, in the event of such appeal, would become a mere party in the suit instead of a judge. The Pope therefore must be induced either to give a favourable pronouncement on his own account, or to appoint a Legatine Court ad hoc—a Court whose judgment would be final. A very difficult matter; for precisely at this time the recent misfortunes of France were bearing their fruit: the emperor became entirely predominant in Italy, and obtained complete control of Clement—and the emperor was Katharine’s most affectionate nephew. So the hapless Pope, who was very anxious to keep friends with Henry but was naturally even more anxious not to offend Charles, desired above everything to evade giving a decision himself. On the other hand, Wolsey felt that there must be no pretext for subsequently questioning the legality of the process by which the dispensation was to be quashed, and therefore it was imperative that in form that process should convey the Papal sanction. Besides this, he had a very powerful personal reason for insisting on it. In England the Boleyn connection, who knew perfectly well what were Wolsey’s views about Anne, were working hard and not without success to destroy the king’s trust in the Cardinal, who saw his influence tottering. Failure to procure the divorce would certainly mean for him destruction; success, followed by the Boleyn marriage, would place more power in the hands of the most hostile faction, and he would be left absolutely alone to bear the whole obloquy of an extremely unpopular measure, unless the ultimate responsibility could be forced on the reluctant Pope.

As far as Wolsey was concerned, Clement won the game after apparently yielding. A Legatine Commission was appointed, but Campeggio was associated with Wolsey as judge: he managed to spend the best part of a year in reaching England; it was in fact fifteen months after the appointment that the Court began its sittings. A few weeks later, the Pope revoked the case to Rome. For all practical purposes, the revocation sealed the Cardinal’s fate.

For two years past Wolsey’s position, for all that it seemed to the world so assured, had been extremely precarious. The king had sent one agent to Rome behind his minister’s back. The agent’s mission failed ignominiously, but the thing was significant. Wolsey had gone to France on a diplomatic errand; on his return, instead of being summoned to a confidential meeting with the king, he found Anne Boleyn in the presence. He had been soundly rated by the king because, in appointing an abbess to Wilton, he had rejected a most unsuitable protégée of the Boleyns. He knew the stake for which he was playing: he can hardly have doubted, from the beginning of what was called “The King’s Affair,” that his fate was bound up with success or failure. The illusion that he ruled the king was one from which it does not appear that he ever suffered himself. All he did was to rule England and English policy precisely so long as he retained the personal favour of the king, and his policy did not clash with any of the royal predilections.

In this matter of the “divorce,” Wolsey has found an earnest apologist in Father Taunton. In his view, it would seem that the Cardinal was justified, because he believed that there really was a technical flaw in the form of the dispensation as granted by Pope Julius: if there was such a flaw, the king was entitled to the benefit of it: and its existence would enable the Pope to quash the dispensation, without so much as raising the question whether the granting of it at all was ultra vires for any Pope. Now the ingenuity of the lawyer who wins his client’s case on a technical quibble may be admired—in a way: the ingenuity of the ecclesiastic, who would have provided the Pope with a golden bridge for evading an awkward question, is also to be admired. But in presenting these grounds for admiration, the last possibility of a moral defence is given away. Persons honestly believing that the relation between Henry and Katharine was by the moral law incestuous, and could not be otherwise, despite any possible Papal dispensation, were entitled to urge the dissolution of their union. But if that relation was not inherently immoral, and was capable of being made legal as well, then the barest sense of justice demanded, that no dubious point of law should be brought in, in order to engineer a dissolution.

The whole case for Wolsey, according to Father Taunton, rests precisely on this very dubious point of law. The dispensation was formally drawn to make the marriage between Henry and Katharine lawful even if affinity had been contracted. But in the ordinary course, as the law stood, a woman being not married but fully betrothed to a man might not—although no actual marriage had taken place—marry that man’s brother, her doing so being against “public honesty.” Since the greater includes the less, and the whole includes the part, it would seem obvious that a dispensation covering the actual marriage ipso facto covered the pre-contract. Yet the apologist would have it that the Cardinal was satisfied to rest the whole case for nullifying the marriage on the position that the dispensation was technically invalid because it did not specifically refer to “public honesty” as well as to affinity. Such was the contemptible quibble by which the “master-mind of his age” was prepared to procure a pronouncement that Katharine was no wife—so that the Papacy might escape an awkward dilemma.

It is at least intelligible to maintain that circumstances may arise under which, for the public safety, flagrant injustice towards an individual may be and ought to be committed. That is undoubtedly the feeling at the bottom of Mr. Froude’s argument. Possibly also it was at the back of Father Taunton’s mind; but he does not put it forward. If the doctrine itself be admitted, a loyal son of the Roman Church is perhaps entitled to hold that it was right to sacrifice Katharine in order to avoid raising a question extremely inconvenient to the Papacy. Perhaps also that view is the excuse least derogatory to Wolsey which can be offered. A review, however, of the entire context of the documents which Father Taunton cites in part points rather to the conclusion that the Cardinal did mean to argue that—dispensation or no dispensation—affinity was an absolute bar; and intended to fall back on the quibble only as a last desperate resort if the contraction of affinity were disproved; that he at least wished to find the moral ground for nullity maintained, but, if that should prove impossible, was prepared to surrender the extreme Papal claim.

The view of the whole business resulting from a consideration of all the facts so far as they can be certainly ascertained is entirely consistent with the rest of the Cardinal’s career. Ambition made him desire power; like other men of great intellect and strong will, he knew himself fitted to hold it; like many other statesmen, and with a good deal more reason than some, he imagined himself the only safe guide for the State; and he knew that if he once fell there would be for him no recovery. About 1526, when for a dozen years he had been the greatest figure in the eyes of the Western world, he found himself presented with a dilemma. He must execute the king’s will in a particular matter—or fall.

The king’s will would at least serve the State well in one respect if it issued in providing a male heir to the throne. Also, if the marriage were really contrary to the moral law and outside the dispensing power, it would be in the interest of public morals that the fact should be declared. So far, no one could possibly be blamed for maintaining the king’s case. That was the line subsequently taken by Cranmer. But for Wolsey the situation was much more difficult than for Cranmer, because for Wolsey it was a sine qua non that the Pope’s official authority should be maintained. He could not, therefore, adopt any course which ignored that authority even so far as by not requiring its open sanction: much less could he, like Cranmer, defy it. Whether, for the sake of preserving that authority the more rigidly, he intended to ignore the one moral defence for the desired measure and content himself with pleading a legal quibble, is a question that can be argued; but it is quite clear that he was prepared to do so in the last resort. In short, if the only way to avoid his own downfall was by sacrificing an innocent victim, the innocence of the victim should not save her. He would have preferred, no doubt, that the sacrifice should not be made, but, under the circumstances, he did not hesitate. His moral plane was too conventionally low for the alternative course. More or Fisher would have acted otherwise. But the successful statesman who is ready to commit political suicide rather than actively participate in an unrighteous deed which he cannot prevent, is not often to be met with. And Wolsey had the further excuse that he hoped to save the Church, as he conceived it, from the disastrous results which he foresaw if the matter fell into other hands.

VI
WOLSEY AND THE REFORMATION

From the attitude of Wolsey to the Papacy in the matter of the divorce, we are naturally led to a consideration of his whole position in matters ecclesiastical and religious.

The great revolution which we call the Reformation had two main aspects. Employing the term “the Church” as representing not the whole body of professing Christians but the clerical organisation: the Reformation in the first place changed everywhere, though in varying degrees, the relation of the secular governments to the Church within their borders; in the second place it changed the relations of the various geographical sections of the Church to the whole Catholic body of which they were members. Thus the State in England assumed a new attitude to the Church in England, and the Church in England as well as the State was placed in a new relation to the Roman pontificate. These changes were essentially political.

In its second aspect, the Reformation was a religious revolution; a revision of ethical standards; a revival of that ardour of sentiment and of conviction whereof martyrs are born; a spiritual movement, accompanied by a doctrinal upheaval. That portion of Christendom which adhered to the Roman pontificate, confining its doctrinal modifications within the limits set by the Council of Trent, arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The rest arrogated to themselves the title of the Reformed Churches, accepting the general label of Protestants originally appropriate only to the Lutheran section. Like all political labels, all three of these terms were incorrect, “Protestant” being improperly extended, while the “Reformed” Churches might be Catholic, and the “Catholic” Church was itself reformed. Perhaps it would be of advantage rather to treat the doctrinal Reformation as a third aspect, and to distinguish the great actors by the parts they played in the political, the religious, and the doctrinal Reformations respectively, whether in restraining or in promoting change. Thus, religion did not enter into the programme of Henry VIII.; as to doctrine he certainly was not a reformer; politically, he emerged as a revolutionary. Men like More and Colet were ardent reformers of religion; in theology and on the political side, they were conservative. Luther, Calvin and Knox were of the advanced party in each case. But it must be definitely laid down that of the three aspects of the Reformation the most vital was the religious, not the political or the theological; and the men who, whether Catholic or Protestant, were the religious leaders, are on a higher plane of greatness than the rest; it is amongst them that we must look for the “master-minds” of the age.

Now it does not appear that in any single one of these three aspects Wolsey as a matter of fact influenced the great movement, already fairly under weigh, in any appreciable degree. Had he, instead of Clement, occupied the Papal throne, the political power of the Papacy would indubitably have been for the time greatly advanced. Had his own power in England survived the divorce business, the secular onslaught on the ecclesiastical body conducted by Cromwell would not have taken place. It is conceivable that under modified circumstances he might have evolved a modus vivendi for Church and State more favourable to the Church than that which emerged from the thirty tempestuous years which followed his death. But in fact the whole manner of the Cardinal’s life, his immersion in secular politics, the magnificence of his household, his many benefices, his vast accumulation of wealth, the arrogance of his demeanour, typified and flaunted before the public eye precisely those shortcomings of the clergy at large on which the anti-clerical spirit of the laity was battening. The Cardinal might have strengthened the Church’s power of resistance; he certainly was in no small degree the cause of the animosity of her assailants. In the eyes of the whole world, he was essentially a man of the world, worldly; and in worldliness, far more than in the temptations of the Flesh or the Devil, the best of the reformers found the Church’s besetting sin.

No political skill, no state-craft, no loyalty to his order, could have gone to the root of the matter by removing the moral grounds of hostility to the ecclesiastical organisation. A moral enthusiasm of which—to put it mildly—no hint whatever is to be found in the great minister, was absolutely essential for any man who was either to renovate the prestige of the clergy so that the people should follow them or so to inspire the people that the clergy should follow the popular movement. In England there arose no prophet, but for that much-needed rôle Wolsey was about as little fitted as any imaginable leader.

Nevertheless, something he did and more he was willing to do. There were specific grievances which up to a certain point he sought to remedy. Without surrendering any of the privileges of his order, he made in his own Legatine Courts a vast improvement on the practice of the ordinary Ecclesiastical Courts. He did away with a considerable number of small religious Houses whose condition was more or less of a scandal. His visitations brought about improved discipline in many of the larger Houses; some of his appointments, as to the Abbey at Glastonbury, were notably admirable; in rejecting an unworthy abbess for Wilton he braved the anger of the king at a time when he ran an exceptionally heavy risk in doing so. Above all, he was fully alive to the necessity of educating a new generation of clergy up to a high standard; and to that end he created his great foundations of Ipswich and Cardinal College (Christ Church), Oxford, carrying out on a much more extensive scale what Dean Colet and Bishop Fox had set themselves to do before him. His college was crippled and his school was wrecked when he fell; but in this at least he deserves to be honoured by the side of William of Wickham. Yet the name of William is hardly to be coupled with those of Luther or Loyola. Wolsey was a real and sincere patron of education; he had a sufficiently keen sense of order and public decency to be a just judge and something of a disciplinarian; but much more than this would have been required to make him a potent moral force; and without being that he could not, even had he become Pope, have affected the Reformation in a permanent manner, though he might have modified its political course. He was the consummation of the old school of political ecclesiastics. Probably he was never so much as conscious that a moral revolution was in progress. What he did know was that the political position of the Holy See, and of the whole ecclesiastical system, was threatened, and his legatine and Papal ambitions may fairly be attributed as much to a belief in his own fitness to pilot the ship as to selfishly personal motives. But the mere fact that, with the powers he did acquire and the vast abilities he possessed, he yet accomplished practically nothing either as a reformer or as a bulwark of the old order, is fairly conclusive proof that he was neither the “greatest of English statesmen” nor “the master-mind of his age.”

VII
WOLSEY’S FALL AND CHARACTER

The Legatine Court was suspended, and the question of the divorce advoked to Rome, in July 1529. The signs of Wolsey’s doom were quick to gather. His master practically ceased to hold personal communication with him. It was evident, when writs for a Parliament were issued in September, that the Cardinal was no longer directing the king: for he had consistently aimed so far as possible at the suppression of the functions of Parliament. Campeggio was hardly out of the country when his colleague was indicted under the Statute of Præmunire for having exercised the legatine office contrary to the law. The Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk deprived him of the Great Seal which he held as Chancellor. Ill and despairing, he retired to his house at Esher, shorn of all his offices. He was attainted in the House of Peers, and the Bill was passed. In the Commons, however, the vigorous opposition to it made by Cromwell, and a feeling that the king was not unfavourable to its rejection, resulted in its being thrown out.

Probably Henry had not yet thoroughly made up his mind as to his course of action, and wished to preserve a possibility of recalling his minister to his counsels. He was told that he might be permitted to discharge some of his pastoral functions, and was allowed to retire in the spring to York, to take up the duties of the Archbishopric; and in spite of the immense fines imposed on him, he was by no means stripped bare of this world’s goods. York was fixed on as being more remote from the neighbourhood both of Henry and of the Continent than Winchester. He threw himself into the unaccustomed rôle with apparent zest, and seemed on the verge of achieving an unexpected reputation for pastoral piety and devotion, when a fresh blow fell. He was summoned to London on a charge of treason. He had been unwise enough to write to Francis I and pray for his intercession with Henry; he was also accused, though groundlessly, of having made really treasonous proposals to the Pope. Already ill when he started, he became rapidly worse on his journey south, and having reached the Abbey of Leicester, was unable again to rise from his bed. There he passed away, pathetically forlorn; but at least spared the last undeserved ignominy of a traitor’s doom.

On the high road to success and in the height of his power, Wolsey extorts an admiration which is still somewhat reluctant. His figure cannot be called attractive. Over the business of the divorce it is difficult not to feel him positively repellent. But in his fall he rose to moral heights of which his previous career gives no warning. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Here, it would seem, was one who—not voluntarily surrendering but forcibly bereft of the world, when he had gained it—found thereby his soul’s salvation. Through tears and tribulation, pain of the worn-out body, anguish of the spirit, he won it. In the day of his triumph, his countrymen hated him while they could not but admire; hated him with a rare bitterness which made even Thomas More ungenerous; save some few of his own household, none felt a touch of sympathy, unless perhaps the king, who condescended to send him one or two kindly messages to salve his own royal conscience while he was stripping his most loyal servant of everything he possessed. Yet in the months of his retirement, while, in his diocese of York, he devoted himself to the care of his spiritual flock, the fallen Cardinal won on all hands a passionate affection bestowed only upon men and women who can forget themselves in their thought for others. At bottom there must have been in the man an essential sweetness and loveableness repressed—dried up in the fires of ambition, parched in the sunshine of prosperity, welling forth in the shadow of adversity. Gone was the power that swayed the politics of a continent; gone the gorgeous pomp, the insolent state, that stirred the impotent malice of the lesser men he had overshadowed. But with their loss, the hidden best that was in the fallen minister found free play.

Wolsey’s chroniclers have been against him. Those who wished to magnify the king pointed to the Cardinal as the evil genius who had prompted every ill-judged deed. The nobility hated him as an insolent and upstart foe to their order. Katharine’s party hated him, because he was credited not only with anti-Spanish policy but with being the prime mover of the divorce. The Boleyn party hated him, because they knew that he loathed the Boleyn marriage. He had no sympathy from the Protestants, since he stood for the old ecclesiastical order; none from the later Catholics, since his attitude to the Papacy was misunderstood; none from the populace, because he embodied the most unpopular characteristics of ecclesiasticism. Even Cavendish, who admired him, is careful in his record to point the moral that pride goeth before a fall, lest his praise of the Cardinal’s demeanour in his last year of life should be regarded as unduly laudatory. From Skelton to Fox the martyrologist, every man had some motive for throwing a stone at him.

But if Shakespeare—or another—has summed up for us the libels of his enemies, the same hand has shaped the far truer eulogium pronounced by the “honest chronicler” Griffith in the same play. By his own talents he had made himself great: in his high station, if in some respects he abused his power, yet in the main he worked for the glory of England. It is inconceivable that when he fell, when the world slipped from the grasp of one who had been the very type of worldliness, he should have kissed the rod with perfect resignation, and found no taste of bitterness in the cup allotted to him. Yet there was at least a solid proportion of truth in the pious words of Griffith:

His overthrow heaped happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little;
And, to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.

No amount of historical inquiry will ever suffice to displace in the public mind a portrait bearing Shakespeare’s signature. The Wolsey of the play is not easy to reconcile with the Wolsey Griffith described after his disappearance from the stage: but these words are still a part of the Shakespearean portrait.

SIR THOMAS MORE

I
INTRODUCTORY

Reverence for tradition is not inconsistent with a belief in progress. History yields us abundant instances of great minds which have combined a keen appreciation of the ideas of liberty and equality with a strong predilection in favour of time-honoured institutions. Sometimes, but rarely, the conservative instinct predominates in youth, and gives way to the liberal instinct as time goes on. Sometimes, not rarely, the liberalism of youth yields to the conservatism of later life. In either case, we are presented with the apparent paradox of the man who, maintaining the complete consistency of his own career, is found to be at one period of his life on the side of the reformers, and at another period on the side of the reactionaries. When political movements are comparatively slow, these paradoxes do not obtrude themselves: but when revolutions are in the air, they become conspicuous. There are two eras which are particularly fruitful in such phenomena; those, namely, of the Reformation and of the French Revolution.

Each of those periods presents us in England with one political thinker of the highest rank whose utterances before the great change are cited in authority by progressives, while their later pronouncements or actions are cited with approbation by the opposing forces. There is nothing surprising about the change in political attitude which unexpected events produce in a Stephen Gardiner or a William Pitt; it is merely a divergence from the earlier course. But Burke and More give a prima facie impression of a complete reversal of principle. “Miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes of the vicissitudes of Thomas More’s career”; so Mr. Sidney Lee has very recently written of him; as other critics have fallen back on the theory that Burke’s intellect went to pieces. Both these great men did, in fact, misinterpret the very startling events of which they were witness, partly because actual facts was misrepresented to them. Neither believed that a work-a-day world with established institutions could be accommodated to ideal polities where those institutions had never grown up. They had in practice to adapt their ideals to what they saw as hard facts. Hence they condemned in the concrete what they would have approved in the abstract. Yet both were close and acute reasoners, and probably neither would have admitted for a moment that he had deserted in later life a single principle which he had maintained at an earlier stage.

SIR THOMAS MORE

From a Painting by Holbein in the National Portrait Gallery

But whether critics differ in their attempts to reconcile the More who wrote the “Utopia” with the Lord Chancellor More, or give up the attempt to explain the paradox as hopeless, the attractiveness and nobility of the man stand unchallenged, as his intellectual eminence is indisputable. It is impossible not to love and admire him. Of the other nine men treated in this volume, all have apologists more or less enthusiastic, but all have bitterly or contemptuously hostile critics. More is one of the few men that have left their mark on our history, who has won the tribute of universal affection and esteem.

II
UNDER HENRY VII

Thomas More was born in London in 1478, seven years after Thomas Wolsey, and about the same length of time before Thomas Cromwell. There is a rather curious prevalence of the name Thomas among prominent men at this time, Cranmer being a fourth, and the youngest of the quartet. More’s father was a barrister, who later became a judge; a gentleman with a pleasant humour, a turn for economy, and conservative views. John More was married thrice, and seems to have been comfortably wived, being responsible for a witticism on the subject of matrimony such as usually emanates from men whose personal experience contradicts it. “Taking a wife,” said he, “is like putting your hand into a bag containing a number of snakes and one eel. You may lay hold of the eel.” His son was not warned off the experiment, either by the jest or by his experience of step-mothers.

Young Thomas was a lad of parts; his father was a person of distinction in the great city. Morton, Archbishop and Lord Chancellor, and subsequently a Cardinal, the wise counsellor of Henry VII. throughout the first half of his reign, took the boy into his service, and evidently found much satisfaction in cultivating and encouraging his remarkable intelligence and wit; prophesying “marvellous things” of him. The great man’s kindness was repaid by the very attractive portrait which his protégé has given us in the first book of the “Utopia.” By Morton’s influence, Thomas, at fourteen, was sent to Oxford—not an unusual age. Cranmer too was sent to Cambridge at fourteen: while Wolsey’s youth was exceptional, for he took his degree at the same age. More’s undergraduate career, however, was brief. He was intended by his father to follow the profession of the law, and John More took alarm when he found that his son was being beguiled into an enthusiasm for the recently introduced study of Greek. There was no connexion between law and Greek; besides, Greek was unsettling: it seemed to put new-fangled and heterodox ideas into folk’s heads. So after two years, More was withdrawn from Oxford, entered at New Inn to study the law, and in February, 1496, was admitted a student at Lincoln’s Inn: just about the time when John Colet was returning from Italy.

There is every probability that Colet and his younger contemporary had already foregathered at Oxford, in listening to the teaching of Grocyn: otherwise it is not very easy to account for the warm intimacy which arose between the Oxford Divinity Lecturer and the young student of Lincoln’s Inn: though the fact that both their fathers were men of such eminence in London, that the families may easily have been brought into contact, must not be forgotten. In any case, the names of Colet, Erasmus and More became closely associated between 1496 and 1500. Erasmus paid a flying visit to England in 1498. Colet’s discourses were already famous, and the Dutchman and the Englishman were introduced to each other by Prior Charnock of the College of St. Mary the Virgin: to their great mutual satisfaction. As the story runs, Colet told Erasmus of the surprising genius of his young friend Thomas More, and told More of the amazing endowments of his new acquaintance. The two, unknown to each other, met at the same table, and fell into a dialectical discussion which neither could resist; till at last the elder, putting two and two together, exclaimed “Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus,” the younger promptly responding “Aut tu es Erasmus, aut Diabolus.” Whether the tale be true or not, the acquaintance was made, and ripened rapidly into the warmest of friendships. In those days, complimentary epithets between scholars were nearly as cheap and meant nearly as little, as vituperative ones; but there is no mistake about the genuine and spontaneous character of the terms in which Erasmus wrote to and of Thomas More. He is always dulcissimus, iucundissimus, or something equally endearing. Erasmus had superlatives for other people too, but there is no one else on whom he lavishes the same wealth of playful affection. It was to Robert Fisher that the scholar about this time wrote his classic appreciation of his young friend—Thomae Mori ingenio quid unquam finxit natura vel mollius, vel dulcius, vel felicius? “What hath nature ever fashioned more tender, more charming, more happy, than the character of Thomas More?”

It was during this visit that More played a characteristic trick on Erasmus, one which shows how well the quondam page of Cardinal Morton (who had just entered on the last year of his life) stood in distinguished quarters. Erasmus was staying at Greenwich with his patron Lord Mountjoy. Thither came More, with a friend, to see him and carry him off for a walk, in the course of which they came to a handsome building, where More said he wished to pay his respects. Somewhat to his dismay, Erasmus found on entering that they were invading a royal domain, and that their visit was to Prince Henry and his brother and sisters who wanted him there and then to produce them a poem. He demurred, but was let off on condition of his promising to send them one—a promise faithfully carried out.

More shared with his older friend a capacity for perceiving the humorous side of things which stood him in good stead all his life. But he had a deeper vein of seriousness, and to him—as to Colet—religion meant a great deal more than it did to the cosmopolitan scholar. The profession for which he was still training—he was not yet called to the Bar—was one to which his abilities were eminently adapted, and his intimacy with Colet did not prevent him from loyally devoting his time and his studies to that training, as his father desired. But as soon as he was duly called, he began to give his natural predilections freer play, and we find him delivering in the City a course of lectures on Augustine’s De Civitate Dei: to the admiration of his old master Grocyn and others. Not, however, to the neglect of his legal pursuits, for he was appointed Reader at Furnivall’s Inn; or of larger ambitions, for, young as he was, he appeared as a member of Henry VII.’s Parliament of 1504. The story of the “beardless boy” persuading that assembly to reject a royal demand for cash, as told by his son-in-law William Roper, is familiar; and even if not altogether accurately reported, leaves no doubt that he did so offend Henry that he felt it advisable to retire into political obscurity—the king characteristically taking his revenge by extracting a fine from his father.

It may have been this episode which gave him a temporary inclination to betake himself to a monastic life: but this did not last. Investigation did not lead to the conclusion that life in a monastery was quite the same in practice as in theory, and a penchant for asceticism could be indulged without entering the cloister. Moreover, this summer Colet was in London, probably to commence work at St. Paul’s, where he had just been nominated to the Deanery; and Colet was not the man to counsel such a step. On the contrary, he advised his friend to marry, and the advice was taken next year.[B] The story is quaintly characteristic. Visiting “one Mr. Colte a gentleman of Essex,” he was attracted by the three daughters of the house. The second being the prettiest, took his fancy, but he thought it would be hard on the elder sister if the younger got a husband first, so he “of a certayne pittie framed his fancie towardes her” instead—with excellent results.

[B] Roper’s chronology is not very intelligible. He says that—after being called to the Bar—More was three years a Reader at Furnivall’s Inn, and then passed four years in the Charterhouse without taking the vows. The other evidence, however, points pretty conclusively to 1505 as the date of his marriage.

On the whole it does not look as if More went in any very great fear of the old king’s wrath. Mr. Colte would not have been in a hurry to bestow his daughter in marriage on a young man whom Henry was seeking occasion to slay: and probably More himself would have hesitated to give hostages to fortune under those conditions.

III
THE EARLY YEARS OF HENRY VIII

Whatever reason he may have had to fear ill-will from Henry VII.—who seldom wasted vindictive sentiments on people whose punishment could not be substantially expressed in terms of hard cash—More could count on the goodwill of his young successor. More than one of the princes of those days ranked among the most accomplished men of their times; and like his brother-in-law of Scotland, Henry would have more than held his own in any company, intellectual or athletic. As yet, the world did not know that his abilities were matched by a ruthless selfishness. He seemed a brilliant and charming boy, frank-hearted and open-handed, with just the carelessness becoming to his age: the very reverse of the old king as men thought of him in his later years, sordid, crafty, griping. The reign of Empsons and Dudleys was at an end; the approach to the new king’s favour was to be through very different avenues. To have been in the black books of Henry VII. was no reason for fearing Henry VIII.

More prospered rapidly in his profession, and had no desire to be drawn to Court or into the whirl of politics. He was very soon appointed to the important office of Under-Sheriff in the City, and his private practice was ere long bringing him a very substantial income. Also, to his great satisfaction, the expectation of a more cheerful régime in England was bringing Erasmus back again—there had been one flying visit in the interval—to write the Encomium Moriae under More’s own roof, and still further to enrich and stimulate that congenial intellectual society in which More himself had been living ever since Colet had taken up his duties as Dean of St. Paul’s.

But however little ambitious More might be, his talents were too conspicuous to permit of his being left alone. In 1515, the commercial war with Flanders—an outcome of the foreign complications in which Henry VIII. had become involved—was embarrassing both countries so much that there was a strong desire for adjustment. An embassy was to be sent, with Cuthbert Tunstall at its head. The merchants of London desired to be represented; they wanted More to represent them; Wolsey, now supreme, acceded; More was attached to the embassy, and the abilities he displayed marked him out as a man fitted for the king’s service. For a time More resisted; but his masterly conduct of a case in which he was appointed as counsel for the Pope (in respect of a ship which the Crown claimed as forfeit) caused Henry to put renewed pressure on him. In 1518, he had become a courtier in his own despite. This, by the way, may have some bearing on the fact that in that year his father was elevated to the judicial Bench.

Some years earlier, More’s domestic life had suffered: his first wife dying in 1512 and leaving him with four little children on his hands. To provide the orphans with a mother, he took to himself a second wife, some years older than himself; a kindly conventional soul, as it would seem, who quite understood that her husband was a very clever man, but was eternally puzzled by his disregard of worldly considerations, and hopelessly confused by the whimsical irony with which he loved to meet her “Tilly vally, Sir Thomas,” when he had been doing something peculiarly exasperating from her point of view. She mothered his children, and himself as much as he would let her; and never succeeded in disturbing his humorous equanimity, though her own must have been everlastingly ruffled.

The embassy to the Netherlands sealed More’s fate, by forcing him into political life. It is also intimately associated with the one great original literary work produced in England in the first half of the sixteenth century: a work which established the fame of its author as a political thinker of the highest rank, in spite of the intentionally fantastic form in which it was cast.

IV
THE UTOPIA

Throughout More’s life, revolutionary forces had been at work in the political, the intellectual, and the religious world; but as yet they had not concentrated in any volcanic explosion. At present, More’s most intimate associates stood in the very forefront of the most advanced school, and his “Utopia” was to make his position beside them as conspicuous to the world as it was assured in fact. He had taken to Greek, in spite of his anxious parent, like a duck to water: his affinity to the Platonic Socrates is obvious. John Colet was his guide, philosopher and friend; and the downright reactionaries, like the Bishop of London, had vain hankerings to suppress Colet as a dangerous heretic. He was the chosen intellectual mate of Erasmus, who had done or was doing more than any man living, to rid men’s minds of the shackles of the old scholastic formalism. The grosser popular superstitions, the worship of the letter and neglect of the spirit, the pursuit of worldly advancement by the successors of the apostles, were constant subjects for pulpit castigations by the one friend, and the lively and scathing mockery of the other. The mediæval theory that war is a pastime for the ambitions of princes was vigorously denounced by both. In all these things More was with them heart and soul; and he had already given audacious indication of his belief that the function of government is to seek the good not of the governors but of the governed, when he incurred the displeasure of Henry VII. in 1504. This progressive attitude of mind found its complete expression in the fantasy of Utopia.

The notion of constructing an imaginary Commonwealth under ideal conditions on ideal lines was of course derived straight from Plato’s Republic. That any existing State could be reformed into the semblance of such a Commonwealth by the fiat of legislators, neither Plato nor More ever dreamed. Neither the Republic nor the Utopia is in the nature of one of those paper Constitutions whose devisers would fain impose them in all their logical perfection upon recalcitrant nations. They aim at setting forth those fundamental principles which must indeed lie at the root of all healthy forms of government, but must also inevitably materialise into different shapes under differing conditions. The reproach that such schemes are not practical, which is damning to a paper Constitution, is here wholly irrelevant. They were never meant to be practical. Sir Galahad is not a practical model for the British citizen, who would take warning from the career of the Knight of La Mancha. Yet the conception of Sir Galahad is worthy of serious contemplation by the British citizen, who may therefrom derive not a little practical direction in the conduct of his life. To condemn the presentation of avowed ideals as unpractical, is merely to display a complete misapprehension of the meaning and use of ideals.

More, however, did not derive his method from Plato. The Athenian started by looking for the logical principles on which a State should be constructed, and built it, storey by storey. The Englishman imagined his State already complete and expounded the finished structure; taking example by other myths than the Republic. With happy ingenuity, he made use of a suggestion from the records of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci to locate his dream-city in realms which some of that eminent traveller’s company might have visited, alone of Europeans. In similarly happy vein, he utilised his embassy to the Netherlands to provide an introduction, the form of which was doubtless suggested by Platonic precedent, though it is in no sense an imitation. The characterisation of the persons whose conversation is reported is not unworthy of the master.

The work is in two parts: the account of Utopia itself, and this preliminary book, which introduces the traveller Hythloday, with his criticisms on European politics in general, and the state of England in particular. This, More would have us believe, is the way in which a foreign Odysseus having “viewed the cities and marked the ways of many a People” would judge the institutions on which the Englishman prided himself. The suggestion that he wished to make himself safe by attributing those criticisms to some one else is hardly tenable. It does not appear that any one ever suspected Hythloday of having had a more material existence than Lemuel Gulliver after him. The intention is simply to dispose the reader’s mind so as to accept the verisimilitude of what he knows to be a fiction; the intention of every dramatic artist. Reason tells you that you are sitting in a theatre and watching actors behind the footlights. Imagination tells you that real events are going on before your eyes. If imagination fails, tragedy becomes burlesque, and comedy silliness. The description of Utopia appeals with tenfold force when your imagination accepts it as a place which a real human traveller has seen; and the illusion is only possible when the real human traveller has been convincingly presented. Raphael Hythloday is as real as Robinson Crusoe. But there is no reason to suppose that More wanted any one to think that Hythloday had an address in Antwerp—as Peter Giles says, “Some ... for that his minde and affection was altogether set and fixed upon Utopia, say that he hathe taken his voyage thetherwards agayne.” “No-where land” is the unsubstantial resting-place of the non-material but convincing traveller.

Similarly, by putting his criticisms on English affairs into the mouth of a foreign observer, from whose lips they come with a perfect fitness, the artist procures for them an attention and consideration which would be refused if they were being thought of as the criticisms of an Englishman vilifying his own country. Again, the illusion is needed only till the required effect is produced, namely, recognition of the validity of the criticism.

The illusion is created with subtle skill. More relates how he was sent on the Netherlands embassy, with various references to his associates, and the actual facts of that episode in his career, and tells how his (real) friend, Peter Giles of Antwerp, introduced the traveller Hythloday—an interesting person who had voyaged to those lands of which Europeans as yet knew exceedingly little and imagined an infinite deal. More draws him out, and extracts from him his impression of England, where he had visited Cardinal Morton, of the state of Europe in general, and finally, by way of contrast, of that remote and unknown State of Utopia, which has opened his eyes to what lies at the root of so much that is unsatisfactory in the realms of Christendom. Thus More is enabled to win interested attention to his own criticism of the social and political conditions prevalent, and his own political philosophy. Whatever the latter may be, the former is as practical as possible.

The picture given of the world in which men were actually living and moving, and pursuing their business or their pleasure, is vivid and impressive. Moreover, its truth is borne out by all other evidence. It is the work of a keen and humorous observer; and the analysis of the causes of the pervading evils is unerring. It was no doubt wise of More to antedate the description by a score or so of years, referring it to Cardinal Morton’s days; but in 1515, every evil depicted had become even more marked—and, it may be said, continued to increase progressively until the reign of Elizabeth, the same causes continuing to operate, with the addition of others which intensified the effects. Every rising in the reigns of Henry VIII., of Edward VI., and of Mary, whatever its ostensible ground, bears unmistakeable signs that the agricultural depression with its attendant evils was a secondary, if not the primary cause.

It would be too much to expect that the remedies More recommended should have been equally above criticism. Economic science was in its earliest infancy; in spite of experience, no one had begun to suspect the inefficacy of legislation in certain directions, and there are plenty of people who still believe that natural forces can be regulated by statute. In no single respect was any thinker of his times in advance of Sir Thomas More in these matters. But in many respects he was in advance not only of the foremost of his contemporaries, but even of current opinion and practice three hundred years later.

Thus, after describing the prevalence of thieving and robbery, he points to idleness as its cause, but dwells emphatically on the distinction between the idleness which is of choice and that which is enforced by lack of employment. Half the thieves would be honest labourers if they had the chance. The maintenance or development of industries which provide employment would be an effective cure; but instead of seeking a cure, the authorities fall back on punishment. But the severity of the law, instead of checking the minor misdemeanours, converts the pickpocket into a dangerous robber who—having no worse penalty to fear for the graver offence—resorts to violence without hesitation: so that the system regularly manufactures the worst ruffianism.

The instability and disorganisation of industry produced by what we now call “corners,” has its prototype in the “engrossing” and “forestalling,” by which wealthy men make themselves monopolists. The inevitable tendency of capital to flow in dividend-producing, not philanthropic, channels, is foreshadowed by the steady conversion by wealth-seeking landlords of arable land into sheep-runs; a process which left much of the rural population without work, wages, food, or home. Incidentally it may be noted that, while modern historians are disposed rather to dwell on the substitution of greedy laymen for the monasteries as landlords as one of the later causes of this particular trouble, More expressly includes “certeyn abbottes, holy men no doubt,” in his denunciation thereof. He may, however, mean no more than that even the Church was not exempt from this reproach. In dealing with this economic tendency for capital to seek the most lucrative channel, More made the universal mistake of his day in believing that it could be effectively restrained by Acts of Parliament.

In a vein no less practical, and no less opposed to the conventional ideas of the time, and with a still more playful seriousness, the traveller discourses of high politics and finance as they were debated in the Cabinets of Europe, with the aggrandisement and enrichment of monarchs as the one end in view. “‘This myne advyce, maister More,’ says he, ‘how think you it would be harde and taken?’ ‘So God helpe me, not very thankefully’ quod I.’”

By this discussion, the way is prepared for Hythloday to favour his company with an account of the remarkable polity which he found in Utopia (a State as to the whereabouts of which More subsequently writes in anxious inquiry to Peter Giles, who answers in the like vein of pretended regret at being unable to answer the question). This account occupies the second book, forming about two-thirds of the whole work.

In this fantasy, practicality vanishes at the outset. Such are the defences, natural or artificial, of this most favoured island, that any would-be invader is doomed to certain destruction, while the country produces everything that man requires for comfort. It needs no army and no navy, self-defence and self-assertion being equally superfluous: its relations with foreign States are purely complimentary. The Utopians make no foreign leagues. Where the bonds of goodwill are not sufficient to maintain friendly relations, nations enter upon leagues, but only to desert them at the first call of interest. Such is the strange conviction of the Utopians, though they had not themselves experienced the kaleidoscopic permutations and combinations of Ferdinand the Catholic, Maximilian, Louis XII., Henry VII., Julius II., and the Venetians. If by any chance they find it necessary to go to war, there is a convenient breed of fighting men in a country not too far away, who can always be hired for the purpose.

Being thus preserved from the creation of a military caste, while universal education has prevented knowledge from being concentrated in a priestly caste, it has been easy to prevent the development of any sort of privileged class through the accumulation of private property, which is prohibited. Hence, in Utopia, communism is practicable, and the whole system is as a matter of course communistic, though the principle is not extended to the relations between the sexes. Having arrived at their religion not through the Christian Revelation, but by Reason, any religious views are tolerated which are not manifestly anti-social. It is a corollary of these conditions that government is in the hands of elected magistrates, who have neither class interests nor personal interests to deflect them from their proper function of ruling with a single eye to the interests of the whole people. The possibility that sectarian interests might have developed as a disturbing factor does not seem to have presented itself; perhaps, where no religious views might be aggressively expressed or repressed, no strife of sects was to be feared.

In every direction, of course, the manners and customs of the Utopians suggest that the manners and customs of the English are susceptible of improvement. They take a philosophic view of the pleasures of life, reckoning the gratification of animal appetites exceedingly low in practice as well as in theory. They have no lust of gold and jewels. They have no craving for display, for gambling, for the baser forms of sport. On the other hand, they appreciate the value of sanitation. There is no idleness, since every one is required to do his share of work, but there is ample leisure for all; instead of one half of the population having too much, and the other half too little, to do. Thus they can enjoy in abundance those rational pleasures in which they take a true delight, abiding in health and wealth.

V
MORE IN PUBLIC LIFE

It should be sufficiently clear that no one was more thoroughly aware than Sir Thomas More himself that the Utopian conditions could not be produced in a European State, and that Utopian institutions could only exist under Utopian conditions. Of that fact he was destined to give practical demonstration when called upon to discharge the functions of a practical ruler.

In 1518 More became a Privy Councillor, and probably his influence may be detected in the efforts, renewed about this time, to check the conversion of arable land into pasture, and the evil practice of enclosures. But Martin Luther’s activity was just beginning, and its results were to make the contrast between Utopia and England even more marked than previously. Before entering, however, on More’s attitude to this new phase of the Reformation, we have to note some other points in this stage of his career.

More stood in high favour. He had not climbed to a great position by arduous effort; greatness, worthy of it as he was, had been thrust upon him. His advancement was promoted by Wolsey, who was seldom vindictive except towards rivals whose power might make them dangerous. In 1521 he was knighted. When Parliament was summoned in 1523 he was made Speaker, by no means at his own desire, but chiefly at that of the King and the Cardinal. The result was probably not quite what Wolsey had anticipated. On his appointment, he had implied very clearly, though in diplomatic terms, that he meant to uphold freedom of speech in the House. But the business on hand was the voting of money, and Wolsey made the mistake of attempting to overawe the Commons by coming down to the House himself. The Members declined to speak or vote in his presence; the Cardinal’s demands were received with dead silence. Wolsey turned on the Speaker. The Speaker made it perfectly clear that the House could not give way on the question of privilege. When Wolsey withdrew, Parliament demonstrated its loyalty by making a substantial grant.

According to More’s son-in-law, this incident brought More into the black books of the Cardinal, who with ill intent tried to get him sent on an embassy to Spain, under colour of complimenting him. If Wolsey really meant evil by him, his designs came to nothing, for there was no sign of any diminution in the royal favour. Already, however, in 1525, Wolsey’s position was becoming precarious, though to all appearance he was as dominant as ever. More’s next advancement was to the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1526; and from this time Henry’s personal demands on his time and his society became exceedingly pressing. A year later, the whole of the king’s real interest was absorbed in the divorce question, which was to seal Wolsey’s fate directly, and More’s indirectly. Henry consulted him about it, and More then as always told his master honest truth—he did not see how the marriage with Katharine could lawfully be voided. From that position he never swerved. The king could respect conscientious scruples on the part of a favourite, and did so as long as More remained a favourite. More, however, had no illusions about the king’s constancy. “If my head,” he told Roper, “would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go.” But when Henry decided that Wolsey could no longer serve his turn, it was More whom he selected to fill the office of Lord Chancellor, in spite of his views of the divorce.

During these years, the uprising of Luther had developed into a widespread religious revolt. Henry, having no quarrel with Pope Leo, and proud of his own attainments as a theologian, chose to enter the lists for the demolition of Luther; producing an apologia for the Papacy which earned him the title of “Defender of the Faith.” Before publishing this work he showed it to More, who warned him, with shrewd foresight, that, if ever he did come to have a quarrel with the Pope, he would find it very difficult to get over his own argument, which proved too much in support of Papal authority. Henry, however, would not modify the view then expressed, and succeeded in satisfying his counsellor that it was sound. In due course the prophecy came true: Henry repudiated the position he had formerly defended. Unhappily for More, however, the king had finally convinced him, and he declined to surrender his conviction: with fatal consequences.

Viewed even exclusively as a religious movement, Luther’s revolt would not have attracted More’s sympathies. He had never doubted any of the dogmas of the Church, though he had a plentiful contempt for many prevailing corruptions which were recognised as such by men to whom heresy was never imputed by their bitterest enemy. He believed with conviction a great deal that Erasmus accepted merely pro forma. Luther not only propounded views on specific dogmas which More regarded as heretical, he challenged the whole authority of Rome; and More believed in the authority of Rome. But beyond all this the Lutheran revolt was very soon followed by the German Peasant revolt, which deluged half Europe with blood. The Peasants’ War was completely misapprehended in England, where the agricultural troubles, bad as they were, could bear no comparison with the oppression from which the German peasants suffered; but its leadership fell, naturally enough, into the hands of men as fanatical in their zeal for religious as for social reform. The overthrow of all authority and the universal triumph of sheer anarchy appeared to be their goal; and the world believed, or was taught to believe, that it was Luther who had started the conflagration. The heretical pamphlets which issued from Germany and Switzerland—lumped together, by those who did not know the facts, as Lutheran—gave colour to this belief by the virulence of their attacks on the Papacy and the clergy; and it is small wonder that many of the most liberal-minded men could anticipate nothing but stark ruin, the coming of chaos, unless the torrent were stayed. The threatening crash of all reverence, of all authority save such as could be enforced by push of pike, seemed to be brought measurably closer, when, in 1527, the Imperial armies sacked Rome in emulation of Alaric, and the representative of St. Peter was held a prisoner by the representative of Caesar Augustus.

In the abstract, and under Utopian conditions, More was singularly alive to the beauty of the principle of practically universal toleration. But Europe and England were presenting a problem which could never have arisen in Utopia at all. Even in Utopia, it was recognised that certain negations were directly anti-social, and that the propagation of them must be repressed. Here in Europe, it seemed as if every negation of a received dogma was to be turned into an anti-social engine. Under the conditions, the toleration of any heresy, certainly of all such as palpably involved an attack on authority, tended to anarchy. The conclusion that what was good unreservedly in Utopia would not be good in England is obvious. We can all see now, of course, that More misinterpreted the facts. The anarchism was an accident of the religious movement, which it shed of itself, not an inherent part of it: the Church lost as much ground by the action of her own zealots as by the attacks of her most fanatical opponents. But for a man who interpreted the facts as More did, there was nothing inconsistent in declaring for toleration in Utopia, but in England repression.

There is another point, too, which is generally unnoticed. The Utopians arrived at their religion by reason; they had no way of ascertaining truth except through reason; hence, for one man to condemn another for holding a different “doxy” would be in itself irrational. Christendom, in More’s view, was in a different position. It had received Truth by direct Revelation, and an Exponent of Truth by Divine appointment. What the Church had definitely pronounced to be heterodox was to be regarded finally and conclusively as false. To permit the preaching of doctrine known to be false was quite different from permitting the discussion or inculcation of divergent opinions on which there was no authority qualified to pronounce absolutely. Even at the moment when More was describing the religion of Utopia, before he had ever heard the name of Luther, he might with perfect consistency have held that heresy ought to be repressed in Christian countries. The argument, of course, has nothing to do with the wisdom or unwisdom of a repressive policy; it is concerned merely with the “inconsistency” of More’s Utopian theory and his Catholic practice. Those who found the Divine Revelation not in the voice of the Church but in the text of Scripture, were equally convinced that deviation from indisputable Truth should be punished by the strong hand.

Broadly, the suggestion here put forward is that the Utopian religions are philosophies: that all philosophies are matter of argument; that intolerance of opinions which are matter of argument is irrational. On the other hand (to More), Catholic Christianity is not a philosophy, but is revealed truth; not therefore matter of argument, except so far as details have not been defined; that suppression of doctrines subversive of Catholic truth is certainly legitimate, and may be necessary.

However that may be, it is undeniable that More appears in the least favourable light as a Catholic controversialist; losing balance and tone, he writes currente calamo, without restraint, with lapse of dignity, and with only an occasional redeeming turn of humour. That is to say, he drops to the normal level of contemporary controversialists on both sides, instead of abiding in that serene atmosphere which otherwise distinguishes him. The aggressive bellicosity of princes grieved him, and the king’s divorce business vexed him: but the spread of heresy was the one thing which upset his equanimity. “I pray God,” said he to Roper, “that some of us, as heigh as we seeme to sitt upon the mountaines, treadinge heretickes under our feete like annts, live not the day that we gladly would wish to be at leagge and composition with them, to let them have their Churches quietly to themselves; soe that they would be content to lett us have ours quietly to our selves.”

Similarly, the one and only ground of reproach against his conduct in any public matter is that as Chancellor he may have sanctioned putting heretics to the torture, and did during the last six months of his office—not before—send certain heretics to the stake. It is true that the only men in England, in those days, who, having the opportunity, did not send a single heretic to the fire, were the much-abused Protector Somerset and the still more abused Wolsey. But we would fain have had Thomas More an exception. Still, it can at least be affirmed positively that the penalty was only inflicted when all hope was over of persuading the “heretics” to recognise their error, and save their bodies as well as their souls; and that every effort was made to give them the opportunity of doing so. Given More’s premises, the conclusion that their death would tend to the salvation of other souls was irresistible.

It was towards the end of 1529 that Wolsey was struck down, and More, very much against his will, was elevated to the Chancellorship. For a commoner and a layman to receive the appointment was almost revolutionary—at least it was a very signal mark of the depression of the nobility, although it was many a year since any but an ecclesiastic had held the office. In everything, More proved himself a notably admirable occupant of the post, dealing out justice with unprecedented despatch; not only without allowing himself to be corrupted, in which he was not unique, but also without accepting those substantial compliments from suitors which less rigidly scrupulous judges were in the habit of profiting by, even when they did not allow their decisions to be affected. No personal or professional considerations were ever permitted by him to interfere with the ends of justice, the most exact that it was in his power to achieve. But his tenure of the Chancellorship was brief. More was unique in many respects, and in his own day he was unique in refusing to retain office when he could no longer do so without violating his conscience—without making himself a party to a policy which he held to be wrong. Other men shifted the responsibility on to the king; More felt that the responsibility could not be shifted, and in 1532 he resigned.

The cause of the resignation was Henry’s ecclesiastical policy; its immediate occasion, the submission of the clergy. The fall of Wolsey was simultaneous with the summoning of the famous “Seven Years” or “Reformation” Parliament of Henry VIII. The king had given no sort of sign of any disposition to relax the severity of his attitude towards heresy; but as the months and years passed, it became increasingly evident that his rigid orthodoxy was to be accompanied by a prolonged anti-clerical and anti-Papal campaign, the meaning whereof was to be revealed only by degrees. A twelvemonth had barely passed when the clergy were suddenly notified that they had as a body been guilty of a breach of Præmunire in accepting the Legatine authority of Wolsey, and this was followed up by requiring Convocation to affirm that the king was sole and Supreme Protector and Head of the Church. No new authority was directly claimed for the Crown—without reading between the lines; though it was tolerably clear that a good deal more might be read into the declaration. The clergy yielded. Then the Commons presented their supplication against the ordinaries. The subsequent operations showed that the Royal Supremacy was to be applied after quite a new fashion. The clergy yielded to the logic of force, and made their “submission.” More, holding that no layman, king or not, could by any possibility be rightfully head of the Church in this new sense, concluded that he had no alternative but to retire into private life.

VI
INDIGNATIO PRINCIPIS

The divorce was Henry’s first objective; it was duly pronounced by the new Archbishop in the following spring. The step, however, was intensely unpopular. The more clearly this was brought home to the king’s mind, the more anxious he became to have the avowed support of every one whose opinion carried weight. Irritation reached its climax over the affair of the “Nun of Kent,” a young woman named Elizabeth Barton, who had for some little time been posing as a sort of prophetess. How far she believed in her own imposture it is not possible to tell, but she was certainly exploited by fanatical adherents of the Papacy, and when she took to denouncing the wrath of God against the king for the divorce, there was a real risk that the superstition of the day would make her ravings dangerous. There were two men whom no persuasions had prevailed upon to pronounce in favour of the Boleyn marriage—Fisher of Rochester and Sir Thomas More. It was found that both had had some sort of dealings with the nun. Henry determined that they should both suffer as her accomplices, unless they would openly range themselves with his supporters. But the case against More was so hopelessly futile that the king’s advisers warned him that the ex-Chancellor’s inclusion in the Bill of Attainder could only result in the Bill itself being thrown out. His name was therefore removed, to the great rejoicing of his friends. More saw farther into the king’s mind than they did. “Quod defertur non aufertur,” he said to his daughter.

He was right. The king and Cromwell were ready to go to the last extremity to force the two recalcitrants into line. An Act had been passed, fixing the succession to the throne on the children of Anne Boleyn. The ratification of the marriage had led him to remark to Roper: “God give grace, son, that these matters be not in a while confirmed with oaths.” The Act of Succession carried with it authority to impose an oath to maintain it; but the oath subsequently formulated was so worded as to bind the subscriber to the admission of the invalidity of the marriage with Katharine, and the denial of the Papal authority. The oath was proffered to More and Fisher; both refused it, though both were ready to maintain the succession. Both were sent to the Tower.

It was in fact more than doubtful whether the Act warranted the imposition of the oath in the prescribed form. The imprisonment of the culprits without trial was in any case illegal, and every attempt to persuade them to yield failed. The King always preferred to have the letter of the law on his side; and it was impossible to pretend that the refusal to subscribe involved treason. To give their destruction a legal colour, a fresh Act of Succession was passed at the end of the year (1534), expressly confirming the form of the oath; and this was accompanied by an Act of Supremacy, making it treason to refuse to affirm the Royal Supremacy. After that, it was simple enough to send More and Fisher to their doom. To deny the Supremacy was one thing; More had abstained from that. To refuse to affirm it was another; More had always done so. He maintained his position, and was condemned to death as a traitor, under the law which had been framed expressly to enmesh him. His defence was only that the law itself was invalid as being against the law of Christendom, and the liberties of the Church as affirmed in Magna Charta; which of course the judges could not admit. A week later, on July 6—the Eve of St. Thomas (of Canterbury)—1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded.

VII
CHARACTER AND DEATH

Thanks mainly to the charm of the biography by his son-in-law, William Roper, the private life and character of Thomas More are among the most familiar to us in history. It is a life good to dwell upon, sweet and wholesome. Even in its public aspects there is but the single note that jars, his harshness—molestia he called it—towards the heretics, whom he classed with homicides and robbers: in its domestic aspects it is wholly charming. In his private capacity he could love even a heretic. Roper himself, the sympathetic husband of his favourite daughter Margaret, was bitten with Lutheran doctrines, which even the persuasiveness of his revered father-in-law could not induce him to relinquish. To the error, as he deemed it, which was not accompanied by propagandism, More was as tender as could be desired. “Meg,” he said to Mistress Roper, “I have borne long with thy husband; I have reasoned long time with him, and still given him my fatherly counsel; but I perceive none of this can call him home again. And therefore, Meg, I will no longer dispute with him, nor yet will I give him over, but I will go another way to work, and get me to God and pray for him.”

There we have the natural Thomas More, obeying the kindly dictates of his own heart, which held no rancour towards any one who had not in some sort constituted himself an enemy of the “weal publick.” Personal hostility to himself he held of no account. Shortly before he was made Lord Chancellor, an old servant of his came to him in great indignation against some merchants who had been “liberally rayling” at More. Would he not, seeing what his favour was with the king, punish these scurrilous people as they deserved? But More’s reply was a very sound piece of philosophy in his usual humorous vein—“Would you have me punish them by whome I receave more benefitt than by you all that be my friends? Lett them a God’s name speake as lewedly as they list of me, and shoote never soe many arrowes at me, so long as they do not hitt me, what am I the worse? But if they should once hitt me, then would it a little trouble me. Howbeit, I trust by Gode’s helpe, there shall none of them all be able once to touch me. I have more cause, I assure thee, to pittie them than to be angrie with them.”

We are told much of his simple piety and faith. The same ardently reverent spirit, which made him cling to the Church and uphold her authority, at one time very nearly sent him into the cloister, and did cause him to retain so much of the ascetic tradition that he wore a hair-shirt next his skin all his days; though it was only by accident that any one save his beloved “Meg,” Margaret Roper, became aware of the fact. His subjugation of the flesh was free from its too common accompaniment of arrogant or morbid austerity. It was little more than an avoidance of insidious and apparently harmless temptations, an appreciation of the unimportance of gratifying physical appetites. He reaped his reward. The sudden descent from ample wealth to a narrow income, involved in his resignation of the Chancellorship, had no terrors for him. He had tried hard fare at Oxford, less hard at New Inn, something better at Lincoln’s Inn. He and his family could very well live by the Lincoln’s Inn standard. If they found that too high for the reduced exchequer, there was the New Inn standard to fall back on, and after that the Oxford standard. And even after that “May we yeat with bagges and walletts go a-begging togither ... and soe still keepe companie merrily together.” A cheery philosophy.

Two of Roper’s anecdotes show, in the dramatic touches which bring a very living Duke of Norfolk before us, how the son-in-law profited by his father-in-law’s example; besides illustrating More’s quaint combination of seriousness and humour. The duke went to see him about his resignation, at Chelsea, and found him singing in the Church choir. “To whome after service, as they went home togither arme in arme, the duke said, ‘God body, God body, my L^d. Chancellor, a parish Clarke, a parish Clarke, you dishonour the King and his office.’ ‘Nay,’ quoth Sir Thomas Moore smilinge upon the Duke, ‘your Grace may not thinke, that the Kinge your Master and myne, will with me for serving God his Master be offended, or thereby count his office dishonoured.’” And again, when he had escaped the Bill of Attainder: “The Duke sayd unto him, ‘By the masse, Mr. Moore, it is perillous strivinge with Princes, and therefore I would wish you somewhat to inclyne to the Kinge’s pleasure. For by Gode’s body Mr. Moore Indignatio principis mors est.’ ‘Ys that all, my Lord?’ quoth he. ‘Is there in good fayth noe more difference betweene your Grace and me but that I shall dye to day and you tomorrow?’”

But in the last days, the never-failing humour has an exquisitely pathetic setting.

The worthy wife, “somewhat worldlie too,” comes to see her husband in the Tower; she cannot understand why he is so silly as to stop there, when he might so easily recover the king’s goodwill by doing “as all the Busshopps and best learned of this realm have done.” He listens placidly to the outburst, then: “I pray thee, good Mistress Alice, tell me one thing: is not this house as nighe heaven as mine own?” We are reminded of the last words Humphrey Gilbert was heard to utter before the Squirrel foundered: “We are as near God by sea as by land.” But there was no one to reply to Gilbert as “shee, after her accustomed fashion, not likeinge such talke, answeared Tille valle, tille valle.” The good soul has no patience for such incomprehensible folly. Margaret Roper visits him, the darling daughter, of all his children the likest to him in wit and in person; with her he is sure of perfect sympathy. She knows that his doom is absolutely certain, nor is she one to dissuade him from following the dictates of his conscience. After the sentence in Westminster Hall, she is waiting at the Tower wharf for the last fond farewell, the parting blessing. Heedless of spectators, she darts through the press of halberdiers guarding the prisoner, to fling herself on his neck, pour out her tears and her love on his breast. He soothes her with words of tender counsel and affection. At last she tears herself away, but overcome with the passion of devotion, “suddenlye turned back againe, and rann to him as before, tooke him about the necke, and divers times togeather most lovingely kissed him, and at last with a full heavie harte was fayne to separate from him: the behouldinge whereof was to manye of them that were present thereat soe lamentable that it made them for very sorrow to mourne and weepe.”

Shall we wonder at such love for the man who on receiving sentence could say to his judges, as reported by Anthony St. Leger, “I verily trust and right heartily pray that though your lordships have now in earth been Judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation”; whose spirit was so imperturbable in its serenity, that it looked upon death as a mere casual episode which in no wise ruffled his habitual humour. “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant,” he said, with his foot on the scaffold, noticing how ill it had been put together, “see me safe up. For my coming down, let me shift for myself”: and as he laid his neck on the block, moving his beard aside, “Pity that should be cut; it hath committed no treason.”

His head, according to custom, was set on Temple Bar, but Margaret Roper, she “who clasped in her last trance her murdered father’s head,” was allowed to obtain possession of it, and preserved it in spices till her own death. The news of the execution was conveyed to Charles V. His comment is endorsed by posterity—“If we had been master of such a servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy Councillor.”

THOMAS CROMWELL

I
THOMAS CROMWELL

For six years, Thomas Cromwell was palpably and unmistakably the ruler of England—subject to the approval of the king. For the four years preceding, it is practically certain that he both suggested and organised Henry’s policy. England has never known a statesman so irresistible, so relentless, while his power lasted; nor one whose downfall was more sudden or so universally applauded. He is the most terrifying because he is the most passionless figure in our history. He wrought like fate, with a perfect disregard of all human sentiment and emotion; a scourge of God. Not, however, a mere scourge like the earthquake and the pestilence; not a mere destroyer; for, while he shattered, he built. But for Cromwell, it may be doubted whether Elizabeth’s England could have come into being.

For a second time Henry VIII. found the man most consummately fitted to minister to his own ambition; to plan, to organise, to smite—and to be smitten. As Wolsey, having accomplished his work, fell because he failed to engineer his master’s matrimonial projects, so Cromwell, having accomplished his work, fell in attempting to engineer a matrimonial project which displeased his master. Both the great ministers were men of humble birth at the best: popular report gave out that the father of the one was a butcher, that of the other a blacksmith. The one mounted to power, the last and perhaps the greatest product of the old relation between Church and State; the other was the first layman who, lacking even gentle blood, achieved the highest position in the State, and shattered her old relation with the Church. The reign of Henry VIII. abounds in huge ironies: it is not perhaps the least of them that the Hammer of the Monks passed into the service of the king from the service of the Cardinal.

THOMAS CROMWELL 1st EARL OF ESSEX

By Holbein, from an Engraving by Houbraken in the British Museum

Diversities in the judgments passed on Thomas Cromwell are less marked than in the case of most of the statesmen portrayed in this volume. There is no possibility of questioning the utter absence of moral scruple in the methods by which he pursued his ends, the completeness with which he subordinated every other consideration to their achievement, the vast organising power he displayed. That he was actuated by a moral repulsion to the Roman system, or a religious enthusiasm for the purity of the Gospel, is a view that can only be put forward on the sweeping assumption that everybody concerned in the Reformation at all was so actuated, except feeble or wicked bigots who clung to the old order. Cromwell as a Protestant Martyr is very much like Frederic the Great as Protestant Hero. Every one who believes that it was good for England to reject the Papal authority and to subordinate the Church in England to the State, is bound to consider that the man who did these things for England rendered his country a great service. Every one who holds the contrary view as to the Papacy and the Church must hold that he rendered her almost immeasurable dis-service. But these are judgments not on the man but on the circumstances.

Yet there is one very curious fact about Thomas Cromwell. Although he set his mark indelibly on the history of his country, and in spite of the exceptionally dramatic course of his career, his name seems to convey very little to most Englishmen—save as the secretary whom Wolsey charged to “fling away ambition.” Oliver looms so large that it is difficult to grasp the idea that another person of the same name also loomed large a hundred years earlier. No playwright or novelist has made him a central figure in drama or novel. Yet it may at least be argued that of the ten characters here examined, his personality was the one which most decisively influenced the course of history.

II
EARLIER CAREER AND RISE TO POWER

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century there was dwelling in Putney one Walter Cromwell, alias Smyth, who appears to have been a brewer, smith, and armourer, and incidentally to have been a very troublesome person with a taste for breaking the law in minor matters. There is no doubt that Walter was the father of Thomas: whose birth conjecture places about 1485. Down to 1512, the accounts of Cromwell’s life rest entirely on later gossip, sometimes professedly derived from remarks which he himself let fall. All reports, however, agree in saying that he went to Italy when very young—“fleeing from his father,” one of them avers. It needs no evidence to show that he had a remarkably enterprising and self-reliant spirit, and if he did run away from a turbulent parent to seek his fortune by his wits, it was a course thoroughly consonant with his subsequent career. The reports state further that he served as a man-at-arms under an Italian nobleman, and with the French in 1503. Allowing for presumable inaccuracies of detail, there is no reason to doubt that he tried his hand as a trader of sorts in the Low Countries and in Italy. There is, however, definite ground for believing that he returned to England about 1512, and married the next year. If Mistress Elizabeth Wykeys did not bring something fairly handsome in the way of a fortune, Thomas Cromwell must have strangely forgotten himself. For some years, it may be affirmed with confidence that he took part in business as a wool-merchant or “shearman,” combining this trade with practice as an attorney. Documentary evidence puts it effectively beyond doubt that he was professionally known as a man of law to Wolsey in 1520. In 1523 he sat in the House of Commons as a Member of that Parliament which, under Sir Thomas More’s Speakership, declined to discuss the voting of a subsidy in the Cardinal’s presence.

By this time we are getting away from the region of conjecture, anecdote, and hearsay, into that of definite records. What we know of Cromwell’s share in this Parliament is derived from two documents; one, a letter of his own, in which he gibes at his fellow members for having babbled at large about everything under the sun without doing anything. “I have endured,” he says, “a Parliament which continued by the space of seventeen whole weeks, where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, temperance, treason, murder, felony, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and continued within our realm. Howbeit, in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do; that is to say, as well as we might, and left where we began.’ If Carlyle had lighted upon that, how his heart would have rejoiced! The second document, however, suggests that if Cromwell, like Carlyle, had no great opinion of talkers, he meant his own voice to be heard: since it is almost certainly the MS. draft of a speech which he prepared for delivery in that same Parliament. The speech is exceedingly clever, and most diplomatically expressed—but is dead against Wolsey’s subsidy. Perhaps he thought better of it, and kept it in MS. If not, it was an audacious speech to make, for a man who was getting in touch with the Cardinal, from whose good graces much might be hoped. Still, a like audacity paid him well some six years later. It may have been carefully calculated in both instances; but in both there were big risks.@

At any rate, his favour with the great minister increased. He dropped his wool-business, extended his private legal practice, was entrusted with much legal work by the Cardinal, and became known as the person through whom suitors to Wolsey might find it advisable to make their applications. It was not long before he found, in his capacity as a man of law, congenial employment in the suppression of small religious Houses, and the appropriation of their endowments to Wolsey’s colleges at Ipswich and Oxford. This business he did to the entire satisfaction of his master; and since he never at any time hesitated to accept or extract material contributions to his private exchequer from any one concerned, his accumulations grew pari passu with his favour. So also, incidentally, did his unpopularity, for which he cared absolutely nothing. His confidential relations with the apparently all-powerful minister made him a person of considerable though unofficial importance; bringing him in contact with people of high position. Thus in 1527 he was well-known to Reginald Pole (afterwards Cardinal), whom he counselled to drop high-flown ideas, and learn the practical business of a politician by studying Machiavelli’s “Prince”—a work of which he must have obtained a MS. copy, as it had not yet been printed, though written probably as early as 1513.

But the toils of the divorce business were already enmeshing Cromwell’s patron; as the year 1529 advanced, clouds, lightning-charged, were gathering over his head, and the secretary knew that the hour was about to strike when he himself must either “make or mar.”

We have seen that practically nothing is known with absolute certainty as to Cromwell’s early years; we have seen also that the reports about that period of his life are sufficiently consistent with each other and with his later career to warrant us in assuming that they were tolerably well grounded. It would be difficult to conceive of any man thus trained, turning out otherwise than a cynic. At home, we have the father, a man in a respectable position, who is, however, eternally being summonsed for some breach of the law. The clever and independent youngster quarrels with his father, and takes himself off to foreign parts. He makes for Italy—the land of all others where brains counted most; the land also where morals counted least; the land par excellence of poison and poniards; the land where every one was formally orthodox, and hardly any one—least of all the priests—believed anything much. Only a religious enthusiast could pass through the ordeal of life in Italy—at the age of twenty or thereabouts—without becoming a sceptic. That a Cromwell should have passed through it without conceiving a most heart-felt contempt for the whole Roman system would be incredible; but it is hardly more credible that he should have been converted into a cold, stern moralist. If he was, he kept the cold, stern morality pretty thoroughly in abeyance until it found vent in the destruction of the monasteries.

After a brief experience of life in camp and in the guard-room, the young man is apparently for some ten years knocking about from Venice to Antwerp, acquiring a sound knowledge of trade and a mastery of the ways of traders. Then he returns to England and turns his knowledge to account, combining with it a lucrative practice, as a presumably somewhat unscrupulous but amazingly clever attorney. Always it is the seamy side of life which concerns him; and at any rate, after he has sown his wild oats and acquired experience, he adds to the conviction that most men would be knaves if they could, the certainty that, at least in comparison with Thomas Cromwell, most of them are fools. This consciousness makes him ambitious. He manages to attract the great Cardinal’s attention by his abilities. The summoning of a Parliament gives him an opportunity. He prepares a speech for it, which will certainly make him a man of some mark if it is delivered—and a clever speech in opposition, as many parliamentarians learned when Parliament had become a real power, is not always an obstacle to government favour. Cromwell is still a man of the people, and the speech is on the people’s side. Whether he made that speech pay him by delivering it or by suppressing it remains uncertain—either is possible. Anyhow, from that date his favour and his prosperity advanced rapidly; his thorough knowledge of law, of business, and of character, and his immense mastery of detail, making him a quite invaluable servant. And he who has become invaluable to the first minister of the Court may become invaluable to the Court itself.

Now what would be the natural political attitude of such a man? Had there been room for a career as a demagogue when he sat in the Parliament of 1523, he might have adopted that rôle: aiming, of course, at a dictatorship. But there was no opening. To such a man, however, it is quite certain that the absolute rule of one man would present itself as the sole really strong form of government. Absolutism was taking the place of the old Feudalism all over Europe; Henry VII. had laid sure foundations for it in England; Wolsey had carried on the work; it would be the business of Wolsey’s successor to complete it. The political theory of Machiavelli was not in itself novel; it must have been familiar, as a latent theory, to every one who knew anything of the Italy of the Medicis and the Borgias. The novelty lay in stating it boldly in the open. That, even the author of the “Prince” had not done as yet: he had merely formulated it for private circulation. Publication was deferred. But the Machiavellian creed had reached the hands of Wolsey’s secretary, who had adopted it with complete appreciation. Its central tenets are the complete divorce between ethical considerations and political methods, and the complete concentration of all power under the control of one will. The “Prince” became Cromwell’s political text-book, whose principles and maxims he was prepared to apply with appalling thoroughness if ever the opportunity offered.

It was remarked that before the appointment of Sir Thomas More in 1529, no one had held the office of Lord Chancellor unless he was either of noble birth or an ecclesiastic. More, however, was of gentle blood. It required a yet more violent departure from precedent for the king to take as his own most confidential adviser a layman of plebeian origin; and some considerable time elapsed before Cromwell held openly the position which in effect had already long been his. The story of his elevation will occupy the section now following: here we have attempted to present the figure of the man who in the autumn of 1529 was nothing more than the confidential secretary of a minister who was on the very verge of the historic “farewell to all his greatness.” The secretary presents in many respects a very marked contrast to his master, but the contrast with his master’s successor in the Chancellorship is still more striking. England never knew a statesman whose politics were so entirely ethical as More; never one who ignored ethics so completely as Cromwell. With the one, conscience stood unmistakeably first; with the other it was non-existent, as far as state-craft was concerned. That is not to say that the man himself was without conscience or moral sense; just as Machiavelli, his master, was the last statesman in Italy who could be called a scoundrel. Cromwell held with Machiavelli that the political end justifies any means; the only question for the statesman is, whether in the particular instance a flagrantly immoral method may frustrate the end sought instead of furthering it, by shocking sentiments which require to be conciliated. The Italian would not personally practise all that he preached: his English disciple went farther. Both doctrine and practice were the direct contradictions of the doctrine and practice of Thomas More.

III
PLANNING THE CAMPAIGN

The blow fell: the Cardinal was struck suddenly down. What did Cromwell do? In effect, we have two authorities—Cavendish, Wolsey’s honest but not over astute biographer, and Foxe, honest too, but ready to believe whatever chimed in best with his own theories. On Hallowmass Day, November 1, Cavendish found the secretary in the Great Chamber at Esher, whither the fallen Cardinal had retired; in much perturbation of spirit over the prospect of his own ruin for his faithful service to Wolsey, and resolved, in his own phrase, to go up to London, and “make or mar.” He did not desert his master, but he went up to London and made haste to commend himself to the other side. He played his cards boldly, bidding directly for the favour of Norfolk, with whose approbation he forthwith entered the newly-called Parliament as member for Taunton. In fact, he had the wit to recognise that by skilful management he could be loyal to Wolsey and push his own prospects at the same time. The move was audacious, and successful. He had three possible courses. A baser or a less astute man would have tried to win favour with his master’s enemies by turning and rending his master. A less daring one would have carefully dropped out of sight, taking his chance of being able some day to retrieve his position. Cromwell was bold enough to take up the cudgels openly in defence of the Cardinal, thereby winning much credit for courage and loyalty: at the same time, retaining the fallen minister’s confidence. Thus he was also enabled to manœuvre for Wolsey, and to mollify some of his enemies by judicious presents, bestowed under his advice and direction—and passing through his hands. There is no need to discredit either the loyalty or the courage displayed, but there is no denying that in displaying it he served his own interests better than he could have done in any other way.

Cromwell’s public defence of the Cardinal did not in fact mean much more than active opposition in Parliament to the Bill of Attainder; and Henry, at any rate, was not thirsting for Wolsey’s blood. It was probably some time before he quite made up his mind that he could do better without the man who had done so much for him. It is not unlikely that what ultimately decided him was the growing perception that he could make the combination of Cromwell and Cranmer serve his turn more effectively. He had just caught from the Cambridge Doctor the idea of discarding the Papal jurisdiction in the divorce in favour of the National Ecclesiastical Courts supported by the opinion of the qualified University doctors of Europe. There is very little doubt that one of the first steps taken by Cromwell was to obtain an interview with the king, nominally to defend himself against the malice of the Cardinal’s enemies; and that he turned the interview to account by hinting pretty openly that he could work out for the king a policy which would not only ensure the divorce, but bring him much profit in other ways, making him “the richest king that ever was in England,” says Chapuys, the emperor’s ambassador.

Now Henry’s was not the type of mind which invents large and far-reaching schemes of political action; but it was the type which can appreciate and appropriate a big scheme designed by some one else. Hitherto, until he became awake to the idea that Clement, under pressure from the emperor, might actually deny him the divorce, there is no reason to suppose that he had ever dreamt of quarrelling with the Papacy as an institution, or with the ecclesiastical body in England. Recently things had looked as if there might be a serious personal quarrel with Clement, of a kind for which there were precedents, and Stephen Gardiner had used distinctly threatening expressions in that sense to his Holiness. Wolsey’s difficulties had been largely due to his anxiety lest the divorce should lead to something still more serious; but that had been all. Now, however, Wolsey was hardly displaced when the first moves were made in what was revealed later as a huge campaign, directed in the first instance against clerical abuses, extending to privileges, and finally absorbing property; in the course of which every pretension of the Holy See to jurisdiction, authority or tribute in the realm of England was flatly and decisively repudiated.

The whole thing worked out in its successive stages with such systematic precision that there is no room for doubt of its having been completely planned from a very early stage. Throughout, Henry identified himself with it thoroughly. But it is almost inconceivable that he should have had any such plan in his head when he was making Sir Thomas More his Chancellor, and Norfolk to all appearance his principal counsellor. On the other hand, the scheme is precisely such a one as would have formed in the brain of the student of Machiavelli who felt himself to be the one man who was able and willing to carry it out in the king’s service. The old Baronage was already hardly dangerous; a very few judicious blows would make it utterly incapable of organised resistance; but if the English ecclesiastical body, with its great corporate wealth, worked in harmonious accord with the Papacy, under skilful leadership, in opposition to the Crown, the Crown might not get the best of the conflict. With the Church brought to heel in England, itself severed from the Papacy, and its wealth in the grip of the sovereign, the royal will would be irresistible. To suggest this new policy to the king, with himself as the instrument to put it in execution, not perhaps all at once, but enough at a time to carry the king along with him, would be a stroke which could hardly fail of success; especially as, in enumerating the advantages the policy offered, the certainty of getting the desired divorce could be placed in the forefront. Henry could be perfectly relied upon to see his own advantage in the proposal; he was equally certain to recognise in the designer of the scheme the qualities needed for carrying it out. Everything points to Cromwell, not Henry, as the deviser. The only alternative is, that Henry had already made his plan, but only began to regard it as practicable after he had guessed at and tested Cromwell’s capacities as an instrument; a very much less probable hypothesis on the face of it. Moreover, it is quite certain that neither before 1529 nor after 1540 did Henry show any power of creating out of his own head a deeply considered and far-reaching policy. When he was left to himself, or when he went counter to Wolsey or Cromwell, he never showed himself a statesman who naturally took “long views.”

Cromwell, then, is to be regarded not as the able and unscrupulous instrument chosen by Henry to carry out his own preconceived design of revolutionising the relations between the secular sovereign, the Church in England, and the Papal authority. Henry had the ability to appreciate and to adopt the plan, but the brain which both conceived and organised it, as well as the hand which executed it, belonged not to the king but to the minister.

IV
CONTRA ECCLESIAM

It does not in effect militate against this view, that before Cromwell could have set any agency in motion, Parliament did itself lead the way by attacking certain minor and universally recognised abuses, without waiting for Convocation to deal with them. It needed nothing in the way of a campaign to ensure reforms being demanded and approved where the clergy themselves admitted that the existing state of things was scandalous. The first real blow was struck some months after Cromwell had obtained the king’s ear, when Convocation, towards the close of 1530, was startled by a message that the whole of the clergy had offended against the Statute of Præmunire in admitting the Legatine authority of the deceased Cardinal. That authority had of course been sanctioned by the approval of the king; but the fact that it was illegal was not thereby altered. Technically, there was no possibility of evading the charge. The clergy had broken the law; they must pay the penalty. They did, fining themselves to the tune of a million or so of our money. If they had not been perfectly helpless, the impudence of the demand, coming from the king, would have been simply colossal: but a demand which cannot be gainsaid can hardly be called impudent. Wolsey, of course, had been penalised for exercising the authority, but then there was the superficial excuse that he had obtained his master’s sanction by beguiling his unsuspecting innocence. Here the king could not even produce that flimsy excuse.

This financial operation, however, struck the keynote of the Cromwellian policy. Wolsey had over-ridden the law in procuring the Legatine appointment: he had sought to do so by demanding Benevolences: he had sought to do so by overawing Parliament. Now, everything was to be done under form of law. Even if—unwittingly of course—the authorities transgressed their legal powers, the transgression was to be regularised by a statute ad hoc. The principle was equally agreeable to the tender conscience of Henry and the legal proclivities of his minister.

The huge fine, however, did not satisfy the requirements. Convocation, in passing the Bill, was compelled to pass also a clause acknowledging the king as the “Only Supreme Head” of the Church, though it was allowed to introduce the qualifying phrase “so far as the law of Christ permits.” Except as an ingenious salve to clerical consciences, the qualification was futile, since, in the exercise of his supremacy, Henry would certainly not admit that he was going farther than those laws permitted, and he would also be the de facto judge on the question if any one should dare to raise it. The whole clause might be interpreted as meaning everything, or as meaning nothing—but the king would be the interpreter.

The Bill, with the clause, was passed in 1531. Again the campaign rested for about a year. So far, apart from a slight rectification of abuses, nothing more—in form—had been done than to exact from the clergy a penalty to which they had rendered themselves technically liable, and to demand from them the formal admission of what was asserted to be already the constitutional position of the Crown in relation to them. In theory there had been nothing in the nature of innovation. Now, it was time for innovation; so Parliament had to be called in, as against the Church. But the innovation was to threaten the Papal claims, so the Church must share the responsibility. Thus a fresh phase of the campaign opened with the beginning of 1532.

Again there were in the first place obvious abuses which were dealt with under Acts concerning mortmain and benefit of clergy. These, of themselves, implied nothing in particular. But it was a very different thing with the Annates Act: the first direct and manifest challenge of a Papal claim. Rome had claimed from every bishop on his appointment to a See the whole of the first year’s revenue. This, as the Act pointed out, was a very grievous burden on the bishops, for whose relief this system was to be stopped. Until quite recently, it has never been disputed that this Bill was introduced in response to the actual petition of Convocation. That idea was based on the existence of a document which—closer examination leaves no doubt—did not proceed from Convocation at all, as had hitherto been supposed. Chapuys reported at the time that the bishops opposed the measure. By this time, doubtless, the supremacy business had awakened their alarm, and others besides Fisher were beginning to dread a rupture with the Papacy. There are however, two special features which demand our attention. The Bill was framed ostensibly for the relief of the clergy, implying that the Crown, not the Papacy, was the true protector of their interests, and emphasising an antagonism between English Churchmen and the Pope. Also, it was not required to be put in immediate execution, but was to be held in suspense during the king’s pleasure. A double purpose was served thereby, though the intention was masked. Clement could buy the withdrawal of the measure by conceding the divorce: while if he should elect to close that door to reconciliation, it would not be too late to divert the annates into the king’s pocket, instead of abolishing the impost. The clergy would be none the better in either event, but the trick would have helped to keep them on the king’s side till it was too late to change. Henry was still playing for a divorce with the Papal sanction; he had not come to regard a final breach with the Papacy as an end desirable per se. Cromwell, we may assume, took a different view, but of course could not dream of forcing Henry’s hand: what he could do was to have everything in thorough order for a decisive breach, if and when the moment should come.

There was something more, however, for Parliament to do, namely its presentation of the Supplication against the Ordinaries. There is no doubt at all that in every essential this was Cromwell’s personal handiwork. It was a double-barrelled attack, from the popular point of view, on the way in which the Church exercised its jurisdiction; from the sovereign’s point of view, on the authority of the Church’s legislation. The whole intention of it was to force the clergy as a body to admit that their authority, whether as individuals or as a corporate body, was subordinate to that of the sovereign. Its object was attained with entire success: it resulted in what was known as the “Submission of the Clergy,” virtually a complete surrender. The defeat was practically the death-blow of the aged Archbishop Warham; while the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, found himself so totally opposed to the principle involved that he resigned office and went into retirement.

Warham’s death at this juncture was most convenient. The old man had not been sufficiently stout of heart to offer a stubborn resistance to the new policy, but he had yielded with much misgiving and soreness of spirit. He had been restive enough to make it doubtful whether in the last resort he might not decline to pronounce a judgment against Katharine in defiance of the Pope. By appointing Cranmer to the Archbishopric, Henry made sure of a primate who would have no qualms on the point. This security made him ready to precipitate the crisis which the Pope was craving to postpone or evade. The simple truth was that Clement felt himself to be completely in the grip of the emperor, and no conceivable threats from England could have extracted the desired verdict from him. The fact was unmistakeably revealed by the publication, in February, of what was in effect an order to Henry to re-instate Katharine on pain of excommunication. The reply was the Act in Restraint of Appeals—in form an Act declaratory of the existing law of England, in effect an announcement of independence—immediately followed by Cranmer’s judicial pronouncement invalidating the marriage with Katharine ab initio. Until Clement retorted by declaring Cranmer’s judgment void, Henry abstained from confirming either the Act in Restraint of Appeals or the Annates Act; their confirmation was his rejoinder. After that, there might be talk of reconciliation, but the practical possibility was gone past recall.

V
THE FABRIC OF DESPOTISM

The year 1533 may be regarded as marking the irreparable breach with the Papacy, though it was not till 1534 that Clement gave his own formal judgment in favour of Katharine, and Convocation issued its own declaration that the “Bishop of Rome” derives from Scripture no more jurisdiction in England than “any other foreign bishop”—two sentences which may perhaps be regarded as merely bolting an already locked door. The purpose of Cromwell’s anti-clerical campaign was so far achieved that the clergy had been driven out of their main strongholds by their “submission,” and had next been cut off from the aid of a Papal alliance. These were the preliminary measures to the assertion in very concrete guise of the untrammelled supremacy of the Crown in things ecclesiastical and temporal alike, which was the aim of the policy we have ascribed primarily to Cromwell rather than his master. An additional reason for so ascribing it is to be found in the strong presumption afforded by the evidence that Henry himself did not wish to cast off the Papal allegiance utterly, until he found that he could get the divorce in no other way. Apart from his fixed resolution to make Anne Boleyn his wife at all costs, it may be doubted if he reckoned that the complication of foreign relations involved in a final repudiation of the Pope’s authority would be compensated by the more unqualified control of ecclesiastical matters at home. For him the divorce turned the scale: and since he could not escape the disadvantages of revolting, he meant to have every scrap of advantage that could be reaped from it too. The differences which presently arose between the king and his minister on the conduct of foreign affairs will be found to have some bearing on this view of the case.

At any rate, the breach being made, Henry was as ready as Cromwell for aggression; and Cromwell was let loose to carry out his policy—within the realm—to the uttermost: no longer working in the background, but in a position as openly dominant as Wolsey himself had occupied.

The first business was to confirm formally the positions already taken up, in a fresh series of Acts of Parliament, in the early session of 1534; embodying the recent measures, but generally carrying them a step further. Thus “Peter Pence” were abolished as well as Annates. An appeal to the King’s Court of Chancery from the Ecclesiastical Courts was substituted for the Appeal to Rome abolished by the Restraint of Appeals. The “submission of the clergy” was extended so as to bring the whole instead of a part only of the canon law under the purview of the commission to be appointed for its examination. The corollary of the Boleyn marriage was an Act of Succession in favour of the offspring of Anne: but the Act carried with it a murderous sting. “I pray that these things be not confirmed with oaths,” More had said when the marriage was ratified. His anticipation was justified. An oath of obedience to the Act was to be administered.

In this affair of the oath, we as usual find Henry and Cromwell in perfect accord as to policy, but not actuated by precisely the same motive. The thing in Cromwell’s mind is the Royal Supremacy; he is determined to be rid of conditions which check the activities of the Crown, and of men whose influence tends to keep alive doubts as to the Crown’s legitimate powers. Henry’s point of view is the personal one. He has done a very unpopular thing in divorcing Katharine and marrying Anne, and is determined to make every one admit that he was entirely in the right. Now, there was in England no ecclesiastic so universally esteemed for probity and saintliness as Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester; there was no layman who could compare for intellectual eminence and beauty of character with Thomas More. It was known to the world that both these men held that Katharine’s marriage had been valid, and that both disapproved the recent anti-Papal developments. So also it was known that in the Houses of Religion which stood highest in reputation for sincerity and austerity, and were untouched by the breath of scandal, the divorce and the revolt were regarded with horror. To force these recalcitrants openly to declare in favour of the divorce and the Royal Supremacy, would be a great triumph. On the other hand, nothing would so terrorise opposition as the smiting down, before the horrified eyes of the world, of victims so distinguished. Cromwell therefore drafted the oath of obedience to the Act of Succession in such terms that the subscriber would have to swear not only loyalty to the provisions of the Act, but acceptance of the divorce as right, and of the Royal Supremacy as theoretically sound. More, Fisher, and some of the monks to whom the oath was administered, refused to desert their principles. They would swear to maintain the succession as laid down, since it lay within the function of the State to order the succession; but they would not take the oath as it stood. Thereupon they were sent to prison.

It may readily be believed that the minister, as reported, swore a great oath when he heard More’s refusal. The moral effect of winning such converts would have been incalculable: preferable certainly to shocking public sentiment as the alternative course must do. But he was not in the least afraid of shocking public sentiment, at any rate if he at the same time inspired terror; if circumstances demanded victims, the more conspicuous they were, the better.

For once, however, a point had been overlooked: it appeared impossible lawfully to proceed to extremities on the ground of refusal to take the oath. The omission was rectified in the next session of Parliament. In a fresh Act of Succession, the oath as administered was expressly ratified, and the occasion was seized to pass a new Treasons Act, inadequately described as drastic. It was made treason to question the titles of the queen and the heirs apparent, or to impute heresy or schism to the king; and the lawyers were able so to interpret it that mere silence might be construed as treason—it was enough to refuse to affirm the Supremacy and the rest of it. The two new Acts were brought to bear on the victims, who remained firm and were executed in the following summer. There is no shadow of a hint anywhere that Cromwell suffered a single qualm in working out the destruction of either More or Fisher, but it is hardly necessary to make him responsible for the equally ruthless attitude of the king. According to Roper’s circumstantial narrative, Henry was so vindictive towards More when once he had turned against him, that he could hardly be persuaded to have him left out of the Bill of Attainder in the affair of the Nun of Kent, until the Chancellor, Lord Audley, and others succeeded in convincing him that Parliament could not possibly pass the Bill with More’s name included. If ever there was a chance of life for Fisher and More, it was destroyed when Henry’s fury was roused by the new Pope making Fisher a Cardinal. These facts illustrate the difference between Henry’s attitude and Cromwell’s. To Cromwell, More and Fisher are merely obstructions to his policy. They must either cease to obstruct or be crushed. To spare them for sentimental reasons would be absurd, but there is no passion or vindictiveness or animosity about their destruction, as far as he is concerned.

Never had any king of England wielded so deadly an engine of despotism as was placed in Henry’s hands by this Treasons Act of Cromwell; whereof, however, the full force depended on its manipulation by its designer. The country was in a very short time so sown with the minister’s spies that the moment any one became obnoxious to authority it was the simplest thing possible to procure an information of a hasty word spoken or passed by in silence, of a phrase that might have carried a double meaning; and the victim’s doom was virtually sealed. The excuse, of course, was the one on which a tyranny that seeks to justify itself invariably falls back—that an unparalleled emergency demands extraordinary powers. It was not, indeed, quite obvious that there was an unparalleled emergency in existence, but then it might arise at any moment. Cromwell was going on to a series of measures which might prove acceptable, but might on the other hand provoke a storm of indignation. With the Treasons Act ready to his hand, he could anticipate conspiracy by striking wherever and whenever it pleased him. It was an integral part of his political theory that Government—i.e. the Despot—should have that power. It was not, of course, aimed specifically at the Church; it was only incidentally concerned with More and Fisher. The repression of clericalism was only a part of the scheme for a legalised Despotism. The climax, the theoretical coping-stone of the edifice, was not achieved till the Act which in 1539 gave Royal Proclamations the force of law; but for practical purposes, the Treasons Act made Henry a monarch more absolute than any other in Christendom.

Cromwell, however, had not as yet fulfilled the promise he is said to have given of making Henry “the richest king that ever was in England.” As a matter of fact, whatever riches had come in his way Henry would never have kept a full treasury, since he always emptied it with both hands. But Cromwell in his capacity as Vicar-General, or representative of the Supreme Head with unlimited powers—which office was bestowed on him early in 1535, a few months after the Treasons Act—was to make him a record present. It was a matter of principle with him, in his methods, to make rude display to the higher clergy of the fact that they must now recognise themselves as mere menials of the Crown, whose functions might be superseded at the royal pleasure; and on those lines he acted in striking his next blow, sending out a commission of his own creatures to “visit” the monasteries, and report upon them. It is only necessary to recall one of his casual memoranda at a later date—“Item, the Abbot of Reading, to be sent down to be tried and executed”—to feel properly satisfied that the case of the monasteries was prejudged. The commission was intended to report evil concerning them, and not good; and the commissioners acted up to their instructions. It is quite possible that a perfectly impartial tribunal after complete investigation would have found the evidence hardly less damning; but what the commissioners did was to pay a series of hasty visits, collect all the scandal they could get any one to retail to them, insult or frighten respectable and responsible inmates till they gave confused or evasive answers, or none at all, to interrogatories, and so to produce what passed as evidence of a very abominable and corrupt state of affairs. Whereupon Parliament passed an Act dissolving between three and four hundred Houses, in effect handing their property over to the Crown. Some of this wealth was theoretically appropriated to endowing new bishoprics and to other corresponding purposes; but in practice a fraction of it only was so utilised. Some of the lands were given away to people whom it was convenient for the king—or Cromwell—to placate; most were sold at low prices—with the effect of establishing a new landed proprietary which in the years long after was to play a part in the national politics which their creator can hardly have foreseen. It was not Cromwell’s way to reach for more than he could grasp; before he made one stride, he had calculated for the next, but he did not take it till his own time. So he did not wipe out the monastic system at a blow. The completion of the business waited—like the Royal Proclamations Act—till 1539. For the present, Cromwell was content to impose on the greater monasteries, and such of the lesser ones as still survived, a disciplinary code which professed to have in view the enforcement of a becoming austerity, but was felt to be so intolerably severe as effectually to bring about several voluntary dissolutions or surrenders.

Cromwell’s royal partner, no doubt, in a famous phrase of much later date, “stood amazed at his own moderation.” But the country hardly took the same view. The year which saw, in February, the first Act dissolving the lesser monasteries, saw also in the autumn a rising in Lincolnshire, very shortly followed by the organised Yorkshire insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. As in all the religious rebellions of the Reformation, the issues were a good deal mixed up with social discontents; and the last straw was probably a piece of Cromwell’s handiwork which had nothing to do with ecclesiastical matters, being a measure known as the Statute of Uses, designed to get rid of a maze of legal complications which had arisen from ingenious evasions of the law as to the inheritance of land. The insurgents, however, put the religious innovations in the forefront of their schedule of grievances: openly demanding the dismissal of both Cromwell and Cranmer. The military management of the suppression of the rebellion was left to the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk, but no collision was allowed till the northern levies had been diplomatically induced to disperse; after which some sporadic outbreaks were used, after the turn of the year, as an excuse for an extremely heavy-handed exaction of retribution. Cromwell, however, turned the whole thing to account; as certain abbots and priors had been more or less deeply implicated, whereby the opportunity was given for suppressing several considerable religious communities, and hanging some highly placed Churchmen. A further result was the re-organisation of the government of the counties constituting the Marches—those which were always living with an eye on Scotland, and enjoyed or suffered a special system of control—by the establishment of a new Council of the North which diminished the power of the nobility in those regions; Cromwell always maintaining the same end persistently in view, the weakening of all power of organised resistance to the king’s will.

Another year brought another opportunity. In 1538, Cromwell discovered a conspiracy. The South-west of England, like the North, was ever on what may be called the Romantic side when developments, political or religious, were in progress. It was now perturbed over the innovations. It appeared that the Marquis of Exeter, the king’s first cousin and a grandson of Edward IV., was engaged in some sort of conspiracy with the Poles, whose mother was the old Countess of Salisbury, daughter of “false fleeting perjured Clarence.” Amongst them, they stood for the relics of the old Yorkist anti-Tudor faction. Cromwell had already taken occasion to warn Reginald Pole—whose diatribes against Henry, issued from abroad, had brought him under the royal ban—that his kinsmen in England might pay the penalty for his audacity. Whether there was any real body in the conspiracy is open to doubt, but there was quite enough evidence to go upon under the Treasons Act. The process by attainder practically suppressed any defence. Exeter, Montague (the head of the Poles) and others were executed; and there were sufficient means for involving some more Houses of religion, with their heads, notably the revered Abbot of Glastonbury, who were hanged as traitors.

Thus, by the opening of 1539, everything was ready for the two final measures. The regrettable conduct of the monastic establishments in associating themselves with treason provided a final justification for the complete suppression of the system, and incidentally the further enrichment of the Crown. In the field of constitutional practice, the Crown had frequently proceeded by Royal Proclamations, but there was generally some attendant danger of the authority of these being challenged. Parliament was now called upon formally to concede to such proclamations the effect of regular Statutes. It may be remarked in passing that the Parliament called in 1529 had been responsible for the whole of the legislation down to its last session in the early spring of 1536, when it passed the Act dissolving the lesser monasteries. Whether it was subservient or not, Cromwell had nothing to do with packing it: it was only at the last moment that he was provided with a seat in it. But there is no doubt that the subsequent Parliaments, beginning with that summoned in May 1536, were packed by Cromwell and his agents. That was an inevitable part of the system which was to make the king absolute, whilst preserving the traditional forms.

VI
CROMWELL AND PROTESTANTISM

The policy of organising a Despotism was necessarily anti-Papal and also anti-clerical. In the former aspect, it complicated foreign relations; in the latter, it was involved with the movement towards a spiritual and dogmatic reformation of religion. Cromwell’s course in foreign politics was dictated by anti-Papal considerations. So long as Katharine, the aunt of Charles V., was alive, there was no prospect of reconciliation between the Emperor and Henry, so that England could not work on Wolsey’s favourite line of holding the balance between Charles and the French king, who felt himself perfectly safe from any risk of a renewed combination between his rivals. Hence, Cromwell usually hankered for close association with the German Protestant princes, united in the League of Schmalkad, as an effective counter to the Emperor. Such an alliance might either coerce Charles into a reconciliation with Protestantism and England, or might make Francis think it worth his while to join an anti-Papal league. Having this idea in his mind, Cromwell’s attitude towards Lutheranism abroad and the religious progressives in England was always friendly: since he realised that the course of events must divide Christendom under the Papal and anti-Papal standards, which came to be called Catholic and Protestant respectively. If Rome were cast off by some of her children, while others remained faithful, sooner or later the latter would be compelled to unite for the purpose of crushing the rebels. Thus the defiance of Rome and of Charles by the pronouncement of the divorce in 1533, was attended by overtures to the League of Protestant Princes.

The Lutherans, however, looked askance. They feared the Greeks et dona ferentes; had not Henry taken the field conspicuously against their leader? German Lutheranism was deep-rooted in a genuine religious feeling; it could feel no confidence in the king of England as a convert to the Augsburg confession. Therefore the princes and the divines of Protestant Germany went warily. On the other hand, the isolation of England made Francis more than careless of an English alliance unless on terms extremely profitable to himself. The death of Katharine, however, in January 1536, changed the situation. It was no longer necessary for the emperor to range himself against England. It is noteworthy that the immediate effect on Cromwell was to make him desire an Imperial (which meant the old Burgundian) alliance, but he was promptly pulled up by the king, who had learnt once before that Wolsey had been right in his policy of holding the balance, and that he himself had erred in forcing an alliance with Charles. The emperor and Francis fell to fighting again, and for a while England was approximately in the old position of having each of the great Powers intriguing for her alliance, while she held aloof and coquetted with both. Then the combatants grew tired, and, with the improved prospect of their reconciliation, their ardour for English friendship cooled.

Just before this time, Henry’s third wife died. Neither his first nor his second spouse had provided him with a male heir; he had divorced the one, and cut off the head of the other. Jane Seymour did what was expected of her, but died in the execution of her duty. One not too sturdy baby boy, and two daughters who had been judicially pronounced illegitimate, gave room for uneasiness as to the succession. A fourth matrimonial venture was thus rendered advisable: providing opportunities for diplomatic intrigue. The royal ladies of Europe, however, do not seem to have coveted the position: “If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England’s disposal,” is said to have been the caustic comment of a suggested bride. Neither Francis nor Charles would be inveigled. On the contrary, they patched up a peace in the summer of 1538, and Henry’s policy of keeping them at odds with each other, while dangling an English alliance before both, broke down, as Cromwell’s previous attempt to join decisively with Charles had been frustrated. Cromwell fell back on the line which in his heart he would probably have preferred throughout, of alliance with the Lutherans: and at last he hoped—by finding a Lutheran bride for Henry—to attach his master decisively to that policy. Henry gave a half-hearted assent; the minister made his final throw. In the moment of seeming victory, his knell was sounded. Before we come to this, the last act in Cromwell’s drama, we may revert to his relations with the religious movement in England.

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.

HENRY VIII.

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”