E-text prepared by Charles Aldarondo, Deirdre Menchaca, Keith Edkins,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

[CONTENTS]

Froude's
History Of England

THE REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH

Volume I

by

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

Introduction by
W. LLEWELYN WILLIAMS M.P. B.C.L.

FIRST PUBLISHED 1909

London & Toronto J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
New York E.P. Dutton & Co

INTRODUCTION

James Anthony Froude was born at Dartington Rectory, the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes, on April 23, 1818. His father was a clergyman of the old school, as much squire as parson. In the concluding chapter to his History of England, Froude wrote that "for a hundred and forty years after the Revolution of 1688, the Church of England was able to fulfil with moderate success the wholesome functions of a religious establishment. Theological doctrinalism passed out of fashion; and the clergy, merged as they were in the body of the nation, and no longer endeavouring to elevate themselves into a separate order, were occupied healthily in impressing on their congregations the meaning of duty and moral responsibility to God." Of this sane and orthodox, but not over-spiritual, clergy, Archdeacon Froude was an excellent and altogether wholesome type. He was a stiff Tory; his hatred of Dissent was so uncompromising that he would not have a copy of the Pilgrim's Progress in the rectory. A stern, self-contained, reticent man, he never, in word of deed, confessed his affection for his youngest son. He was a good horseman, and was passionately fond of open-air exercises and especially of hunting. His one accomplishment was drawing, and his sketches in after years earned the praise of Ruskin.

Cast in the same mould, but fashioned by different circumstances, the archdeacon's eldest son, Richard Hurrell Froude, was a man of greater intellectual brilliance and even more masterful character. He was one of the pioneers of the Oxford Movement, and it was only his early death that deposed him from his place of equality with Newman and Keble and Pusey. Anthony was a sickly child, and from his earliest years lacked the loving care of a mother. He was brought up with Spartan severity by his father and his aunt. The most venial self-indulgence was regarded as criminal. From the age of three he was inured to hardship by being ducked every morning in a trough of ice-cold water. Hurrell Froude felt no tenderness for the ailing lad. Once, in order to rouse a manly spirit in his little brother, he took him by the heels, plunged him like another Achilles into a stream, and

stirred with his head the mud at the bottom. Froude has been accused, and not without justice, of not feeling a proper aversion to acts of cruelty. The horrible Boiling Act of Henry VIII. excites neither disgust nor hatred in him; and he makes smooth excuses for the illegal tortures of the rack and the screw which were inflicted on prisoners by Elizabeth and her ministers. He had himself been reared in a hardy school; he had been trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that surrounded his loveless childhood and youth.

Hurrell Froude was the idol of his younger brothers. He was a man of brilliant parts, and a born leader of men. His hatred of Radicals and Dissenters transcended even his father's dislike of them. His conception of the Church differed widely from that in which the archdeacon had been reared. To him a clergyman was a priest who belonged to a sacerdotal caste, and who ought not "to merge himself in the body of the nation." To him the Reformation was an infamous crime, and Henry VIII. was worse than the Bluebeard of the nursery. His hero was Thomas à Becket. He wrote a sketch of his life and career, which he did not live to finish. His friends ill-advisedly published it after his death. His ideal ecclesiastical statesman of modern times was Archbishop Laud. Charles I. was a martyr, and the Revolution of 1688 an inglorious blunder. To the day of his death—in spite of the harsh discipline which he received at his hands in boyhood, in spite of wide divergence of opinion in later years in all matters secular and religious—Froude never ceased to worship at his brother's shrine. Out of regard for his memory, more than from any passionate personal conviction, he associated himself while at Oxford with the Anglican movement. His affectionate admiration for Newman, neither time nor change served to impair. If Carlyle was his prophet in later years, his influence happily did not affect his style. That was based on the chaste model of Newman. He owed his early friendship with Newman to that great man's association with Hurrell Froude. Many years after, when Freeman had venomously accused him of "dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost forgotten fame"—poor Froude's offence was that he dared to write an essay on Thomas à Becket—he defended himself with rare emotion against the charge. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole

the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person—not one—in whom, as I now think him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure."

As Froude's powers developed and matured, and as his experience of the world broadened, he cast away his brother's yoke, and reverted more to his father's school of thought. As his father was to him the ideal clergyman of the Church of England, so the Church before 1828 remained to him the model of what an established religion should be. He was a thorough Erastian, who believed in the subordination of the Church to the state. He detested theological doctrinalism of all kinds; he revolted against the idea that the clergy should form a separate order. The pretensions of Whitgift and Laud, the High Anglican school of Keble and Pusey, the whole conception of the Church and the priesthood which underlay the Oxford Movement, were things obnoxious to him. In a characteristic passage in the chapter on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew he reveals his hatred and distrust of dogmatism. "Whenever the doctrinal aspect of Christianity has been prominent above the practical," he wrote, "whenever the first duty of the believer has been held to consist in holding particular opinions on the functions and nature of his Master, and only the second in obeying his Master's commands, then always, with a uniformity more remarkable than is obtained in any other historical phenomena, there have followed dissension, animosity, and in later ages bloodshed. Christianity, as a principle of life, has been the most powerful check upon the passions of mankind. Christianity as a speculative system of opinion has converted them into monsters of cruelty."

Holding such decided views on doctrinalism, it might have been thought that Froude would have visited all the warring sects of the sixteenth century with equal judgment. No Church was more doctrinal than that of Geneva; no Calvinist ever was more dogmatic than John Knox. But the men who fought the battle of the Reformation in England and Scotland were, in the main, the Calvinists; and to Froude the Reformation was the beginning of a new and better era, when the yoke of the priest had been finally cast away. "Calvinism," he said in one of his addresses at St. Andrews, "was the spirit which rises in revolt against untruth." John Knox was too heroic a figure not to rouse the artistic sense in

Froude. "There lies one," said the Regent Morton over his coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal man." Froude has made this epitaph the text of the noblest eulogy ever delivered on Knox. "No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox." He surpassed Cromwell and Burghley in integrity of purpose and in purity of methods. He towered above the Regent Murray in intellect, and he worked on a larger scale than Latimer. "His was the voice that taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious, and fanatical, but who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force again to submit to tyranny." Yet even here, Froude could not refrain from quoting the sardonic comment of the English ambassador at Edinburgh: Knox behaved, said Randolph, "as though he were of God's privy council."

It is certain, at least, that other reformers, who were not greatly inferior to Knox in capacity, and not at all in piety and honesty, have not met the same generous treatment at his hands. He sneers at Hooper because he had scruples about wearing episcopal robes at his consecration as Bishop of Worcester, though he himself in a famous passage asserts the anomalous position of bishops in the Church of England. Hooper, as a Calvinist, was in the right in objecting, and though the point upon which he took his stand was nominally one of form, there lay behind it a protest against the Anglican conception of a bishop. He speaks slightingly of Ridley and Ferrars, though he makes ample amends to them and to Hooper, when he comes to describe the manner of their death. To the reformers who fled from the Marian persecution, including men like Jewel and Grindal, he refers with scornful contempt, though he has no word of criticism to apply to Knox for retiring to England and to the continent when the flame of persecution was certainly not more fierce. Latimer is one of his favourites,—a plain, practical man, not given to abstract speculation or theological subtleties, but one who was content to do his duty day by day without the fear of man before his eyes. Latimer, though he was looked upon

as a Protestant in the earliest years of the English Reformation, believed in the Real Presence up to a short time before his death. But of all English ecclesiastics Thomas Cranmer was perhaps most to Froude's liking. Cranmer was, like Froude himself, an artist in words. The English liturgy owes its charm and beauty to his sense of style, his grace of expression, and his cultured piety. That he was a great man few will be found in these days to maintain; fewer still will believe that he deserved the scathing invective of Macaulay. But no one can read the account given by Froude of his last years without feeling that the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury was neither saint nor martyr. If ever there was one, he was a timeserver. He pronounced the divorce of Catherine of Arragon, though he had sworn fealty to the Pope. He never raised a protest against any of the political murders of Henry VIII.—with the notable exception of his courageous attempt to save his friend, Thomas Cromwell. Even in that case, however, he lies under the suspicion of having interfered through fear that his own fate was involved in that of the malleus monachorum. In the days of Edward VI. he aimed at the liberty, if not at the life, of Bonner and Gardiner, without semblance of legal right: He recanted in the reign of Mary when he thought he could purchase his miserable life. It was only when all hope of pardon was past that he re-affirmed his belief in the reformed faith. Indeed, he waited until the day of his execution before withdrawing his recantation, and confounded his enemies on the way to the stake. To a master of dramatic narrative the last scene of Cranmer's life came as a relief and an inspiration. "So perished Cranmer," wrote Froude, in a memorable passage: "he was brought out, with the eyes of his soul blinded, to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed the next day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the court had over-reached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would have left the archbishop to die broken-hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The worth of a man must be

measured by his life, not by his failure under a single and peculiar peril. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which he would build his Church."

With this conscious and avowed bias in favour of undogmatic Christianity, Froude came to write the story of the transition of England from a Catholic to a Protestant country. He was not without sympathy with the old order of things. We cannot but feel a thrill as we read his incomparable description of the change which was effected in men's thoughts and ideas by the translation of the mediæval into the modern world? "For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions, of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world." Froude was once asked what was the greatest and most essential quality of an historian. He replied that it was imagination. It was a true and a just saying, and Froude himself possessed the faculty in abundance.

It was not only with the old order that Froude showed his sympathy. He is seldom ungenerous in his references to

individual Catholics, however mistaken in his sight their opinions may have been. With Wolsey and Warham, Fisher and More, even with Gardiner and Bonner he deals fairly and with some amount of real sympathy. The heroic death of Campian moves him to pity just as much as the death of Latimer; the strenuous labours of Father Parsons to overthrow Elizabeth and Protestantism failed to remove him beyond the pale of Froude's charitable judgment. One English Catholic alone was reserved for the historian's harsh and sometimes petulant criticism. For Cardinal Pole Froude felt the angriest contempt. He was descended from the blood royal, both of England and of Wales. On his father's side he was descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his mother's from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most learned and illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in King Henry's favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the state. He was not without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he had—the favour of his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved, and the kindred who were proud of him, the hope of promotion and of power, his friends, his home, and his country, for conscience' sake. He remained true to the ancient faith in which he was reared. With unerring instinct he foresaw that, once England was severed from the Papacy, it would be impossible for king or parliament to stem the flood of the Reformation. For twenty years he remained an exile on the continent. He returned an old and broken man, to witness the overthrow of his cherished plans. He was repudiated by the Pope whose authority he had sacrificed everything to maintain, and in his old age he suffered the humiliation of being accused of heresy in the court of Rome. He died the same day as Mary died, with the knowledge that all his life's labours and sacrifices were come to naught, and that the dominion of the Roman Church in England was gone for ever. Froude saw none of the pathos or tragedy of Pole's life. To him the cardinal was a renegade, a traitor to his country, a mercenary of the Pope, a foreign potentate, a "hysterical dreamer," who vainly imagined that he was "the champion of heaven, and the destroyer of heresy."

Froude was, above all, an Englishman. His strongest sympathies went out to the "God's Englishmen" of Elizabeth's reign, who broke the power of Rome and Spain, and

who made England supreme in Europe. In his first chapter he describes the qualities of Englishmen with a zest and gusto that drew the comment from Carlyle that "this seems to me exaggerated: what we call John Bullish." He described them as "a sturdy, high-hearted race, sound in body and fierce in spirit which, under the stimulus of those great shins of beef, their common diet, were the wonder of the age." Carlyle's advice when he read this passage in proof was characteristic:—"Modify a little: Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops; Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal." But the passage stood unmodified, in spite of Froude's regard for his master.

How this fierce and turbulent people fought their way to world-wide empire was a problem which Froude thought he was able to solve. It was, in the main, because they broke down the power of the priests, and insisted on the supremacy of state over Church. Therefore all his filial affection, his patriotism, and his ecclesiastical prejudices were arrayed on the same side. If history be an exact science, then Froude can lay no claim to the title of historian. He was a brilliant advocate, a man of letters endowed with a matchless style, writing of matters which interested him deeply, and in the investigation of which he spent twenty years of his life. Froude himself would have been the first to repudiate the idea that history is philosophy teaching by examples, or that an historian has necessarily a greater insight into the problems of the present than any other observant student of affairs. "Gibbon," he once wrote, "believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction."

It is absurd to attack Froude on the ground that he was biassed. No man has ever yet written a living history without being biassed. Thucydides detested the radicalism of Cleon as heartily as Gibbon hated the Christianity of Rome. It was once the fashion of the Oxford school to decry Froude as being unworthy of the name of historian. Stubbs, indeed,

did pay public tribute to Froude's "great work," but he stood almost alone of his school. Freeman for many years pursued and persecuted Froude with a persistent malevolence which happily has no parallel in the story of English scholarship. It is not necessary in this place to do more than refer to that unpleasant episode. Since the publication of the brilliant vindication of Froude in Mr. Herbert Paul's Life, it would be superfluous to go into the details of that unhappy controversy. The only difference between Froude and other historians is that Froude's partisanship is always obvious. He was not more favourable to Henry VIII. than Stubbs was to Thomas à Becket. But Froude openly avowed his preferences and his dislikes. Catholicism was to him "a dying superstition," Protestantism "a living truth." Freeman went further, and charged Froude with having written a history which was not "un livre de bonne joy." It is only necessary to recall the circumstances under which the History was written to dispose of that odious charge. In order to obtain material for his History, Froude spent years of his life in the little Spanish village of Simancas. "I have worked in all," he said in his Apologia, "through nine hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five languages and in different handwritings. I am not rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a passage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability." Few, indeed, have had to encounter such difficulties as met Froude in his exploration of the archives at Simancas. "Often at the end of a page," he wrote many years after, "I have felt as after descending a precipice, and have wondered how I got down. I had to cut my way through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with bundles of dust-coloured despatches, and told to make the best of it. Often have I found the sand glistening on the ink where it had been sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never looked at again since it was read and put away." Of these difficulties not a trace is discoverable in Froude's easy and effortless narrative. When he was approaching the completion of his History, he vowed that his account of the Armada should be as interesting as a novel. He succeeded not only with that portion of his task, but with all the stirring story that he set out to narrate. But the ease

of his style only concealed the real pains which he had taken. Of Freeman's charge Froude has long been honourably acquitted. The Simancas MSS. have since been published in the Rolls Series, and Mr. Martin Hume, in his Introduction, has paid his tribute to the care, accuracy, and good faith of their first transcriber. Long before this testimony could be given, Scottish historians who disagreed with Froude's conclusions on many points,—men such as Skelton and Burton—had been profoundly impressed with the care, skill, and conscientiousness with which Froude handled the mass of tangled materials relating to the history of Scotland.

This does not mean that Froude is free from minor inaccuracies, or that he is innocent of graver faults which flowed from his abundant quality of imagination. He constantly quotes a sentence inaccurately in his text, while it is accurately transcribed in a footnote. He is careless in matters which are important to students of Debrett, as for instance, he indiscriminately describes Lord Howard as Lord William Howard and Lord Howard. But Froude was sometimes guilty of something worse than these trivial "howlers." Lecky exposed, with calm ruthlessness, some of Froude's exaggerations—to call them by no worse name—in his Story of the English in Ireland. When his Erasmus was translated into Dutch, the countrymen of Erasmus accused him of constant, if not deliberate, inaccuracy. Lord Carnarvon once sent Froude to South Africa as an informal special commissioner. When he returned to this country he wrote an article on the South African problem in the Quarterly Review. Sir Bartle Frere, who knew South Africa as few men did, said of it that it was an "essay in which for whole pages a truth expressed in brilliant epigrams alternates with mistakes or misstatements which would scarcely be pardoned in a special war correspondent hurriedly writing against time." So dangerous is the quality of imagination in a writer!

Truth to tell, Froude was a literary man with a fondness for historical investigation, and an artist's passion for the dramatic in life and story. He wrote with a purpose—that purpose being to defend the English Reformation against the attacks of the neo-Catholic-Anglicans, under whose influence he had himself been for a time in his youth. To him, therefore, Henry VIII. was "the majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome." This is not the occasion, nor is the present writer the man, to analyse that complex and masterful

personality. Froude started to defend the English Reformation against the vile charge that it was the outcome of kingly lust. That charge he has finally dispelled. Henry VIII. was not the monster that Lingard painted. He beheaded two queens, but few will be found to assert to-day that either Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard were innocent martyrs. People must agree to differ to the crack of doom as to the justice of Catherine's divorce. It is one of those questions which different men will continue to answer in different ways. But one thing is abundantly clear. If Henry was actuated merely by passion for Anne Boleyn, he would scarcely have waited for years before putting Queen Catherine away. Henry divorced Anne of Cleves, but Anne, who survived the dissolution of her marriage and remained in England for twenty years, made no complaint of her treatment, and she has had no champions either among Catholic or Protestant writers. Her divorce is only remembered as the occasion of the downfall of the greatest statesman of his age, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. But in his eagerness to proclaim the truth, Froude went on to defend a paradox. Once free from the charge of lust,—and compared with Francis of France or Charles V., Henry was a continent man—Henry became to Froude the ideal monarch.

Some one has said that Henry VIII. was the greatest king that ever lived, because he always got his own way. If that be the test, then Henry was indeed "every inch a king." He broke with Rome; he deposed the Pope from his supremacy over England; he dissolved the monasteries; he sent the noblest and wisest in England to the scaffold; he reduced Wales to law and order and gave her a constitution; he married and unmarried as he liked; he disposed of the succession to the throne of England by his will; and his people never murmured. Only once, when the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out, was his throne in any danger, and that insurrection he easily suppressed. He made war with France; he invaded Scotland more than once, and every time with striking success. He played his vigorous part in European politics, and at his death he left his realm inviolate. It is an amazing record, which might well dazzle a writer of Froude's temperament and training. But there are dark shades in the picture, which Froude was content to make little of, if not to ignore. He is fond of contrasting Henry's way with conspirators with that of his

daughter Elizabeth. He sneers at her "tenderness" towards high-born traitors, and never ceases to reproach her with her one act of repression after the Yorkshire rising. But he had not a word to say against the tyrannical murders of Henry VIII. Elizabeth truly boasted that she never punished opinion: Henry sent to the scaffold better men than himself for holding academical opinions contrary to his own. Cardinal Fisher may have been—after the publication of Chappuys's letters it is not possible to deny that he was—technically guilty of treason. But he was a saint and an old man past eighty, and "the earth on the edge of the grave was already crumbling under his feet." The king spared neither age nor worth nor innocence. He had been the familiar friend of More; he had walked through his gardens at Chelsea leaning on his arm; More had been his chancellor; he was still the greatest of his subjects; while frankly admitting that he differed in opinion from the king on the question of the royal supremacy, he promised that he would not try to influence others. Henry was inexorable. He not only condemned him to die a traitor's death,—he added a callous message, which still rouses the indignation of every generous soul, that he should "not use many words on the scaffold." Thomas Cromwell had served him as few ministers have served a king; to him was due—or, at least, he was the capable instrument of—the policy which has given distinction to Henry's reign; but he was delivered over to his enemies when the king's caprice had shifted to another quarter. Even Froude finds it difficult to excuse the execution of More and Cromwell. But, having once made up his mind to make a hero of Henry, he goes on with it bravely to the end. He hides nothing, he excuses nothing, he extenuates nothing. Neither the death of the aged Countess of Salisbury or of the gallant Earl of Surrey, nor the illegal imprisonment of the aged Norfolk, the hero of Flodden, shakes his faith in his hero-king. He even relates, with minute detail, how a few days before the king's death, four poor persons, one of whom was a tailor, were burnt at the stake for denying the Real Presence. But his final comment on it all was: "His personal faults were great, and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far deeper blemishes would be but scars upon the features of a sovereign who in trying times sustained nobly the honour of the English name, and carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its history."

When a young man Froude had been elected Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. This entailed his taking holy orders, though he does not seem to have regularly performed the duties of a clergyman. In 1849 he published his first book, The Nemesis of Faith, now happily forgotten. It raised an immediate commotion. It was denounced as heretical, and the senior tutor of Exeter burnt it during a lecture in the College Hall. Froude resigned his Fellowship, and his connection with the university was severed for thirty-three years. He was one of the first to take advantage of the alteration of the law which enabled a clergyman to resign his orders. In 1892 he went back to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History. "The temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he said, "was too much for me." He died on October 20, 1894, and on his tombstone he is simply described, by his own wish, as Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford.

The writer is indebted for information with regard to Froude's life to Mr. Pollard's article in the Dictionary of National Biography, and to Mr. Herbert Paul's admirable Life of Froude (Pitman).

W. LLEWELYN WILLIAMS.

November 16, 1908.

The following is a list of the published works of J.A. Froude:

Life of St. Neot (Lives of the English Saints, edited by J.H. Newman), 1844; Shadows of the Clouds (Tales), by Zeta (pseud.), 1847; A Sermon (on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached at St. Mary's Church on the Death of the Rev. George May Coleridge, 1847; Article on Spinoza (Oxford and Cambridge Review), 1847; The Nemesis of Faith (Tale), 1849; England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review), 1852; Book of Job (Westminster Review), 1853; Poems of Matthew Arnold (Westminster Review), 1854; Suggestions on the Best Means of Teaching English History (Oxford Essays, etc.), 1855; History of England, 12 vols., 1856-70; The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character, 1865; Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St. Andrews, March 19, 1869, 1869; Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867, 2 vols., series 2-4, 1871-83 (articles from Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, etc.); The Cat's Pilgrimage, 1870; Calvinism: Address at St. Andrews, 1871; The English in Ireland, 3 vols., 1872-74; Bunyan (English Men of Letters), 1878; Cæsar: a Sketch, 1879; Two Lectures on South Africa, 1880; Thomas Carlyle (a history of the first forty years of his life, etc.), 2 vols., 1882; Luther: a Short Biography, 1883; Thomas Carlyle (a history of his life in London, 1834-81), 2 vols., 1884; Oceana, 1886; The English in the West Indies, 1888; Liberty and Property: an Address [1888]; The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, 1889; Lord Beaconsfield (a Biography), 1890; The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, 1891; The Spanish Story of the Armada, 1892; Life and Letters of Erasmus, 1894; English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, 1895; Lectures on the Council of Trent, 1896; My Relations with Carlyle, 1903.

EDITED:—Carlyle's Reminiscences, 1881; Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, 1883.

CONTENTS

HENRY VIII

CHAPTER I

SOCIAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the influence of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves back into a time in which for centuries the European world grew upon a single type, in which the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms of the son's, and the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of his distant ancestors. So absolutely has change become the law of our present condition, that it is identified with energy and moral health; to cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass away from off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it, is to have missed the best object for which we now seem to exist.

It has been, however, with the race of men as it has been with the planet which they inhabit. As we look back over history, we see times of change and progress alternating with other times when life and thought have settled into permanent forms; when mankind, as if by common consent, have ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented with what they possess, have endeavoured to make use of it for purposes of moral cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks through many ages before the Persian war; such was that of the Romans till the world revenged itself upon its conquerors by the introduction among them of the habits of the conquered; and such again became the condition of Europe when the Northern nations grafted the religion and the laws of the Western empire on their own hardy natures, and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political organisation which remained unshaken for a thousand years.

The aspirant after sanctity in the fifteenth century of the

Christian era found a model which he could imitate in detail in the saint of the fifth. The gentleman at the court of Edward IV. or Charles of Burgundy could imagine no nobler type of heroism than he found in the stories of King Arthur's knights. The forms of life had become more elaborate—the surface of it more polished—but the life itself remained essentially the same; it was the development of the same conception of human excellence; just as the last orders of Gothic architecture were the development of the first, from which the idea had worked its way till the force of it was exhausted.

A condition of things differing alike both outwardly and inwardly from that into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is necessarily obscure to us. In the alteration of our own character, we have lost the key which would interpret the characters of our fathers, and the great men even of our own English history before the Reformation seem to us almost like the fossil skeletons of another order of beings. Some broad conclusions as to what they were are at least possible to us, however; and we are able to determine, with tolerable certainty, the social condition of the people of this country, such as it was before the movements of the sixteenth century, and during the process of those movements.

The extent of the population can only be rudely conjectured. A rough census was taken at the time of the Armada, when it was found to be something under five millions; but anterior to this I can find no authority on which I can rely with any sort of confidence. It is my impression, however, from a number of reasons—each in itself insignificant, but which taken together leave little doubt upon my mind—that it had attained that number by a growth so slow as to be scarcely perceptible, and had nearly approached to it many generations before. Simon Fish, in The Supplication of Beggars,[¹] says that the number of households in England in 1531 was 520,000. His calculation is of the most random kind; for he rates the number of parishes at 52,000, with ten households on an average in each parish. A mistake so preposterous respecting the number of parishes shows the great ignorance of educated men upon the subject. The ten households in each parish may, probably (in some parts of the country), have been a correct computation; but this tells us little with respect to the aggregate numbers, for the households were very large—the farmers, and the gentlemen also, usually having all the persons whom

they employed residing under their own roof. Neither from this, therefore, nor from any other positive statement which I have seen, can I gather any conclusion that may be depended upon. But when we remember the exceeding slowness with which the population multiplied in a time in which we can accurately measure it—that is to say, from 1588 to the opening of the last century—under circumstances in every way more favourable to an increase, I think we may assume that the increase was not so great between 1500 and 1588, and that, previous to 1500, it did not more than keep pace with the waste from civil and foreign war. The causes, indeed, were wholly wanting which lead to a rapid growth of numbers. Numbers now increase with the increase of employment and with the facilities which are provided by the modern system of labour for the establishment of independent households. At present, any able-bodied unskilled labourer earns, as soon as he has arrived at man's estate, as large an amount of wages as he will earn at any subsequent time; and having no connection with his employer beyond the receiving the due amount of weekly money from him, and thinking himself as well able to marry as he is likely to be, he takes a wife, and is usually the father of a family before he is thirty. Before the Reformation, not only were early marriages determinately discouraged, but the opportunity for them did not exist. A labourer living in a cottage by himself was a rare exception to the rule; and the work of the field was performed generally, as it now is in the large farms in America and Australia, by servants who lived in the families of the squire or the farmer, and who, while in that position, commonly remained single, and married only when by prudence they had saved a sufficient sum to enable them to enter some other position.

Checked by circumstances of this kind, population would necessarily remain almost stationary, and a tendency to an increase was not of itself regarded by the statesmen of the day as any matter for congratulation or as any evidence of national prosperity. Not an increase of population, which would facilitate production and beat down wages by competition, but the increase of the commonwealth, the sound and healthy maintenance of the population already existing, were the chief objects which the government proposed to itself; and although Henry VIII. carefully nursed his manufactures, there is sufficient proof in the grounds alleged for the measures to which he resorted, that there was little redundancy of occupation.

In a statute, for instance, for the encouragement of the linen manufactures, it is said[²] that—"The King's Highness, calling to his most blessed remembrance the great number of idle people daily increasing throughout this his Realm, supposeth that one great cause thereof is by the continued bringing into the same the great number of wares and merchandise made, and brought out and from, the parts beyond the sea into this his Realm, ready wrought by manual occupation; amongst the which wares one kind of merchandise in great quantity, which is linen cloth of divers sorts made in divers countries beyond the sea, is daily conveyed into this Realm; which great quantity of linen cloth so brought is consumed and spent within the same; by reason whereof not only the said strange countries where the said linen cloth is made, by the policy and industry of making and vending the same are greatly enriched; and a marvellous great number of their people, men, women, and children, are set on work and occupation, and kept from idleness, to the great furtherance and advancement of their commonwealth; but also contrariwise the inhabitants and subjects of this Realm, for lack of like policy and industry, are compelled to buy all or most part of the linen cloth consumed in the same, amounting to inestimable sums of money. And also the people of this Realm, as well men as women, which should and might be set on work, by exercise of like policy and craft of spinning, weaving, and making of cloth, lies now in idleness and otiosity, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, great diminution of the King's people, and extreme ruin, decay, and impoverishment of this Realm. Therefore, for reformation of these things, the King's most Royal Majesty intending, like a most virtuous Prince, to provide remedy in the premises; nothing so much coveting as the increase of the Commonwealth of this his Realm, with also the virtuous exercise of his most loving subjects and people, and to avoid that most abominable sin of idleness out of the Realm, hath, by the advice and consent of his Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, ordained and enacted that every person occupying land for tillage, shall for every sixty acres which he hath under the plough, sow one quarter of an acre in flax or hemp."

This Act was designed immediately to keep the wives and children of the poor in work in their own houses;[³] but it leaves

no doubt that manufactures in England had not of themselves that tendency to self-development which would encourage an enlarging population. The woollen manufactures similarly appear, from the many statutes upon them, to have been vigorous at a fixed level, but to have shown no tendency to rise beyond that level. With a fixed market and a fixed demand, production continued uniform.

A few years subsequent, indeed, to the passing of the Act which I have quoted, a very curious complaint is entered in the statute book, from the surface of which we should gather, that so far from increasing, manufactures had alarmingly declined. The fact mentioned may bear another meaning, and a meaning far more favourable to the state of the country; although, if such a phenomenon were to occur at the present time, it could admit of but one interpretation. In the 18th and 19th of the 32nd of Henry VIII., all the important towns in England, from the Tweed to the Land's End, are stated, one by one, to have fallen into serious decay. Usually when we meet with language of this kind, we suppose it to mean nothing more than an awakening to the consciousness of evils which had long existed, and which had escaped notice only because no one was alive to them. In the present instance, however, the language was too strong and too detailed to allow of this explanation; and the great body of the English towns undoubtedly were declining in wealth and in the number of their inhabitants. "Divers and many beautiful houses of habitation," these statutes say, "built in tyme past within their walls and liberties, now are fallen down and decayed, and at this day remain unre-edified, and do lie as desolate and vacant grounds, many of them nigh adjoining to the High-streets, replenished with much uncleanness and filth, with pits, sellers, and vaults lying open and uncovered, to the great perill and danger of the inhabitants and other the King's subjects passing by the same; and some houses be very weak and feeble, ready to fall down, and therefore dangerous to pass by, to the great decay and hinderance of the said boroughs and towns."[⁴]

At present, the decay of a town implies the decay of the trade

of the town; and the decay of all towns simultaneously would imply a general collapse of the trade of the whole country. Walled towns, however, before the Reformation, existed for other purposes than as the centre points of industry: they existed for the protection of property and life: and although it is not unlikely that the agitation of the Reformation itself did to some degree interrupt the occupation of the people, yet I believe that the true account of the phenomenon which then so much disturbed the parliament, is, that one of their purposes was no longer required; the towns flagged for a time because the country had become secure. The woollen manufacture in Worcestershire was spreading into the open country,[⁵] and, doubtless, in other counties as well; and the "beautiful houses" which had fallen into decay, were those which, in the old times of insecurity, had been occupied by wealthy merchants and tradesmen, who were now enabled, by a strong and settled government, to dispense with the shelter of locked gates and fortified walls, and remove their residences to more convenient situations. It was, in fact, the first symptom of the impending social revolution. Two years before the passing of this Act, the magnificent Hengrave Hall, in Suffolk, had been completed by Sir Thomas Kitson, "mercer of London,"[⁶] and Sir Thomas Kitson was but one of many of the rising merchants who were now able to root themselves on the land by the side of the Norman nobility, first to rival, and then slowly to displace them.

This mighty change, however, was long in silent progress before it began to tell on the institutions of the country. When city burghers bought estates, the law insisted jealously on their accepting with them all the feudal obligations. Attempts to use the land as "a commodity" were, as we shall presently see, angrily repressed; while, again, in the majority of instances, such persons endeavoured, as they do at present, to cover the recent origin of their families by adopting the manners of the nobles, instead of transferring the habits of the towns to the parks and chases of the English counties. The old English organisation maintained its full activity; and the duties of property continued to be for another century more considered than its rights.

Turning, then, to the tenure of land—for if we would understand the condition of the people, it is to this point that our first attention must be directed—we find that through the many

complicated varieties of it there was one broad principle which bore equally upon every class, that the land of England must provide for the defence of England. The feudal system, though practically modified, was still the organising principle of the nation, and the owner of land was bound to military service for his country whenever occasion required. Further, the land was to be so administered, that the accustomed number of families supported by it should not be diminished, and that the State should suffer no injury from the carelessness or selfishness of the owners.[⁷] Land never was private property in that personal sense of property in which we speak of a thing as our own, with which we may do as we please; and in the administration of estates, as indeed in the administration of all property whatsoever, duty to the State was at all times supposed to override private interest or inclination. Even tradesmen, who took advantage of the fluctuations of the market, were rebuked by parliament for "their greedy and covetous minds," "as more regarding their own singular lucre and profit than the commonweal of the Realm;"[⁸] and although in an altered world, neither industry nor enterprise will thrive except under the stimulus of self-interest, we may admire the confidence which in another age expected every man to prefer the advantage of the community to his own. All land was held upon a strictly military principle. It was the representative of authority, and the holder or the owner took rank in the army of the State according to the nature of his connection with it. It was first broadly divided among the great nobility holding immediately under the crown, who, above and beyond the ownership of their private estates, were the Lords of the Fee throughout their presidency, and possessed in right of it the services of knights and gentlemen who held their manors under them, and who followed their standard in war. Under the lords of manors, again, small freeholds and copyholds were held of various extent, often forty shilling and twenty shilling value, tenanted by peasant occupiers, who thus, on their own land, lived as free Englishmen, maintaining by their own free labour themselves and their families. There was thus a descending scale of owners, each of whom possessed his separate right, which the law guarded and none might violate; yet no one of whom, again, was independent of an authority higher than himself; and the entire body of the English free possessors of the soil was interpenetrated by a coherent organisation which

converted them into a perpetually subsisting army of soldiers. The extent of land which was held by the petty freeholders was very large, and the possession of it was jealously treasured; the private estates of the nobles and gentlemen were either cultivated by their own servants, or let out, as at present, to free tenants; or (in earlier times) were occupied by villains, a class who, without being bondmen, were expected to furnish further services than those of the field, services which were limited by the law, and recognised by an outward ceremony, a solemn oath and promise from the villain to his lord. Villanage, in the reign of Henry VIII., had practically ceased. The name of it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were allowed to live in idleness. Every man was regimented somewhere; and although the peasantry, when at full age, were allowed, under restrictions, their own choice of masters, yet the restrictions both on masters and servants were so severe as to prevent either from taking advantage of the necessities of the other, or from terminating through caprice or levity, or for any insufficient reason, a connection presumed to be permanent.[⁹]

Through all these arrangements a single aim is visible, that every man in England should have his definite place and definite duty assigned to him, and that no human being should be at liberty to lead at his own pleasure an unaccountable existence. The discipline of an army was transferred to the details of social life, and it issued in a chivalrous perception of the meaning of the word duty, and in the old characteristic spirit of English loyalty.

From the regulations with respect to land, a coarser advantage was also derived, of a kind which at the present time will be effectively appreciated. It is a common matter of dispute whether landed estates should be large or small; whether it is better that the land should be divided among small proprietors, cultivating their own ground, or that it should follow its present tendency, and be shared by a limited and constantly diminishing number of wealthy landlords. The advocates for a peasant proprietary tell us truly, that a landed monopoly is dangerous;

that the possession of a spot of ground, though it be but a few acres, is the best security for loyalty, giving the state a pledge for its owner, and creating in the body of the nation a free, vigorous, and manly spirit. The advocates for the large estates tell us, that the masses are too ill-educated to be trusted with independence; that without authority over them, these small proprietors become wasteful, careless, improvident; that the free spirit becomes a democratic and dangerous spirit; and finally, that the resources of the land cannot properly be brought out by men without capital to cultivate it. Either theory is plausible. The advocates of both can support their arguments with an appeal to experience; and the verdict of fact has not as yet been pronounced emphatically.

The problem will be resolved in the future history of this country. It was also nobly and skilfully resolved in the past. The knights and nobles retained the authority and power which was attached to the lordships of the fees. They retained extensive estates in their own hands or in the occupation of their immediate tenants; but the large proportion of the lands was granted out by them to smaller owners, and the expenditure of their own incomes in the wages and maintenance of their vast retinues left but a small margin for indulgence in luxuries. The necessities of their position obliged them to regard their property rather as a revenue to be administered in trust, than as "a fortune" to be expended in indulgence. Before the Reformation, while the differences of social degree were enormous, the differences in habits of life were comparatively slight, and the practice of men in these things was curiously the reverse of our own. Dress, which now scarcely suffices to distinguish the master from his servant, was then the symbol of rank, prescribed by statute to the various orders of society as strictly as the regimental uniform to officers and privates; diet also was prescribed, and with equal strictness; but the diet of the nobleman was ordered down to a level which was then within the reach of the poorest labourer. In 1336, the following law was enacted by the Parliament of Edward III.:[¹⁰] "Whereas, heretofore through the excessive and over-many sorts of costly meats which the people of this Realm have used more than elsewhere, many mischiefs have happened to the people of this Realm—for the great men by these excesses have been sore grieved; and the lesser people, who only endeavour to imitate the great ones in such sort of meats, are much impoverished,

whereby they are not able to aid themselves, nor their liege lord, in time of need, as they ought; and many other evils have happened, as well to their souls as their bodies—our Lord the King, desiring the common profit as well of the great men as the common people of his Realm, and considering the evils, grievances, and mischiefs aforesaid, by the common assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and other nobles of his said Realm, and of the commons of the same Realm, hath ordained and established that no man, of what estate or condition soever he be, shall cause himself to be served, in his house or elsewhere, at dinner, meal, or supper, or at any other time, with more than two courses, and each mess of two sorts of victuals at the utmost, be it of flesh or fish, with the common sorts of pottage, without sauce or any other sorts of victuals. And if any man choose to have sauce for his mess, he may, provided it be not made at great cost; and if fish or flesh be to be mixed therein, it shall be of two sorts only at the utmost, either fish or flesh, and shall stand instead of a mess, except only on the principal feasts of the year, on which days every man may be served with three courses at the utmost, after the manner aforesaid."

Sumptuary laws are among the exploded fallacies which we have outgrown, and we smile at the unwisdom which could expect to regulate private habits and manners by statute. Yet some statutes may be of moral authority when they cannot be actually enforced, and may have been regarded, even at the time at which they were issued, rather as an authoritative declaration of what wise and good men considered to be right, than as laws to which obedience could be compelled. This act, at any rate, witnesses to what was then thought to be right by "the great persons" of the English realm; and when great persons will submit themselves of their free will to regulations which restrict their private indulgence, they are in little danger of disloyalty from those whom fortune has placed below them.

Such is one aspect of these old arrangements; it is unnecessary to say that with these, as with all other institutions created and worked by human beings, the picture admits of being reversed. When by the accident of birth men are placed in a position of authority, no care in their training will prevent it from falling often to singularly unfit persons. The command of a permanent military force was a temptation to ambition, to avarice, or hatred, to the indulgence of private piques and jealousies, to political discontent on private and personal grounds. A combination of three or four of the leading nobles

was sufficient, when an incapable prince sate on the throne, to effect a revolution; and the rival claims of the houses of York and Lancaster to the crown, took the form of a war unequalled in history for its fierce and determined malignancy, the whole nation tearing itself in pieces in a quarrel in which no principle was at stake, and no national object was to be gained. A more terrible misfortune never befel either this or any other country, and it was made possible only in virtue of that loyalty with which the people followed the standard, through good and evil, of their feudal superiors. It is still a question, however, whether the good or the evil of the system predominated; and the answer to such question is the more difficult because we have no criterion by which, in these matters, degrees of good and evil admit of being measured. Arising out of the character of the nation, it reflected this character in all its peculiarities; and there is something truly noble in the coherence of society upon principles of fidelity. Fidelity of man to man is among the rarest excellences of humanity, and we can tolerate large evils which arise out of such a cause. Under the feudal system men were held together by oaths, free acknowledgments, and reciprocal obligations, entered into by all ranks, high and low, binding servants to their masters, as well as nobles to their kings; and in the frequent forms of the language in which the oaths were sworn we cannot choose but see that we have lost something in exchanging these ties for the harsher connecting links of mutual self-interest.

"When a freeman shall do fealty to his lord," the statute says, "he shall hold his right hand upon the book, and shall say thus:—Hear you, my lord, that I shall be to you both faithful and true, and shall owe my faith to you for the land that I hold, and lawfully shall do such customs and services as my duty is to you, at the times assigned, so help me God and all his saints."

"The villain," also, "when he shall do fealty to his lord, shall hold his right hand over the book, and shall say:—Hear you, my lord, that I from this day forth unto you shall be true and faithful, and shall owe you fealty for the land which I hold of you in villanage; and that no evil or damage will I see concerning you, but I will defend and warn you to my power. So help me God and all his saints."[¹¹]

Again, in the distribution of the produce of land, men dealt fairly and justly with each other; and in the material condition of the bulk of the people there is a fair evidence that the system

worked efficiently and well. It worked well for the support of a sturdy high-hearted race, sound in body and fierce in spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which, under the stimulus of those "great shins of beef,"[¹²] their common diet, were the wonder of the age. "What comyn folke in all this world," says a state paper in 1515[¹³] "may compare with the comyns of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" The relative numbers of the French and English armies which fought at Cressy and Agincourt may have been exaggerated, but no allowance for exaggeration will effect the greatness of those exploits; and in stories of authentic actions under Henry VIII., where the accuracy of the account is undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies wherever they could meet them. Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers, vagabond apprentices, from London,[¹⁴] who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered, without pay, without reward, except what they could win for themselves; and when they fell at last they fell only when surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless desperation. Invariably, by friend and enemy alike, the English are described as the fiercest people in all Europe (the English wild beasts, Benvenuto Cellini calls them); and this great physical power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, and to the soldier's training in which every man of them was bred from childhood. The state of the working classes can, however, be more certainly determined by a comparison of their wages with the prices of food. Both were regulated, so far as regulation was

possible, by act of parliament, and we have therefore data of the clearest kind by which to judge. The majority of agricultural labourers lived, as I have said, in the houses of their employers; this, however, was not the case with all, and if we can satisfy ourselves as to the rate at which those among the poor were able to live who had cottages of their own, we may be assured that the rest did not live worse at their masters' tables.

Wheat, the price of which necessarily varied, averaged in the middle of the fourteenth century tenpence the bushel;[¹⁵] barley averaging at the same time three shillings the quarter. With wheat the fluctuation was excessive; a table of its possible variations describes it as ranging from eighteenpence the quarter to twenty shillings; the average, however, being six and eightpence.[¹⁶] When the price was above this sum, the merchants might import to bring it down;[¹⁷] when it was below this price the farmers were allowed to export to the foreign markets.[¹⁸] The same scale, with a scarcely appreciable tendency to rise, continued to hold until the disturbance in the value of the currency. In the twelve years from 1551 to 1562, although once before harvest wheat rose to the extraordinary price of forty-five shillings a quarter, it fell immediately after to five shillings and four.[¹⁹] Six and eightpence continued to be considered in parliament as the average; [²⁰] and on the whole it seems to have been maintained for that time with little variation.[²¹]

Beef and pork were a halfpenny a pound—mutton was three farthings. They were fixed at these prices by the 3rd of the 24th of Hen. VIII. But the act was unpopular both with buyers and with sellers. The old practice had been to sell in the gross, and under that arrangement the rates had been generally

lower. Stow says,[²²] "It was this year enacted that butchers should sell their beef and mutton by weight—beef for a halfpenny the pound, and mutton for three farthings; which being devised for the great commodity of the realm (as it was thought), hath proved far otherwise: for at that time fat oxen were sold for six and twenty shillings and eightpence the piece; fat wethers for three shillings and fourpence the piece; fat calves at a like price; and fat lambs for twelvepence. The butchers of London sold penny pieces of beef for the relief of the poor—every piece two pound and a half, sometimes three pound for a penny; and thirteen and sometimes fourteen of these pieces for twelvepence; mutton eightpence the quarter, and an hundred weight of beef for four shillings and eightpence." The act was repealed in consequence of the complaints against it,[²³] but the prices never fell again to what they had been, although beef sold in the gross could still be had for a halfpenny a pound in 1570.[²⁴] Other articles of food were in the same proportion. The best pig or goose in a country market could be bought for fourpence; a good capon for threepence or fourpence; a chicken for a penny; a hen for twopence.[²⁵]

Strong beer, such as we now buy for eighteenpence a gallon, was then a penny a gallon;[²⁶] and table-beer less than a halfpenny. French and German wines were eightpence the gallon. Spanish and Portuguese wines a shilling. This was the highest price at which the best wines might be sold; and if there was any fault in quality or quantity, the dealers forfeited four times the amount.[²⁷] Rent, another important consideration, cannot be

fixed so accurately, for parliament did not interfere with it. Here, however, we are not without very tolerable information. "My father," says Latimer,[²⁸] "was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the King's Majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles, each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did of the said farm." If "three or four pounds at the uttermost" was the rent of a farm yielding such results, the rent of labourers' cottages is not likely to have been considerable.[²⁹]

Some uncertainty is unavoidable in all calculations of the present nature; yet, after making the utmost allowances for errors, we may conclude from such a table of prices that a penny, in terms of the labourer's necessities, must have been nearly equal in the reign of Henry VIII. to the present shilling. For a penny, at the time of which I write, the labourer could buy as much bread, beef, beer, and wine—he could do as much towards finding lodging for himself and his family—as the labourer of the nineteenth century can for a shilling. I do not see that this admits of question. Turning, then, to the table of wages, it will be easy to ascertain his position. By the 3rd of the 6th of Henry VIII. it was enacted that master carpenters, masons, bricklayers, tylers, plumbers, glaziers, joiners, and other employers of such skilled workmen, should give to each of their journeymen, if no meat or drink was allowed, sixpence a day

for the half year, fivepence a day for the other half; or fivepence-halfpenny for the yearly average. The common labourers were to receive fourpence a day for half the year, for the remaining half, threepence.[³⁰] In the harvest months they were allowed to work by the piece, and might earn considerably more;[³¹] so that, in fact (and this was the rate at which their wages were usually estimated), the day labourer, if in full employment, received on an average fourpence a day for the whole year. Allowing a deduction of one day in a fortnight for a saint's day or a holiday, he received, therefore, steadily and regularly, if well conducted, an equivalent of something near to twenty shillings a week, the wages at present paid in English colonies: and this is far from being a full account of his advantages. Except in rare instances, the agricultural labourer held land in connection with his house, while in most parishes, if not in all, there were large ranges of common and unenclosed forest land, which furnished his fuel to him gratis, where pigs might range, and ducks and geese; where, if he could afford a cow, he was in no danger of being unable to feed it; and so important was this privilege considered, that when the commons began to be largely enclosed, parliament insisted that the working man should not be without

some piece of ground on which he could employ his own and his family's industry.[³²] By the 7th of the 31st of Elizabeth, it was ordered that no cottage should be built for residence without four acres of land at lowest being attached to it for the sole use of the occupants of such cottage.

It will, perhaps, be supposed that such comparative prosperity of labour was the result of the condition of the market in which it was sold, that the demand for labour was large and the supply limited, and that the state of England in the sixteenth century was analogous to that of Australia or Canada at the present time. And so long as we confine our view to the question of wages alone, it is undoubted that legislation was in favour of the employer. The Wages Act of Henry VIII. was unpopular with the labourers, and was held to deprive them of an opportunity of making better terms for themselves.[³³] But we shall fall into extreme error if we translate into the language of modern political economy the social features of a state of things

which in no way correspond to our own. There was this essential difference, that labour was not looked upon as a market commodity; the government (whether wisely or not, I do not presume to determine) attempting to portion out the rights of the various classes of society by the rule, not of economy, but of equity. Statesmen did not care for the accumulation of capital; they desired to see the physical well-being of all classes of the commonwealth maintained at the highest degree which the producing power of the country admitted; and population and production remaining stationary, they were able to do it. This was their object, and they were supported in it by a powerful and efficient majority of the nation. On the one side parliament interfered to protect employers against their labourers; but it was equally determined that employers should not be allowed to abuse their opportunities; and this directly appears from the 4th of the 5th of Elizabeth, by which, on the most trifling appearance of a depreciation in the currency, it was declared that the labouring man could no longer live on the wages assigned to him by the act of Henry; and a sliding scale was instituted by which, for the future, wages should be adjusted to the price of food.[³⁴]

The same conclusion may be gathered also, indirectly, from other acts, interfering imperiously with the rights of property where a disposition showed itself to exercise them selfishly. The city merchants, as I have said, were becoming landowners; and some of them attempted to apply the rules of trade to the management of landed estates. While wages were ruled so high, it answered better as a speculation to convert arable land into pasture; but the law immediately stepped in to prevent a proceeding which it regarded as petty treason to the commonwealth. Self-protection is the first law of life; and the country relying for its defence on an able-bodied population, evenly distributed, ready at any moment to be called into action, either against foreign invasion or civil disturbance, it could not permit the owners of land to pursue for their own benefit a course of action which threatened to weaken its garrisons. It is not often that we are able to test the wisdom of legislation by specific results so clearly as in the present instance. The first attempts of the kind which I have described were made in the Isle of Wight, early in the reign of Henry VII. Lying so

directly exposed to attacks from France, the Isle of Wight was a place which it was peculiarly important to keep in a state of defence, and the following act was therefore the consequence:—

"Forasmuch as it is to the surety of the Realm of England that the Isle of Wight, in the county of Southampton, be well inhabited with English people, for the defence as well of our antient enemies of the Realm of France as of other parties; the which Isle is late decayed of people by reason that many towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made pasture for beasts and cattle, and also many dwelling-places, farms, and farmholds have of late time been used to be taken into one man's hold and hands, that of old time were wont to be in many several persons' holds and hands, and many several households kept in them; and thereby much people multiplied, and the same Isle thereby well inhabited, which now, by the occasion aforesaid, is desolate and not inhabited, but occupied with beasts and cattle, so that if hasty remedy be not provided, that Isle cannot long be kept and defended, but open and ready to the hands of the king's enemies, which God forbid. For remedy hereof, it is ordained and enacted that no manner of person, of what estate, degree, or condition soever, shall take any several farms more than one, whereof the yearly value shall not exceed the sum of ten marks; and if any several leases afore this time have been made to any person or persons of divers and sundry farmholds, whereof the yearly value shall exceed that sum, then the said person or persons shall choose one farmhold at his pleasure, and the remnant of his leases shall be utterly void."[³⁵]

An act, tyrannical in form, was singularly justified by its consequences. The farms were rebuilt, the lands reploughed, the island repeopled; and in 1546, when a French army of sixty thousand men attempted to effect a landing at St. Helen's, they were defeated and driven off by the militia of the island and a few levies transported from Hampshire and the adjoining counties.[³⁶] The money-making spirit, however, lay too deep to be checked so readily. The trading classes were growing rich under the strong rule of the Tudors. Increasing numbers of them were buying or renting land; and the symptoms complained of broke out in the following reign in many parts of

England. They could not choose but break out indeed; for they were the outward marks of a vital change, which was undermining the feudal constitution, and would by and bye revolutionise and destroy it. Such symptoms it was impossible to extinguish; but the government wrestled long and powerfully to hold down the new spirit; and they fought against it successfully, till the old order of things had finished its work, and the time was come for it to depart. By the 1st of the 7th of Henry VIII., the laws of feudal tenure were put in force against the landed traders. Wherever lands were converted from tillage to pasture, the lords of the fee had authority to seize half of all profits until the farm-buildings were reconstructed. If the immediate lord did not do his duty, the lord next above him was to do it; and the evil still increasing, the act, twenty years later, was extended further, and the king had power to seize.[³⁷] Nor was this all. Sheep-farming had become an integral branch of business; and falling into the hands of men who understood each other, it had been made a monopoly, affecting seriously the prices of wool and mutton.[³⁸] Stronger measures were therefore now taken, and the class to which the offenders belonged was especially pointed out by parliament.

"Whereas," says the 13th of the 25th of Henry VIII., "divers and sundry persons of the king's subjects of this Realm, to whom God of his goodness hath disposed great plenty and abundance of moveable substance, now of late, within few years, have daily studied, practised, and invented ways and means how they might accumulate and gather together into few hands, as well great multitude of farms as great plenty of cattle, and in especial, sheep, putting such lands as they can get to pasture and not to tillage; whereby they have not only pulled

down churches and towns and enhanced the old rates of the rents of the possessions of this Realm, or else brought it to such excessive fines that no poor man is able to meddle with it, but also have raised and enhanced the prices of all manner of corn, cattle, wool, pigs, geese, hens, chickens, eggs, and such other commodities, almost double above the prices which hath been accustomed, by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the poor people of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink, and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty, that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other inconveniences, or pitifully die for hunger and cold; and it is thought by the king's humble and loving subjects, that one of the greatest occasions that moveth those greedy and covetous people so to accumulate and keep in their hands such great portions and parts of the lands of this Realm from the occupying of the poor husbandmen, and so to use it in pasture and not in tillage, is the great profit that cometh of sheep which be now come into a few persons' hands, in respect of the whole number of the king's subjects; it is hereby enacted, that no person shall have or keep on lands not their own inheritance more than 2000 sheep; that no person shall occupy more than two farms; and that the 19th of the 4th of Henry VII., and those other acts obliging the lords of the fees to do their duty, shall be re-enacted and enforced." [³⁹]

By these measures the money-making spirit was for a time driven back, and the country resumed its natural course. I am not concerned to defend the economic wisdom of such proceedings; but they prove, I think, conclusively, that the labouring classes owed their advantages not to the condition of the labour market, but to the care of the state; and that when the state relaxed its supervision, or failed to enforce its regulations, the labourers being left to the market chances, sank instantly in the unequal struggle with capital.

The government, however, remained strong enough to hold its ground (except during the discreditable interlude of the

reign of Edward VI.) for the first three quarters of the century; and until that time the working classes of this country remained in a condition more than prosperous. They enjoyed an abundance far beyond what in general falls to the lot of that order in long-settled countries; incomparably beyond what the same class were enjoying at that very time in Germany or France. The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the legislature justifying the general policy by its success: and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the people at a time when, if they had been discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law acknowledged to be their right. The government had no power to compel submission to injustice, as was proved by the fate of an attempt to levy a "benevolence" by force, in 1525. The people resisted with a determination against which the crown commissioners were unable to contend, and the scheme ended with an acknowledgment of fault by Henry, who retired with a good grace from an impossible position. If the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should not have failed to have heard of them when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press those grievances forward. Complaint was loud enough when complaint was just, under the Somerset protectorate. [⁴⁰]

The incomes of the great nobles cannot be determined, for they varied probably as much as they vary now. Under Henry IV. the average income of an earl was estimated at £2000 a year.[⁴¹] Under Henry VIII. the great Duke of Buckingham, the wealthiest English peer, had £6000.[⁴²] And the income of the

Archbishop of Canterbury was rated at the same amount.[⁴³] But the establishments of such men were enormous; their ordinary retinues in time of peace consisting of many hundred persons; and in war, when the duties of a nobleman called him to the field, although in theory his followers were paid by the crown, yet the grants of parliament were on so small a scale that the theory was seldom converted into fact, and a large share of the expenses was paid often out of private purses. The Duke of Norfolk, in the Scotch war of 1523, declared (not complaining of it, but merely as a reason why he should receive support) that he had spent all his private means upon the army; and in the sequel of this history we shall find repeated instances of knights and gentlemen voluntarily ruining themselves in the service of their country. The people, not universally, but generally, were animated by a true spirit of sacrifice; by a true conviction that they were bound to think first of England, and only next of themselves; and unless we can bring ourselves to understand this, we shall never understand what England was under the reigns of the Plantagenets and Tudors. The expenses of the court under Henry VII. were a little over £14,000 a year, out of which were defrayed the whole cost of the king's establishment, the expenses of entertaining foreign ambassadors, the wages and maintenance of the yeomen of the guard, the retinues of servants, and all necessary outlay not incurred for public business. Under Henry VIII., of whose extravagance we have heard so much, and whose court was the most magnificent in the world, these expenses were £19,894 16s. 8d.,[⁴⁴] a small sum when compared with the present cost of the royal establishment, even if we adopt the relative estimate of twelve to one, and suppose it equal to £240,000 a year of our money. But indeed it was not equal to £240,000; for, although the proportion held in articles of common consumption, articles of luxury were very dear indeed.[⁴⁵]

Passing down from the king and his nobles, to the body of the people, we find that the income qualifying a country gentleman to be justice of the peace was £20 a year, [⁴⁶] and if he did his duty, his office was no sinecure. We remember Justice Shallow and his clerk Davy, with his novel theory of magisterial law; and Shallow's broad features have so English a cast about them, that we may believe there were many such, and that the duty was not always very excellently done. But the Justice Shallows were not allowed to repose upon their dignity. The justice of the peace was required not only to take cognisance of open offences, but to keep surveillance over all persons within his district, and over himself in his own turn there was a surveillance no less sharp, and penalties for neglect prompt and peremptory.[⁴⁷] Four times a year he was to make proclamation of his duty, and exhort all persons to complain against him who had occasion.

Twenty pounds a year, and heavy duties to do for it, represented the condition of the squire of the parish.[⁴⁸] By the 2nd of the 2nd of Henry V., "the wages" of a parish priest were limited to £5 6s. 8d., except in cases where there was special licence from the bishop, when they might be raised as high as £6. Priests were probably something better off under Henry VIII., but the statute remained in force, and marks an approach at least to their ordinary salary.[⁴⁹] The priest had enough, being

unmarried, to supply him in comfort with the necessaries of life. The squire had enough to provide moderate abundance for himself and his family. Neither priest nor squire was able to establish any steep difference in outward advantages between himself and the commons among whom he lived.

The habits of all classes were open, free, and liberal. There are two expressions corresponding one to the other, which we frequently meet with in old writings, and which are used as a kind of index, marking whether the condition of things was or

was not what it ought to be. We read of "merry England;"—when England was not merry, things were not going well with it. We hear of "the glory of hospitality," England's pre-eminent

boast,-by the rules of which all tables, from the table of the twenty-shilling freeholder to the table in the baron's hall and abbey refectory, were open at the dinner hour to all comers, without stint or reserve, or question asked:[⁵⁰] to every man, according to his degree, who chose to ask for it there was free fee and free lodging; bread, beef, and beer for his dinner; for his lodging, perhaps, only a mat of rushes in a spare corner of the hall, with a billet of wood for a pillow,[⁵¹] but freely offered and freely taken, the guest probably faring much as his host fared, neither worse nor better. There was little fear of an abuse of such licence, for suspicious characters had no leave to wander at pleasure; and for any man found at large and unable to give a sufficient account of himself, there were the ever-ready parish stocks or town gaol. The "glory of hospitality" lasted far down into Elizabeth's time; and then, as Camden says, "came in great bravery of building, to the marvellous beautifying of the realm, but to the decay" of what he valued more.

In such frank style the people lived, hating three things with all their hearts: idleness, want, and cowardice; and for the rest carrying their hearts high, and having their hands full. The[⁵²] hour of rising, winter and summer, was four o'clock, with breakfast at five, after which the labourers went to work and the gentlemen to business, of which they had no little. In the country every unknown face was challenged and examined—if the account given was insufficient, he was brought before the justice; if the village shopkeeper sold bad wares, if the village cobbler made "unhonest" shoes, if servants and masters quarrelled, all was to be looked to by the justice; there was no fear lest time should hang heavy with him. At twelve he dined; after dinner he went hunting, or to his farm or to what he pleased.[⁵³] It was a life unrefined, perhaps, but coloured with a broad, rosy, English health.

Of the education of noblemen and gentlemen we have contradictory accounts, as might be expected. The universities were well filled, by the sons of yeomen chiefly. The cost of supporting them at the colleges was little, and wealthy men took a pride in helping forward any boys of promise.[⁵⁴] It seems clear also, as the Reformation drew nearer, while the clergy were sinking lower and lower, a marked change for the better became perceptible in a portion at least of the laity. The more old-fashioned of the higher ranks were slow in moving; for as late as the reign of Edward VI.[⁵⁵] there were peers of parliament unable to read; but on the whole, the invention of printing, and the general ferment which was commencing all over the world, had produced marked effects in all classes. Henry VIII. himself spoke four languages, and was well read in theology and history; and the high accomplishments of More and Sir T. Elliott, of Wyatt and Cromwell, were but the extreme expression of a temper which was rapidly spreading, and which gave occasion, among other things to the following reflection in Erasmus. "Oh, strange vicissitudes of human things," exclaims he. "Heretofore the heart of learning was among such as professed religion. Now, while they for the most part give themselves up,

ventri luxui pecuniæque, the love of learning is gone from them to secular princes, the court and the nobility. May we not justly be ashamed of ourselves? The feasts of priests and divines are drowned in wine, are filled with scurrilous jests, sound with intemperate noise and tumult, flow with spiteful slanders and defamation of others; while at princes' tables modest disputations are held concerning things which make for learning and piety."

A letter to Thomas Cromwell from his son's tutor will not be without interest on this subject; Cromwell was likely to have been unusually careful in his children's training, and we need not suppose that all boys were brought up as prudently. Sir Peter Carew, for instance, being a boy at about the same time, and giving trouble at the High School at Exeter, was led home to his father's house at Ottery, coupled between two foxhounds.[⁵⁶] Yet the education of Gregory Cromwell is probably not far above what many young men of the middle and higher ranks were beginning to receive. Henry Dowes was the tutor's name, beyond which fact I know nothing of him. His letter is as follows:—

"After that it pleased your mastership to give me in charge, not only to give diligent attendance upon Master Gregory, but also to instruct him with good letters, honest manners, pastyme of instruments, and such other qualities as should be for him meet and convenient, pleaseth it you to understand that for the accomplishment thereof I have endeavoured myself by all ways possible to excogitate how I might most profit him. In which behalf, through his diligence, the success is such as I trust shall be to your good contentation and pleasure, and to his no small profit. But for cause the summer was spent in the service of the wild gods, [and] it is so much to be regarded after what fashion youth is brought up, in which time that that is learned for the most part will not be wholly forgotten in the older years, I think it my duty to acertain your mastership how he spendeth his time. And first after he hath heard mass he taketh a lecture of a dialogue of Erasmus' Colloquies, called Pietas Puerilis, wherein is described a very picture of one that should be virtuously brought up; and for cause it is so necessary for him, I do not only cause him to read it over, but also to practise the precepts of the same. After this he exerciseth his hand in writing one or two hours, and readeth upon Fabyan's Chronicle as long. The residue of the day he doth spend upon the lute

and virginals. When he rideth, as he doth very oft, I tell him by the way some history of the Romans or the Greeks, which I cause him to rehearse again in a tale. For his recreation he useth to hawk and hunt and shoot in his long bow, which frameth and succeedeth so well with him that he seemeth to be thereunto given by nature."[⁵⁷]

I have spoken of the organisation of the country population, I have now to speak of that of the towns, of the trading classes and manufacturing classes, the regulations respecting which are no less remarkable and no less illustrative of the national character. If the tendency of trade to assume at last a form of mere self-interest be irresistible, if political economy represent the laws to which in the end it is forced to submit itself, the nation spared no efforts, either of art or policy, to defer to the last moment the unwelcome conclusion.

The names and shadows linger about London of certain ancient societies, the members of which may still occasionally be seen in quaint gilt barges pursuing their own difficult way among the swarming steamers; when on certain days, the traditions concerning which are fast dying out of memory, the Fishmongers' Company, the Goldsmiths' Company, the Mercers' Company, make procession down the river for civic feastings at Greenwich or Blackwall. The stately tokens of ancient honour still belong to them, and the remnants of ancient wealth and patronage and power. Their charters may be read by curious antiquaries, and the bills of fare of their ancient entertainments. But for what purpose they were called into being, what there was in these associations of common trades to surround with gilded insignia, and how they came to be possessed of broad lands and church preferments, few people now care to think or to inquire. Trade and traders have no dignity any more in the eyes of any one, except what money lends to them; and these outward symbols scarcely rouse even a passing feeling of curiosity. And yet these companies were once something more than names. They are all which now remain of a vast organisation which once penetrated the entire trading life of England—an organisation set on foot to realise that most necessary, if most difficult, condition of commercial excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother, and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be what they

pretend to be.[⁵⁸] I spoke of the military principle which directed the distribution and the arrangements of land. The analogy will best explain a state of things in which every occupation was treated as the division of an army; regiments being quartered in every town, each with its own self-elected officers, whose duty was to exercise authority over all persons professing the business to which they belonged; who were to see that no person undertook to supply articles which he had not been educated to manufacture; who were to determine the prices at which such articles ought justly to be sold; above all, who were to take care that the common people really bought at shops and stalls what they supposed themselves to be buying; that cloth put up for sale was true cloth, of true texture and full weight: that leather was sound and well tanned; wine pure, measures honest; flour unmixed with devil's dust;—who were generally to look to it that in all contracts between man and man for the supply of man's necessities, what we call honesty of dealing should be truly and faithfully observed.[⁵⁹] An organisation for this purpose did once really exist in England,[⁶⁰] really trying to do the work which it was intended to do, as half the pages of our early statutes witness.

In London, as the metropolis, a central council sate for every branch of trade, and this council was in communication with the Chancellor and the Crown. It was composed of the highest and most respectable members of the profession, and its office was to determine prices, fix wages, arrange the rules of apprenticeship, and discuss all details connected with the business on which legislation might be required. Further, this council received the reports of the searchers—high officers taken from their own body, whose business was to inspect, in company with the lord mayor or some other city dignitary, the shops of the respective traders; to receive complaints, and to examine into them. In each provincial town local councils sate in connection with the municipal authorities, who fulfilled in these places the same duties; and their reports being forwarded to the central body, and considered by them, representations on all necessary matters were then made to the privy council; and by the privy council, if requisite, were submitted to parliament. If these representations were judged to require legislative interference, the statutes which were passed in consequence were returned through the Chancellor to the mayors of the various towns and cities, by whom they were proclaimed as law. No person was allowed to open a trade or to commence a manufacture, either in London or the provinces, unless he had first served his apprenticeship; unless he could prove to the satisfaction of the authorities that he was competent in his craft; and unless he submitted as a matter of course to their supervision. The legislature had undertaken not to let that indispensable task go wholly unattempted, of distributing the various functions of society by the rule of capacity; of compelling every man to do his duty in an honest following of his proper calling, securing to him that he in his turn should not be injured by his neighbour's misdoings.

The state further promising for itself that all able-bodied men should be found in work,[⁶¹] and not allowing any man to work at a business for which he was unfit, insisted as its natural right that children should not be allowed to grow up in idleness, to be returned at mature age upon its hands. Every child, so far as possible, was to be trained up in some business or calling,[⁶²] idleness "being the mother of all sin," and the essential duty of every man being to provide honestly for himself and his family. The educative theory, for such it was, was simple but effective: it was based on the single principle that, next to the knowledge of a man's duty to God, and as a means towards

doing that duty, the first condition of a worthy life was the ability to maintain it in independence. Varieties of inapplicable knowledge might be good, but they were not essential; such knowledge might be left to the leisure of after years, or it might be dispensed with without vital injury. Ability to labour could not be dispensed with, and this, therefore, the state felt it to be its own duty to see provided; so reaching, I cannot but think, the heart of the whole matter. The children of those who could afford the small entrance fees were apprenticed to trades, the rest were apprenticed to agriculture; and if children were found growing up idle, and their fathers or their friends failed to prove that they were able to secure them an ultimate maintenance, the mayors in towns and the magistrates in the country had authority to take possession of such children, and apprentice them as they saw fit, that when they grew up "they might not be driven" by want or incapacity "to dishonest courses."[⁶³]

Such is an outline of the organisation of English society under the Plantagenets and Tudors. A detail of the working of the trade laws would be beyond my present purpose. It is obvious that such laws could be enforced only under circumstances when production and population remained (as I said before) nearly stationary; and it would be madness to attempt to apply them to the changed condition of the present. It would be well if some competent person would make these laws the subject of a special treatise. I will run the risk, however, of wearying the reader with two or three illustrative statutes, which I have chosen, not as being more significant than many others, but as specimens merely of the discipline under which, for centuries, the trade and manufactures of England contrived to move; showing on one side the good which the system effected, on the other the inevitable evils under which it finally sank.

The first which I shall quote concerns simply the sale of specific goods and the means by which tradesmen were prevented from enhancing prices. The Act is the 6th of the 24th of Henry VIII., and concerns the sale of wines, the statute prices of which I have already mentioned.

"Because," says this Act, "that divers merchants inhabiting within the city of London have of late not only presumed to bargain and sell in gross to divers of the king's subjects great quantities of wines of Gascony, Guienne, and French wines, some for five pounds per tonne, some for more and some for less, and so after the rate of excessive prices contrary to the effect

of a good and laudable statute lately made in this present parliament; that is to say, contrary to and above the prices thereof set by the Right Honourable Lord Chancellor, Lord Treasurer, Lord President of the King's most honourable Council, Lord Privy Seal, and the two Chief Justices of either bench, whereby they be fallen into the penalties limited by the said statute; as by due proof made by examination taken is well known—but also having in their hands great abundance of wine, by them acquired and bought to be sold, obstinately and maliciously, since their said attemptate and defaults proved, have refused to bargain and sell to many of the king's subjects any of their said wines remaining and being in their hands; purposing and intending thereby their own singular and unreasonable lucres and profits, to have larger and higher prices of their said wines, to be set according to their insatiable appetites and minds; it is therefore ordained and enacted, by authority of this present parliament, that every merchant now having, or which shall hereafter have, wines to be sold, and refusing to sell or deliver, or not selling and delivering any of the said wines for ready money therefore to be paid, according to the price or prices thereof being set, shall forfeit and lose the value of the wine so required to be bought.... For due execution of which provision, and for the relief of the king's subjects, it shall be lawful to all and singular justices of the peace, mayors, bailiffs, and other head officers in shires, cities, boroughs, towns, etc., at the request of any person to whom the said merchant or merchants have refused to sell, to enter into the cellars and other places where such wines shall lie or be, and to sell and deliver the same wine or wines desired to be bought to the person or persons requiring to buy the same; taking of the buyer of the wine so sold to the use and satisfaction of the proprietor aforesaid, according to the prices determined by the law."

The next which I select is the eleventh of the second and third of Philip and Mary; and falling in the midst of the smoke of the Smithfield fires, and the cruelties of that melancholy time, it shines like a fair gleam of humanity, which will not lose anything of its lustre because the evils against which it contends have in our times, also, furnished matter for sorrow and calamity—calamity which we unhappily have been unable even to attempt to remedy. It is termed "An Act touching Weavers," and runs:

"Forasmuch as the weavers of this realm have, as well at

this present parliament as at divers other times, complained that the rich and wealthy clothiers do in many ways oppress them—some by setting up and keeping in their houses divers looms, and keeping and maintaining them by journeymen and persons unskilful, to the decay of a great number of artificers which were brought up in the said science of weaving, with their families and their households—some by engrossing of looms into their hands and possession, and letting them out at such unreasonable rents, as the poor artificers are not able to maintain themselves, much less maintain their wives, families, and children—some also by giving much less wages and hire for weaving and workmanship than in times past they did, whereby they are enforced utterly to forsake their art and occupation wherein they have been brought up; It is, therefore, for remedy of the premises, and for the avoiding of a great number of inconveniences which may grow if in time it be not foreseen, ordained and enacted by authority of this present parliament, that no person using the feat or mystery of cloth-making, and dwelling out of a city, borough, market-town, or corporate town, shall keep, or retain, or have in his or their houses or possession, any more than one woollen loom at a time; nor shall by any means, directly or indirectly, receive or take any manner of profit, gain, or commodity, by letting or setting any loom, or any house wherein any loom is or shall be used or occupied, which shall be together by him set or let, upon pain of forfeiture for every week that any person shall do the contrary to the tenor and true meaning hereof, twenty shillings."

A provision then follows, limiting weavers living in towns to two looms—the plain intention being to prevent the cloth manufacture from falling into the power of large capitalists employing "hands;" and to enable as many persons as possible to earn all in their own homes their own separate independent living. I suppose that the parliament was aware that by pursuing this policy the cost of production was something increased; that cloth was thus made dearer than it would have been if trade had been left to follow its own course. It considered, however, that the loss was compensated to the nation by retaining its people in the condition not of "hands," but of men; by rendering them independent of masters, who only sought to make their own advantage at the expense of labour; and enabling them to continue to maintain themselves in manly freedom. The weak point of all such provisions did not lie, I think, in the economic aspect of them, but in a far deeper difficulty. The details of

trade legislation, it is obvious, could only be determined by persons professionally conversant with those details; and the indispensable condition of success with such legislation is, that it be conducted under the highest sense of the obligations of honesty. No laws are of any service which are above the working level of public morality; and the deeper they are carried down into life, the larger become the opportunities of evasion. That the system succeeded for centuries is evident from the organisation of the companies remaining so long in its vitality; but the efficiency of this organisation for the maintenance of fair dealing could exist only so long as the companies themselves—their wardens and their other officials, who alone, quisque in suâ arte, were competent to judge what was right and what was wrong—could be trusted, at the same time being interested parties, to give a disinterested judgment. The largeness of the power inevitably committed to the councils was at once a temptation and an opportunity to abuse those powers; and slowly through the statute book we find the traces of the poison as it crept in and in. Already in the 24th of Henry VIII., we meet with complaints in the leather trade of the fraudulent conduct of the searchers, whose duty was to affix their seal upon leather ascertained to be sound, before it was exposed for sale, "which mark or print, for corruption and lucre, is commonly set and put by such as take upon them the search and sealing, as well upon leather insufficiently tanned, as upon leather well tanned, to the great deceit of the buyers thereof." About the same time, the "craft wardens" of the various fellowships, "out of sinister mind and purpose," were levying excessive fees on the admission of apprentices; and when parliament interfered to bring them to order, they "compassed and practised by cautill and subtle means to delude the good and wholesome statutes passed for remedy."[⁶⁴] The old proverb, Quis custodiat custodes, had begun to verify itself, and the symptom was a fatal one. These evils, for the first half of the century, remained within compass; but as we pass on we find them increasing steadily. In the 7th and the 8th of Elizabeth, there are indications of the truck system; and towards her later years, the multiplying statutes and growing complaints and difficulties show plainly that the companies had lost their healthy vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were fast taking themselves away. There were no longer tradesmen to be found in sufficient numbers who were possessed of the necessary

probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with the deep melancholy which in those years settled down on Elizabeth herself.

For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe. In the fabric of habit in which they had so laboriously built for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer.

And now it is all gone—like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world.

The transition out of this old state is what in this book I have undertaken to relate. As yet there were uneasy workings below the surface; but the crust was unbroken, and the nation remained outwardly unchanged as it had been for centuries. I have still some few features to add to my description.

Nothing, I think, proves more surely the mutual confidence which held together the government and the people, than the fact that all classes were armed. Every man, as I have already said, was a soldier; and every man was ready equipped at all times with the arms which corresponded to his rank. By the great statute of Winchester,[⁶⁵] which was repeated and expanded on many occasions in the after reigns, it was enacted, "That every man have harness in his house to keep the peace after the antient assise—that is to say, every man between

fifteen years of age and sixty years shall be assessed and sworn to armour according to the quantity of his lands and goods—that is, to wit, for fifteen pounds lands and forty marks goods, a hauberke, a helmet of iron, a sword, a dagger, and a horse. For ten pounds of lands and twenty marks goods, a hauberke, a helmet, a sword, and a dagger. For five pounds lands, a doublet, a helmet of iron, a sword, and a dagger. For forty shillings lands, a sword, a bow and arrows, and a dagger. And all others that may shall have bows and arrows. Review of armour shall be made every year two times, by two constables for every hundred and franchise thereunto appointed; and the constables shall present, to justices assigned for that purpose, such defaults as they do find."

As the archery was more developed, and the bow became the peculiar weapon of the English, regular practice was ordered, and shooting became at once the drill and the amusement of the people. Every hamlet had its pair of butts; and on Sundays and holidays[⁶⁶] all able-bodied men were required to appear in the field, to employ their leisure hours "as valyant Englishmen ought to do," "utterly leaving the play at the bowls, quoits, dice, kails, and other unthrifty games;" magistrates, mayors, and bailiffs being responsible for their obedience, under penalty, if these officers neglected their duty, of a fine of twenty shillings for each offence. On the same days, the tilt-yard at the Hall or Castle was thrown open, and the young men of rank amused themselves with similar exercises. Fighting, or mock fighting—and the imitation was not unlike the reality—was at once the highest enjoyment and the noblest accomplishment of all ranks in the state; and over that most terrible of human occupations they had flung the enchanted halo of chivalry, decorating it with all the fairest graces, and consecrating it with the most heroic aspirations.

The chivalry, with much else, was often perhaps something ideal. In the wars of the Roses it had turned into mere savage ferocity; and in forty years of carnage the fighting propensities had glutted themselves. A reaction followed, and in the early years of Henry VIII. the statutes were growing obsolete, and the "unlawful games" rising again into favour. The younger nobles, or some among them, were shrinking from the tilt-yard, and were backward on occasions even when required for war. Lord Surrey, when waiting on the Border, expecting the Duke of Albany to invade the northern counties, in 1523, complained

of the growing "slowness" of the young lords "to be at such journeys,"[⁶⁷] and of their "inclination to dancing, carding, and dicing." The people had followed the example, and were falling out of archery practice, exchanging it for similar amusements. Henry VIII., in his earlier days an Englishman after the old type, set himself resolutely to oppose these downward tendencies, and to brace again the slackened sinews of the nation. In his own person he was the best rider, the best lance, and the best archer in England; and while a boy he was dreaming of fresh Agincourts, and even of fresh crusades. In 1511, when he had been king only three years, parliament re-enacted the Winchester statute, with new and remarkable provisions; and twice subsequently in the course of his reign he returned back upon the subject, insisting upon it with increasing stringency. The language of the Act of 1511 is not a little striking. "The King's Highness," so the words run, "calling to his gracious remembrance that by the feats and exercise of the subjects of his realm in shooting in long bows, there had continually grown and been within the same great numbers and multitudes of good archers, which hath not only defended the realm and the subjects thereof against the cruel malice and dangers of their enemies in times heretofore past, but also, with little numbers and puissance in regard of their opposites, have done many notable acts and discomfitures of war against the infidels and others; and furthermore reduced divers regions and countries to their due obeysance, to the great honour, fame, and surety of this realm and subjects, and to the terrible dread and fear of all strange nations, anything to attempt or do to the hurt or damage of them: Yet nevertheless that archery and shooting in long bows is but little used, but daily does minish and decay, and abate more and more; for that much part of the commonalty and poor people of this realm, whereby of old time the great number and substance of archers had grown and multiplied, be not of power nor ability to buy them long bows of yew to exercise shooting in the same, and to sustain the continual charge thereof; and also because, by means and occasions of customable usage of tennis play, bowles, claish and other unlawful games, prohibited by many good and beneficent statutes, much impoverishment hath ensued: Wherefore, the King's Highness, of his great wisdom and providence, and also for zeal to the public weal, surety, and defence of this his realm, and the antient fame in this behalf to be revived, by

the assent of his Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and his Commons in this present parliament assembled, hath enacted and established that the statute of Winchester for archers be put in due execution; and over that, that every man being the king's subject, not lame, decrepit, or maimed, being within the age of sixty years, except spiritual men, justices of the one bench and of the other, justices of the assize, and barons of the exchequer, do use and exercise shooting in long bows, and also do have a bow and arrows ready continually in his house, to use himself in shooting. And that every man having a man child or men children in his house, shall provide for all such, being of the age of seven years and above, and till they shall come to the age of seventeen years, a bow and two shafts, to learn them and bring them up in shooting; and after such young men shall come to the age of seventeen years, every of them shall provide and have a bow and four arrows continually for himself, at his proper costs and charges, or else of the gift and provision of his friends, and shall use the same as afore is rehearsed." Other provisions are added, designed to suppress the games complained of, and to place the bows more within the reach of the poor, by cheapening the prices of them.

The same statute[⁶⁸] (and if this be a proof that it had imperfectly succeeded, it is a proof also of Henry's confidence in the general attachment of his subjects) was re-enacted thirty years later, at the crisis of the Reformation, when the northern counties were fermenting in a half-suppressed rebellion, and the catholics at home and abroad were intriguing to bring about a revolution. In this subsequent edition of it[⁶⁹] some particulars are added which demand notice. In the directions to the villages for the maintaining each "a pair of buttes," it is ordered that no person above the age of twenty-four shall shoot with the light flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards. Up to two hundred and twenty yards, therefore, the heavy war arrow was used, and this is to be taken as the effective range for fighting purposes of the old archery.[⁷⁰]

No measures could have been invented more effective than this vigorous arming to repress the self-seeking tendencies in the mercantile classes which I have mentioned as beginning to show themselves. Capital supported by force may make its own terms with labour; but capital lying between a king on one side resolved to prevent oppression, and a people on the other side in full condition to resist, felt even prudence dictate moderation, and reserved itself for a more convenient season.

Looking, therefore, at the state of England as a whole, I cannot doubt that under Henry the body of the people were prosperous, well-fed, loyal, and contented. In all points of material comfort they were as well off as they had ever been before; better off than they have ever been in later times.

Their amusements, as prescribed by statute, consisted in training themselves as soldiers. In the prohibitions of the statutes we see also what their amusements were inclined to be. But besides "the bowles and the claish," field sports, fishing, shooting, hunting, were the delight of every one, and although the forest laws were terrible, they served only to enhance the excitement by danger. Then, as now, no English peasant could be convinced that there was any moral crime in appropriating the wild game. It was an offence against statute law, but no offence against natural law; and it was rather a trial of skill between the noble who sought to monopolise a right which seemed to be common to all, and those who would succeed, if they could, in securing their own share of it. The Robin Hood ballads reflect the popular feeling and breathe the warm genial spirit of the old greenwood adventurers. If deer-stealing was a sin, it was more than compensated by the risk of the penalty to which those who failed submitted, when no other choice was left. They did not always submit, as the old northern poem shows of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudislee, with its most immoral moral; yet I suppose there was never pedant who could resist the spell

of those ringing lines, or refuse with all his heart to wish the rogues success, and confusion to the honest men.

But the English peasantry had pleasures of less ambiguous propriety, and less likely to mislead our sympathies. The chroniclers have given us many accounts of the masques and plays which were acted in the court, or in the castles of the noblemen. Such pageants were but the most splendid expression of a taste which was national and universal. As in ancient Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens, itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or in the farmhouse kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the drama of the Christian faith. To us, who can measure the effect of such scenes only by the impression which they would now produce upon ourselves, these exhibitions can seem but unspeakably profane; they were not profane when tendered in simplicity, and received as they were given. They were no more profane than those quaint monastic illuminations which formed the germ of Italian art; and as out of the illuminations arose those paintings which remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed, stands alone among mankind. We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No genius can dispense with experience; the aberrations of power, unguided or ill-guided, are ever in proportion to its intensity, and life is not long enough to recover from inevitable mistakes. Noble conceptions already existing, and a noble school of execution which will launch mind and hand at once upon their true courses, are indispensable

to transcendent excellence; and Shakspeare's plays were as much the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of Copernicus.

No great general ever arose out of a nation of cowards; no great statesman or philosopher out of a nation of fools; no great artist out of a nation of materialists; no great dramatist except when the drama was the passion of the people. Acting was the especial amusement of the English, from the palace to the village green. It was the result and expression of their power over themselves, and power over circumstances. They were troubled with no subjective speculations; no social problems vexed them with which they were unable to deal; and in the exuberance of vigour and spirits they were able, in the strict and literal sense of the word, to play with the materials of life. The mystery plays came first; next the popular legends; and then the great figures of English history came out upon the stage, or stories from Greek and Roman writers; or sometimes it was an extemporised allegory. Shakspeare himself has left us many pictures of the village drama. Doubtless he had seen many a Bottom in the old Warwickshire hamlets; many a Sir Nathaniel playing "Alissander," and finding himself "a little o'erparted." He had been with Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, and Flute the bellows-mender, when a boy we will not question, and acted with them, and written their parts for them; had gone up with them in the winter's evenings to the Lucy's Hall before the sad trouble with the deer-stealing; and afterwards, when he came to London and found his way into great society, he had not failed to see Polonius burlesquing Cæsar on the stage, as in his proper person Polonius burlesqued Sir William Cecil. The strolling players in Hamlet might be met at every country wake or festival; it was the direction in which the especial genius of the people delighted to revel. As I desire in this chapter not only to relate what were the habits of the people, but to illustrate them also, within such compass as I can allow myself, I shall transcribe out of Hall[⁷¹] a description of a play which was acted by the boys of St. Paul's School, in 1527, at Greenwich, adding some particulars, not mentioned by Hall, from another source.[⁷²] It is a good instance of the fantastic splendour with which exhibitions of this kind were

got up, and it possesses also a melancholy interest of another kind, as showing how little the wisest among us can foresee our own actions, or assure ourselves that the convictions of to-day will alike be the convictions of to-morrow. The occasion was the despatch of a French embassy to England, when Europe was outraged by the Duke of Bourbon's capture of Rome, when the children of Francis I. were prisoners in Spain, and Henry, with the full energy of his fiery nature, was flinging himself into a quarrel with Charles V. as the champion of the Holy See.

At the conclusion of a magnificent supper "the king led the ambassadors into the great chamber of disguisings; and in the end of the same chamber was a fountain, and on one side was a hawthorne tree, all of silk, with white flowers, and on the other side was a mulberry tree full of fair berries, all of silk. On the top of the hawthorne were the arms of England, compassed with the collar of the order[⁷³] of St. Michael, and in the top of the mulberry tree stood the arms of France within a garter. The fountain was all of white marble, graven and chased; the bases of the same were balls of gold, supported by ramping beasts wound in leaves of gold. In the first work were gargoylles of gold, fiercely faced with spouts running. The second receit of this fountain was environed with winged serpents, all of gold, which griped it; and on the summit of the same was a fair lady, out of whose breasts ran abundantly water of marvellous delicious savour. About this fountain were benches of rosemary, fretted in braydes laid on gold, all the sides set with roses, on branches as they were growing about this fountain. On the benches sate eight fair ladies in strange attire, and so richly apparelled in cloth of gold, embroidered and cut over silver, that I cannot express the cunning workmanship thereof. Then when the king and queen were set, there was played before them, by children, in the Latin tongue, a manner of tragedy, the effect whereof was that the pope was in captivity and the church brought under foot. Whereupon St. Peter appeared and put the cardinal (Wolsey) in authority to bring the pope to his liberty, and to set up the church again. And so the cardinal made intercession with the kings of England and France that they took part together, and by their means the pope was delivered. Then in came the French king's children, and complained to the cardinal how the emperour kept them as hostages, and would not come to reasonable point with their

father, whereupon they desired the cardinal to help for their deliverance; which wrought so with the king his master and the French king that he brought the emperour to a peace, and caused the two young princes to be delivered." So far Hall relates the scene, but there was more in the play than he remembered or cared to notice, and I am able to complete this curious picture of a pageant once really and truly a living spectacle in the old palace at Greenwich, by an inventory of the dresses worn by the boys and a list of the dramatis personæ.

The school-boys of St. Paul's were taken down the river with the master in six boats, at the cost of a shilling a boat—the cost of the dresses and the other expenses amounting in all to sixty-one shillings.

The characters were—

An orator in apparel of cloth of gold.

Religio, Ecclesia, Veritas, like three widows, in garments of silk, and suits of lawn and Cyprus.

Heresy and False Interpretation, like sisters of Bohemia, apparelled in silk of divers colours.

The heretic Luther, like a party friar, in russet damask and black taffety.

Luther's wife, like a frow of Spiers in Almayn, in red silk.

Peter, Paul, and James, in habits of white sarsnet, and three red mantles, and lace of silver and damask, and pelisses of scarlet.

A Cardinal in his apparel.

Two Sergeants in rich apparel.

The Dolphin and his brother in coats of velvet embroidered with gold, and capes of satin bound with velvet.

A Messenger in tinsel satin.

Six men in gowns of grey sarsnet.

Six women in gowns of crimson velvet.

War, in rich cloth of gold and feathers, armed.

Three Almeyns, in apparel all cut and holed in silk.

Lady Peace in lady's apparel white and rich.

Lady Quietness and Dame Tranquillity richly beseen in lady's apparel.

It is a strange world. This was in November, 1527. In November, 1530, but three brief years after, Wolsey lay dying in misery, a disgraced man, at Leicester Abbey; "the Pope's Holiness" was fast becoming in English eyes plain Bishop of Rome, held guilty towards this realm of unnumbered enormities,

and all England was sweeping with immeasurable velocity towards the heretic Luther. So history repeats the lesson to us, not to boast ourselves of the morrow, for we know not what a day may bring forth.

Before I conclude this survey, it remains for me to say something of the position of the poor, and of the measures which were taken for the solution of that most difficult of all problems, the distinguishing the truly deserving from the worthless and the vagabond. The subject is one to which in the progress of this work I shall have more than one occasion to return; but inasmuch as a sentimental opinion prevails that an increase of poverty and the consequent enactment of poor-laws was the result of the suppression of the religious houses, and that adequate relief had been previously furnished by these establishments, it is necessary to say a few words for the removal of an impression which is as near as possible the reverse of the truth. I do not doubt that for many centuries these houses fulfilled honestly the intentions with which they were established; but as early as the reign of Richard II. it was found necessary to provide some other means for the support of the aged and impotent; the monasteries not only having then begun to neglect their duty; but by the appropriation of benefices having actually deprived the parishes of their local and independent means of charity.[⁷⁴] Licences to beg were at that time granted to deserving persons; and it is noticeable that this measure was in a few years followed by the petition to Henry IV. for the secularisation of ecclesiastical property.[⁷⁵] Thus early in our history had the regular clergy forgotten the nature of their mission, and the object for which the administration of the nation's charities had been committed to them. Thus early, while their houses were the nurseries of dishonest mendicancy,[⁷⁶] they had surrendered to lay compassion, those who ought to have been their especial care. I shall unhappily have occasion hereafter to illustrate these matters in detail. I mention them in this place only in order to dissipate at once a foolish dream. At the opening of the sixteenth century, before the suppression of the monasteries had suggested itself in a practical form, pauperism was a state question of great difficulty, and as such I have at present to consider it.

For the able-bodied vagrant, it is well known that the old

English laws had no mercy. When wages are low, and population has outgrown the work which can be provided for it, idleness may be involuntary and innocent; at a time when all industrious men could maintain themselves in comfort and prosperity, "when a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" was really and truly the law of the land, it was presumed that if strong capable men preferred to wander about the country, and live upon the labour of others, mendicancy was not the only crime of which they were likely to be guilty; while idleness itself was justly looked upon as a high offence, and misdemeanour. The penalty of God's laws against idleness, as expressed in the system of nature, was starvation; and it was held intolerable that any man should be allowed to escape a divine judgment by begging under false pretences, and robbing others of their honest earnings.

In a country also the boast of which was its open-handed hospitality, it was necessary to take care that hospitality was not brought to discredit by abuse; and when every door was freely opened to a request for a meal or a night's lodging, there was an imperative duty to keep a strict eye on whatever persons were on the move. We shall therefore be prepared to find "sturdy and valiant beggars" treated with summary justice as criminals of a high order; the right of a government so to treat them being proportioned to the facilities with which the honestly disposed can maintain themselves.

It might have been expected, on the other hand, that when wages were so high, and work so constant, labourers would have been left to themselves to make provision against sickness and old age. To modern ways of thinking on these subjects, there would have seemed no hardship in so leaving them; and their sufferings, if they had suffered, would have appeared but as a deserved retribution. This, however, was not the temper of earlier times. Charity has ever been the especial virtue of Catholic States, and the aged and the impotent were always held to be the legitimate objects of it. Men who had worked hard while they were able to work were treated like decayed soldiers, as the discharged pensionaries of society; they were held entitled to wear out their age (under restrictions) at the expense of others; and so readily did society acquiesce in this aspect of its obligations, that on the failure of the monasteries to do their duty, it was still sufficient to leave such persons to voluntary liberality, and legislation had to interfere only to direct such liberality into its legitimate channels. In the

23rd of Edw. III. cap. 7, a prohibition was issued against giving alms to "valiant beggars," and this proving inadequate, and charity being still given indiscriminately, in the twelfth year of Richard II. the system of licences was introduced, and a pair of stocks was erected by order in every town or village, to "justify" persons begging unpermitted. The monasteries growing more and more careless, the number of paupers continued to multiply, and this method received successive expansions, till at length, when the Reformation was concluded, it terminated, after many changes of form, in the famous Act of Elizabeth. We can thus trace our poor law in the whole course of its growth, and into two stages through which it passed I must enter with some minuteness. The 12th of the 22nd of Henry VIII., and the 25th of the 27th, are so remarkable in their tone, and so rich in their detail, as to furnish a complete exposition of English thought at that time upon the subject; while the second of these two acts, and probably the first also, has a further interest for us, as being the composition of Henry himself, and the most finished which he has left to us.[⁷⁷]

"Whereas," says the former of these two Acts, "in all places throughout this realm of England, vagabonds and beggars have of long time increased, and daily do increase in great and excessive numbers, by the occasion of idleness, mother and root of all vices; whereby hath insurged and sprung, and daily insurgeth and springeth, continual thefts, murders, and other heinous offences and great enormities, to the high displeasure of God, the inquietation and damage of the king's people, and to the marvellous disturbance of the common weal of this realm; and whereas, strait statutes and ordinances have been before this time devised and made, as well by the king our sovereign lord, as also by divers his most noble progenitors, kings of England, for the most necessary and due reformation of the premises; yet that notwithstanding, the said number of vagabonds and beggars be not seen in any part to be diminished, but rather daily augmented and increased into great routs or companies, as evidently and manifestly it doth and may appear: Be it therefore enacted by the king our sovereign lord, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons, in this present parliament assembled, that the justices of the peace of all and singular the shires of England within the limits of their commission, and all other justices of the peace, mayors, sheriffs,

bailiffs, and other officers of every city, borough, or franchise, shall from time to time, as often as need shall require, make diligent search and inquiry of all aged, poor, and impotent persons, which live, or of necessity be compelled to live by alms of the charity of the people; and such search made, the said officers, every of them within the limits of their authorities, shall have power, at their discretions, to enable to beg within such limits as they shall appoint, such of the said impotent persons as they shall think convenient; and to give in commandment to every such impotent beggar (by them enabled) that none of them shall beg without the limits so appointed to them. And further, they shall deliver to every such person so enabled a letter containing the name of that person, witnessing that he is authorised to beg, and the limits within which he is appointed to beg, the same letter to be sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or borough, and subscribed with the name of one of the said justices or officers aforesaid. And if any such impotent person do beg in any other place than within such limits, then the justices of the peace, and all other the king's officers and ministers, shall by their discretions punish all such persons by imprisonment in the stocks, by the space of two days and two nights, giving them only bread and water."

Further, "If any such impotent person be found begging without a licence, at the discretion of the justices of the peace, he shall be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped within the town in which he be found, or within some other town, as it shall seem good. Or if it be not convenient so to punish him, he shall be set in the stocks by the space of three days and three nights."

Such were the restrictions under which impotency was allowed support. Though not in itself treated as an offence, and though its right to maintenance by society was not denied, it was not indulged, as we may see, with unnecessary encouragement. The Act then proceeds to deal with the genuine vagrant.

"And be it further enacted, that if any person or persons, being whole and mighty in body and able to labour, be taken in begging in any part of this realm; and if any man or woman, being whole and mighty in body, having no land, nor master, nor using any lawful merchandry, craft, or mystery whereby he might get his living, be vagrant, and can give none account how he doth lawfully get his living, then it shall, be lawful to the constables and all other king's officers, ministers, and

subjects of every town, parish, and hamlet, to arrest the said vagabonds and idle persons, and bring them to any justice of the peace of the same shire or liberty, or else to the high constable of the hundred; and the justice of the peace, high constable, or other officer, shall cause such idle person so to him brought, to be had to the next market town or other place, and there to be tied to the end of a cart, naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the same town till his body be bloody by reason of such whipping; and after such punishment of whipping had, the person so punished shall be enjoined upon his oath to return forthwith without delay, in the next and straight way, to the place where he was born, or where he last dwelled before the same punishment, by the space of three years; and then put himself to labour like a true man ought to do; and after that done, every such person so punished and ordered shall have a letter, sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, or wapentake, witnessing that he hath been punished according to this estatute, and containing the day and place of his punishment, and the place where unto he is limited to go, and by what time he is limited to come thither: for that within that time, showing the said letter, he may lawfully beg by the way, and otherwise not; and if he do not accomplish the order to him appointed by the said letter, then to be eftsoons taken and whipped; and so often as there be fault found in him, to be whipped till he has his body put to labour for his living, or otherwise truly get his living, so long as he is able to do so."

Then follow the penalties against the justices of the peace, constables, and all officers who neglect to arrest such persons; and a singularly curious catalogue is added of certain forms of "sturdy mendicancy," which, if unspecified, might have been passed over as exempt, but to which Henry had no intention of conceding further licence. It seems as if, in framing the Act, he had Simon Fish's petition before him, and was commencing at last the rough remedy of the cart's-tail, which Fish had dared to recommend for a very obdurate evil.[⁷⁸] The friars of the mendicant orders were tolerated for a few years longer; but

many other spiritual persons may have suffered seriously under the provisions of the present statute.

"Be it further enacted," the Act continues, "that scholars of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, that go about begging, not being authorised under the seal of the said universities, by the commissary, chancellor, or vice-chancellor of the same; and that all and singular shipmen pretending losses of their ships and goods, going about the country begging without sufficient authority, shall be punished and ordered in manner and form as is above rehearsed of strong beggars; and that all proctors and pardoners, and all other idle persons going about in counties or abiding in any town, city, or borough, some of them using divers subtle, crafty, and unlawful games and plays, and some of them feigning themselves to have knowledge in physick, physnamye, and palmistry, or other crafty science, whereby they bear the people in hand that they can tell their destinies, dreams, and fortunes, and such other like fantastical imaginations, to the great deceit of the king's subjects, shall, upon examination had before two justices of the peace, if by provable witness they be found guilty of such deceits, be punished by whipping at two days together, after the manner before rehearsed. And if they eftsoons offend in the same or any like offence, to be scourged two days, and the third day to be put upon the pillory, from nine o'clock till eleven the forenoon of the same day, and to have the right ear cut off; and if they offend the third time, to have like punishment with whipping and the pillory, and to have the other ear cut off."

It would scarcely have been expected that this Act would have failed for want of severity in its penalties; yet five years later, for this and for some other reasons, it was thought desirable to expand the provisions of it, enhancing the penalties at the same time to a degree which has given a bloody name in the history of English law to the statutes of Henry VIII. Of this expanded statute[⁷⁹] we have positive evidence, as I said, that Henry was himself the author. The merit of it, or the guilt of it—if guilt there be—originated with him alone. The early clauses contain practical amendments of an undoubtedly salutary kind. The Act of 1531 had been defective in that no specified means had been assigned for finding vagrants in labour, which, with men of broken character, was not immediately easy. The smaller monasteries having been suppressed in the interval, and sufficient funds being thus placed

at the disposal of the government, public works[⁸⁰] were set on foot throughout the kingdom, and this difficulty was obviated.

Another important alteration was a restriction upon private charity. Private persons were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to give money to beggars, whether deserving or undeserving. The poor of each parish might call at houses within the boundaries for broken meats; but this was the limit of personal almsgiving; and the money which men might be disposed to offer was to be collected by the churchwardens on Sundays and holidays in the churches. The parish priest was to keep an account of receipts and of expenditure, and relief was administered with some approach to modern formalities. A further excellent but severe enactment empowered the parish officers to take up all idle children above the age of five years, "and appoint them to masters of husbandry or other craft or labour to be taught;" and if any child should refuse the service to which he was appointed, or run away "without cause reasonable being shown for it," he might be publicly whipped with rods, at the discretion of the justice of the peace before whom he was brought.

So far, no complaint can be urged against these provisions: they display only that severe but true humanity, which, in offering fair and liberal maintenance for all who will consent to be honest, insists, not unjustly, that its offer shall be accepted, and that the resources of charity shall not be trifled away. On the clause, however, which gave to the Act its especial and distinguishing character, there will be large difference of opinion. "The sturdy vagabond," who by the earlier statute was condemned on his second offence to lose the whole or a part of his right ear, was condemned by the amended Act, if found a third time offending, with the mark upon him of his mutilation, "to suffer pains and execution of death, as a felon and as an enemy of the commonwealth." So the letter stands. For an able-bodied man to be caught a third time begging was held a crime deserving death, and the sentence was intended, on fit occasions, to be executed. The poor man's advantages, which I have estimated at so high a rate, were not purchased without drawbacks. He might not change his master at his will, or wander from place to place. He might not keep his children

at his home unless he could answer for their time. If out of employment, preferring to be idle, he might be demanded for work by any master of the "craft" to which he belonged, and compelled to work whether he would or no. If caught begging once, being neither aged nor infirm, he was whipped at the cart's tail. If caught a second time, his ear was slit, or bored through with a hot iron. If caught a third time, being thereby proved to be of no use upon this earth, but to live upon it only to his own hurt and to that of others, he suffered death as a felon. So the law of England remained for sixty years. First drawn by Henry, it continued unrepealed through the reigns of Edward and of Mary, subsisting, therefore, with the deliberate approval of both the great parties between whom the country was divided. Reconsidered under Elizabeth, the same law was again formally passed; and it was, therefore, the expressed conviction of the English nation, that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the commonwealth, to be healed by wholesome discipline if the gangrene was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.[⁸¹]

A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy. The state of the country was critical; and the danger from questionable persons traversing it unexamined and uncontrolled was greater than at ordinary times. But in point of justice, as well as of prudence, it harmonised with the iron temper of the age, and it answered well for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in whose hearts lay an intense hatred of rascality, and among whom no one need have lapsed into evil courses except by deliberate preference for them. The moral substance of the English must have been strong indeed when it admitted of such hardy treatment; but on the whole, the people were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if wisdom may be tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes.

The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael Angelo; the Spaniards who were the contemporaries

of Cortez; the Germans who shook off the pope at the call of Luther; and the splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met them as the English met them. The English alone never lost their self-possession; and if they owed something to fortune in their escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady purpose of their rulers.

To conclude this chapter then.

In the brief review of the system under which England was governed, we have seen a state of things in which the principles of political economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right and wrong; and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has become too large, employment has become too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of external control; while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the one motive principle is certain to ensue, and when it ensues is absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called ordinances of nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty to his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of action than the advantages which he may gain in an enemy's market; so it is not uncheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in a normal condition of militancy against social injustice; when the government was enabled by happy circumstances to pursue into detail a single and serious aim at the well-being—well-being in its widest sense—of all members of the commonwealth. The world, indeed, was not made particularly pleasant. Of liberty, in the modern sense of the word, of the supposed right of every man "to do what he will with his own" or with himself, there was no idea. To the question, if ever it was asked, May I not do what I will with my own? there was the brief answer, No man may do what is wrong, either with that which is his own or with that which is another's. Workmen were not allowed to take advantage of the scantiness of the labour market to exact extravagant wages. Capitalists were not allowed to drive the labourers from their holdings, and destroy their healthy independence.

The antagonism of interests was absorbed into a relation of which equity was something more than the theoretic principle, and employers and employed were alike amenable to a law which both were compelled to obey. The working man of modern times has bought the extension of his liberty at the price of his material comfort. The higher classes have gained in luxury what they have lost in power. It is not for the historian to balance advantages. His duty is with the facts.

CHAPTER II

THE LAST YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF WOLSEY

Times were changed in England since the second Henry walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the monks flogged him on the pavement in the Chapter-house, doing penance for Becket's murder. The clergy had won the battle in the twelfth century because they deserved to win it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt the meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their authority was exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of the crown; and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to stoop before them. The victory was great; but, like many victories, it was fatal to the conquerors. It filled them full with the vanity of power; they forgot their duties in their privileges; and when, a century later, the conflict recommenced, the altering issue proved the altering nature of the conditions under which it was fought. The laity were sustained in vigour by the practical obligations of life; the clergy sunk under the influence of a waning religion, the administration of the forms of which had become their sole occupation; and as character forsook them, the Mortmain Act,[⁸²] the Acts of Premunire, and the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors mark the successive defeats that drove them back from the high post of command which character alone had earned for them. If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve. Its worst abuses would have then terminated, and the reformation of

doctrine in the sixteenth century would have been left to fight its independent way unsupported by the moral corruption of the church from which it received its most powerful impetus. The nation was ready for sweeping remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the pope, as the language of the Statutes of Provisors[⁸³] conclusively proves, and they were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the religious houses—a complete measure of secularisation being then, as I have already said,[⁸⁴] the expressed desire of the House of Commons.[⁸⁵] With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed. It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners might be changed together.

The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion. It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution effected by Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church's favour; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the church, determined to conciliate it. He confirmed the Statutes of Provisors,[⁸⁶] but he allowed them to sink into disuse. He forbade the further mooting of the confiscation project; and to him is due the first permission of the bishops to send heretics to the stake.[⁸⁷] If English tradition is to be trusted, the clergy still felt insecure; and the French wars of Henry V. are said to have been undertaken, as we all know from Shakspeare, at the persuasion of Archbishop Chichele, who desired to distract his attention from reverting to dangerous subjects. Whether this be true or not, no prince of the house of Lancaster betrayed a wish to renew the quarrel with the church. The battle of Agincourt, the conquest and re-conquest of France, called off the attention of the people; while the rise of the Lollards, and the intrusion of speculative questions, the agitation of which has ever been the chief aversion of English statesmen, contributed to change the current; and the reforming spirit must have lulled before the outbreak of the wars of the Roses, or one of the two parties in so desperate

a struggle would have scarcely failed to have availed themselves of it. Edward IV. is said to have been lenient towards heresy; but his toleration, if it was more than imaginary, was tacit only; he never ventured to avow it. It is more likely that in the inveterate frenzy of those years men had no leisure to remember that heresy existed.

The clergy were thus left undisturbed to go their own course to its natural end. The storm had passed over them without breaking; and they did not dream that it would again gather. The immunity which they enjoyed from the general sufferings of the civil war contributed to deceive them; and without anxiety for the consequences, and forgetting the significant warning which they had received, they sank steadily into that condition which is inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men without faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet condemned to celibacy, and cut off from the common duties and common pleasures of ordinary life. On the return of a settled government, they were startled for a moment in their security; the conduct of some among them had become so unbearable, that even Henry VII., who inherited the Lancastrian sympathies, was compelled to notice it; and the following brief act was passed by his first parliament, proving by the very terms in which it is couched the existing nature of church discipline. "For the more sure and likely reformation," it runs, "of priests, clerks, and religious men, culpable, or by their demerits openly noised of incontinent living in their bodies, contrary to their order, be it enacted, ordained, and established, that it be lawful to all archbishops and bishops, and other ordinaries having episcopal jurisdiction, to punish and chastise such religious men, being within the bounds of their jurisdiction, as shall be convict before them, by lawful proof, of adultery, fornication, incest, or other fleshly incontinency, by committing them to ward and prison, there to remain for such time as shall be thought convenient for the quality of their trespasses."[⁸⁸]

Previous to the passing of this act, therefore, the bishops, who had power to arrest laymen on suspicion of heresy, and detain them in prison untried,[⁸⁹] had no power to imprison priests, even though convicted of adultery or incest. The legislature were

supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cardinal Morton procured authority from the pope to visit the religious houses, the abominations of which had become notorious;[⁹⁰] and in a provincial synod held on the 24th of February, 1486, he laid the condition of the secular clergy before the assembled prelates. Many priests, it was stated, spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging at taverns, in the dissolute enjoyment of the world. They wore their hair long like laymen; they were to be seen lounging in the streets with cloak and doublet, sword and dagger. By the scandal of their lives they imperilled the stability of their order.[⁹¹] A number of the worst offenders, in London especially, were summoned before the synod and admonished;[⁹²] certain of the more zealous among the learned (complures docti) who had preached against clerical abuses were advised to be more cautious, for the avoiding of scandal;[⁹³] but the archbishop, taking the duty upon himself, sent round a circular among the clergy of his province, exhorting them to general amendment.[⁹⁴]

Yet this little cloud again disappeared. Henry VII. sat too insecurely on his throne to venture on a resolute reform, even if his feelings had inclined him towards it, which they did not. Morton durst not resolutely grapple with the evil. He rebuked and remonstrated; but punishment would have caused a public scandal. He would not invite the inspection of the laity into a disease which, without their assistance, he had not the strength to encounter; and his incipient reformation died away ineffectually in words. The church, to outward appearance, stood more securely than ever. The obnoxious statutes of the Plantagenets were in abeyance, their very existence, as it seemed, was forgotten; and Thomas à Becket never desired more absolute independence for the ecclesiastical order than Archbishop Warham found established when he succeeded to the primacy. He, too, ventured to repeat the experiment of his predecessor. In 1511 he attempted a second visitation of the monasteries, and again exhorted a reform; but his efforts were even slighter than Morton's, and in their results equally without fruit. The maintenance of his order in its political supremacy was of greater moment to him than its moral purity: a decent veil was cast over the clerical infirmities, and their vices were forgotten as soon as they ceased to be proclaimed.[⁹⁵] Henry VIII., a mere boy on his accession, was borne away with the prevailing stream; and trained from his childhood by theologians, he entered upon his reign saturated with theological prepossessions. The intensity of his nature recognising no half measures, he was prepared to make them the law of his life; and so zealous was he, that it seemed as if the church had found in him a new Alfred or a Charlemagne. Unfortunately for the church, institutions may be restored in theory; but theory, be it never so perfect, will not give them back their life; and Henry discovered, at length, that the church of the sixteenth century as little resembled the church of the eleventh, as Leo X. resembled Hildebrand, or Warham resembled St. Anselm.

If, however, there were no longer saints among the clergy, there could still arise among them a remarkable man; and in Cardinal Wolsey the king found an adviser who was able to retain him longer than would otherwise have been possible in the course which he had entered upon; who, holding a middle place between an English statesman and a catholic of the old order, was essentially a transition minister; and who was qualified, above all men then living, by a combination of talent,

honesty, and arrogance, to open questions which could not again be closed when they had escaped the grasp of their originator. Under Wolsey's influence Henry made war with Louis of France, in the pope's quarrel, entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English protestants. But Wolsey could not blind himself to the true condition of the church. He was too wise to be deceived with outward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, in Europe and at home, the alternative of ruin or amendment; and therefore he familiarised Henry with the sense that a reformation was inevitable, and dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the church itself inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay.

His intended measures were approaching maturity, when all Europe was startled by the news that Rome had been stormed by the Imperial army, that the pope was imprisoned, the churches pillaged, the cardinals insulted, and all holiest things polluted and profaned. A spectator, judging only by outward symptoms, would have seen at that strange crisis in Charles V. the worst patron of heresy, and the most dangerous enemy of the Holy See; while the indignation with which the news of these outrages was received at the English court, would have taught him to look on Henry as the one sovereign in Europe on whom that See might calculate most surely for support in its hour of danger. If he could have pierced below the surface, he would have found that the pope's best friend was the prince who held him prisoner; that Henry was but doubtfully acquiescing in the policy of an unpopular minister; and that the English nation would have looked on with stoical resignation if pope and papacy had been wrecked together. They were not inclined to heresy; but the ecclesiastical system was not the catholic faith; and this system, ruined by prosperity, was fast pressing its excesses to the extreme limit, beyond which it could not be endured. Wolsey talked of reformation, but delayed its coming; and in the mean time, the persons to be reformed showed no fear that it would come at all. The monasteries grew worse and worse. The people were taught only what they could teach themselves. The consistory courts became more oppressive. Pluralities multiplied, and non-residence and profligacy. Favoured parish clergy held as many as eight benefices.[⁹⁶] Bishops accumulated sees, and, unable to

attend to all, attended to none. Wolsey himself, the church reformer (so little did he really know what a reformation meant), was at once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, of Bath, and of Durham, and Abbot of St. Alban's. In Latimer's opinion, even twenty years later, and after no little reform in such matters, there was but one bishop in all England who was ever at his work and ever in his diocese. "I would ask a strange question," he said, in an audacious sermon at Paul's Cross, "Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing of his office?[⁹⁷] I can tell, for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the others, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. Among all the pack of them that have cure, the devil shall go for my money, for he applieth his business. Therefore, ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil to be diligent in your office. If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil."[⁹⁸]

Under such circumstances, we need not be surprised to find the clergy sunk low in the respect of the English people. Sternly intolerant of each other's faults, the laity were not likely to be

indulgent to the vices of men who ought to have set an example of purity; and from time to time, during the first quarter of the century, there were explosions of temper which might have served as a warning if any sense or judgment had been left to profit by it.

In 1514 a London merchant was committed to the Lollards' Tower for refusing to submit to an unjust exaction of mortuary;[⁹⁹] and a few days after was found dead in his cell. An inquest was held upon the body, when a verdict of wilful murder was returned against the chancellor of the Bishop of London; and so intense was the feeling of the city, that the bishop applied to Wolsey for a special jury to be chosen on the trial. "For assured I am," he said, "that if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favorem hæreticæ pravitatis, that they will cast and condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel."[¹⁰⁰] Fish's famous pamphlet also shows the spirit which was seething; and though we may make some allowance for angry rhetoric, his words have the clear ring of honesty in them; and he spoke of what he had seen and knew. The monks, he tells the king, "be they that have made a hundred thousand idle dissolute women in your realm, who would have gotten their living honestly in the sweat of their faces had not their superfluous riches allured them to lust and idleness. These be they that when they have drawn men's wives to such incontinency, spend away their husbands' goods, make the women to run away from their husbands, bringing both man, wife, and children to idleness, theft, and beggary. Yea, who is able to number the great broad bottomless ocean sea full of evils that this mischievous generation may bring upon us if unpunished?"[¹⁰¹]

Copies of this book were strewed about the London streets; Wolsey issued a prohibition against it, with the effect which such prohibitions usually have. Means were found to bring it under the eyes of Henry himself; and the manner in which it was received by him is full of significance, and betrays that the facts of the age were already telling on his understanding. He was always easy of access and easy of manner; and the story,

although it rests on Foxe's authority, has internal marks of authenticity.

"One Master Edmund Moddis, being with the king in talk of religion, and of the new books that were come from beyond the seas, said that if it might please his Highness to pardon him, and such as he would bring to his Grace, he should see such a book as it was a marvel to hear of. The king demanded who they were? He said 'Two of your merchants—George Elliot and George Robinson.' The king appointed a time to speak with them. When they came before his presence in a privy closet, he demanded what they had to say or to shew him. One of them said that there was a book come to their hands which they had there to shew his Grace. When he saw it he demanded if any of them could read it. 'Yea,' said George Elliot, 'if it please your Grace to hear it.' 'I thought so,' said the king; 'if need were, thou couldst say it without book.'

"The whole book being read out, the king made a long pause, and then said, 'If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and should begin at the lower part, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head.' Then he took the book, and put it in his desk, and commanded them, on their allegiance, that they should not tell any man that he had seen it."[¹⁰²]

Symptoms such as these boded ill for a self-reform of the church, and it was further imperilled by the difficulty which it is not easy to believe that Wolsey had forgotten. No measures would be of efficacy which spared the religious houses, and they would be equally useless unless the bishops, as well as the inferior clergy, were comprehended in the scheme of amendment. But neither with monks nor bishops could Wolsey interfere except by a commission from the pope, and the laws were unrepealed which forbade English subjects, under the severest penalties, to accept or exercise within the realm an authority which they had received from the Holy See. Morton had gone beyond the limits of the statute of provisors in receiving powers from Pope Innocent to visit the monasteries. But Morton had stopped short with inquiry and admonition. Wolsey, who was in earnest with the work, had desired and obtained a full commission as legate, but he could only make use of it at his peril. The statute slumbered, but it still existed.[¹⁰³]

He was exposing not himself only, but all persons, lay and clerical, who might recognise his legacy to a Premunire; and he knew well that Henry's connivance, or even expressed permission, could not avail him if his conduct was challenged. He could not venture to appeal to parliament. Parliament was the last authority whose jurisdiction a churchman would acknowledge in the concerns of the clergy; and his project must sooner or later have sunk, like those of his two predecessors, under its own internal difficulties, even if the accident had not arisen which brought the dispute to a special issue in its most vital point, and which, fostered by Wolsey for his own purposes, precipitated his ruin.

It is never more difficult to judge equitably the actions of public men than when private as well as general motives have been allowed to influence them, or when their actions may admit of being represented as resulting from personal inclination, as well as from national policy. In life, as we actually experience it, motives slide one into the other, and the most careful analysis will fail adequately to sift them. In history, from the effort to make our conceptions distinct, we pronounce upon these intricate matters with unhesitating certainty, and we lose sight of truth in the desire to make it truer than itself. The difficulty is further complicated by the different points of view which are chosen by contemporaries and by posterity. Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell most on those which approach nearest to themselves: contemporaries whose interests are at stake overlook what is personal in consideration of what is to them of broader moment; posterity, unable to realise political embarrassments which have ceased to concern them, concentrate their attention on such features of the story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to the private and personal passions of the men and women whose character they are considering.

These natural, and to some extent inevitable tendencies, explain the difference with which the divorce between Henry VIII. and Catherine of Arragon has been regarded by the English nation in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. In the former, not only did the parliament profess to desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary[¹⁰⁴] that "all indifferent and discreet persons" judged that it was right

and necessary. In the latter, perhaps, there is not one of ourselves who has not been taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth, she is an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle appetite. The story is a long and painful one, and on its personal side need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself into the question, and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been at stake beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his queen, the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of England would have coloured the entire complexion of the Reformation.

The succession to the throne, although determined in theory by the ordinary law of primogeniture, was nevertheless, subject to repeated arbitrary changes. The uncertainty of the rule was acknowledged and deplored by the parliament,[¹⁰⁵] and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity of sentiment, compelled the observance. An opinion prevailed—not, I believe, traceable to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force of statute in the prejudices of the nation—that no stranger born out of the realm could inherit.[¹⁰⁶] Although the descent in the female line was not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the throne.[¹⁰⁷] Even Henry VII. refused to strengthen his title by advancing the claims of his wife: and the uncertainty of the laws of marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Romish canon law, which affected the legitimacy of children,[¹⁰⁸] furnished, in connection

with the further ambiguities of clerical dispensations, perpetual pretexts, whenever pretexts were needed, for a breach of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the character of the nation remained essentially military, it could as little tolerate an incapable king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with an inefficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the title, when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward II., a Richard II., or a Henry VI., the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a statute,[¹⁰⁹] as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.[¹¹⁰] So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its character in blood in the private records of every English family, having been the long struggle of the preceding century, from which the nation was still suffering, and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it had endured. It had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be searched in vain for any parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so unmeaning.

This very unmeaning character of the dispute increased the difficulty of ending it. In wars of conquest or of principle, when something definite is at stake, the victory is either won, or it is lost; the conduct of individual men, at all events, is overruled by considerations external to themselves which admit of being weighed and calculated. In a war of succession, where the great families were divided in their allegiance, and supported the rival claimants in evenly balanced numbers, the inveteracy of the conflict increased with its duration, and propagated itself from generation to generation. Every family

was in blood feud with its neighbour; and children, as they grew to manhood, inherited the duty of revenging their fathers' deaths.

No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of York and the battle of Bosworth; and experience too truly convinced Henry VII. that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because there was no will to continue it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon his mind of the constant dread of an explosion, can we excuse or understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the Earl of Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present an act of arbitrary or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty.

Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been without their effects. The country had collected itself; the feuds of the families had been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience, had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better fed, better cared for, more justly governed than they had ever been before; and though abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking back from their new vantage-ground, were able to recognise the past in its true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the determining principle of their action.

It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising prospect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood. If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to insurrection; if she did not live, and the king had no other children, a civil war was inevitable. At present such a difficulty would be disposed of by an immediate

and simple reference to the collateral branches of the royal family; the crown would descend with even more facility than the property of an intestate to the next of kin. At that time, if the rule had been recognised, it would only have increased the difficulty, for the next heir in blood was James of Scotland; and, gravely as statesmen desired the union of the two countries, in the existing mood of the people, the very stones in London streets, it was said,[¹¹¹] would rise up against a king of Scotland who claimed to enter England as sovereign. Even the parliament itself declared in formal language that they would resist any attempt on the part of the Scottish king "to the uttermost of their power."[¹¹²]

As little, however, as the English would have admitted James's claims, would James himself have acknowledged their right to reject them. He would have pleaded the sacred right of inheritance, refusing utterly the imaginary law which disentitled him: he would have pressed his title with all Scotland to back him, and probably with the open support of France. Centuries of humiliation remained unrevenged, which both France and Scotland had endured at English hands. It was not likely that they would waste an opportunity thrust upon them by Providence. The country might, it is true, have encountered this danger, serious as it would have been, if there had been hope that it would itself have agreed to any other choice. England had many times fought successfully against the same odds, and would have cared little for a renewal of the struggle, if united in itself: but the prospect on this side, also, was fatally discouraging. The elements of the old factions were dormant, but still smouldering. Throughout Henry's reign a White Rose agitation had been secretly fermenting; without open success, and without chance of success so long as Henry lived, but formidable in a high degree if opportunity to strike should offer itself. Richard de la Pole, the representative of this party, had been killed at Pavia, but his loss had rather strengthened their cause than weakened it, for by his long exile he was unknown in England; his personal character was without energy; while he made place for the leadership of a far more powerful spirit in the sister of the murdered Earl of Warwick, the Countess of Salisbury, mother of Reginald Pole. This lady had inherited, in no common degree, the fierce nature of the Plantagenets; born to command, she had rallied round her the Courtenays, the Nevilles, and all the powerful kindred of Richard the King

Maker, her grandfather. Her Plantagenet descent was purer than the king's; and if Mary died and Henry left no other issue, half England was likely to declare either for one of her sons, or for the Marquis of Exeter, the grandson of Edward IV.

In 1515, when Giustiniani,[¹¹³] the Venetian ambassador, was at the court, the Dukes of Buckingham, of Suffolk, and of Norfolk, were also mentioned to him as having each of them hopes of the crown. Buckingham, meddling prematurely in the dangerous game, had lost his life for it; but in his death he had strengthened the chance of Norfolk, who had married his daughter. Suffolk was Henry's brother-in-law;[¹¹⁴] chivalrous, popular, and the ablest soldier of his day; and Lady Margaret Lennox, also, daughter of the Queen of Scotland by her second marriage, would not have wanted supporters, and early became an object of intrigue. Indeed, as she had been born in England, it was held in parliament that she stood next in order to the Princess Mary.[¹¹⁵]

Many of these claims were likely to be advanced if Henry died leaving a daughter to succeed him. They would all inevitably be advanced if he died childless; and no great political sagacity was required to foresee the probable fate of the country if such a moment was chosen for a French and Scottish invasion. The very worst disasters might be too surely looked for, and the hope of escape, precarious at the best, hung upon the frail thread of a single life. We may therefore imagine the dismay with which the nation saw this last hope failing them—and failing them even in a manner more dangerous than if it had failed by death; for it did but add another doubt, when already there were too many. In order to detach France from Scotland, and secure, if possible, its support for the claims of the princess, it had been proposed to marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king. The negotiations were conducted through the Bishop of Tarbês,[¹¹⁶] and at the first conference the Bishop raised a question in the name of his government, on the validity of the papal dispensation granted by Julius the Second, to legalise the marriage from which she was sprung. The abortive marriage Scheme perished

in its birth, but the doubt which had been raised could not perish with it. Doubt on such a subject once mooted might not be left unresolved, even if the raising it thus publicly had not itself destroyed the frail chance of an undisputed succession. If the relations of Henry with Queen Catherine had been of a cordial kind, it is possible that he would have been contented with resentment; that he would have refused to reconsider a question which touched his honour and his conscience; and, united with parliament, would have endeavoured to bear down all difficulties with a high hand. This at least he might have himself attempted. Whether the parliament, with so precarious a future before them, would have consented, is less easy to say. Fortunately or unfortunately, the interests of the nation pointed out another road, which Henry had no unwillingness to enter.

On the death of Prince Arthur, five months after his marriage, Henry VII. and the father of the Princess alike desired that the bond between their families thus broken should be re-united; and, as soon as it became clear that Catherine had not been left pregnant (a point which, tacitly at least, she allowed to be considered uncertain at the time of her husband's decease), it was proposed that she should be transferred, with the inheritance of the crown, to the new heir. A dispensation was reluctantly granted by the pope,[¹¹⁷] and reluctantly accepted by the English ministry. The Prince of Wales, who was no more than twelve years old at the time, was under the age at which he could legally sue for such an object; and a portion of the English council, the Archbishop of Canterbury among them, were unsatisfied,[¹¹⁸] both with the marriage itself, and with the adequacy of the forms observed in a matter of so dubious an import. The betrothal took place at the urgency of Ferdinand. In the year following Henry VII. became suddenly ill; Queen Elizabeth died; and superstition working on the previous hesitation, misfortune was construed into an indication of the displeasure of Heaven. The intention was renounced, and the prince, as soon as he had completed his fourteenth year, was invited and required to disown, by a formal act, the obligations contracted in

his name.[¹¹⁹] Again there was a change. The king lived on, the alarm yielded to the temptations of covetousness. Had he restored Catherine to her father he must have restored with her the portion of her dowry which had been already received; he must have relinquished the prospect of the moiety which had yet to be received. The negotiation was renewed. Henry VII. lived to sign the receipts for the first instalment of the second payment;[¹²⁰] and on his death, notwithstanding much general murmuring,[¹²¹] the young Henry, then a boy of eighteen, proceeded to carry out his father's ultimate intentions. The princess-dowager, notwithstanding what had passed, was still on her side willing;—and the difference of age (she was six years older than Henry) seeming of little moment when both were comparatively young, they were married. For many years all went well; opposition was silenced by the success which seemed to have followed, and the original scruples were forgotten. Though the marriage was dictated by political convenience, Henry was faithful, with but one exception, to his wife's bed—no slight honour to him, if he is measured by the average royal standard in such matters; and, if his sons had lived to grow up around his throne, there is no reason to believe that the peace of his married life would have been interrupted, or that, whatever might have been his private feelings, he would have appeared in the world's eye other than acquiescent in his condition.

But his sons had not lived; years passed on, bringing with them premature births, children born dead, or dying after a few days or hours,[¹²²] and the disappointment was intense in proportion to the interests which were at issue. The especial penalty denounced against the marriage with a brother's wife[¹²³] had been all but literally enforced; and the king found himself growing to middle life and his queen passing beyond it with his prayers unheard, and no hope any longer that they might be heard. The disparity of age also was more perceptible as time went by, while Catherine's constitution was affected by her misfortunes, and differences arose on which there is no occasion to dwell in these pages—differences which in themselves reflected no discredit either on the husband or the wife, but which were sufficient to extinguish between two infirm human beings an affection that had rested only upon mutual esteem, but had not assumed the character of love.

The circumstances in which Catherine was placed were of a kind which no sensitive woman could have endured without impatience and mortification; but her conduct, however natural, only widened the breach which personal repugnance and radical opposition of character had already made too wide. So far Henry and she were alike that both had imperious tempers, and both were indomitably obstinate; but Henry was hot and

impetuous, Catherine was cold and self-contained—Henry saw his duty through his wishes; Catherine, in her strong Castilian austerity, measured her steps by the letter of the law; the more her husband withdrew from her, the more she insisted upon her relation to him as his wife; and continued with fixed purpose and immovable countenance[¹²⁴] to share his table and his bed long after she was aware of his dislike for her.

If the validity of so unfortunate a connection had never been questioned, or if no national interests had been dependent on the continuance or the abolition of it, these discomforts were not too great to have been endured in silence. They were not originally occasioned by any latent inclination on the part of the king for another woman. They had arisen to their worst dimensions before he had ever seen Anne Boleyn, and were produced by causes of a wholly independent kind; and even if it had not been so, when we remember the tenor of his early life we need not think that he would have been unequal to the restraint which ordinary persons in similar circumstances are able to impose on their caprices. The legates spoke no more than the truth when they wrote to the pope, saying that "it was mere madness to suppose that the king would act as he was doing merely out of dislike of the queen, or out of inclination, for another person; he was not a man whom harsh manners and an unpleasant disposition (duri mores et injucunda consuetudo) could so far provoke; nor could any sane man believe him to be so infirm of character that sensual allurements would have led him to dissolve a connexion in which he had passed the flower of youth without stain or blemish, and in which he had borne himself in his trial so reverently and honourably."[¹²⁵] I consider this entirely true in a sense which no great knowledge of human nature is required to understand. The king's personal dissatisfaction was great: if this had been all, however, it would have been extinguished or endured; but the interests of the nation, imperilled as they were by the maintenance of the marriage, entitled him to regard his position under another aspect. Even if the marriage in itself had never been questioned, he might justly have desired the dissolution of it; and when he recalled the circumstances under which it was contracted, the hesitation of the council, the reluctance of the pope, the alarms and vacillation of his father, we may readily perceive how scruples of conscience must have arisen in a soil well prepared to receive

them—how the loss of his children must have appeared as a judicial sentence on a violation of the Divine law. The divorce presented itself to him as a moral obligation, when national advantage combined with superstition to encourage what he secretly desired; and if he persuaded himself that those public reasons, without which, in truth and fact, he would not have stirred, were those that alone were influencing him, the self-deceit was of a kind with which the experience of most men will probably have made them too familiar. In those rare cases where inclination coincides with right, we cannot be surprised if mankind should mislead themselves with the belief that the disinterested motives weigh more with them than the personal.

A remarkable and very candid account of Henry's feelings is furnished by himself in one of the many papers of instructions[¹²⁶] which he forwarded to his secretary at Rome. Hypocrisy was not among his faults, and in detailing the arguments which were to be laid before the pope he has exhibited a more complete revelation of what was passing in himself—and indirectly of his own nature in its strength and weakness—than he perhaps imagined while he wrote. The despatch is long and perplexed; the style that of a man who saw his end clearly, and was vexed with the intricate and dishonest trifling with which his way was impeded, and which nevertheless he was struggling to tolerate. The secretary was to say, "that the King's Highness having above all other things his intent and mind ever founded upon such respect unto Almighty God as to a Christian and catholic prince doth appertain, knowing the fragility and uncertainty of all earthly things, and how displeasant unto God, how much dangerous to the soul, how dishonourable and damageable to the world it were to prefer vain and transitory things unto those that be perfect and certain, hath in this cause, doubt, and matter of matrimony, whereupon depend so high and manifold consequences of greatest importance, always cast from his conceit the darkness and blundering confusion of falsity, and specially hath had and put before his eyes the light and shining brightness of truth; upon which foundation as a most sure base for perpetual tranquillity of his conscience his Highness hath expressly resolved and determined with himself to build and establish all his acts, deeds, and cogitations touching this matter; without God did build the house, in vain they laboured that went about to build it; and all actions grounded upon that immovable fundament of truth, must needs therein be firm,

sound, whole, perfect, and worthy of a Christian man; which if truth were put apart, they could not for the same reason be but evil, vain, slipper, uncertain, and in nowise permanent or endurable." He then laboured to urge on the pope the duty of straightforward dealing; and dwelt in words which have a sad interest for us (when we consider the manner in which the subject of them has been dealt with) on the judgment bar, not of God only, but of human posterity, at which his conduct would be ultimately tried.

"The causes of private persons dark and doubtful be sometimes," the king said, "pretermitted and passed over as things more meet at some seasons to be dissimuled than by continual strife and plea to nourish controversies. Yet since all people have their eyes conject upon princes, whose acts and doings not only be observed in the mouths of them that now do live, but also remain in such perpetual memory to our posterity [so that] the evil, if any there be, cannot but appear and come to light, there is no reason for toleration, no place for dissimulation; but [there is reason] more deeply, highly, and profoundly to penetrate and search for the truth, so that the same may vanquish and overcome, and all guilt, craft, and falsehood clearly be extirpate and reject."

I am anticipating the progress of the story in making these quotations; for the main burden of the despatch concerns a forged document which had been introduced by the Roman lawyers to embarrass the process, and of which I shall by-and-bye have to speak directly; but I have desired to illustrate the spirit in which Henry entered upon the general question—assuredly a more calm and rational one than historians have usually represented it to be. In dealing with the obstacle which had been raised, he displayed a most efficient mastery over himself, although he did not conclude without touching the pith of the matter with telling clearness. The secretary was to take some opportunity of speaking to the pope privately; and of warning him, "as of himself," that there was no hope that the king would give way: he was to "say plainly to his Holiness that the king's desire and intent convolare ad secundas nuptias non patitur negativum; and whatsoever should be found of bull, brief, or otherwise, his Highness found his conscience so inquieted, his succession in such danger, and his most royal person in such perplexity for things unknown and not to be spoken, that other remedy there was not but his Grace to come by one way or other, and specially at his hands, if it might be, to the desired

end; and that all concertation to the contrary should be vain and frustrate."

So peremptory a conviction and so determined a purpose were of no sudden growth, and had been probably maturing in his mind for years, when the gangrene was torn open by the Bishop of Tarbês, and accident precipitated his resolution. The momentous consequences involved, and the reluctance to encounter a probable quarrel with the emperor, might have long kept him silent, except for some extraneous casualty; but the tree being thus rudely shaken, the ripe fruit fell. The capture of Rome occurring almost at the same moment, Wolsey caught the opportunity to break the Spanish alliance; and the prospect of a divorce was grasped at by him as a lever by which to throw the weight of English power and influence into the papal scale, to commit Henry definitely to the catholic cause. Like his acceptance of legatine authority, the expedient was a desperate one, and if it failed it was ruinous. The nation at that time was sincerely attached to Spain. The alliance with the house of Burgundy was of old date; the commercial intercourse with Flanders was enormous, Flanders, in fact, absorbing all the English exports; and as many as 15,000 Flemings were settled in London. Charles himself was personally popular; he had been the ally of England in the late French war; and when in his supposed character of leader of the anti-papal party in Europe he allowed a Lutheran army to desecrate Rome, he had won the sympathy of all the latent discontent which was fermenting in the population. France, on the other hand, was as cordially hated as Spain was beloved. A state of war with France was the normal condition of England; and the reconquest of it the universal dream from the cottage to the castle. Henry himself, early in his reign, had shared in this delusive ambition; and but three years before the sack of Rome, when the Duke of Suffolk led an army into Normandy, Wolsey's purposed tardiness in sending reinforcements had alone saved Paris.[¹²⁷]

There could be no doubt, therefore, that a breach with the emperor would in a high degree be unwelcome to the country. The king, and probably such members of the council as were aware of his feelings, shrank from offering an open affront to the Spanish people., and anxious as they were for a settlement of the succession, perhaps trusted that advantage might be taken of some political contingency for a private arrangement; that

Catherine might be induced by Charles himself to retire privately, and sacrifice herself, of her free will, to the interests of the two countries. This, however, is no more than conjecture; I think it probable, because so many English statesmen were in favour at once of the divorce and of the Spanish alliance—two objects which, only on some such hypothesis, were compatible. The fact cannot be ascertained, however, because the divorce itself was not discussed at the council table until Wolsey had induced the king to change his policy by the hope of immediate relief.

Wolsey has revealed to us fully his own objects in a letter to Sir Gregory Cassalis, his agent at Rome. He shared with half Europe in an impression that the emperor's Italian campaigns were designed to further the Reformation; and of this central delusion he formed the keystone of his conduct. "First condoling with his Holiness," he wrote, "on the unhappy position in which, with the college of the most reverend cardinals, he is placed,[¹²⁸] you shall tell him how, day and night, I am revolving by what means or contrivance I may bring comfort to the church of Christ, and raise the fallen state of our most Holy Lord. I care not whit it may cost me, whether of expense or trouble; nay, though I have to shed my blood, or give my life for it, assuredly so long as life remains to me for this I will labour. And how let me mention the great and marvellous effects which have been wrought by my instrumentality on the mind of my most excellent master the king, whom I have persuaded to unite himself with his Holiness in heart and soul. I urged innumerable reasons to induce him to part him from the emperor, to whom he clung with much tenacity. The most effective of them all was the constancy with which I assured him of the good-will and affection which were felt for him by his Holiness, and the certainty that his Holiness would furnish proof of his friendship in conceding his said Majesty's requests, in such form as the church's treasure and the authority of the Vicar of Christ shall permit, or so far as that authority extends or may extend. I have undertaken, moreover, for all these things in their utmost latitude, pledging my salvation, my faith, my honour and soul upon them. I have said that his demands shall be granted amply and fully, without scruple, without room or occasion being left for after-retractation; and the King's Majesty, in consequence, believing on these my solemn asseverations that the Pope's Holiness is really and indeed well inclined towards him, accepting what is spoken by me as spoken by the

legate of the Apostolic See, and therefore, as in the name of his Holiness, has determined to run the risk which I have pressed upon him; he will spare no labour or expense, he will disregard the wishes of his subjects, and the private interest of his Realm, to attach himself cordially and constantly to the Holy See."[¹²⁹]

These were the words of a man who loved England well, but who loved Rome better; and Wolsey has received but scanty justice from catholic writers, since he sacrificed himself for the catholic cause. His scheme was bold and well laid, being weak only in that it was confessedly in contradiction to the instincts and genius of the nation, by which, and by which alone, in the long run, either this or any other country has been successfully governed. And yet he might well be forgiven if he ventured on an unpopular course in the belief that the event would justify him; and that, in uniting with France to support the pope, he was not only consulting the true interest of England, but was doing what England actually desired, although blindly aiming at her object by other means. The French wars, however traditionally popular, were fertile only in glory. The rivalry of the two countries was a splendid folly, wasting the best blood of both countries for an impracticable chimera; and though there was impatience of ecclesiastical misrule, though there was jealousy of foreign interference, and general irritation with the state of the church, yet the mass of the people hated protestantism even worse than they hated the pope, the clergy, and the consistory courts. They believed—and Wolsey was, perhaps, the only leading member of the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not under the same delusion—that it was possible for a national church to separate itself from the unity of Christendom, and at the same time to crush or prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental system could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those mysteries were dispensed should minister in gilded chains. This was the English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the second Henry, and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a thing of words and paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew well that an ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation of doctrine; that plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the priesthood, when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an earthly authority higher than their own.

He was not to be blamed if he took the people at their word; if he believed that, in their doctrinal conservatism, they knew and meant what they were saying: and the reaction which took place under Queen Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried and failed, and the alternative was seen to be absolute between a union with Rome or a forfeiture of catholic orthodoxy, prove after all that he was wiser than in the immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy had succeeded, and if, strengthened by success, he had introduced into the church those reforms which he had promised and desired,[¹³⁰] he would have satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation.

Like other men of genius, Wolsey also combined practical sagacity with an unmeasured power of hoping. As difficulties gathered round him, he encountered them with the increasing magnificence of his schemes; and after thirty years' experience of public life, he was as sanguine as a boy. Armed with this little lever of the divorce, he saw himself, in imagination, the rebuilder of the catholic faith and the deliverer of Europe. The king being remarried, and the succession settled, he would purge the Church of England, and convert the monasteries into intellectual garrisons of pious and learned men, occupying the land from end to end. The feuds with France should cease for ever, and, united in a holy cause, the two countries should restore the papacy, put down the German heresies, depose the emperor, and establish in his place some faithful servant of the church. Then Europe once more at peace, the hordes of the Crescent, which were threatening to settle the quarrels of Christians in the West as they had settled them in the East—by the extinction of Christianity itself,—were to be hurled back into their proper barbarism.[¹³¹] These magnificent visions fell from him in conversations

with the Bishop of Bayonne, and may be gathered from hints and fragments of his correspondence. Extravagant as they seem, the prospect of realising them was, humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable. He had but made the common mistake of men of the world who are the representatives of an old order of things at the time when that order is doomed and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounded the barrenness of death with the barrenness of a winter which might be followed by a new spring and summer; he believed that the old life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could trample out; and as in the early years of Christianity the meanest slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the forbidden mysteries of the gospel, saw deeper, in the divine power of his faith, into the future even of this earthly world than the sagest of his imperial persecutors, so a truer political prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor men, for whom his myrmidons were searching in the purlieus of London, who were risking death and torture in disseminating the pernicious volumes of the English Testament.

If we look at the matter, however, from a more earthly point of view, the causes which immediately defeated Wolsey's policy were not such as human foresight could have anticipated. We ourselves, surveying the various parties in Europe with the light of our knowledge of the actual sequel, are perhaps able to understand their real relations; but if in 1527 a political astrologer had foretold that within two years of that time the pope and the emperor who had imprisoned him would be cordial allies, that the positions of England and Spain toward the papacy would be diametrically reversed, and that the two countries were on the point of taking their posts, which they would ever afterwards maintain, as the champions respectively of the opposite principles to those which at that time they seemed to represent, the prophecy would have been held scarcely less insane than a prophecy six or even three years before the event, that in the year 1854 England would be united with an Emperor Napoleon for the preservation of European order.

Henry, then, in the spring of the year 1527, definitively breaking the Spanish alliance, formed a league with Francis I., the avowed object of which was the expulsion of the Imperialists

from Italy; with a further intention—if it could be carried into effect—of avenging the outrage offered to Europe in the pope's imprisonment, by declaring vacant the imperial throne. Simultaneously with the congress at Amiens where the terms of the alliance were arranged, confidential persons were despatched into Italy to obtain an interview—if possible—with the pope, and formally laying before him the circumstances of the king's position, to request him to make use of his powers to provide a remedy. It is noticeable that at the outset of the negotiation the king did not fully trust Wolsey. The latter had suggested, as the simplest method of proceeding, that the pope should extend his authority as legate, granting him plenary power to act as English vicegerent so long as Rome was occupied by the Emperor's troops. Henry, not wholly satisfied that he was acquainted with his minister's full intentions in desiring so large a capacity, sent his own secretary, unknown to Wolsey, with his own private propositions—requesting simply a dispensation to take a second wife, his former marriage being allowed to stand with no definite sentence passed upon it; or, if that were impossible, leaving the pope to choose his own method, and settle the question in the manner least difficult and least offensive.[¹³²]

Wolsey, however, soon satisfied the king that he had no sinister intentions. By the middle of the winter we find the private messenger associated openly with Sir Gregory Cassalis, the agent of the minister's communications;[¹³³] and a series of formal demands were presented jointly by these two persons in the names of Henry and the legate; which, though taking many forms, resolved themselves substantially into one. The pope was required to make use of his dispensing power to enable the King of England to marry a wife who could bear him children, and thus provide some better security than already existed for the succession to the throne. This demand could not be considered as in itself unreasonable; and if personal feeling was combined with other motives to induce Henry to press it, personal feeling did not affect the general bearing of the question. The king's desire was publicly urged on public grounds, and thus, and thus only, the pope was at liberty to consider it. The marriages of princes have ever been affected by other considerations than those which influence such relations between private persons. Princes may not, as "unvalued

persons" may, "carve for themselves;" they pay the penalty of their high place, in submitting their affections to the welfare of the state; and the same causes which regulate the formation of these ties must be allowed to influence the continuance of them. The case which was submitted to the pope was one of those for which his very power of dispensing had been vested in him; and being, as he called himself, the Father of Christendom, the nation thought themselves entitled to call upon him to make use of that power. A resource of the kind must exist somewhere—the relation between princes and subjects indispensably requiring it. It had been vested in the Bishop of Rome, because it had been presumed that the sanctity of his office would secure an impartial exercise of his authority. And unless he could have shown (which he never attempted to show) that the circumstances of the succession were not so precarious as to call for his interference, it would seem that the express contingency had arisen which was contemplated in the constitution of the canon law;[¹³⁴] and that where a provision had been made by the church of which he was the earthly head, for difficulties of this precise description, the pope was under an obligation either to make the required concessions in virtue of his faculty, or, if he found himself unable to make those concessions, to offer some distinct explanation of his refusal. I speak of the question as nakedly political. I am not considering the private injuries of which Catherine had so deep a right to complain, nor the complications subsequently raised on the original validity of the first marriage. A political difficulty, on which alone he was bound to give sentence, was laid before the pope in his judicial capacity, in the name of the nation; and the painful features which the process afterwards assumed are due wholly to his original weakness and vacillation.

Deeply, however, as we must all deplore the scandal and suffering which were occasioned by the dispute, it was in a high degree fortunate, that at the crisis of public dissatisfaction in England with the condition of the church, especially in the conduct of its courts of justice, a cause should have arisen which tested the whole question of church authority in its highest

form; where the dispute between the laity and the ecclesiastics was represented in a process in which the pope sat as judge; in which the king was the appellant, and the most vital interests of the nation were at stake upon the issue. It was no accident which connected a suit for divorce with the reformation of religion. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction was upon its trial, and the future relations of church and state depended upon the pope's conduct in a matter which no technical skill was required to decide, but only the moral virtues of probity and courage. The time had been when the clergy feared only to be unjust, and when the functions of judges might safely be entrusted to them. The small iniquities of the consistory courts had shaken the popular faith in the continued operation of such a fear; and the experience of an Alexander VI., a Julius II., and a Leo X. had induced a suspicion that even in the highest quarters justice had ceased to be much considered. It remained for Clement VII. to disabuse men of their alarms, or by confirming them to forfeit for ever the supremacy of his order in England. Nor can it be said for him that the case was one in which it was unusually difficult to be virtuous. Justice, wounded dignity, and the interests of the See pointed alike to the same course. Queen Catherine's relationship to the emperor could not have recommended her to the tenderness of the pope, and the policy of assenting to an act which would infallibly alienate Henry from Charles, and therefore attach him to the Roman interests, did not require the eloquence of Wolsey to make it intelligible. If, because he was in the emperor's power, he therefore feared the personal consequences to himself, his cowardice of itself disqualified him to sit as a judge.

It does not fall within my present purpose to detail the first stages of the proceedings which followed. In substance they are well known to all readers of English history, and may be understood without difficulty as soon as we possess the clue to the conduct of Wolsey. I shall, however, in a few pages briefly epitomise what passed.

At the outset of the negotiation, the pope, although he would take no positive steps, was all, in words, which he was expected to be. Neither he nor the cardinals refused to acknowledge the dangers which threatened the country. He discussed freely the position of the different parties, the probabilities of a disputed succession, and the various claimants who would present themselves, if the king died without an heir of undisputed legitimacy.[¹³⁵]

Gardiner writes to Wolsey,[¹³⁶] "We did even more inculcate what speed and celerity the thing required, and what danger it was to the realm to have this matter hang in suspense. His Holiness confessed the same, and thereupon began to reckon what divers titles might be pretended by the King of Scots and others, and granted that, without an heir male, with provision to be made by consent of the state for his succession, and unless that what shall be done herein be established in such fashion as nothing may hereafter be objected thereto, the realm was like to come to dissolution."

In stronger language the Cardinal-Governor of Bologna declared that "he knew the gyze of England as well as few men did, and if the king should die without heirs male, he was sure it would cost two hundred thousand men's lives. Wherefore he thought, supposing his Grace should have no more children by the queen, and that by taking of another wife he might have heirs male, the bringing to pass that matter, and by that to avoid the mischiefs afore written, he thought would deserve Heaven."[¹³⁷] Whatever doubt their might be, therefore, whether the original marriage with Catherine was legal, it was universally admitted that there was none about the national desirableness of the dissolution of it; and if the pope had been free to judge only by the merits of the case, it is impossible to doubt that he would have cut the knot, either by granting a dispensation to Henry to marry a second wife—his first being formally, though not judicially, separated from him—or in some other way.[¹³⁸] But the emperor was "a lion in his path;" the question of strength between the French and the Spaniards remained undecided, and Clement would come to no decision until he was assured of the power of the allies to protect him from the consequences. Accordingly he said and unsaid, sighed, sobbed, beat his breast, shuffled, implored, threatened;[¹³⁹] in all ways he endeavoured to escape from his dilemma, to say yes and to say no, to do nothing, to offend no one, and above all to gain time, with the weak man's hope that "something might happen" to extricate him. Embassy followed embassy from England, each using language more threatening than its predecessor. The thing, it was said, must be done, and should be done. If it was not done by the pope it would be done at home in some

other way, and the pope must take the consequences.[¹⁴⁰] Wolsey warned him passionately of the rising storm,[¹⁴¹] a storm which would be so terrible when it burst "that it would be better to die than to live." The pope was strangely unable to believe that the danger could be real, being misled perhaps by other information from the friends of Queen Catherine, and by an over-confidence in the attachment of the people to the emperor. He acted throughout in a manner natural to a timid amiable man, who found himself in circumstances to which he was unequal; and as long as we look at him merely as a man we can pity his embarrassment. He forgot, however, that only because he was supposed to be more than a man had kings and emperors consented to plead at his judgment seat—a fact of which Stephen Gardiner, then Wolsey's secretary, thought it well to remind him in the following striking language:—

"Unless," said the future Bishop of Winchester in the council, at the close of a weary day of unprofitable debating, "unless some other resolution be taken than I perceive you intend to make, hereupon shall be gathered a marvellous opinion of your Holiness, of the college of cardinals, and of the authority of this See. The King's Highness, and the nobles of the realm who shall be made privy to this, shall needs think that your Holiness and these most reverend and learned councillors either will not answer in this cause, or cannot answer. If you will not, if you do not choose to point out the way to an erring man, the care of whom is by God committed to you, they will say, 'Oh race of men most ungrateful, and of your proper office most oblivious! You who should be simple as doves are full of all deceit, and craft, and dissembling. If the king's cause be good, we require that you pronounce it good. If it be bad, why will you not say that it is bad, so to hinder a prince to whom you are so much bounden

from longer continuing with it? We ask nothing of you but justice, which the king so loves and values, that whatever sinister things others may say or think of him, he will follow that with all his heart; that, and nothing else, whether it be for the marriage or against the marriage.'

"But if the King's Majesty," continued Gardiner, hitting the very point of the difficulty, "if the King's Majesty and the nobility of England, being persuaded of your good will to answer if you can do so, shall be brought to doubt of your ability, they will be forced to a harder conclusion respecting this See—namely, that God has taken from it the key of knowledge; and they will begin to give better ear to that opinion of some persons to which they have as yet refused to listen, that those papal laws which neither the pope himself nor his council can interpret, deserve only to be committed to the flames." "I desired his Holiness," he adds, "to ponder well this matter."[¹⁴²]

Clement was no hero, but in his worst embarrassments his wit never failed him. He answered that he was not learned, and "to speak truth, albeit there was a saying in the canon law, that Pontifex habet omnia jura in scrinio pectoris (the pope has all laws locked within his breast), yet God had never given him the key to open that lock." He was but "seeking pretexts" for delay, as Gardiner saw, till the issue of the Italian campaign of the French in the summer of 1528 was decided. He had been liberated, or had been allowed to escape from Rome, in the fear that if detained longer he might nominate a vicegerent; and was residing at an old ruined castle at Orvieto, waiting upon events, leaving the Holy City still occupied by the Prince of Orange. In the preceding autumn, immediately after the congress at Amiens, M. de Lautrec, accompanied by several English noblemen, had led an army across the Alps. He had defeated the Imperialists in the north of Italy in several minor engagements; and in January his success appeared so probable, that the pope took better heart, and told Sir Gregory Cassalis, that if the French would only approach near enough to enable him to plead compulsion, he would grant a commission to Wolsey, with plenary power to conclude the cause.[¹⁴³] De Lautrec, however,

foiled in his desire to bring the Imperialists to a decisive engagement, wasted his time and strength in ineffectual petty sieges; and finally, in the summer, on the unhealthy plains of Naples, a disaster more fatal in its consequences than the battle of Pavia, closed the prospects of the French to the south of the Alps; and with them all Wolsey's hopes of realising his dream. Struck down, not by a visible enemy, but by the silent hand of fever, the French general himself, his English friends, and all his army melted away from off the earth. The pope had been wise in time. He had committed himself in words and intentions; but he had done nothing which he could not recall. He obtained his pardon from the emperor by promising to offend no more; and from that moment never again entertained any real thought of concession. Acting under explicit directions, he made it his object thenceforward to delay and to procrastinate. Charles had no desire to press matters to extremities. War had not yet been declared[¹⁴⁴] against him by Henry; nor was he anxious

himself to precipitate a quarrel from which, if possible, he would gladly escape. He had a powerful party in England, which it was unwise to alienate by hasty, injudicious measures; and he could gain all which he himself desired by a simple policy of obstruction. His object was merely to protract the negotiation and prevent a decision, in the hope either that Henry would be wearied into acquiescence, or that Catherine herself would retire of her own accord, or, finally, that some happy accident might occur to terminate the difficulty. It is, indeed, much to the honour of Charles V. that he resolved to support the queen. She had thrown herself on his protection; but princes in such matters consider prudence more than feeling, and he could gain nothing by defending her: while, both for himself and for the church he risked the loss of much. He over-rated the strength of his English connection, and mistook the English character; but he was not blind to the hazard which he was incurring, and would have welcomed an escape from the dilemma perhaps as warmly as Henry would have welcomed it himself. The pope, who well knew his feelings, told Gardiner, "It would be for the wealth of Christendom if the queen were in her grave; and he thought the emperor would be thereof most glad of all;" saying, also, "that he thought like as the emperor had destroyed the temporalities of the church, so should she be the destruction of the spiritualities."[¹⁴⁵]

In the summer of 1528, before the disaster at Naples, Cardinal Campeggio had left Rome on his way to England, where he was to hear the cause in conjunction with Wolsey. An initial measure of this obvious kind it had been impossible to refuse; and the pretexts under which it was for many months delayed, were exhausted before the pope's ultimate course had been made clear to him. But Campeggio was instructed to protract his journey to its utmost length, giving time for the campaign to decide itself. He loitered into the autumn, under the excuse of gout and other convenient accidents, until the news reached him of De Lautrec's death, which took place on the 21st of August; and then at length proceeding, he betrayed to Francis I., on passing through Paris, that he had no intention of allowing judgment to be passed upon the cause.[¹⁴⁶] Even Wolsey was beginning to tremble at what he had attempted, and was doubtful

of success.[¹⁴⁷] The seeming relief came in time, for Henry's patience was fast running out. He had been over-persuaded into a course which he had never cordially approved. The majority of the council, especially the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk, were traditionally imperial, and he himself might well doubt whether he might not have found a nearer road out of his difficulties by adhering to Charles. Charles, after all, was not ruining the papacy, and had no intention of ruining it; and his lightest word weighed more at the court of Rome than the dubious threats and prayers of France. The Bishop of Bayonne, resident French ambassador in London, whose remarkable letters transport us back into the very midst of that unquiet and stormy scene, tells us plainly that the French alliance was hated by the country, that the nobility were all for the emperor, and that among the commons the loudest discontent was openly expressed against Wolsey from the danger of the interruption of the trade with Flanders. Flemish ships had been detained in London, and English ships in retaliation had been arrested in the Zealand ports; corn was unusually dear, and the expected supplies from Spain and Germany were cut off;[¹⁴⁸] while the derangement of the woollen trade, from the reluctance of the merchants to venture purchases, was causing distress all over the country, and Wolsey had been driven to the most arbitrary measures to prevent open disturbance.[¹⁴⁹] He had set his hopes upon the chance of a single cast which he would not believe could fail him, but on each fresh delay he was compelled to feel his declining credit, and the Bishop of Bayonne wrote, on the 20th of August, 1528, that the cardinal was in bad spirits, and had told him in confidence, that "if he could only see the

divorce arranged, the king remarried, the succession settled, and the laws and the manners and customs of the country reformed, he would retire from the world and would serve God the remainder of his days."[¹⁵⁰] To these few trifles he would be contented to confine himself—only to these; he was past sixty, he was weary of the world, and his health was breaking, and he would limit his hopes to the execution of a work for which centuries imperfectly sufficed. It seemed as if he measured his stature by the lengthening shadow, as his sun made haste to its setting. Symptoms of misgiving may be observed in the many anxious letters which he wrote while Campeggio was so long upon his road; and the Bishop of Bayonne, whose less interested eyes could see more deeply into the game, warned him throughout that the pope was playing him false.[¹⁵¹] Only in a revulsion from violent despondency could such a man as Wolsey have allowed himself, on the mere arrival of the legate, and after a few soft words from him, to write in the following strain to Sir Gregory Cassalis:—

"You cannot believe the exultation with which at length I find myself successful in the object for which these many years, with all my industry, I have laboured. At length I have found means to bind my most excellent sovereign and this glorious realm to the holy Roman see in faith and obedience for ever. Henceforth will this people become the most sure pillar of support to bear up the sacred fabric of the church. Henceforth, in recompense for that enduring felicity which he has secured to it, our most Holy Lord has all England at his devotion. In brief time will this noble land make its grateful acknowledgments to his clemency at once for the preservation of the most just, most wise, most excellent of princes, and for the secure establishment of the realm and the protection of the royal succession."[¹⁵²]

This letter was dated on the fourth of October, and was written in the hope that the pope had collected his courage, and that the legate had brought powers to proceed to judgment. In a few days the prospect was again clouded, and Wolsey was once more in despair.[¹⁵³] Campeggio had brought with him instructions if possible to arrange a compromise,—if a compromise

was impossible, to make the best use of his ingenuity, and do nothing and allow nothing to be done. In one of two ways, however, it was hoped that he might effect a peaceful solution. He urged the king to give way and to proceed no further; and this failing, as he was prepared to find, he urged the same thing upon the queen.[¹⁵⁴] He invited Catherine, or he was directed to invite her, in the pope's name,[¹⁵⁵] for the sake of the general interests of Christendom, to take the vows and enter what was called religio laxa, a state in which she might live unincumbered by obligations except the easy one of chastity, and free from all other restrictions either of habit, diet, or order. The proposal was Wolsey's, and was formed when he found the limited nature of Campeggio's instructions;[¹⁵⁶] but it was adopted by the latter; and I cannot but think (though I have no proof of it) that it was not adopted without the knowledge of the emperor. Whatever were his own interests, Charles V. gave Catherine his unwavering support: he made it his duty to maintain her in the ignominious position in which she was placed, and submitted his own conduct to be guided by her wishes. It cannot be doubted, however, from the pope's words, and also from the circumstances of the case, that if she could have prevailed upon herself to yield, it would have relieved him from a painful embarrassment. As a prince, he must have felt the substantial justice of Henry's demand, and in refusing to allow the pope to pass a judicial sentence of divorce, he could not but have known that he was compromising the position of the Holy See: while Catherine herself, on the other hand, if she had yielded, would have retired without a stain; no opinion would have been pronounced upon her marriage; the legitimacy of the Princess Mary would have been left without impeachment; and her right to the succession, in the event of no male heir following from any new connection which the king might form, would have been readily secured to her by act of parliament. It may be asked why she did not yield, and it is difficult to answer the question. She was not a person who would have been disturbed by the loss of a few court vanities. Her situation as Henry's wife could not have had many charms for her, nor can it be thought that she retained a personal affection for him. If she had loved him, she would have suffered too deeply in the struggle to have continued to resist, and the cloister would have seemed a paradise. Or if the cloister had appeared too sad a shelter for her, she might have gone back to the gardens of the

Alhambra, where she had played as a child, carrying with her the affectionate remembrance of every English heart, and welcomed by her own people as an injured saint. Nor again can we suppose that the possible injury of her daughter's prospects from the birth of a prince by another marriage could have seemed of so vast moment to her. Those prospects were already more than endangered, and would have been rather improved than brought into further peril.

It is not for us to dictate the conduct which a woman smarting under injuries so cruel ought to have pursued. She had a right to choose the course which seemed the best to herself, and England especially could not claim of a stranger that readiness to sacrifice herself which it might have demanded and exacted of one of its own children. We may regret, however, what we are unable to censure; and the most refined ingenuity could scarcely have invented a more unfortunate answer than that which the Queen returned to the legate's request. She seems to have said that she was ready to take vows of chastity if the king would do the same. It does not appear whether the request was formally made, or whether it was merely suggested to her in private conversation. That she told the legates, however, what her answer would be, appears certain from the following passage, sadly indicating the "devices of policy" to which in this unhappy business honourable men allowed themselves to be driven:—