Part 20

"The intellectual movement, to which we give the name of Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through the Drama. Other races in that era of quickened activity, when modern man regained the consciousness of his own strength and goodliness after centuries of mental stagnation and social depression, threw their energies into the plastic arts and scholarship. The English found a similar outlet for their pent-up forces in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe. Humanism had placed the present once more in a vital relation to the past. The navies of Portugal and Spain had discovered new continents beyond the ocean; the merchants of Venice and Genoa had explored the farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors, and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing cares, the race was fully conscious of its national importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen, with whose idealised personality the people identified their newly acquired sense of greatness. ... What in those fifty years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own admiring curiosity. England was in a state of transition when the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare periods when the past and the future are both coloured by imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams--a dream of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and the Sidneys of a milder epoch. ... What distinguished the English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the contrary they retained an unenviable character for more than common savagery. ... Erasmus describes the filth of their houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness, intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but not cruel; luxurious but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert Dudley. . . . Affectations of foreign vices were only a varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was the life beneath. {826} Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek; drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every township had its gallows; every village its stocks, whipping-post and pillory. Here and there, heretics were burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill was seldom dry. ... Men and women who read Plato, or discussed the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes, relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. ... It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this confusion rose cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle, tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen, listened with Jessica to music in the moon-light at Belmont, wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. Such was the society of which our theatre became the mirror."

_J. A. Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, chapter 2, section 1, 2, and 5._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1497. Cabot's discovery of the North American Continent.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1497.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1498. Voyage and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot. Ground of English claims in the New World.

See AMERICA: A. D. 1498.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1502. The marriage which brought the Stuarts to the English throne.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1509. The character and reign of Henry VII.

"As a king, Bacon tells us that he was 'a wonder for wise men.' Few indeed were the councillors that shared his confidence, but the wise men, competent to form an estimate of his statesmanship, had but one opinion of his consummate wisdom. Foreigners were greatly struck with the success that attended his policy. Ambassadors were astonished at the intimate knowledge he displayed of the affairs of their own countries. From the most unpropitious beginnings, a proscribed man and an exile, he had won his way in evil times to a throne beset with dangers; he had pacified his own country, cherished commerce, formed strong alliances over Europe, and made his personal influence felt by the rulers of France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as that of a man who could turn the scale in matters of the highest importance to their own domestic welfare. ... From first to last his policy was essentially his own; for though he knew well how to choose the ablest councillors, he asked or took their advice only to such an extent as he himself deemed expedient. ... No one can understand his reign, or that of his son, or, we might add, of his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, without appreciating the fact that, however well served with councillors, the sovereign was in those days always his own Prime Minister. ... Even the legislation of the reign must be regarded as in large measure due to Henry himself. We have no means, it is true, of knowing how much of it originated in his own mind; but that it was all discussed with him in Council and approved before it was passed we have every reason to believe. For he never appears to have put the royal veto upon any Bill, as constitutional usage both before and after his days allowed. He gave his assent to all the enactments sent up to him for approval, though he sometimes added to them provisos of his own. And Bacon, who knew the traditions of those times, distinctly attributes the good legislation of his days to the king himself. 'In that part, both of justice and policy, which is the most durable part, and cut, as it were, in brass or marble, the making of good laws, he did excel.' This statement, with but slight variations in the wording, appears again and again throughout the History; and elsewhere it is said that he was the best lawgiver to this nation after Edward I. ... The parliaments, indeed, that Henry summoned were only seven in number, and seldom did anyone of them last over a year, so that during a reign of nearly twenty-four years many years passed away without a Parliament at all. But even in those scanty sittings many Acts were passed to meet evils that were general subjects of complaint. ... He could scarcely be called a learned man, yet he was a lover of learning, and gave his children an excellent education. His Court was open to scholars. ... He was certainly religious after the fashion of his day. ... His religious foundations and bequests perhaps do not necessarily imply anything more than conventional feeling. But we must not overlook the curious circumstance that he once argued with a heretic at the stake at Canterbury and got him to renounce his heresy. It is melancholy to add that he did not thereupon release him from the punishment to which he had been sentenced; but the fact seems to show that he was afraid of encouraging insincere conversions by such leniency. During the last two or three years of the 15th century there was a good deal of procedure against heretics, but on the whole, we are told, rather by penances than by fire. Henry had no desire to see the old foundations of the faith disturbed. His zeal for the Church was recognised by no less than three Popes in his time, who each sent him a sword and a cap of maintenance. ... To commerce and adventure he was always a good friend. By his encouragement Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol and discovered Newfoundland--The New Isle, as it at first was called. Four years earlier Columbus had first set foot on the great western continent, and had not his brother been taken by pirates at sea, it is supposed that he too might have made his great discovery under Henry's patronage."

_James Gairdner, Henry the Seventh, chapter 13._

ALSO IN: _Lord Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1509, Accession of King Henry VIII.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1151-1513. Enlisted In the Holy League of Pope Julius II. against France.

See ITALY: A. D. 1510-1513.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1513. Henry's invasion of France. The victory of the Battle of the Spurs.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.

{827}

ENGLAND: A. D. 1513-1529. The ministry of Cardinal Wolsey.

From 1513 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey, who became Archbishop of York in 1514, and Cardinal in 1515, was the minister who guided the policy of Henry VIII., so far as that head-strong and absolute monarch could be guided at all. "England was going through a crisis, politically, socially, and intellectually, when Wolsey undertook the management of affairs. ... We must regret that he put foreign policy in the first place, and reserved his constructive measures for domestic affairs. ... Yet even here we may doubt if the measures of the English Reformation would have been possible if Wolsey's mind had not inspired the king and the nation with a heightened consciousness of England's power and dignity. Wolsey's diplomacy at least tore away all illusions about Pope and Emperor, and the opinion of Europe, and taught Henry VIII. the measure of his own strength. It was impossible that Wolsey's powerful hand should not leave its impression upon everything which it touched. If Henry VIII. inherited a strong monarchy, Wolsey made the basis of monarchical power still stronger. ... Wolsey saw in the royal power the only possible means of holding England together and guiding it through the dangers of impending change. ... Wolsey was in no sense a constitutional minister, nor did he pay much heed to constitutional forms. Parliament was only summoned once during the time that he was in office, and then he tried to browbeat Parliament and set aside its privileges. In his view the only function of Parliament was to grant money for the king's needs. The king should say how much he needed, and Parliament ought only to advise how this sum might be most conveniently raised. ... He was unwise in his attempt to force the king's will upon Parliament as an unchangeable law of its action. Henry VIII. looked and learned from Wolsey's failure, and when he took the management of Parliament into his own hands he showed himself a consummate master of that craft. ... He was so skilful that Parliament at last gave him even the power over the purse, and Henry, without raising a murmur, imposed taxes which Wolsey would not have dared to suggest. ... Where Wolsey would have made the Crown independent of Parliament, Henry VIII. reduced Parliament to be a willing instrument of the royal will. ... Henry ... clothed his despotism with the appearance of paternal solicitude. He made the people think that he lived for them, and that their interests were his, whereas Wolsey endeavoured to convince the people that the king alone could guard their interests, and that their only course was to put entire confidence in him. Henry saw that men were easier to cajole than to convince. ... In spite of the disadvantage of a royal education, Henry was a more thorough Englishman than Wolsey, though Wolsey sprang from the people. It was Wolsey's teaching, however, that prepared Henry for his task. The king who could use a minister like Wolsey and then throw him away when he was no longer useful, felt that there was no limitation to his self-sufficiency. ... For politics in the largest sense, comprising all the relations of the nation at home and abroad, Wolsey had a capacity which amounted to genius, and it is doubtful if this can be said of any other Englishman. ... Taking England as he found her, he aimed at developing all her latent possibilities, and leading Europe to follow in her train. ... He made England for a time the centre of European politics, and gave her an influence far higher than she could claim on material grounds. ... He was indeed a political artist, who worked with a free hand and a certain touch.. ... He was, though he knew it not, fitted to serve England, but not to serve the English king. He had the aims of a national statesman, not of a royal servant. Wolsey's misfortune was that his lot was cast on days when the career of a statesman was not distinct from that of a royal servant."

_M. Creighton, Cardinal Wolsey, chapters 8 and 11._

ALSO IN: _J. S. Brewer, The Reign of Henry VIII._

_J. A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey, chapters 1-2._

_G. Cavendish, Life of Wolsey._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1514. Marriage of the king's sister with Louis XII. of France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1516-1517. Intrigues against France.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1516-1517.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1519. Candidacy of Henry VIII. for the imperial crown.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1519.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1520-1521. Rivalry of the Emperor and the French King for the English alliance.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1520-1523.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1525. The king changes sides in European politics and breaks his alliance with the Emperor.

See FRANCE: A. D. 1525-1526.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1527. New alliance with France and Venice against Charles V. Formal renunciation of the claim of the English kings to the crown of France.

See ITALY: A. D. 1527-1529.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1527-1534. Henry VIII. and the Divorce question. The rupture with Rome.

Henry VIII. owed his crown to the early death of his brother Arthur, whose widow, Catharine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand, and consequently the aunt of Charles V. [emperor], Henry was enabled to marry through a dispensation obtained by Henry VII. from Pope Julius II.,--marriage with the wife of a deceased brother being forbidden by the laws of the Church. Henry was in his twelfth year when the marriage was concluded, but it was not consummated until the death of his father. ... The question of Henry's divorce from Catharine soon became a subject of discussion, and the effort to procure the annulling of the marriage from the pope was prosecuted for a number of years. Henry professed, and perhaps with sincerity, that he had long been troubled with doubts of the validity of the marriage, as being contrary to the divine law, and therefore not within the limit of the pope's dispensing power. The death of a number of his children, leaving only a single daughter, Mary, had been interpreted by some as a mark of the displeasure of God. At the same time the English people, in the fresh recollection of the long dynastic struggle, were anxious on account of the lack of a male heir to the throne. On the queen's side it was asserted that it was competent for the pope to authorize a marriage with a brother's widow, and that no doubt could possibly exist in the present case, since, according to her testimony, her marriage with Arthur had never been completed. The eagerness of Henry to procure the divorce increased with his growing passion for Anne Boleyn. The negotiations with Rome dragged slowly on. Catharine was six years older than himself, and had lost her charms. {828} He was enamored of this young English girl, fresh from the court of France. He resolved to break the marriage bond with the Spanish princess who had been his faithful wife for nearly twenty years. It was not without reason that the king became more and more incensed at the dilatory and vacillating course of the pope. ... Henry determined to lay the question of the validity of his marriage before the universities of Europe, and this he did, making a free use of bribery abroad and of menaces at home. Meantime, he took measures to cripple the authority of the pope and of the clergy in England. In these proceedings he was sustained by a popular feeling, the growth of centuries, against foreign ecclesiastical interference and clerical control in civil affairs. The fall of Wolsey was the effect of his failure to procure the divorce, and of the enmity of Anne Boleyn and her family. ... In order to convict of treason this minister, whom he had raised to the highest pinnacle of power, the king did not scruple to avail himself of the ancient statute of præmunire, which Wolsey was accused of having transgressed by acting as the pope's legate in England--it was dishonestly alleged, without the royal license. Early in 1531 the king charged the whole body of the clergy with having incurred the penalties of the same law by submitting to Wolsey in his legatine character. Assembled in convocation, they were obliged to implore his pardon, and obtained it only in return for a large sum of money. In their petition he was styled, in obedience to his dictation, 'The Protector and Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England,' to which was added, after long debate, at the suggestion of Archbishop Warham--'as far as is permitted by the law of Christ.' The Church, prostrate though it was at the feet of the despotic king, showed some degree of self-respect in inserting this amendment. Parliament forbade the introduction of papal bulls into England. The king was authorized if he saw fit, to withdraw the annats--first-fruits of benefices--from the pope. Appeals to Rome were forbidden. The retaliatory measures of Henry did not move the pope to recede from his position. On or about January 25, 1533, the king was privately married to Anne Boleyn. ... In 1534 Henry was conditionally excommunicated by Clement VII. The papal decree deposing him from the throne, and absolving his subjects from their allegiance, did not follow until 1538, and was issued by Paul III. Clement's bull was sent forth on the 23 of March. On the 23 of November Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, without the qualifying clause which the clergy had attached to their vote. The king was, moreover, clothed with full power and authority to repress and amend all such errors, heresies, and abuses as 'by any manner of spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed.' Thus a visitatorial function of vast extent was recognized as belonging to him. In 1532 convocation was driven to engage not 'to enact or promulge or put in execution' any measures without the royal license, and to promise to change or to abrogate any of the 'provincial constitutions' which he should judge inconsistent with his prerogative. The clergy were thus stripped of all power to make laws. A mixed commission, which Parliament ordained for the revision of the whole canon law, was not appointed in this reign. The dissolution of the king's marriage thus dissolved the union of England with the papacy."

_G. P. Fisher, History of the Christian Church, period 8, chapter 6._

ALSO IN:

_J. S. Brewer, The Reign of Henry VIII., volume 2, chapters 27-35._

_J. A. Froude, History of England, volume 1, chapter 2._

_S. H. Burke, Historical Portraits of the Tudor Dynasty, volume 1, chapters 8-25._

_J. Lingard, History of England, volume 6, chapter 3._

_T. E. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir T. More._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1529-1535. The execution of Sir Thomas More.