Part 11

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 Henry’s candidature was withdrawn, and no one was any the worse.

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

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

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

III

WAR

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

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

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

IV

THE “DIVORCE”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

THE NEW POLICY

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

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

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