Part 12

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

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

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

VI

DIVERGENCES BETWEEN HENRY AND CROMWELL

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

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

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

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

In the ecclesiastical policy also, as it emerges after the definite breach with Rome, Cromwell was evidently more inclined to encourage the advanced school than his master. Henry made Cranmer Archbishop, wanting in that post a man who accepted whole-heartedly the theory of Royal Supremacy. As long as the reforms proposed were restricted to dealing with notorious abuses of the kind which Colet had freely denounced, and to the introduction of an English Bible--which the Conservatives might regard as dangerous, but could not denounce as in itself heretical--Henry was prepared to give his sanction; but whenever doctrines were in question as to which the followers of the “Old Learning” were in solid agreement, Henry consistently held with them. Cromwell, on the other hand--not from religious sentiment, but on purely political grounds--had Lutheran proclivities, owing to his desire to conciliate Continental Protestantism. He did not, as Cranmer did, urge the acceptance of views to which Henry objected; but his influence was always in favour of “advanced” appointments, and of a lax application of the laws which pressed hardly upon that school. Henry’s personal affection for Cranmer, a liking for Latimer, and an absence of any such feeling towards Gardiner and Gardiner’s colleagues, kept him from active interference in this respect. But he saw to it that what the law laid down should be unimpeachably orthodox, and every attempt of Cromwell’s to draw nearer to the Lutherans was countered by affirmations of a rigid adherence to the Old Faith and denunciation of innovations: culminating in the Act of the Six Articles. The differences in the formularies of faith issued from 1536 to 1540 are all in the direction of increasing definiteness, of leaving fewer questions open; and the definiteness is always in favour of the old school. Although the minister officially supported the Six Articles, while the Archbishop made all the fight possible against it, the Act was the king’s deliberate work, and the forcing of it through was without any possible doubt a direct set-back for Cromwell. At the same time, however, Henry took occasion to impress on his Court, with his usual vigour, that it would be extremely injudicious for any one to act on the hypothesis that it involved any diminution of the personal favour in which Cranmer was held.

In the rest of the domestic policy--Treason Acts, Supremacy Acts, Acts of Succession, Dissolution of Monasteries, Attainders--there is no opposition between king and minister. The edifice of absolutism with the sanction of Parliament is steadily reared, on the ruins of the ecclesiastical fabric and of the last families round whom any sort of Yorkist tradition can centre. When at last it had culminated in the Royal Proclamations Act, Cromwell ceased to be necessary; being no longer necessary, he offended his master; and, offending him, fell as Wolsey fell before him.

VII

HENRY’S CLOSING YEARS

Down to this point, then, from 1513 to 1540, we may believe that Henry was the puppet first of Wolsey and then of Cromwell; or that both were no more than the instruments of his supreme genius; or that, having with a light heart delegated all his duties and cares to the Cardinal, he resolved to rule himself, upset the Cardinal, and used Cromwell as a tool and scapegoat. Or we may judge that the creative, designing brains were his ministers’; but that he deliberately made their policy his own, except when he had a fancy for diverging from it, trusting to their pilotage just so long as it suited him--that they, not he, were the pilots, but he was emphatically the captain. We may even believe that the ministers were responsible only for the mistakes in execution, the king for the great designs. But when Cromwell is gone no one takes the vacant place. Gardiner and Norfolk are at the head of the Council, which becomes a hotbed of intrigues; but it is quite impossible to attribute the royal policy either to any individual or to any clique. Hence, in the king’s conduct of affairs during the remaining six and a half years of his life, we ought to find clues to the nature and extent of the control he really exercised during the thirty years preceding.

The view here put forward has been, that Wolsey diverted him from his first merely boyish dreams of martial achievements, to take hold of the conception of making England stand as the secure arbiter between the great Powers of the Continent, wooed by all--or both, when only two were left--and able always to turn the scale if one or other threatened to preponderate. His brain, however, being somewhat more liable to inflation than the Cardinal’s, he compelled the latter, in pursuit of this policy, to diverge from the right path and commit the country to the French war--possibly, though not on the whole probably, with the notion that the old grandiose idea of conquering France might become practicable. Then, just as the blunder was in course of being remedied, he became obsessed with the determination to divorce Katharine; a proceeding which could hardly fail to make friendly relations with the emperor so impossible as to destroy the basis of the balancing scheme, which demanded that the two European rivals should both be anxious to court English support. Then Cromwell showed him how to use the divorce as a piece of the machinery by which the power of the Crown might be made at least as absolute as any known in European history. He adopted Cromwell’s plan, but not what Cromwell regarded as its corollary, the acceptance of the position, and the alliance of the continental Protestants: endeavouring to hold himself aloof from alliances, and, after Katharine’s death, to regain the position of balance-holder.

Now it has been argued that the policy of 1522 was Wolsey’s own, not the king’s policy forced on him, because it was only when Wolsey was minister that a “spirited foreign policy” was acted upon. It is therefore to be noted that when Henry was left to himself with neither Wolsey nor Cromwell to give counsel, he did quite evidently take up the almost defunct Plantagenet notion of imposing the sovereignty of England on Scotland--which experience had shown to be no more feasible than the conquest of France: and he did again find himself drawn into an Imperial alliance, and actually at war with the French. These facts do not amount to a proof, but they do afford a presumption that the talk about recovering the French crown had not been altogether wind, and that the first fighting alliance with Charles was, like the second, the doing of the king. Probably Henry’s main motive in going into this later French war was to compel Francis to withdraw his support from the Scots. He ought, however, to have known by this time, first, that France could not afford to stand by while Scotland was robbed of the independence which was always a practical and valuable asset for France when she was at war with England: and, secondly, that Charles would play for his own hand, and would find some excuse for leaving his ally isolated the moment his own needs were satisfied.

The Scots affair, by the way, supplies another interesting example of the peculiarities of Henry’s conscience. The head and front of the party in Scotland who were most bitterly hostile to England was Cardinal Beton: who was in close alliance with Mary of Guise, the queen-mother. Henry was ingenious enough to discover that Beton was a rebel, who had secured himself above the reach of the law, and that consequently his assassination would be rather commendable. It is not surprising that the Cardinal was murdered in due course, and that the murderers looked to England for support.

The history of these later years, in short, lends colour to the view that the political errors--in foreign affairs--committed in Wolsey’s days were forced on him by the king: and also that the king himself did not formulate large political conceptions on his own account. More than that, it shows him capable of such serious blunders as the proposal to re-assert the old fable of English suzerainty in Scotland, and--what was in its own way hardly less short-sighted--the wholesale debasement of the coinage. It was not till he was left to manage things with no strong counsellor to aid him that he gave way completely to this most evil propensity of his last years. The thing did incalculable mischief, ruining credit, driving up prices, robbing creditors for the benefit of debtors, and, of course, driving all the sound coins out of circulation. It is to the credit of Somerset in the next reign that, in spite of the depleted treasury, he did not carry that disastrous experiment further: it was left for Northumberland to degrade the currency even more than Henry had done. And it was Henry who had done it, not Wolsey or Cromwell or Gardiner. These things would seem to mean that, left to himself, it was his tendency to resort to paltry and short-sighted tricks and devices of a kind incompatible with the higher statesmanship; tricks which seem at the moment to effect their purpose, but are a mere evasion of the difficulties with which they pretend to deal. In these years, Henry’s statesmanship makes a poor display. We may plead on his behalf that physical disease weakened his intellectual powers, that practically unchecked despotism produced moral degeneration, that we cannot judge the qualities of a man whose rule had been--for whatever reason--undeniably powerful for a quarter of a century, by the mismanagement of the years when he was wearing into his grave. There is truth in the plea. Yet from the degeneration we can infer the inherent defects. The man who muddled his Scottish policy, and left the arrangements for carrying on the government at his death in a state of chaos, was not he who planned, organised, and carried out the defiance of the Papal power and the subjection of the Church; but he may have been perfectly capable of appreciating that vast scheme, and of playing a formidable part in the execution of it. On the other hand, had he been merely a vain tyrannical bully, there was more than one man in his _entourage_ after Cromwell’s fall, who would have had the wit to make a puppet of him--which no one certainly succeeded in doing.

VIII

HENRY’S MARRIAGES

A study of Henry’s character, however brief, would be incomplete if it omitted to touch on his widely varied marital relations. The Blue Beard legend may by this time be fairly looked upon as exploded. He did not marry one wife after another to gratify capricious passions, and, when he was weary of the new toy, cut her head off and get himself another. Except in the case of Anne Boleyn, and possibly Jane Seymour, passion can have had very little to say to his various ventures. His Court was licentious; but the king himself does not appear to have been worse than his neighbours, even if he was no better. Political intriguers tried to obtain influence through mistresses; there was certainly an attempt to supplant Anne Boleyn by this means, and the Earl of Surrey--who was probably innocent enough of real treason but otherwise deserves very little of the pity that has been wasted on him--tried to persuade his own sister to establish herself at the king’s ear in the same way. There is hardly a shadow of doubt that Anne Boleyn’s elder sister Mary was Henry’s mistress before he turned his eyes upon Anne. Rumour declared, though the statement is not substantiated, that Sir John Perrot, who did good work in Ireland in Elizabeth’s day, was really Henry’s son. It is probable, however, that there were no children of his born out of wedlock except the son of Elizabeth Blount, whom he made Duke of Richmond and was credited with intending to get legitimised, when there was no likelihood of a legitimate male heir appearing. The state of the Court was such that Chapuys declined to believe in the otherwise unimpeached virtue of Jane Seymour, merely on the general principle that no woman could be supposed virtuous under the conditions there prevalent--but Chapuys was writing at a moment when he was feeling particularly hot against the whole Court. An item in the royal accounts has been supposed to indicate that Henry kept a sort of harem, but that is based on what is almost certainly a misinterpretation of the term “mistress.” Henry was licentious enough, but there is no reason to imagine him as a satyr, or as on the same plane with Francis I. The kings of the sixteenth century, bad or good, were not often clean livers. The way to Henry’s favour was never through the good graces of the favourite of the hour; and except in the case of Anne Boleyn it never appears that he allowed any passion to interfere with his politics.

At eighteen, as soon as he ascended the throne, Henry married the wife secured for him by the diplomacy of Henry VII. and Ferdinand and the complaisance of the Pope. Katharine was four years the elder, sufficiently good-looking, capable, and fit to be a queen. She had already been the bride of the young king’s elder brother, who had died very shortly after the nuptials: but the Pope had duly provided a dispensation to permit the second marriage. She and her husband got on satisfactorily enough for a time. In 1513, when he was displaying his martial prowess in Picardy, she was occupied in organising the Flodden campaign and wrote to him in a tone implying that they were excellent friends: yet it is possible to recognise a certain want of tact, in the absence of that adroit flattery which Henry’s vain soul loved, when she dwells on her own achievements instead of praising those of her lord. Henry soon grew cool--there is no reason to suppose that he was ever her ardent lover--and already, when babies died or were still-born, he seems to have turned his mind to a divorce, though he dropped the idea again. When the princess Mary was born and did _not_ die, the big jovial monarch made a great pet of the child; and though he was unfaithful to his wife, and had no compunction about it, the conventional friendliness was maintained. There is no doubt that the queen exercised active influence to secure England’s favour for her nephew Charles V.; and critics have found, in the desire of Henry and Wolsey, a few years later, to break with Charles and form an alliance with France, one of the leading motives which recommended the divorce to them.

About 1522, Anne Boleyn came to Court; and from this time, favours began to flow in the direction of the Boleyn family. The probabilities are, however, that as yet they were due rather to the complaisance of the elder sister Mary than to the attractions of the younger. Four years later, it is clear that Anne had become the object of the king’s pursuit; but, whether because she was more virtuous or more ambitious than Mary, Anne would not surrender herself. The king became the victim of an absorbing passion, which made him determined to procure the divorce from Katharine at any cost--whether or no it was primarily responsible for reviving the idea. Once embarked on it, Henry was far too obstinate to allow anything to divert him. Towards the end of 1532--as soon as Warham was dead--he saw his way. Before the year was out, Anne had become his mistress or his wife; a marriage ceremony was performed in January--possibly in November. It is not easy to believe--though the evidence points that way--that Anne, after holding out till the prize was actually in reach, would have risked everything by yielding without insisting on the ceremony first taking place.