Part 13

The marriage was extremely unpopular; the new queen was spiteful, flighty, undignified, if nothing worse. In a very short time, Cranmer was the only friend she had left; she lost her charm for her husband, and she annoyed him by the same failure to fulfil his expectations as Katharine. The old idea cropped up again, that on this as on the previous union the blessing of heaven did not rest. The king found himself attracted by the somewhat inconspicuous charms and persistent virtue of Jane Seymour. Charges were brought against Anne, which may or may not have been true; admissions were made to Cranmer, the nature of which we can only guess at; on the strength of the former, she was condemned to death for treason, and on the strength of the latter the marriage was declared void _ab initio_. The unhappy woman was beheaded; next day, according to Chapuys, the king married Jane Seymour privately. The official marriage was ten days later.

Jane appears to have been a pleasing, colourless, irreproachable person; who, when she had given birth to the much-desired son, departed to another world without having suffered any estrangement from her husband. He, however, was wife-hunting again before long--not because he was attracted by any one, but for purely political ends. Unfortunately he was not satisfied by the possession of purely political qualifications on the part of the ladies, but offended their susceptibilities by wishing to inspect them. At last Cromwell beguiled him into approving the Cleves marriage; but when Anne came over, and retreat seemed impossible, he first found that she was not at all to his taste, and then that the political reasons for wedding her had been quite inadequate. So the ecclesiastical lawyers set to work again to discover an excuse for annulling that marriage; and in the meantime the Duke of Norfolk produced a young niece of his own, Katharine Howard, who took the king’s more than middle-aged fancy. Being quit of Anne, he married the girl, who successfully cajoled him for about a year: after which, the faction opposed to Norfolk discovered and laid before the unfortunate husband evidence of undoubted immorality before and probable immorality after her marriage. So Katharine Howard followed Anne Boleyn to the block. The affair seems to have been a really complete and very painful surprise to Henry.

By this time, the jibe attributed to the Duchess of Milan when Henry was thinking of marrying her--“Had I two heads, one should be at his majesty’s disposal”--would have been quite excusable. Even the ladies of his own Court were not covetous of the queenly throne. Chapuys, ever cynical, hinted that an Act passed at this time would quite account for reluctance on their part: if the king should propose to marry a subject, she must confess any improprieties of which she had been guilty; otherwise, if they were subsequently discovered, she would be held guilty of treason. Still Henry discovered one more lady who was willing to take the risks--a lady of much conjugal experience, now a widow for the second time. This was Katharine Parr, whose last husband had been Lord Latimer. Her virtue, however, was as much above suspicion as Jane Seymour’s had been; she was sensible, careful, and extremely tactful; and when an attempt was made to set her husband against her as a heretic, she satisfied him very easily, and her accuser had to submit to one of Henry’s ratings. She survived him, and married Admiral Thomas Seymour.

The marriages with Katharine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves were both avowedly and professedly political. That with Anne Boleyn was one of passion; that with Katharine Parr one of inclination. It is extremely doubtful whether either was effectively promoted by political intrigue. It is hardly at all doubtful that in the two remaining cases it was political intrigue which brought both Jane Seymour and Katharine Howard under the king’s notice; nevertheless, it is not likely that either of these marriages affected the king’s policy, though the disastrous termination of the second did so.

IX

HENRY’S CHARACTER

The end of Henry’s life was quite characteristic. For some time beforehand every one knew that he could not last long; and intrigues were rife to secure power when he was gone. The Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour’s brother, was at the head of that one of the two main factions whose leading ecclesiastic was Cranmer; they were balanced by Gardiner, with the old Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Earl of Surrey. A false move on Surrey’s part gave a handle to the enemy; Surrey was executed; Norfolk was attainted and his life saved only by Henry’s own death; Gardiner’s name was excluded from the council of “executors,” which is supposed to have been intended by the king to balance the two parties. Henry, left to himself, did not display wisdom in his government, but he always at the worst held the reins in a fast grip and sat firm in the saddle. His arrangements for carrying on the government after him were short-sighted, and his successor in the saddle, Hertford, was as much his inferior in practical mastery as he was superior in his ethical aims. The results are discussed in another chapter. Henry was almost _in articulo mortis_ before any one ventured to tell him that his hours were numbered. At last he allowed Cranmer to be summoned. When he arrived, the king was speechless; but being besought to give some sign that he put his trust in Christ, wrung the Archbishop’s hand. An hour afterwards, he was dead.

Henry’s career leaves a pretty wide option for forming a judgment of his character. After making every possible allowance for flattery, we know that he was exceptionally accomplished, cultured, athletic; he could hold his own with any one, in an argument or in the tilt-yard. His physical courage has been impugned, principally because in respect of infectious diseases he was notoriously a coward. As a young man, if he was unfaithful to his wife he at any rate observed the expected courtesies; it is not surprising to find that as the divorce proceedings went on his manner deteriorated, till his treatment of Katharine, of his daughter Mary, of Anne Boleyn when she lost her hold on him, can only be described as blackguardly. No one, perhaps, would venture to ascribe to him a fervent zeal for religion; but he was intensely satisfied with the rigidity of his own orthodoxy. It is one of the many ironies of his career that his religiousness has been praised exclusively by people whom he would have sent to the stake as heretics without a moment’s hesitation. If he let Cranmer have his way about an English Bible, it was not from an enthusiastic admiration of the Scriptures, but because he knew that some of the clergy thought it would weaken their influence. The nature of his own creed is conveyed in the Act of the Six Articles. Of his “morality,” in the restricted sense of that term, enough has already been said; it was that of his age and his rank. For his conception of honour, his applications of the Statute of _Præmunire_, and the return he rendered to Wolsey and Cromwell and More for their services, are sufficient witness. In the case of More, by the way, it was characteristic of him that when the report of the ex-Chancellor’s execution was brought to him, he turned on Anne Boleyn and told her it was all her doing. For a high-minded man, his approval of the schemes for getting James Beton kidnapped when under a safe-conduct, and for the murder of David Beton, seems a little peculiar; yet in those times, it cannot be denied that similar schemes found sanction in most unexpected quarters. As far as politics were concerned, he kept his promises, on the whole, a shade more loyally than Charles and Francis and their successors. Ferdinand and Maximilian, of course, had never begun to think that promises could be looked upon as binding.

As a statesman: we must reject the theory that he was merely a _Roi Fainéant_ who liked to fancy that he was running the machine while he was merely dancing to the tune called by cleverer men than himself: we reject also the theory that the policy followed throughout was his own creation, and that Wolsey and Cromwell stood in the same relation to him as Morton and Fox to his father. He was not a far-seeing man himself, but he knew a far-seeing man when he found one, having an unfailing instinct for judging other men’s capacities and limitations, intellectual and moral. He was ready to recognise their insight and foresight, their organising and administrative powers, to lay the burden--and the reproach--on their shoulders; but if they did not convince his judgment, they had to obey his behests, not he theirs. And yet there is one field wherein credit, and very high credit, attaches to Henry--credit, moreover, which appears to be entirely his own. As Wolsey had his hobby, education, so Henry had his hobby, the navy. A Royal Navy, a fleet whose business was fighting, was practically his creation. It may very well be that he was much wiser than he knew himself in this matter--that his ships were to him something of a toy. But what he did went far to making the glories of his daughter’s reign possible, as the army of Frederick I. of Prussia made the army of Frederick II. possible.

Finally; although we have denied him personally the greatest qualities of statesmanship displayed by his ministers, he did possess in a very high degree certain essential qualities of a successful ruler. No mere blustering tyrant would have held England in his grip for thirty-seven years; the annals of princes of that type may be terrible, but they are brief. The masses may be held in subjection by a powerful upper class for an indefinite period; the continued power of an individual tyrant--of an active and resolutely aggressive autocratic ruler--depends on his preserving the loyalty of the active part of his subjects. That loyalty Henry retained; he never had the smallest difficulty in stamping out every attempt at resistance. Mere ruthlessness will not account for it; ruthlessness by itself rouses new enemies: a reign of sheer terror is brief. To the instinct for gauging men he added the instinct of gauging popular sentiment--a perception of the line which must not be over-stepped; a knack of gracious and timely withdrawal if ever he seemed to have passed the danger-point. Withal, he recognised that the surest method of getting his own way was to make his subjects believe that it was their way too. His figure is very, very far from being god-like; it is quite remote from the heroic; it might, however, have fairly been called Titanic, if that term did not imply ultimate failure--for he did not fail. Neither his intellectual nor his moral qualities permit us to love him, to praise him, or to honour him; and yet, if we have read him aright, it is impossible not to admire.

PROTECTOR SOMERSET

I

MISCONCEPTIONS

Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was Protector and the most prominent personality in English politics for a period only just exceeding two years and a half. As Earl of Hertford, he grasped the reins of power when Henry VIII. died; but since the fall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry had reigned without allowing any of his servants to occupy a pre-eminent position, and the Earl of Hertford had certainly not been an exception. After his overthrow in the autumn of 1549, his political influence was never strong enough to affect the measures of his successor: it sufficed merely to bring about his own execution as a preventive measure. The whole reign of Edward VI. is, in fact, quite sharply divided into the two periods of the Seymour ascendency and the Dudley ascendency; but the distinction somehow seems to be very commonly overlooked, and Somerset is not only credited with his own doings or misdoings, but with a goodly share of those for which Northumberland was responsible, and with which Somerset was entirely out of sympathy.

It would appear, however, that it would be difficult to find two men whose ideas were more thoroughly antagonistic than those of Somerset and Northumberland: a view not very easily reconcilable with the popular verdict, which seems to regard Somerset as being a weaker if rather more amiable edition of his rival. It is certainly well that the latest detailed study of the Protector’s career should have at least sufficed to make the old method of treating him inexcusable for the future. Without accepting all Mr. Pollard’s inferences as to his subject’s abilities and character, it must be recognised that the portrait presented in his _England under Protector Somerset_, if somewhat “flattered,” will have to be seriously reckoned with by all future historians of the period.

Nevertheless, it may be doubted whether the impression left by that volume is quite what the author intended to convey. The suggestion certainly is that the Protector was really a great man who only failed because he was too much in advance of his age. But in fact, while he possessed certain qualities essential to the great statesman though by no means requisite for a successful politician, he lacked others which are necessary to either character. Some of the projects for which he laboured most strenuously were wrecked, not because they were out of reach, but because of his own inherent incapacity for adapting means to ends; and the general effect of his efforts was not to bring the objects he had in view within nearer reach, but to make them more difficult of attainment than they were before. Failure is no condemnation. Wiclif failed, and Huss failed; but they made the Reformation possible. Somerset failed, and there was hardly one of his aims which had been advanced a single step by his action. A statesman, to deserve the title in its full sense, must be an idealist in his aims, but practical in his methods. The unpractical statesman may deserve our sympathy and our admiration; but we may not therefore give him the full meed of applause which belongs to the benefactors of the race or nation. The unpractical idealist may be invaluable when he is a voice only. When the control of public affairs falls into his hands, he is a public danger.

II

THE PROTECTOR AND HIS PROBLEMS

Edward Seymour was born about 1505: of good family, but not of high rank, though there was a strain of Plantagenet blood on the mother’s side. At any rate, the Seymours were connected with the Court, and the future Protector was still a boy when he was holding offices associated with Royalties. When Henry VIII. tired of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour was the new spouse on whom his choice fell. The marriage naturally brought advancement to her brother; and though she did not long survive the birth of her son, Seymour, who had by this time been appointed to the Privy Council and raised to the earldom of Hertford, continued to enjoy favours as a man of undoubted talents and attractive personality--and uncle of the heir apparent. Favours, however, meant very little in the way of power. He discharged various functions and took part in sundry military operations in France and Scotland; but apart from one smart action near Boulogne, very little real credit attaches to his performances, which consisted for the most part in sacking the city of Edinburgh, and laying waste the Scottish border with rather more than usual in the way of burning and devastation.

Such as they were, however, these achievements sufficed to bring him some prestige as a commander. If there was nothing particularly brilliant about them, the same comment applies generally to those of his fellows and rivals. There was no one marked out by his talents to take up the reins of government when the king should die and be succeeded by a nine-year-old son. But it was fairly obvious that either the Howards, or Hertford in virtue of his relationship to the young Edward, must occupy the leading position. Intrigues and the folly of Surrey turned the scale against the Howards; Surrey and his father were both attainted; the former was executed and the latter escaped only through Henry’s death. Hertford was inevitably the man of the hour.

There was no manner of doubt about the succession. Henry left only one son, and that son’s legitimacy was unchallenged. But by a wholly unique measure, Henry had been empowered to fix by will not only the course of succession after his son but the method of carrying on the government during Edward’s minority. The will, when produced, was found to vest the control in a council of executors, giving priority to none, but remarkable as excluding Bishop Gardiner from the list. The genuineness of the document has been disputed, but probably without sufficient reason. At any rate, as it stood, its provisions were very far from satisfying Hertford’s ambitions, and it is hard to see how any one could have had a personal interest in giving it such a shape. Certainly he had none, and his immediate efforts were directed to inducing the new Council to alter its own constitution fundamentally. For two days the king’s death was kept secret, while Hertford laid his plans in conjunction with Paget, who had possession of the will. When the Council was summoned and the will produced, a proposal was immediately sanctioned appointing Hertford Lord Protector of the realm and of the king’s person. The assent of the king and the peers was formally obtained, and a few weeks later the appointment was confirmed by the king’s authority under the Great Seal. In the interval there had been a general distribution of honours, Hertford himself being made Duke of Somerset. Also the one member of the Council from whom serious opposition was to be feared, Wriothesley the Lord Chancellor (now made Earl of Southampton), justified his own removal by transgressing his powers. Somerset’s position was thus for the time at least made impregnable.

Henry VIII. himself and his second great minister Cromwell had conducted the government of the country on autocratic lines under colour of parliamentary forms, until Parliament itself assigned, not to the Crown as such, but to Henry personally, what amounted to the power of legislation by Royal Proclamation. Somerset, though without this statutory power, continued to make a free use of proclamations, such being in effect the system to which the country had become accustomed. He did not appreciate the change which had taken place. For the successful exercise of those powers a personality was needed which commanded unquestioning obedience, coupled with an unerring sense of the limits of endurance in the subjects. In neither respect was the Protector endowed with the necessary qualities.

There were problems enough to be dealt with to have daunted a master of statecraft. Over the Channel, there was France, aggrieved because England was just now holding Boulogne in pawn. The veteran Francis I. followed his English contemporary and rival to the grave in a very few weeks, and the son who succeeded him was by no means friendly to England. Across the northern border there was Scotland, with a baby queen, a queen-mother who was one of the Guise family who were in the ascendant in France, and a dominant party which in its national sympathies was French, and, in the religious point of view, regarded Henry as a schismatic and all advocates of the Reformation as heretics. At home, it was quite certain that the removal of Henry’s heavy hand would be followed by a renewal of the strife in the Church between the followers of the “Old Learning,” headed by Gardiner, Bonner and Tunstal, and those of the New, whose chief was Archbishop Cranmer. In addition, there was a grave social problem.

For a full half century a steady process had been at work throughout rural England of extending sheep-farming at the expense of cultivation. It was a process which paid the land-owners, owing to the large demands from abroad for English wool. But it was not equally satisfactory to the agricultural labourer, who was deprived of his customary employment (since sheep-farming required far fewer hands) and found no adequate compensation as yet in the industrial growth of towns. The evil was aggravated by the iniquitous manner in which landholders systematically seized every opportunity of appropriating common lands. In the main, this was the outcome of natural economic tendencies, which repeated attempts at legislative interference entirely failed to hold in check. But these troubles had been directly intensified by the action of Henry’s government for more than ten years past. The dissolution of the monasteries had deprived the peasantry of an easy-going and on the whole kindly group of landlords, and replaced these by another group who were generally greedy and rapacious. Moreover, the wholesale and monstrous debasement of the coinage, an expedient to which Henry had been driven by the depletion of the exchequer caused by his extravagance, had brought about a corresponding drop in effective wages, besides shaking financial stability and commercial confidence, with the unfailing disastrous results. From all of which, wide-spread misery and want were prevalent, more particularly in the rural districts.

These problems, we have said, might well have daunted even a master of statecraft. But for each of them the sanguine duke had his solution. It was with no mere paltry self-seeking designs that he had grasped at power. He had elected himself to the office of saviour of society: to the great disgust of some of those members of the Council who had connived at his elevation, in the confident belief that his interests and their own were identical, and would be the first objects at which his government would aim.

III

SOMERSET AND SCOTLAND

At the outset, it was to Scotland that the Protector gave his attention.