Part 15

His brother William, created Lord Seymour of Sudely under the new administration, was also Lord High Admiral. But, as the king’s uncle, he was by no means satisfied with the honours which fell to his share, and was extremely jealous of his brother’s absorption of dignities and power. He plunged in a series of intrigues to get the young king under his own personal influence, and to bring the two younger girls, Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, who might come into the succession, under his own control. He began by secretly marrying Katharine Parr, the king’s widow, for whose hand he had been a suitor before Henry had chosen her for his sixth matrimonial venture: so that his wife had precedence over Somerset’s Duchess. Elizabeth, being under her charge, was thus brought into the Admiral’s household. He bribed Dorset, whose wife under Henry’s will stood next in succession to Henry’s own offspring, to place their daughter Jane under his tutelage also. He put forward a claim that, as the king’s uncle, he was entitled to be governor of the king’s person instead of his brother, who was Protector of the realm--a claim in which he was unsupported. He consistently set himself in opposition to his brother, doing everything in his power to thwart him, and refusing to command the fleet which accompanied the invasion of Scotland. Katharine Parr died within eighteen months of her marriage, and no sooner was she in her grave than he attempted to obtain the hand of Elizabeth, now a girl of barely fifteen years: to whom his behaviour had already been so objectionable that Katharine had found it necessary to remove her out of his reach. As Admiral, instead of repressing the pirates who infested the Channel, he made private league with them for their support--and for shares in their booty. He kept something like a small army of bravoes in his pay, and had a private cannon-foundry of his own; and he found the means for the heavy expenditure entailed through a pact with Sharrington, the master of the mint at Bristol, who was pocketing enormous and iniquitous profits out of the clipping and debasing of the coins he issued.

With Henry on the throne, or a Thomas Cromwell at the head of the State, the Lord Admiral would have been in the Tower in two months. Under the Protectorate, he was allowed to carry on his intrigues and malpractices for two years, with nothing more serious than remonstrances. The discovery, however, of Sharrington’s frauds and Seymour’s implication therein brought matters to a head. The evidence, not only of an abuse of his office which amounted to treason, but of an ulterior intention of subverting the Government, was ample enough, though the only prominent men who were in any sense attached to him were Dorset and Northampton (the latter being Katharine Parr’s brother). There is hardly a question that, in open trial, under the most favourable conditions, the Admiral would have been sentenced and executed. Unfortunately for his own credit, Somerset assented to the view of the Council that the process should be by attainder in Parliament instead. Seymour stood on his right to an open hearing, and refused to answer the interrogatories of committees of the Council or of the Peers; and therefore he was condemned, by the almost unanimous verdict of both houses, unheard. The natural result was that men said at the time, and have continued to say since, that the Protector, fearing that his brother might become a dangerous rival, fabricated charges against him, and in effect contrived one more of the political murders of the type so familiar in the annals of Henry VIII. The Admiral was executed in March. His death was undoubtedly a shock to popular sentiment, and weakened Somerset’s position, so that his fall followed the more easily after the rural risings which turned the majority of the Council decisively against him.

VII

THE EX-PROTECTOR

The Council’s _coup d’état_ cost very little trouble. The moment was seized, when the unsuspecting Somerset was at Hampton Court, Cranmer and Paget being absent; while Russell and Herbert were returning with victorious laurels and most of the available army from the suppression of the Western rising. Both of them had strong feelings as to Somerset’s Enclosures policy. After a futile appeal to the people, there was nothing to do but surrender. But the Duke was at any rate a popular favourite; a good many of those who were in the plot against him liked him well enough personally though his policy annoyed them; he was not of the stuff of which successful political plotters are made; there was no plausible excuse for treating anything that he had done as proving anything worse than incompetence; and the Council were satisfied by his being turned out of office, subjected to a brief imprisonment, and deprived of no great amount of his lands. Six months after his fall he was even readmitted to the Privy Council, as Southampton had been three years before. There was, in short, no display of animosity; but the Warwick faction meant to grasp the management of public affairs, and to conduct them with more profit to themselves than the Protector’s _régime_ permitted.

Warwick and his friends--the Earl did not get himself created Duke of Northumberland till two years later--took over the control in October 1549. They retained it for a little less than four years. During that time their foreign and Scottish policy showed no improvement upon that of Somerset. In matters of religion, they progressed from the Prayer-book of 1548-49 to that of 1552: which would have been of a more pronounced Calvinistic flavour than it was but for the moderating influence of Ridley and Cranmer. Bonner and Gardiner were both deprived of their sees at the beginning of the _régime_, and later Tunstal, Day, and Heath were also imprisoned and deprived. The new appointments were all advanced Reformers. Before Somerset’s fall the Princess Mary had been attacked for persisting in the use of the Mass in private, after the Act of Uniformity, but the Protector granted her a licence to continue. The Warwick government was not similarly complaisant. And when a second Act of Uniformity was passed, of a much narrower type than the first, laymen as well as clergy were penalised for failure to conform. In dealing with the rural troubles Somerset’s policy was reversed, legislation being directed to the coercive repression of discontent and the relaxation of such safeguards as existed against the rapacity of landlords. To this must be added their new treason law, which not only extended the same protection to all Privy Councillors as to the king himself, but also made assemblies “for altering the laws” high treason, while renewing the requirement of two witnesses as well as of a time-limit which Somerset had introduced.

Yet there are historians who say that there is no need to differentiate between the policy of Somerset and his successor--associating them in the same condemnation.

Somerset, restored to liberty and formally reconciled to Warwick, consistently endeavoured to use his influence in mitigation of the rigours of the new Government, whose chief began to fear, not without reason, that the moderate men might draw together and reinstate his rival. Paget, whose abilities made him dangerous, was removed from the Council, and imprisoned on an inadequate pretext in the autumn of 1551, to simplify the carrying out of Warwick’s plot; evidence of an alleged conspiracy was carefully concocted, Somerset and several of his friends were arrested, and the torture--never employed by the Protector--was resorted to for the extraction of confessions from some of the prisoners. A mythical assassination plot was dropped out of the indictment. Finding that even the concocted evidence was quite inadequate for a conviction of treason, Northumberland magnanimously declined to press personal charges, and Somerset was found guilty of felony--apparently on the ground that he had incited the citizens of London to rebellion--by a carefully packed court.

Having been acquitted of treason, but--with equal satisfaction to Northumberland, since the penalty was the same--condemned for felony, the axe borne by Somerset’s gaolers was reversed when he was taken from the judgment-hall. The crowds which had gathered to await the verdict were thus misled into the belief that the trial had gone in his favour, and broke into a clamour of rejoicing. It was a fond illusion. Even when his doom was made known the populace refused to believe that it would be carried out. The Duke himself knew better. As he stood on the scaffold, having already pronounced his moving and dignified dying speech, a messenger was seen approaching, and a wild cry arose--a delighted shout that he was carrying a pardon. Somerset hushed the people, warning them it was no such thing, and bidding them pray with him for the King’s Majesty. Then, with the words “Lord Jesus, save me,” he laid his head on the block to receive the fatal stroke: and the spectators hastened to dip their kerchiefs in his blood, to be preserved as memorials of one who, with all his faults, had won the heart’s love of the common folk.

Somerset’s personal faults were shared by the majority of the prominent men of his time; it was only the greatness of his position which made them a shade more conspicuous in him. As a statesman, he was a melancholy failure; _capax imperii_ he was not in any possible sense; and his incapacity was only the more conclusively proved by the fact that he never suspected it himself. The shrewdest of men would have found it difficult enough to realise his aims, and of shrewdness he had not a particle. His failure was due not less to his complete lack of judgment than to the difficulties inherent in the problems which with easy confidence he set himself to solve. It was an ill thing for England that he was not a wiser man. But it had been well for England if wiser men than he had possessed more of those moral qualities of his to which he himself so woefully failed to give effect.

ARCHBISHOP CRANMER

I

INTRODUCTORY

The Protector Somerset accounted himself a statesman. Of his own choice, he grasped at power; and being unfitted for it, he broke down disastrously. Thomas Cranmer affords a striking contrast. He was dragged into the turmoil of public affairs, in the vortex of the Reformation; against his will, he was compelled to accept ecclesiastical responsibilities which were in themselves semi-political, and to play a part also in affairs which were political exclusively. In the second capacity, he never assumed the direction, but was merely called upon to assent to the actions of others; but as archbishop he was compelled willy nilly to be a protagonist in the religious revolution--a term covering not only changes in the authorised doctrines of the Church and the authorised practices of the clergy, but in the relations of the clerical organisation in England both to the clerical organisation of Christendom and the secular powers at home.

In the eyes of an earnest school of ecclesiastical critics, he proved himself a traitor to the sacred trust which was imposed on him; a time-serving tool of lay usurpers; who, if he had convictions, lacked the courage of them, disowning all that he had most strongly avowed to save himself from the stake; and only at the last in some measure redeeming himself by a belated and almost incomprehensible courage in the hour of his doom. Ardent Protestants endorse half the charges, and condemn him as at best a Laodicean, though one who found grace at the eleventh hour. And historians who display no marked bias on the ecclesiastical questions are apt almost to pass him by, with contemptuous reference to his weakness and subserviency. Still there are not a few who have studied his career with care and sympathy; and their verdict is by no means the one conventionally accepted. It would, indeed, be strange and sad if such a verdict gave a true account of the man who did more than any other individual, on the one hand, to preserve the continuity of the Church, while, on the other hand, he strove to make her comprehensive and national. To no one, indeed, can he assume the proportions of a master-spirit; but the more closely we study him, the more readily we recognise in him a pre-eminently gentle and charitable soul, simple and sincere, striving to do his duty through good and evil report, in a task which he would fain have left to men who were not--as he was--born to be students, not fighters; and actually accomplishing what men of far greater practical ability would have deemed it vain to attempt. If it was better for England that the Church should be what it became than that it should have taken the shape into which either a Gardiner or a Knox would have moulded it, it was well for England that for twenty years Cranmer was her foremost ecclesiastic.

II

CRANMER AT CAMBRIDGE

Thomas Cranmer was born not two years before Henry VIII., in 1489; the son of a country gentleman of no great estate. An elder son was to carry on the family; Thomas and his younger brother were destined to the Church. The younger sons of a country gentleman of straitened means had no very encouraging prospects, and the career chosen for the boy was, no doubt, dictated merely by convenience, though it was well enough suited to his talents and temperament. Somewhat lacking, perhaps, in that cheerful heedlessness of danger and physical pain which is the happy heritage of the normal English boy--the outcome often of rude health and imperturbable nerves rather than of any properly moral endowment--a certain timidity and want of self-confidence in him were evidently fostered by the unsympathetic severity of a pedagogue whose theory of education was, a stick with a master at one end and a boy at the other. In due course he went up to the recent foundation of Jesus College, Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship on taking his degree. Till his fortieth year he continued in these academic shades, and would have remained there peacefully enough to his life’s end if an accident had not brought him under the notice of Henry VIII.

Colet and others, some years earlier, had introduced the new criticism into Oxford; while Cranmer was an undergraduate, Cambridge was still lagging behind. In 1511, however, the placid, not to say stagnant, waters were moved by the appointment of Erasmus to the Greek Chair. There is no record of any personal intercourse between Cranmer and the great scholar; but it was precisely at this time that the former withdrew his attention from the scholastic philosophy and theology which had hitherto absorbed him, and devoted himself to studying the Scriptures. In the University he seems to have been regarded as an undoubtedly learned scholar; for Wolsey, who as an educationist chose his men with judgment, offered him a canonry at his new “Cardinal College” at Oxford; but he was not looked upon as one who would seek preferment or be selected for it unsought, or as in any sense an intellectual leader. The only incident worth noting is that at the outset, being still a layman, he lost his fellowship by marrying a respectable young “gentlewoman,” a connexion of the landlord of a Cambridge hostelry. On her death, however, a year later, he was re-elected to his fellowship--apparently a unique instance in those times of such recognition--proceeding afterwards to take Holy Orders.

Now, in those early days, the intelligence and ability, not only of laymen, but of the greatest ecclesiastics were all on the side of the intellectual emancipation of which Erasmus was the apostle. Archbishop Warham was the scholar’s patron, Fox of Winchester was his warm admirer, Fisher of Rochester had given him his Cambridge appointment. From his disciples Wolsey chose the men for the great college which was his favourite scheme outside of pure politics. Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s, and Thomas More, were among his closest friends. No one of any account thought of receiving with anything but the warmest welcome his edition of the Greek Testament and the _Utopia_ of More, which appeared about the same time. Then a somewhat startling event occurred. The Pope wanted money; he sent out commissioners to obtain it by the sale of indulgences; and a monk at Wittenberg rose up and publicly denounced the whole scheme. At first, the meaning of the portent was not fully appreciated; but before long the denunciation of indulgences developed into a challenge of the entire Papal system, of the pretensions of the Popes, and of sundry accepted dogmas. Reformation by the influence of sweetness and light was by no means the same thing as this volcanic revolution. The men who had done so much to make the new movement possible became eager to repress it. The English king plunged into theological controversy, triumphantly vindicating the Papacy and pulverising the monk of Wittenberg.

Before many years had passed, however, Henry found reason to modify his views, as More had warned him he might do. Papal pretensions stood in the way of royal designs, and that fact brought it home to him that those pretensions were not based upon a rock. The Bishop of Rome was also a European potentate subject to political pressure from other potentates--a political factor with a spiritual sanction. If the spiritual sanction were challenged, the political situation would be simplified. The king’s authority in his own dominions would no longer be trammeled by the claims of a foreign authority to over-ride it. When a collision between the royal and the Papal authority became imminent, it was time to be rid of the Papacy for good and all. That, of course, was quite a different thing from admitting heretical dogmas or denials of dogma.

The occasion was the divorce[C] of Katharine of Aragon. If the Pope had been amenable in that matter, Henry would in all likelihood have left the Papal authority where he found it. But Clement, terrorised by the Emperor, was not amenable--despite the efforts of Wolsey. The collapse of the legatine trial ruined Wolsey and decided the king on a campaign with the object of establishing the Crown as the sole head of the Spirituality; involving the withdrawal or repudiation of the Papal claims and the formal subjection of the clergy in England.

[C] This customary term for the proceedings has been used throughout. But it may be necessary to note that a “decree of nullity”--the thing sought--is not properly speaking a “divorce” at all. Nullity means that no marriage had in fact been contracted; divorce, that a marriage which had been contracted is dissolved.

The trial had just collapsed. Henry in dudgeon retired to Waltham. Two of his suite, his almoner Fox and his secretary Stephen Gardiner, took up their quarters with a Mr. Cressy, in whose house Dr. Cranmer happened to be residing, as the son’s tutor. Gardiner and Fox, being also respectively Provost and Master of King’s and Trinity Hall, were acquainted with Cranmer; and together they naturally discussed what was known as “the king’s affair.” In the course of conversation Cranmer expressed himself to the effect that Henry could do without the Papal decision. He could obtain from the universities of Europe the opinion of the qualified divines on the question whether a Papal dispensation for a marriage with a deceased brother’s widow was _ultra vires_; and take corresponding action on his own responsibility when he learnt the result. The English courts, in short, were competent to pronounce the marriage null or valid, but the position would be made impregnable if they had the expert opinion of Europe to go upon. The conversation was reported to Henry, who caught at the scheme and summoned its deviser to talk to him. Their interview terminated Cranmer’s hitherto undisturbed prospect of passing his days in peaceful and learned seclusion; such an instrument as this was not to be wasted. Unscrupulous loyalty Henry knew by experience he could command; servants of the type which provided it could be used till the last ounce of service had been extracted from them, and then cast aside. But Henry wanted a man of undeniable learning, unblemished character, a tender conscience, a convenient theory of Church and State, and a certain impressibility. The combination was not easily found--but he had found it.

III

RISE TO THE ARCHBISHOPRIC

The common animosity towards Cranmer of those who hold “high” doctrines on the function of the priesthood is entirely intelligible. For them, the divine revelation is entrusted to the Church, and the voice of the Church is the voice of her priesthood. Its authority is absolute, and secular powers seeking to control it are laying profane hands on the Ark of the Covenant. That laymen should not humbly recognise that august claim is deplorable; still, for laymen some excuse may be found. But that a priest should not merely disavow it in words, but emphasise the disavowal by his acts, aiding and abetting the desecration as well as justifying it, is intolerable. When, moreover, that priest is himself, as it were, the shepherd of the whole flock, whose position demands that he above all others should be the guardian and champion of the Church’s rights, he becomes a double-dyed traitor. Palpably guilty of so heinous a crime, the presumption in favour of the truth of any minor charges against him is so strong that it is hardly necessary to examine them: they may almost be taken for granted.

If, indeed, it be unpardonable to believe that the State is supreme, there can be no pardon for Cranmer. But if once it be admitted that a man is not of necessity a moral reprobate for holding that view, and that it is possible, even for a priest, to maintain it with entire honesty and sincerity, the whole fabric of Cranmer’s condemnation collapses. To Cranmer, the State meant the king, and in the king he found an authority more divine--more definitely, that is, of divine sanction--than in any other of the powers that be. When in Queen Mary’s reign he found the royal authority in flat opposition to what he held to be truth, no doubt a very painful and puzzling dilemma presented itself; but the same dilemma is presented to every individual who, having recognised some external authority as final, suddenly discovers that the dictates of that authority and those of his own conscience are in flat contradiction.

Cranmer, in short, was as complete and convinced an Erastian as any layman could possibly have been. It was the clear perception of that fact which primarily made Henry select him as Archbishop Warham’s successor. A frankly Erastian archbishop was an anomaly, but it is not necessary _ipso facto_ to condemn him as a criminal and a hypocrite, or even as a time-server.