Part 5

In its second aspect, the Reformation was a religious revolution; a revision of ethical standards; a revival of that ardour of sentiment and of conviction whereof martyrs are born; a spiritual movement, accompanied by a doctrinal upheaval. That portion of Christendom which adhered to the Roman pontificate, confining its doctrinal modifications within the limits set by the Council of Trent, arrogated to itself the title of Catholic. The rest arrogated to themselves the title of the Reformed Churches, accepting the general label of Protestants originally appropriate only to the Lutheran section. Like all political labels, all three of these terms were incorrect, “Protestant” being improperly extended, while the “Reformed” Churches might be Catholic, and the “Catholic” Church was itself reformed. Perhaps it would be of advantage rather to treat the doctrinal Reformation as a third aspect, and to distinguish the great actors by the parts they played in the political, the religious, and the doctrinal Reformations respectively, whether in restraining or in promoting change. Thus, religion did not enter into the programme of Henry VIII.; as to doctrine he certainly was not a reformer; politically, he emerged as a revolutionary. Men like More and Colet were ardent reformers of religion; in theology and on the political side, they were conservative. Luther, Calvin and Knox were of the advanced party in each case. But it must be definitely laid down that of the three aspects of the Reformation the most vital was the religious, not the political or the theological; and the men who, whether Catholic or Protestant, were the religious leaders, are on a higher plane of greatness than the rest; it is amongst them that we must look for the “master-minds” of the age.

Now it does not appear that in any single one of these three aspects Wolsey as a matter of fact influenced the great movement, already fairly under weigh, in any appreciable degree. Had he, instead of Clement, occupied the Papal throne, the political power of the Papacy would indubitably have been for the time greatly advanced. Had his own power in England survived the divorce business, the secular onslaught on the ecclesiastical body conducted by Cromwell would not have taken place. It is conceivable that under modified circumstances he might have evolved a _modus vivendi_ for Church and State more favourable to the Church than that which emerged from the thirty tempestuous years which followed his death. But in fact the whole manner of the Cardinal’s life, his immersion in secular politics, the magnificence of his household, his many benefices, his vast accumulation of wealth, the arrogance of his demeanour, typified and flaunted before the public eye precisely those shortcomings of the clergy at large on which the anti-clerical spirit of the laity was battening. The Cardinal might have strengthened the Church’s power of resistance; he certainly was in no small degree the cause of the animosity of her assailants. In the eyes of the whole world, he was essentially a man of the world, worldly; and in worldliness, far more than in the temptations of the Flesh or the Devil, the best of the reformers found the Church’s besetting sin.

No political skill, no state-craft, no loyalty to his order, could have gone to the root of the matter by removing the moral grounds of hostility to the ecclesiastical organisation. A moral enthusiasm of which--to put it mildly--no hint whatever is to be found in the great minister, was absolutely essential for any man who was either to renovate the prestige of the clergy so that the people should follow them or so to inspire the people that the clergy should follow the popular movement. In England there arose no prophet, but for that much-needed _rôle_ Wolsey was about as little fitted as any imaginable leader.

Nevertheless, something he did and more he was willing to do. There were specific grievances which up to a certain point he sought to remedy. Without surrendering any of the privileges of his order, he made in his own Legatine Courts a vast improvement on the practice of the ordinary Ecclesiastical Courts. He did away with a considerable number of small religious Houses whose condition was more or less of a scandal. His visitations brought about improved discipline in many of the larger Houses; some of his appointments, as to the Abbey at Glastonbury, were notably admirable; in rejecting an unworthy abbess for Wilton he braved the anger of the king at a time when he ran an exceptionally heavy risk in doing so. Above all, he was fully alive to the necessity of educating a new generation of clergy up to a high standard; and to that end he created his great foundations of Ipswich and Cardinal College (Christ Church), Oxford, carrying out on a much more extensive scale what Dean Colet and Bishop Fox had set themselves to do before him. His college was crippled and his school was wrecked when he fell; but in this at least he deserves to be honoured by the side of William of Wickham. Yet the name of William is hardly to be coupled with those of Luther or Loyola. Wolsey was a real and sincere patron of education; he had a sufficiently keen sense of order and public decency to be a just judge and something of a disciplinarian; but much more than this would have been required to make him a potent moral force; and without being that he could not, even had he become Pope, have affected the Reformation in a permanent manner, though he might have modified its political course. He was the consummation of the old school of political ecclesiastics. Probably he was never so much as conscious that a moral revolution was in progress. What he did know was that the political position of the Holy See, and of the whole ecclesiastical system, was threatened, and his legatine and Papal ambitions may fairly be attributed as much to a belief in his own fitness to pilot the ship as to selfishly personal motives. But the mere fact that, with the powers he did acquire and the vast abilities he possessed, he yet accomplished practically nothing either as a reformer or as a bulwark of the old order, is fairly conclusive proof that he was neither the “greatest of English statesmen” nor “the master-mind of his age.”

VII

WOLSEY’S FALL AND CHARACTER

The Legatine Court was suspended, and the question of the divorce advoked to Rome, in July 1529. The signs of Wolsey’s doom were quick to gather. His master practically ceased to hold personal communication with him. It was evident, when writs for a Parliament were issued in September, that the Cardinal was no longer directing the king: for he had consistently aimed so far as possible at the suppression of the functions of Parliament. Campeggio was hardly out of the country when his colleague was indicted under the Statute of Præmunire for having exercised the legatine office contrary to the law. The Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk deprived him of the Great Seal which he held as Chancellor. Ill and despairing, he retired to his house at Esher, shorn of all his offices. He was attainted in the House of Peers, and the Bill was passed. In the Commons, however, the vigorous opposition to it made by Cromwell, and a feeling that the king was not unfavourable to its rejection, resulted in its being thrown out.

Probably Henry had not yet thoroughly made up his mind as to his course of action, and wished to preserve a possibility of recalling his minister to his counsels. He was told that he might be permitted to discharge some of his pastoral functions, and was allowed to retire in the spring to York, to take up the duties of the Archbishopric; and in spite of the immense fines imposed on him, he was by no means stripped bare of this world’s goods. York was fixed on as being more remote from the neighbourhood both of Henry and of the Continent than Winchester. He threw himself into the unaccustomed _rôle_ with apparent zest, and seemed on the verge of achieving an unexpected reputation for pastoral piety and devotion, when a fresh blow fell. He was summoned to London on a charge of treason. He had been unwise enough to write to Francis I and pray for his intercession with Henry; he was also accused, though groundlessly, of having made really treasonous proposals to the Pope. Already ill when he started, he became rapidly worse on his journey south, and having reached the Abbey of Leicester, was unable again to rise from his bed. There he passed away, pathetically forlorn; but at least spared the last undeserved ignominy of a traitor’s doom.

On the high road to success and in the height of his power, Wolsey extorts an admiration which is still somewhat reluctant. His figure cannot be called attractive. Over the business of the divorce it is difficult not to feel him positively repellent. But in his fall he rose to moral heights of which his previous career gives no warning. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Here, it would seem, was one who--not voluntarily surrendering but forcibly bereft of the world, when he had gained it--found thereby his soul’s salvation. Through tears and tribulation, pain of the worn-out body, anguish of the spirit, he won it. In the day of his triumph, his countrymen hated him while they could not but admire; hated him with a rare bitterness which made even Thomas More ungenerous; save some few of his own household, none felt a touch of sympathy, unless perhaps the king, who condescended to send him one or two kindly messages to salve his own royal conscience while he was stripping his most loyal servant of everything he possessed. Yet in the months of his retirement, while, in his diocese of York, he devoted himself to the care of his spiritual flock, the fallen Cardinal won on all hands a passionate affection bestowed only upon men and women who can forget themselves in their thought for others. At bottom there must have been in the man an essential sweetness and loveableness repressed--dried up in the fires of ambition, parched in the sunshine of prosperity, welling forth in the shadow of adversity. Gone was the power that swayed the politics of a continent; gone the gorgeous pomp, the insolent state, that stirred the impotent malice of the lesser men he had overshadowed. But with their loss, the hidden best that was in the fallen minister found free play.

Wolsey’s chroniclers have been against him. Those who wished to magnify the king pointed to the Cardinal as the evil genius who had prompted every ill-judged deed. The nobility hated him as an insolent and upstart foe to their order. Katharine’s party hated him, because he was credited not only with anti-Spanish policy but with being the prime mover of the divorce. The Boleyn party hated him, because they knew that he loathed the Boleyn marriage. He had no sympathy from the Protestants, since he stood for the old ecclesiastical order; none from the later Catholics, since his attitude to the Papacy was misunderstood; none from the populace, because he embodied the most unpopular characteristics of ecclesiasticism. Even Cavendish, who admired him, is careful in his record to point the moral that pride goeth before a fall, lest his praise of the Cardinal’s demeanour in his last year of life should be regarded as unduly laudatory. From Skelton to Fox the martyrologist, every man had some motive for throwing a stone at him.

But if Shakespeare--or another--has summed up for us the libels of his enemies, the same hand has shaped the far truer eulogium pronounced by the “honest chronicler” Griffith in the same play. By his own talents he had made himself great: in his high station, if in some respects he abused his power, yet in the main he worked for the glory of England. It is inconceivable that when he fell, when the world slipped from the grasp of one who had been the very type of worldliness, he should have kissed the rod with perfect resignation, and found no taste of bitterness in the cup allotted to him. Yet there was at least a solid proportion of truth in the pious words of Griffith:

His overthrow heaped happiness upon him; For then, and not till then, he felt himself, And found the blessedness of being little; And, to add greater honours to his age Than man could give him, he died fearing God.

No amount of historical inquiry will ever suffice to displace in the public mind a portrait bearing Shakespeare’s signature. The Wolsey of the play is not easy to reconcile with the Wolsey Griffith described after his disappearance from the stage: but these words are still a part of the Shakespearean portrait.

SIR THOMAS MORE

I

INTRODUCTORY

Reverence for tradition is not inconsistent with a belief in progress. History yields us abundant instances of great minds which have combined a keen appreciation of the ideas of liberty and equality with a strong predilection in favour of time-honoured institutions. Sometimes, but rarely, the conservative instinct predominates in youth, and gives way to the liberal instinct as time goes on. Sometimes, not rarely, the liberalism of youth yields to the conservatism of later life. In either case, we are presented with the apparent paradox of the man who, maintaining the complete consistency of his own career, is found to be at one period of his life on the side of the reformers, and at another period on the side of the reactionaries. When political movements are comparatively slow, these paradoxes do not obtrude themselves: but when revolutions are in the air, they become conspicuous. There are two eras which are particularly fruitful in such phenomena; those, namely, of the Reformation and of the French Revolution.

Each of those periods presents us in England with one political thinker of the highest rank whose utterances before the great change are cited in authority by progressives, while their later pronouncements or actions are cited with approbation by the opposing forces. There is nothing surprising about the change in political attitude which unexpected events produce in a Stephen Gardiner or a William Pitt; it is merely a divergence from the earlier course. But Burke and More give a _prima facie_ impression of a complete reversal of principle. “Miscalculation and inconsistency were the moving causes of the vicissitudes of Thomas More’s career”; so Mr. Sidney Lee has very recently written of him; as other critics have fallen back on the theory that Burke’s intellect went to pieces. Both these great men did, in fact, misinterpret the very startling events of which they were witness, partly because actual facts was misrepresented to them. Neither believed that a work-a-day world with established institutions could be accommodated to ideal polities where those institutions had never grown up. They had in practice to adapt their ideals to what they saw as hard facts. Hence they condemned in the concrete what they would have approved in the abstract. Yet both were close and acute reasoners, and probably neither would have admitted for a moment that he had deserted in later life a single principle which he had maintained at an earlier stage.

But whether critics differ in their attempts to reconcile the More who wrote the “Utopia” with the Lord Chancellor More, or give up the attempt to explain the paradox as hopeless, the attractiveness and nobility of the man stand unchallenged, as his intellectual eminence is indisputable. It is impossible not to love and admire him. Of the other nine men treated in this volume, all have apologists more or less enthusiastic, but all have bitterly or contemptuously hostile critics. More is one of the few men that have left their mark on our history, who has won the tribute of universal affection and esteem.

II

UNDER HENRY VII

Thomas More was born in London in 1478, seven years after Thomas Wolsey, and about the same length of time before Thomas Cromwell. There is a rather curious prevalence of the name Thomas among prominent men at this time, Cranmer being a fourth, and the youngest of the quartet. More’s father was a barrister, who later became a judge; a gentleman with a pleasant humour, a turn for economy, and conservative views. John More was married thrice, and seems to have been comfortably wived, being responsible for a witticism on the subject of matrimony such as usually emanates from men whose personal experience contradicts it. “Taking a wife,” said he, “is like putting your hand into a bag containing a number of snakes and one eel. You _may_ lay hold of the eel.” His son was not warned off the experiment, either by the jest or by his experience of step-mothers.

Young Thomas was a lad of parts; his father was a person of distinction in the great city. Morton, Archbishop and Lord Chancellor, and subsequently a Cardinal, the wise counsellor of Henry VII. throughout the first half of his reign, took the boy into his service, and evidently found much satisfaction in cultivating and encouraging his remarkable intelligence and wit; prophesying “marvellous things” of him. The great man’s kindness was repaid by the very attractive portrait which his _protégé_ has given us in the first book of the “Utopia.” By Morton’s influence, Thomas, at fourteen, was sent to Oxford--not an unusual age. Cranmer too was sent to Cambridge at fourteen: while Wolsey’s youth was exceptional, for he took his degree at the same age. More’s undergraduate career, however, was brief. He was intended by his father to follow the profession of the law, and John More took alarm when he found that his son was being beguiled into an enthusiasm for the recently introduced study of Greek. There was no connexion between law and Greek; besides, Greek was unsettling: it seemed to put new-fangled and heterodox ideas into folk’s heads. So after two years, More was withdrawn from Oxford, entered at New Inn to study the law, and in February, 1496, was admitted a student at Lincoln’s Inn: just about the time when John Colet was returning from Italy.

There is every probability that Colet and his younger contemporary had already foregathered at Oxford, in listening to the teaching of Grocyn: otherwise it is not very easy to account for the warm intimacy which arose between the Oxford Divinity Lecturer and the young student of Lincoln’s Inn: though the fact that both their fathers were men of such eminence in London, that the families may easily have been brought into contact, must not be forgotten. In any case, the names of Colet, Erasmus and More became closely associated between 1496 and 1500. Erasmus paid a flying visit to England in 1498. Colet’s discourses were already famous, and the Dutchman and the Englishman were introduced to each other by Prior Charnock of the College of St. Mary the Virgin: to their great mutual satisfaction. As the story runs, Colet told Erasmus of the surprising genius of his young friend Thomas More, and told More of the amazing endowments of his new acquaintance. The two, unknown to each other, met at the same table, and fell into a dialectical discussion which neither could resist; till at last the elder, putting two and two together, exclaimed “Aut tu es Morus, aut nullus,” the younger promptly responding “Aut tu es Erasmus, aut Diabolus.” Whether the tale be true or not, the acquaintance was made, and ripened rapidly into the warmest of friendships. In those days, complimentary epithets between scholars were nearly as cheap and meant nearly as little, as vituperative ones; but there is no mistake about the genuine and spontaneous character of the terms in which Erasmus wrote to and of Thomas More. He is always _dulcissimus_, _iucundissimus_, or something equally endearing. Erasmus had superlatives for other people too, but there is no one else on whom he lavishes the same wealth of playful affection. It was to Robert Fisher that the scholar about this time wrote his classic appreciation of his young friend--_Thomae Mori ingenio quid unquam finxit natura vel mollius, vel dulcius, vel felicius?_ “What hath nature ever fashioned more tender, more charming, more happy, than the character of Thomas More?”

It was during this visit that More played a characteristic trick on Erasmus, one which shows how well the quondam page of Cardinal Morton (who had just entered on the last year of his life) stood in distinguished quarters. Erasmus was staying at Greenwich with his patron Lord Mountjoy. Thither came More, with a friend, to see him and carry him off for a walk, in the course of which they came to a handsome building, where More said he wished to pay his respects. Somewhat to his dismay, Erasmus found on entering that they were invading a royal domain, and that their visit was to Prince Henry and his brother and sisters who wanted him there and then to produce them a poem. He demurred, but was let off on condition of his promising to send them one--a promise faithfully carried out.

More shared with his older friend a capacity for perceiving the humorous side of things which stood him in good stead all his life. But he had a deeper vein of seriousness, and to him--as to Colet--religion meant a great deal more than it did to the cosmopolitan scholar. The profession for which he was still training--he was not yet called to the Bar--was one to which his abilities were eminently adapted, and his intimacy with Colet did not prevent him from loyally devoting his time and his studies to that training, as his father desired. But as soon as he was duly called, he began to give his natural predilections freer play, and we find him delivering in the City a course of lectures on Augustine’s _De Civitate Dei_: to the admiration of his old master Grocyn and others. Not, however, to the neglect of his legal pursuits, for he was appointed Reader at Furnivall’s Inn; or of larger ambitions, for, young as he was, he appeared as a member of Henry VII.’s Parliament of 1504. The story of the “beardless boy” persuading that assembly to reject a royal demand for cash, as told by his son-in-law William Roper, is familiar; and even if not altogether accurately reported, leaves no doubt that he did so offend Henry that he felt it advisable to retire into political obscurity--the king characteristically taking his revenge by extracting a fine from his father.

It may have been this episode which gave him a temporary inclination to betake himself to a monastic life: but this did not last. Investigation did not lead to the conclusion that life in a monastery was quite the same in practice as in theory, and a _penchant_ for asceticism could be indulged without entering the cloister. Moreover, this summer Colet was in London, probably to commence work at St. Paul’s, where he had just been nominated to the Deanery; and Colet was not the man to counsel such a step. On the contrary, he advised his friend to marry, and the advice was taken next year.[B] The story is quaintly characteristic. Visiting “one Mr. Colte a gentleman of Essex,” he was attracted by the three daughters of the house. The second being the prettiest, took his fancy, but he thought it would be hard on the elder sister if the younger got a husband first, so he “of a certayne pittie framed his fancie towardes her” instead--with excellent results.

[B] Roper’s chronology is not very intelligible. He says that--after being called to the Bar--More was three years a Reader at Furnivall’s Inn, and then passed four years in the Charterhouse without taking the vows. The other evidence, however, points pretty conclusively to 1505 as the date of his marriage.