[Transcriber’s note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.
The original spelling has been retained.
The index references to footnotes have been linked to the referred-to
footnote, with a few exceptions in which the correct footnote could not
be determined. In those cases, the link goes to the first footnote on the
page.]

HENRY VIII.

HENRY VIII.

BY

A.F. POLLARD, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON;
EXAMINER IN MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITIES OF OXFORD AND
LONDON; AUTHOR OF “A LIFE OF CRANMER,” “ENGLAND UNDER
PROTECTOR SOMERSET,” ETC., ETC.

NEW IMPRESSION

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30th STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919

First published by Messrs. Goupil & Co.
in June, 1902, with numerous illustrations.
New Edition, May, 1905.
Reprinted, January, 1913, and October, 1919.

PREFACE.
(p. v)

It is perhaps a matter rather for regret than for surprise that so few
attempts have been made to describe, as a whole, the life and
character of Henry VIII. No ruler has left a deeper impress on the
history of his country, or done work which has been the subject of
more keen and lasting contention. Courts of law are still debating the
intention of statutes, the tenor of which he dictated; and the moral,
political, and religious, are as much in dispute as the legal, results
of his reign. He is still the Great Erastian, the protagonist of laity
against clergy. His policy is inextricably interwoven with the high
and eternal dilemma of Church and State; and it is well-nigh
impossible for one who feels keenly on these questions to treat the
reign of Henry VIII. in a reasonably judicial spirit. No period
illustrates more vividly the contradiction between morals and
politics. In our desire to reprobate the immorality of Henry’s
methods, we are led to deny their success; or, in our appreciation of
the greatness of the ends he achieved, we seek to excuse the means he
took to
(p. vi)
achieve them. As with his policy, so with his
character. There was nothing commonplace about him; his good and his
bad qualities alike were exceptional. It is easy, by suppressing the
one or the other, to paint him a hero or a villain. He lends himself
readily to polemic; but to depict his character in all its varied
aspects, extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in malice, is a
task of no little difficulty. It is two centuries and a half since
Lord Herbert produced his Life and Reign of Henry
VIII.[1]
The late
Mr. Brewer, in his prefaces to the first four volumes of the Letters
and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII., published under the direction
of the Master of the Rolls, dealt adequately with the earlier portion
of Henry’s career. But Mr. Brewer died when his work reached the year
1530; his successor, Dr. James Gairdner, was directed to confine his
prefaces to the later volumes within the narrowest possible limits;
and students of history were deprived of the prospect of a
satisfactory account of Henry’s later years from a writer of
unrivalled learning.

Henry’s reign, from 1530 onwards, has been described by the late Mr.
Froude in one of the most brilliant and fascinating masterpieces of
historical literature, a work which still holds the field in popular,
if not in scholarly, estimation. But Mr. Froude does not begin until
Henry’s reign was half over, until his character had been determined
by influences
(p. vii)
and events which lie outside the scope of Mr.
Froude’s inquiry. Moreover, since Mr. Froude wrote, a flood of light
has been thrown on the period by the publication of the
above-mentioned Letters and
Papers;[2]
they already comprise a
summary of between thirty and forty thousand documents in twenty
thousand closely printed pages, and, when completed, will constitute
the most magnificent body of materials for the history of any reign,
ancient or modern, English or foreign. Simultaneously there have
appeared a dozen volumes containing the State papers preserved at
Simancas,[3]
Vienna and Brussels and similar series comprising the
correspondence relating to Venice,[4]
Scotland[5]
and Ireland;[6]
while the despatches of French ambassadors have been published under
the auspices of the Ministry for Foreign
(p. viii)
Affairs at
Paris.[7]
Still further information has been provided by the labours
of the Historical Manuscripts
Commission,[8]
the Camden,[9]
the Royal
Historical,[10]
and other learned Societies.

These sources probably contain at least a million definite facts
relating to the reign of Henry VIII.; and it is obvious that the task
of selection has become heavy as well as invidious. Mr. Froude has
expressed his concurrence in the dictum that the facts of history are
like the letters of the alphabet; by selection and arrangement they
can be made to spell anything, and nothing can be arranged so easily
as facts. Experto crede. Yet selection is inevitable, and
arrangement essential. The historian has no option if he wishes to be
intelligible. He will naturally arrange his facts so that they spell
what he believes to be the truth; and he must of necessity suppress
those facts which he judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the
scale on which he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts
compels both selection and suppression, it counsels no less a
restraint of judgment. A case in a court of law is not simplified by a
cloud of witnesses; and the
(p. ix)
new wealth of contemporary
evidence does not solve the problems of Henry’s reign. It elucidates
some points hitherto obscure, but it raises a host of others never
before suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements
written hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no
better; in modern history we frequently have half a dozen witnesses
giving inconsistent accounts of what they have seen with their own
eyes. Dogmatism is merely the result of ignorance; and no honest
historian will pretend to have mastered all the facts, accurately
weighed all the evidence, or pronounced a final judgment.

The present volume does not profess to do more than roughly sketch
Henry VIII.’s more prominent characteristics, outline the chief
features of his policy, and suggest some reasons for the measure of
success he attained. Episodes such as the divorce of Catherine of
Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the determination of
the relations between Church and State, would severally demand for
adequate treatment works of much greater bulk than the present. On the
divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan Ehses
in his Römische
Dokumente.[11]
The dissolution of the monasteries
has been exhaustively treated from one point of view by Dr.
Gasquet;[12]
but an adequate and impartial history of what is called
the Reformation still
(p. x)
remains to be written. Here it is
possible to deal with these questions only in the briefest outline,
and in so far as they were affected by Henry’s personal action. For my
facts I have relied entirely on contemporary records, and my
deductions from these facts are my own. I have depended as little as
possible even on contemporary historians,[13]
and scarcely at all on
later writers.[14]
I have, however, made frequent use of Dr.
Gairdner’s articles in the Dictionary of National Biography,
particularly of that on Henry VIII., the best summary extant of his
career; and I owe not a little to Bishop Stubbs’s two lectures on
Henry VIII., which contain some fruitful suggestions as to his
character.[15]

A.F. POLLARD.

Putney, 11th January, 1905.

CONTENTS.
(p. xi)

CHAPTER I.
The Early Tudors

CHAPTER II.
Prince Henry and His Environment

CHAPTER III.
The Apprenticeship of Henry VIII.

CHAPTER IV.
The Three Rivals

CHAPTER V.
King and Cardinal

CHAPTER VI.
From Calais to Rome

CHAPTER VII.
The Origin of the Divorce

CHAPTER VIII.
The Pope’s Dilemma

CHAPTER IX.
(p. xii)
The Cardinal’s Fall

CHAPTER X.
The King and His Parliament

CHAPTER XI.
“Down with the Church“

CHAPTER XII.
“The Prevailing of the Gates of Hell“

CHAPTER XIII.
The Crisis

CHAPTER XIV.
Rex et Imperator

CHAPTER XV.
The Final Struggle

CHAPTER XVI.
Conclusion

Index

CHAPTER I.
(p. 001)

THE EARLY TUDORS.

In the whole range of English history there is no monarch whose
character has been more variously depicted by contemporaries or more
strenuously debated by posterity than the “majestic lord who broke the
bonds of Rome”. To one historian an inhuman embodiment of cruelty and
vice, to another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and
strength of will, Henry VIII. has, by an almost universal consent,
been placed above or below the grade of humanity. So unique was his
personality, so singular his achievements, that he appears in the
light of a special dispensation sent like another Attila to be the
scourge of mankind, or like a second Hercules to cleanse, or at least
to demolish, Augean stables. The dictates of his will seemed as
inexorable as the decrees of fate, and the history of his reign is
strewn with records of the ruin of those who failed to placate his
wrath. Of the six queens he married, two he divorced, and two he
beheaded. Four English cardinals[16]
lived in his reign; one perished
by the executioner’s axe, one escaped it by absence, and a
(p. 002)
third by a timely but natural death. Of a similar number of
dukes[17]
half were condemned by attainder; and the same method of speedy
despatch accounted for six or seven earls and viscounts and for scores
of lesser degree. He began his reign by executing the ministers of his
father,[18]
he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold. The
Tower of London was both palace and prison, and statesmen passed
swiftly from one to the other; in silent obscurity alone lay
salvation. Religion and politics, rank and profession made little
difference; priest and layman, cardinal-archbishop and “hammer of the
monks,” men whom Henry had raised from the mire, and peers, over whose
heads they were placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More,
Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same dizzy path to the same fatal end;
and the English people looked on powerless or unmoved. They sent their
burgesses and knights of the shire to Westminster without let or
hindrance, and Parliament met with a regularity that grew with the
rigour of Henry’s rule; but it seemed to assemble only to register the
royal edicts and clothe with a legal cloak the naked violence of
Henry’s acts. It remembered its privileges only to lay them at Henry’s
feet, it cancelled his debts, endowed his proclamations with the force
of laws, and authorised him to repeal acts of attainder and dispose of
his crown at will. Secure of its support Henry turned and rent the
spiritual unity of Western Christendom, and settled at a blow that
perennial struggle between Church and State,
(p. 003)
in which kings
and emperors had bitten the dust. With every epithet of contumely and
scorn he trampled under foot the jurisdiction of him who was believed
to hold the keys of heaven and hell. Borrowing in practice the old
maxim of Roman law, cujus regio, ejus
religio,[19]
he placed himself
in the seat of authority in religion and presumed to define the faith
of which Leo had styled him defender. Others have made themselves
despots by their mastery of many legions, through the agency of a
secret police, or by means of an organised bureaucracy. Yet Henry’s
standing army consisted of a few gentlemen pensioners and yeomen of
the guard; he had neither secret police nor organised bureaucracy.
Even then Englishmen boasted that they were not slaves like the
French,[20]
and foreigners pointed a finger of scorn at their
turbulence. Had they not permanently or temporarily deprived of power
nearly half their kings who had reigned since William the Conqueror?
Yet Henry VIII. not only left them their arms, but repeatedly urged
them to keep those arms ready for
use.[21]
He eschewed that air of
mystery with which tyrants have usually sought to impose on the mind
of the people. All his life he moved familiarly and almost unguarded
in the midst of his subjects, and he died in his bed, full of years,
with the spell of his power unbroken and the terror of his name
unimpaired.

What manner of man was this, and wherein lay the secret
(p. 004)
of
his strength? Is recourse necessary to a theory of supernatural
agency, or is there another and adequate solution? Was Henry’s
individual will of such miraculous force that he could ride roughshod
in insolent pride over public opinion at home and abroad? Or did his
personal ends, dictated perhaps by selfish motives and ignoble
passions, so far coincide with the interests and prejudices of the
politically effective portion of his people, that they were willing to
condone a violence and tyranny, the brunt of which fell after all on
the few? Such is the riddle which propounds itself to every student of
Tudor history. It cannot be answered by pæans in honour of Henry’s
intensity of will and force of character, nor by invectives against
his vices and lamentations over the woes of his victims. The
miraculous interpretation of history is as obsolete as the
catastrophic theory of geology, and the explanation of Henry’s career
must be sought not so much in the study of his character as in the
study of his environment, of the conditions which made things possible
to him that were not possible before or since and are not likely to be
so again.

It is a singular circumstance that the king who raised the personal
power of English monarchy to a height to which it had never before
attained, should have come of humble race and belonged to an upstart
dynasty. For three centuries and a half before the battle of Bosworth
one family had occupied the English throne. Even the usurpers, Henry
of Bolingbroke and Richard of York, were directly descended in
unbroken male line from Henry II., and from 1154 to 1485 all the
sovereigns of England were Plantagenets. But who were the Tudors?
They
(p. 005)
were a Welsh family of modest means and doubtful
antecedents.[22]
They claimed, it is true, descent from Cadwallader,
and their pedigree was as long and quite as veracious as most Welsh
genealogies; but Henry VII.’s great-grandfather was steward or butler
to the Bishop of Bangor. His son, Owen Tudor, came as a young man to
seek his fortune at the Court of Henry V., and obtained a clerkship of
the wardrobe to Henry’s Queen, Catherine of France. So skilfully did
he use or abuse this position of trust, that he won the heart of his
mistress; and within a few years of Henry’s death his widowed Queen
and her clerk of the wardrobe were secretly, and possibly without
legal sanction, living together as man and wife. The discovery of
their relations resulted in Catherine’s retirement to Bermondsey
Abbey, and Owen’s to Newgate prison. The Queen died in the following
year, but Owen survived many romantic adventures. Twice he escaped
from prison, twice he was recaptured. Once he took sanctuary in the
precincts of Westminster Abbey, and various attempts to entrap him
were made by enticing him to revels in a neighbouring tavern. Finally,
on the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, he espoused the Lancastrian
cause, and was beheaded by order of Edward IV. after the battle of
Mortimer’s Cross. Two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were born of this
singular match between Queen and clerk of her wardrobe. Both enjoyed
the favour of their royal half-brother, Henry VI. Edmund, the elder,
was first knighted and then created Earl of Richmond. In the
Parliament of 1453, he was formally declared legitimate; he was
enriched by the grant of broad estates and enrolled among the members
of
(p. 006)
Henry’s council. But the climax of his fortunes was
reached when, in 1455, he married the Lady Margaret Beaufort. Owen
Tudor had taken the first step which led to his family’s greatness;
Edmund took the second. The blood-royal of France flowed in his veins,
the blood-royal of England was to flow in his children’s; and the
union between Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort gave Henry VII. such
claim as he had by descent to the English throne.

The Beauforts were descended from Edward III., but a bar sinister
marred their royal pedigree. John of Gaunt had three sons by Catherine
Swynford before she became his wife. That marriage would, by canon
law, have made legitimate the children, but the barons had, on a
famous occasion, refused to assimilate in this respect the laws of
England to the canons of the Church; and it required a special Act of
Parliament to confer on the Beauforts the status of legitimacy. When
Henry IV. confirmed this Act, he introduced a clause specifically
barring their contingent claim to the English throne. This limitation
could not legally abate the force of a statute; but it sufficed to
cast a doubt upon the Beaufort title, and has been considered a
sufficient explanation of Henry VII.’s reluctance to base his claim
upon hereditary right. However that may be, the Beauforts played no
little part in the English history of the fifteenth century; their
influence was potent for peace or war in the councils of their royal
half-brother, Henry IV., and of the later sovereigns of the House of
Lancaster. One was Cardinal-Bishop of Winchester, another was Duke of
Exeter, and a third was Earl of Somerset. Two of the sons of the Earl
became Dukes of Somerset; the younger fell at St. Albans,
(p. 007)
the earliest victim of the Wars of the Roses, which proved so fatal to
his House; and the male line of the Beauforts failed in the third
generation. The sole heir to their claims was the daughter of the
first Duke of Somerset, Margaret, now widow of Edmund Tudor; for,
after a year of wedded life, Edmund had died in November, 1456. Two
months later his widow gave birth to a boy, the future Henry VII.;
and, incredible as the fact may seem, the youthful mother was not
quite fourteen years old. When fifteen more years had passed, the
murder of Henry VI. and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor
in undisputed possession of the Lancastrian title. A barren honour it
seemed. Edward IV. was firmly seated on the English throne. His right
to it, by every test, was immeasurably superior to the Tudor claim,
and Henry showed no inclination and possessed not the means to dispute
it. The usurpation by Richard III., and the crimes which polluted his
reign, put a different aspect on the situation, and set men seeking
for an alternative to the blood-stained tyrant. The battle of Bosworth
followed, and the last of the Plantagenets gave way to the first of
the Tudors.

For the first time, since the Norman Conquest, a king of decisively
British blood sat on the English throne. His lineage was, indeed,
English in only a minor degree; but England might seem to have lost at
the battle of Hastings her right to native kings; and Norman were
succeeded by Angevin, Angevin by Welsh, Welsh by Scots, and Scots by
Hanoverian sovereigns. The Tudors were probably more at home on the
English throne than most of England’s kings; and their humble and
British origin may have contributed to their unique capacity
(p. 008)
for understanding the needs, and expressing the mind, of the English
nation. It was well for them that they established their throne in the
hearts of their people, for no dynasty grasped the sceptre with less
of hereditary right. Judged by that criterion, there were many
claimants whose titles must have been preferred to Henry’s. There were
the daughters of Edward IV. and the children of George, Duke of
Clarence; and their existence may account for Henry’s neglect to press
his hereditary claim. But there was a still better reason. Supposing
the Lancastrian case to be valid and the Beauforts to be the true
Lancastrian heirs, even so the rightful occupant of the throne was not
Henry VII., but his mother, Margaret Beaufort. England had never
recognised a Salic law at home; on occasion she had disputed its
validity abroad. But Henry VII. was not disposed to let his mother
rule; she could not unite the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims by
marriage, and, in addition to other disabilities, she had a second
husband in Lord Stanley, who might demand the crown matrimonial. So
Henry VII.’s hereditary title was judiciously veiled in vague
obscurity. Parliament wisely admitted the accomplished fact and
recognised that the crown was vested in him, without rashly venturing
upon the why or the wherefore. He had in truth been raised to the
throne because men were weary of Richard. He was chosen to vindicate
no theory of hereditary or other abstract right, but to govern with a
firm hand, to establish peace within his gates and give prosperity to
his people. That was the true Tudor title, and, as a rule, they
remembered the fact; they were de facto kings, and they left the de
jure arguments to the Stuarts.

Peace,
(p. 009)
however, could not be obtained at once, nor the embers
of thirty years’ strife stamped out in a moment. For fifteen years
open revolt and whispered sedition troubled the rest of the realm and
threatened the stability of Henry’s throne. Ireland remained a hot-bed
of Yorkist sympathies, and Ireland was zealously aided by Edward IV.’s
sister, Margaret of Burgundy; she pursued, like a vendetta, the family
quarrel with Henry VII., and earned the title of Henry’s Juno by
harassing him as vindictively as the Queen of Heaven vexed the pious
Æneas. Other rulers, with no Yorkist bias, were slow to recognise the
parvenu king and quick to profit by his difficulties. Pretenders to
their rivals’ thrones were useful pawns on the royal chess-board; and
though the princes of Europe had no reason to desire a Yorkist
restoration, they thought that a little judicious backing of Yorkist
claimants would be amply repaid by the restriction of Henry’s energies
to domestic affairs. Seven months after the battle of Bosworth there
was a rising in the West under the Staffords, and in the North under
Lovell; and Henry himself was nearly captured while celebrating at
York the feast of St. George. A year later a youth of obscure origin,
Lambert Simnel,[23]
claimed to be first the Duke of York and then the
Earl of Warwick. The former was son, and the latter was nephew, of
Edward IV. Lambert was crowned king at Dublin amid the acclamations of
the Irish people. Not a voice was raised in Henry’s favour; Kildare,
the practical ruler of Ireland, earls and archbishops, bishops and
barons, and great officers of State, from Lord Chancellor downwards,
swore fealty to the reputed son of an Oxford tradesman. Ireland was
only
(p. 010)
the volcano which gave vent to the subterranean flood;
treason in England and intrigue abroad were working in secret concert
with open rebellion across St. George’s Channel. The Queen Dowager was
secluded in Bermondsey Abbey and deprived of her jointure lands. John
de la Pole, who, as eldest son of Edward IV.’s sister, had been named
his successor by Richard III., fled to Burgundy; thence his aunt
Margaret sent Martin Schwartz and two thousand mercenaries to
co-operate with the Irish invasion. But, at East Stoke, De la Pole and
Lovell, Martin Schwartz and his merry men were slain; and the most
serious of the revolts against Henry ended in the consignment of
Simnel to the royal scullery and of his tutor to the Tower.

Lambert, however, was barely initiated in his new duties when the son
of a boatman of Tournay started on a similar errand with a less
congenial end. An unwilling puppet at first, Perkin Warbeck was on a
trading visit to Ireland, when the Irish, who saw a Yorkist prince in
every likely face, insisted that Perkin was Earl of Warwick. This he
denied on oath before the Mayor of Cork. Nothing deterred, they
suggested that he was Richard III.’s bastard; but the bastard was safe
in Henry’s keeping, and the imaginative Irish finally took refuge in
the theory that Perkin was Duke of York. Lambert’s old friends rallied
round Perkin; the re-animated Duke was promptly summoned to the Court
of France and treated with princely honours. When Charles VIII. had
used him to beat down Henry’s terms, Perkin found a home with
Margaret, aunt to all the pretenders. As usual, there were traitors in
high places in England. Sir William Stanley, whose brother had married
Henry’s mother,
(p. 011)
and to whom Henry himself owed his victory
at Bosworth, was implicated. His sudden arrest disconcerted the plot,
and when Perkin’s fleet appeared off the coast of Kent, the rustics
made short work of the few who were rash enough to land. Perkin sailed
away to the Yorkist refuge in Ireland, but Kildare was no longer
deputy. Waterford, to which he laid siege, was relieved, and the
pretender sought in Scotland a third basis of operations. An abortive
raid on the Borders and a high-born Scottish wife[24]
were all that he
obtained of James IV., and in 1497, after a second attempt in Ireland,
he landed in Cornwall. The Cornishmen had just risen against Henry’s
extortions, marched on London and been defeated at Blackheath; but
Henry’s lenience encouraged a fresh revolt, and three thousand men
flocked to Perkin’s standard. They failed to take Exeter; Perkin was
seized at Beaulieu and sent up to London to be paraded through the
streets amid the jeers and taunts of the people. Two years later a
foolish attempt at escape and a fresh personation of the Earl of
Warwick by one Ralf
Wulford[25]
led to the execution of all three,
Perkin, Wulford, and the real Earl of Warwick, who had been a prisoner
and probably the innocent centre of so many plots since the accession
of Henry VII. Warwick’s death may have been due to the instigation of
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who were negotiating for the marriage
of Catherine of Aragon with Prince Arthur. They were naturally anxious
for the
(p. 012)
security of the throne their daughter was to share
with Henry’s son; and now their ambassador wrote triumphantly that
there remained in England not a doubtful drop of royal
blood.[26]
There were no more pretenders, and for the rest of Henry’s reign
England enjoyed such peace as it had not known for nearly a century.
The end which Henry had sought by fair means and foul was attained,
and there was no practical alternative to his children in the
succession to the English throne.

But all his statecraft, his patience and labour would have been writ
in water without children to succeed him and carry on the work which
he had begun; and at times it seemed probable that this necessary
condition would remain unfulfilled. For the Tudors were singularly
luckless in the matter of children. They were scarcely a sterile race,
but their offspring had an unfortunate habit of dying in childhood. It
was the desire for a male heir that involved Henry VIII. in his breach
with Rome, and led Mary into a marriage which raised a revolt; the
last of the Tudors perceived that heirs might be purchased at too
great a cost, and solved the difficulty by admitting its insolubility.
Henry VIII. had six wives, but only three children who survived
infancy; of these, Edward VI. withered away at the age of fifteen, and
Mary died childless at forty-two. By his
two[27]
mistresses he seems
to have had only one son, who died at the age of eleven, and as far as
we know, he had not a single grandchild, legitimate or other. His
sisters were hardly more fortunate. Margaret’s eldest son by James IV.
died a year after his birth; her eldest daughter died at birth; her
second
(p. 013)
son lived only nine months; her second daughter died
at birth; her third son lived to be James V., but her fourth found an
early grave. Mary, the other sister of Henry VIII., lost her only son
in his teens. The appalling death-rate among Tudor infants cannot be
attributed solely to medical ignorance, for Yorkist babies clung to
life with a tenacity which was quite as inconvenient as the readiness
with which Tudor infants relinquished it; and Richard III., Henry VII.
and Henry VIII. all found it necessary to accelerate, by artificial
means, the exit from the world of the superfluous children of other
pretenders. This drastic process smoothed their path, but could not
completely solve the problem; and the characteristic Tudor infirmity
was already apparent in the reign of Henry VII. He had three sons; two
predeceased him, one at the age of fifteen years, the other at fifteen
months. Of his four daughters, two died in infancy, and the youngest
cost the mother her
life.[28]
The fruit of that union between the Red
Rose and the White, upon which so much store had been
set,[29]
seemed
doomed to fail.

The hopes built upon it had largely contributed to the success of
Henry’s raid upon the English throne, and before he started on his
quest he had solemnly promised to marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of
Edward IV., and heiress of the House of York. But he was resolute to
avoid all appearance of ruling in her right; his title had been
recognised by Parliament, and he had been five months de facto king
before he wedded his Yorkist wife (18th January, 1486). Eight months
and two days later, the Queen gave birth, in the priory of St.
Swithin’s, at Winchester,
(p. 014)
to her first-born son. Four days
later, on Sunday, 24th September, the child was christened in the
minster of the old West Saxon capital, and given in baptism the name
of Arthur, the old British king. It was neither Yorkist nor
Lancastrian, it evoked no bitter memories of civil strife, and it
recalled the fact that the Tudors claimed a pedigree and boasted a
title to British sovereignty, beside the antiquity of which Yorkist
pretentions were a mushroom growth. Duke of Cornwall from his birth,
Prince Arthur was, when three years old, created Prince of Wales.
Already negotiations had been begun for his marriage with Catherine,
the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Both were
cautious sovereigns, and many a rebellion had to be put down and many
a pretender put away, before they would consent to entrust their
daughter to the care of an English king. It was not till 2nd October,
1501, that Catherine landed at Plymouth. At her formal reception into
England, and at her marriage, six weeks later, in St. Paul’s, she was
led by the hand of her little brother-in-law, Prince Henry, then ten
years old.[30]
Against the advice of his council, Henry VII. sent the
youthful bride and bridegroom to live as man and wife at Ludlow
Castle, and there, five and a half months later, their married life
came to a sudden end. Prince Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502, and was
buried in princely state in Worcester Cathedral.

CHAPTER II.
(p. 015)

PRINCE HENRY AND HIS ENVIRONMENT.

The Prince, who now succeeded to the position of heir-apparent, was
nearly five years younger than his brother. The third child and second
son of his parents, he was born on 28th June, 1491, at Greenwich, a
palace henceforth intimately associated with the history of Tudor
sovereigns. The manor of Greenwich had belonged to the alien priory of
Lewisham, and, on the dissolution of those houses, had passed into the
hands of Henry IV. Then it was granted to Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester, who began to enclose the palace grounds; on his death it
reverted to the Crown; and Edward IV., many of whose tastes and
characteristics were inherited by his grandson, Henry VIII., took
great delight in beautifying and extending the palace. He gave it to
his Queen, Elizabeth, and in her possession it remained until her
sympathy with Yorkist plots was punished by the forfeiture of her
lands. Henry VII. then bestowed it on his wife, the dowager’s
daughter, and thus it became the birthplace of her younger children.
Here was the scene of many a joust and tournament, of many a masque
and revel; here the young Henry, as soon as he came to the throne, was
wedded to Catherine of Aragon; here Henry’s sister was married to the
Duke of Suffolk; and here were born all
(p. 016)
future Tudor
sovereigns, Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. At Greenwich, then,
through the forfeit of his grandmother, Henry was born; he was
baptised in the Church of the Observant Friars, an Order, the object
first of his special
favour,[31]
and then of an equally marked
dislike; the ceremony was performed by Richard
Fox,[32]
then Bishop of
Exeter, and afterwards one of the child’s chief advisers. His nurse
was named Ann Luke, and years afterwards, when Henry was King, he
allowed her the annual pension of twenty pounds, equivalent to about
three hundred in modern currency. The details of his early life are
few and far between. Lord Herbert, who wrote his Life and Reign a
century later, records that the young Prince was destined by his
father for the see of
Canterbury,[33]
and provided with an education
more suited to a clerical than to a lay career. The motive ascribed to
Henry VII. is typical of his character; it was more economical to
provide for younger sons out of ecclesiastical, than royal, revenues.
But the story is probably a mere inference from the excellence of the
boy’s education, and from his father’s thrift. If the idea of an
ecclesiastical career for young Henry was ever entertained, it was
soon abandoned for secular preferment. On 5th April, 1492, before the
child was ten months old, he was appointed to the ancient and
important posts of Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover
Castle.[34]
A little later he received the still more honourable
office of Earl Marshal; the duties were performed by
(p. 017)
deputy,
but a goodly portion of the fees was doubtless appropriated for the
expenses of the boy’s establishment, or found its way into the royal
coffers. Further promotion awaited him at the mature age of three. On
12th September, 1494, he became Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland;[35]
six
weeks later he was created Duke of York, and dubbed, with the usual
quaint and formal
ceremonies,[36]
a Knight of the Bath. In December,
he was made Warden of the Scottish Marches, and he was invested with
the Garter in the following
May.[37]

The accumulation of these great offices of State, any one of which
might have taxed the powers of a tried administrator, in the feeble
hands of a child appears at first sight a trifle irrational; but there
was always method in Henry’s madness. In bestowing these
administrative posts upon his children he was really concentrating
them in his own person and bringing them directly under his own
supervision. It was the policy whereby the early Roman Emperors
imposed upon Republican Rome the substance, without the form, of
despotism. It limited the powers of mischief which Henry’s nobles
might otherwise have enjoyed, and provided incomes for his children
without increasing taxation or diminishing the privy purse. The work
of administration could be done at least as effectively, much more
economically, and with far less danger to internal peace by deputies
of lower rank than the dukes and earls and barons who had been wont to
abuse these high positions for the furtherance of private ends, and
often for the levying
(p. 018)
of private war. Nowhere were the
advantages of Henry’s policy more conspicuous than in his arrangements
for the government of Ireland. Ever since Richard, Duke of York, and
George, Duke of Clarence, had ruled as Irish viceroys, Ireland had
been a Yorkist stronghold. There Simnel had been crowned king, and
there peers and peasants had fought for Perkin Warbeck. Something must
be done to heal the running sore. Possibly Henry thought that some of
Ireland’s loyalty might be diverted from Yorkist channels by the
selection of a Tudor prince as its viceroy; but he put his trust in
more solid measures. As deputy to his infant son he nominated one who,
though but a knight, was perhaps the ablest man among his privy
council. It was in this capacity that Sir Edward
Poynings[38]
crossed
to Ireland about the close of 1494, and called the Parliament of
Drogheda. Judged by the durability of its legislation, it was one of
the most memorable of parliaments; and for nearly three hundred years
Poynings’ laws remained the foundation upon which rested the
constitutional relations between the sister kingdoms. Even more
lasting was the precedent set by Prince Henry’s creation as Duke of
York; from that day to this, from Henry VIII. to the present Prince of
Wales, the second son of the sovereign or of the heir-apparent has
almost invariably been invested with that
dukedom.[39]
The original
selection of the title was due to substantial reasons. Henry’s name
was distinctively Lancastrian, his title was no less distinctively
Yorkist;
(p. 019)
it was adopted as a concession to Yorkist
prejudice. It was a practical reminder of the fact which the Tudor
laureate, Skelton, celebrated in song: “The rose both red and white,
in one rose now doth grow”. It was also a tacit assertion of the death
of the last Duke of York in the Tower and of the imposture of Perkin
Warbeck, now pretending to the title.

But thoughts of the coercion of Ireland and conciliation of Yorkists
were as yet far from the mind of the child, round whose person these
measures were made to centre. Precocious he must have been, if the
phenomenal development of brow and the curiously mature expression
attributed to him in his
portrait[40]
are any indication of his
intellectual powers at the age at which he is represented. Without the
childish lips and nose, the face might well be that of a man of fifty;
and with the addition of a beard, the portrait would be an
unmistakable likeness of Henry himself in his later years. When the
Prince was no more than a child, says Erasmus, he was set to
study.[41]
He had, we are told, a vivid and active mind, above measure
able to execute whatever tasks he undertook; and he never attempted
anything in which he did not
succeed.[42]
The Tudors had no modern
dread of educational over-pressure when applied to their children, and
the young Henry was probably as forward a pupil as his son, Edward
VI., his daughter, Elizabeth, or his grand-niece, Lady Jane Grey. But,
fortunately for Henry,
(p. 020)
a physical exuberance corrected his
mental precocity; and, as he grew older, any excessive devotion to the
Muses was checked by an unwearied pursuit of bodily culture. He was
the first of English sovereigns to be educated under the new influence
of the Renaissance. Scholars, divines and poets thronged the Court of
Henry VII. Margaret Beaufort, who ruled in Henry’s household, was a
signal benefactor to the cause of English learning. Lady Margaret
professors commemorate her name in both our ancient universities, and
in their bidding prayers she is to this day remembered. Two colleges
at Cambridge revere her as their foundress; Caxton, the greatest of
English printers, owed much to her munificence, and she herself
translated into English books from both Latin and French. Henry VII.,
though less accomplished that the later Tudors, evinced an intelligent
interest in art and letters, and provided for his children efficient
instructors; while his Queen, Elizabeth of York, is described by
Erasmus as possessing the soundest judgment and as being remarkable
for her prudence as well as for her piety. Bernard
André,[43]
historian and poet, who had been tutor to Prince Arthur, probably took
no small part in the education of his younger brother; to him he
dedicated, after Arthur’s death, two of the annual summaries of events
which he was in the habit of compiling. Giles
D’Ewes,[44]
apparently a
Frenchman and the author of a notable French
(p. 021)
grammar, taught
that language to Prince Henry, as many years later he did to his
daughter, Queen Mary; probably either D’Ewes or André trained his
handwriting, which is a curious compromise between the clear and bold
Italian style, soon to be adopted by well-instructed Englishmen, and
the old English hieroglyphics in which more humbly educated
individuals, including Shakespeare, concealed the meaning of their
words. But the most famous of Henry’s teachers was the poet Skelton,
the greatest name in English verse from Lydgate down to Surrey.
Skelton was poet laureate to Henry VII. Court, and refers in his poems
to his wearing of the white and green of Tudor
liveries.[45]
He celebrated in verse Arthur’s creation as Prince of Wales and Henry’s
as Duke of
York;[46]
and before the younger prince was nine years old,
this “incomparable light and ornament of British Letters,” as Erasmus
styles him, was directing Henry’s studies. Skelton himself writes.—

The honor of England I learned to spell,
I gave him drink of the sugred well
Of Helicon’s waters crystalline,
Acquainting him with the Muses nine.

The coarseness of Skelton’s satires and his open disregard of the
clerical vows of chastity may justify some doubt of the value of the
poet’s influence on Henry’s character; but he so far observed the
conventional duties of his post as to dedicate to his royal pupil, in
1501, a moral treatise in Latin of no particular
worth.[47]
More deserving
(p. 022)
of Henry’s study were two books inscribed to him a
little later by young Boerio, son of the King’s Genoese physician and
a pupil of Erasmus, who, according to his own account, suffered untold
afflictions from the father’s temper. One was a translation of
Isocrates’ De Regno, the other of Lucian’s tract against believing
calumnies.[48]
The latter was, to judge from the tale of Henry’s
victims, a precept which he scarcely laid to heart in youth. In other
respects he was apt enough to learn. He showed “remarkable docility
for mathematics,” became proficient in Latin, spoke French with ease,
understood Italian, and, later on, possibly from Catherine of Aragon,
acquired a knowledge of Spanish. In 1499 Erasmus himself, the greatest
of the humanists, visited his friend, Lord Mountjoy, near Greenwich,
and made young Henry’s acquaintance. “I was staying,” he
writes,[49]
“at Lord Mountjoy’s country house when Thomas More came to see me, and
took me out with him for a walk as far as the next village, where all
the King’s children, except Prince Arthur, who was then the eldest
son, were being educated. When we came into the hall, the attendants
not only of the palace, but also of Mountjoy’s household, were all
assembled. In the midst stood Prince Henry, now nine years old, and
having already something of royalty in his demeanour in which there
was a certain dignity combined with singular courtesy. On his right
was Margaret, about eleven years of age, afterwards married to James,
King of Scots; and on his left played Mary, a child of four. Edmund
was an infant in arms. More, with his companion Arnold,
(p. 023)
after paying his respects to the boy Henry, the same that is now King
of England, presented him with some writing. For my part, not having
expected anything of the sort, I had nothing to offer, but promised
that, on another occasion, I would in some way declare my duty towards
him. Meantime, I was angry with More for not having warned me,
especially as the boy sent me a little note, while we were at dinner,
to challenge something from my pen. I went home, and in the Muses’
spite, from whom I had been so long divorced, finished the poem within
three days.” The
poem,[50]
in which Britain speaks her own praise and
that of her princes, Henry VII. and his children, was dedicated to the
Duke of York and accompanied by a letter in which Erasmus commended
Henry’s devotion to learning. Seven years later Erasmus again wrote to
Henry, now Prince of Wales, condoling with him upon the death of his
brother-in-law, Philip of Burgundy, King of Castile. Henry replied in
cordial manner, inviting the great scholar to continue the
correspondence. The style of his letter so impressed Erasmus that he
suspected, as he
says,[51]
“some help from others in the ideas and
expressions. In a conversation I afterwards had with William, Lord
Mountjoy, he tried by various arguments to dispel that suspicion, and
when he found he could not do so he gave up the point and let it pass
until he was sufficiently instructed in the case. On another occasion,
when we were talking alone together, he brought out a number of the
Prince’s letters, some to other people and some to himself, and among
them one which answered to mine: in
(p. 024)
these letters were
manifest signs of comment, addition, suppression, correction and
alteration—You might recognise the first drafting of a letter, and
you might make out the second and third, and sometimes even the fourth
correction; but whatever was revised or added was in the same
handwriting. I had then no further grounds for hesitation, and,
overcome by the facts, I laid aside all suspicion.” Neither, he adds,
would his correspondent doubt Henry VIII’s authorship of the book
against Luther if he knew that king’s “happy genius”. That famous book
is sufficient proof that theological studies held no small place in
Henry’s education. They were cast in the traditional mould, for the
Lancastrians were very orthodox, and the early Tudors followed in
their steps. Margaret Beaufort left her husband to devote herself to
good works and a semi-monastic life; Henry VII. converted a heretic at
the stake and left him to
burn;[52]
and the theological conservatism,
which Henry VIII. imbibed in youth, clung to him to the end of his
days.

Nor were the arts neglected, and in his early years Henry acquired a
passionate and lifelong devotion to music. Even as Duke of York he had
a band of minstrels apart from those of the King and Prince
Arthur;[53]
and when he was king his minstrels formed an indispensable
part of his retinue, whether he went on progress through his kingdom,
or crossed the seas on errands of peace or
war.[54]
He became an
expert performer on the lute, the organ and the harpsichord, and all
the cares of State could not divert him from practising on those
(p. 025)
instruments both day and night. He sent all over England in
search of singing men and boys for the chapel royal, and sometimes
appropriated choristers from Wolsey’s chapel, which he thought better
provided than his
own.[55]
From Venice he enticed to England the
organist of St. Mark’s, Dionysius Memo, and on occasion Henry and his
Court listened four hours at a stretch to Memo’s organ
recitals.[56]
Not only did he take delight in the practice of music by himself and
others; he also studied its theory and wrote with the skill of an
expert. Vocal and instrumental pieces of his own composition,
preserved among the manuscripts at the British
Museum,[57]
rank among
the best productions of the time; and one of his anthems, “O Lorde,
the Maker of all thyng,” is of the highest order of merit, and still
remains a favourite in English cathedrals.

In April, 1502, at the age of ten, Henry became the heir-apparent to
the English throne. He succeeded at once to the dukedom of Cornwall,
but again a precedent was set which was followed but yesterday; and
ten months were allowed to elapse before he was, on 18th February,
1503, created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, the dukedom of York
becoming void until a king or an heir apparent should again have a
second son.[58]
The first sign of his increased importance was his
implication in the maze of matrimonial intrigues which formed so large
a part of sixteenth-century diplomacy. The last thing
(p. 026)
kings
considered was the domestic felicity of their children; their
marriages were pieces in the diplomatic game and sometimes the means
by which States were built up. While Duke of York, Henry had been
proposed as a husband for Eleanor,[59]
daughter of the Archduke
Philip; and his sister Mary as the bride of Philip’s son Charles, who,
as the heir of the houses of Castile and of Aragon, of Burgundy and of
Austria, was from the cradle destined to wield the imperial sceptre of
Cæsar. No further steps were taken at the time, and Prince Arthur’s
death brought other projects to the front.

Immediately on receiving the news, and two days before they dated
their letter of condolence to Henry VII., Ferdinand and Isabella
commissioned the Duke of Estrada to negotiate a marriage between the
widowed Catherine and her youthful
brother-in-law.[60]
No doubt was
entertained but that the Pope would grant the necessary dispensation,
for the spiritual head of Christendom was apt to look tenderly on the
petitions of the powerful princes of this world. A more serious
difficulty was the question of the widow’s dower. Part only had been
paid, and Ferdinand not merely refused to hand over the rest, but
demanded the return of his previous instalments. Henry, on the other
hand, considered himself entitled to the whole, refused to refund a
penny, and gave a cold reception to the proposed marriage between
Catherine and his sole surviving son. He was, however, by no means
blind to the advantages of the Spanish matrimonial and political
alliance, and still less to
(p. 027)
the attractions of Catherine’s
dower; he declined to send back the Princess, when Isabella, shocked
at Henry VII.’s proposal to marry his daughter-in-law himself,
demanded her return; and eventually, when Ferdinand reduced his terms,
he suffered the marriage treaty to be signed. On 25th June, 1503,
Prince Henry and Catherine were solemnly betrothed in the Bishop of
Salisbury’s house, in Fleet Street.

The papal dispensation arrived in time to solace Isabella on her
death-bed in November, 1504; but that event once more involved in
doubt the prospects of the marriage. The crown of Castile passed from
Isabella to her daughter Juaña; the government of the kingdom was
claimed by Ferdinand and by Juaña’s husband, Philip of Burgundy. On
their way from the Netherlands to claim their inheritance, Philip and
Juaña were driven on English shores. Henry VII. treated them with all
possible courtesy, and made Philip a Knight of the Garter, while
Philip repaid the compliment by investing Prince Henry with the Order
of the Golden Fleece.[61]
But advantage was taken of Philip’s plight
to extort from him the surrender of the Earl of Suffolk, styled the
White Rose, and a commercial treaty with the Netherlands, which the
Flemings named the Malus Intercursus. Three months after his arrival
in Castile, Philip died, and Henry began to fish in the troubled
waters for a share in his dominions. Two marriage schemes occurred to
him; he might win the hand of Philip’s sister Margaret, now Regent of
the Netherlands, and with her hand the control of those provinces; or
he might marry Juaña and claim in her right to administer Castile. On
(p. 028)
the acquisition of Castile he set his mind. If he could not
gain it by marriage with Juaña, he thought he could do so by marrying
her son and heir, the infant Charles, to his daughter Mary. Whichever
means he took to further his design, it would naturally irritate
Ferdinand and make him less anxious for the completion of the marriage
between Catherine and Prince Henry. Henry VII. was equally averse from
the consummation of the match. Now that he was scheming with Charles’s
other grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian, to wrest the government of
Castile from Ferdinand’s grasp, the alliance of the King of Aragon had
lost its attraction, and it was possible that the Prince of Wales
might find elsewhere a more desirable bride. Henry’s marriage with
Catherine was to have been accomplished when he completed the age of
fourteen; but on the eve of his fifteenth birthday he made a solemn
protestation that the contract was null and void, and that he would
not carry out his
engagements.[62]
This protest left him free to
consider other proposals, and enhanced his value as a negotiable
asset. More than once negotiations were started for marrying him to
Marguerite de Valois, sister of the Duke of Angoulême, afterwards
famous as Francis
I.;[63]
and in the last months of his father’s
reign, the Prince of Wales was giving audience to ambassadors from
Maximilian, who came to suggest matrimonial alliances between the
prince and a daughter of Duke Albert of Bavaria, and between Henry
VII. and the Lady Margaret of Savoy, Regent of the
Netherlands.[64]
Meanwhile, Ferdinand, threatened
(p. 029)
on all sides, first came to
terms with France; he married a French princess, Germaine de Foix,
abandoned his claim to Navarre, and bought the security of Naples by
giving Louis XII. a free hand in the north of Italy. He then diverted
Maximilian from his designs on Castile by humouring his hostility to
Venice. By that bait he succeeded in drawing off his enemies, and the
league of Cambrai united them all, Ferdinand and Louis, Emperor and
Pope, in an iniquitous attack on the Italian Republic. Henry VII.,
fortunately for his reputation, was left out of the compact. He was
still cherishing his design on Castile, and in December, 1508, the
treaty of marriage between Mary and Charles was formally signed. It
was the last of his worldly triumphs; the days of his life were
numbered, and in the early months of 1509 he was engaged in making a
peace with his conscience.

The twenty-four years during which Henry VII. had guided the destinies
of England were a momentous epoch in the development of Western
civilisation. It was the dawn of modern history, of the history of
Europe in the form in which we know it to-day. The old order was in a
state of liquidation. The mediæval ideal, described by Dante, of a
universal monarchy with two aspects, spiritual and temporal, and two
heads, emperor and pope, was passing away. Its place was taken by the
modern but narrower ideal of separate polities, each pursuing its own
course, independent of, and often in conflict with, other societies.
Unity gave way to diversity of tongues, of churches, of states; and
the cosmopolitan became nationalist, patriot, separatist. Imperial
monarchy shrank to
(p. 030)
a shadow; and kings divided the emperor’s
power at the same time that they consolidated their own. They extended
their authority on both sides, at the expense of their superior, the
emperor, and at the expense of their subordinate feudal lords. The
struggle between the disruptive forces of feudalism and the central
power of monarchy ended at last in monarchical triumph; and internal
unity prepared the way for external expansion. France under Louis XI.
was first in the field. She had surmounted her civil troubles half a
century earlier than England. She then expelled her foreign foes,
crushed the remnants of feudal independence, and began to expand at
the cost of weaker States. Parts of Burgundy, Provence, and Brittany
became merged in France; the exuberant strength of the new-formed
nation burst the barriers of the Alps and overflowed into the plains
of Italy. The time of universal monarchy was past, but the dread of it
remained; and from Charles VIII.’s invasion of Italy in 1494 to
Francis I.’s defeat at Pavia in 1525, French dreams of world-wide
sovereignty were the nightmare of other kings. Those dreams might, as
Europe feared, have been realised, had not other States followed
France in the path of internal consolidation. Ferdinand of Aragon
married Isabella of Castile, drove out the Moors, and founded the
modern Spanish kingdom. Maximilian married Mary, the daughter of
Charles the Bold, and joined the Netherlands to Austria. United France
found herself face to face with other united States, and the political
system of modern Europe was roughly sketched out. The boundaries of
the various kingdoms were fluctuating. There still remained minor
principalities and powers, chiefly in Italy and Germany, which offered
an easy
(p. 031)
prey to their ambitious neighbours; for both nations
had sacrificed internal unity to the shadow of universal dominion,
Germany in temporal, and Italy in spiritual, things. Mutual jealousy
of each other’s growth at the expense of these States gave rise to the
theory of the balance of power; mutual adjustment of each other’s
disputes produced international law; and the necessity of watching
each other’s designs begat modern
diplomacy.[65]

Parallel with these developments in the relations between one State
and another marched a no less momentous revolution in the domestic
position of their sovereigns. National expansion abroad was marked by
a corresponding growth in royal authority at home. The process was not
new in England; every step in the path of the tribal chief of Saxon
pirates to the throne of a united England denoted an advance in the
nature of kingly power. Each extension of his sway intensified his
authority, and his power grew in degree as it increased in area. So
with fifteenth-century sovereigns. Local liberties and feudal rights
which had checked a Duke of Brittany or a King of Aragon were
powerless to restrain the King of France or of Spain. The sphere of
royal authority encroached upon all others; all functions and all
powers tended to concentrate in royal hands. The king was the emblem
of national unity, the centre of national aspirations, and the object
of national reverence. The Renaissance gave fresh impetus to the
movement. Men turned not only to the theology, literature, and art of
the early Christian era; they began to study anew its political
organisation and its system of law and jurisprudence. The code of
Justinian
(p. 032)
was as much a revelation as the original Greek of
the New Testament. Roman imperial law seemed as superior to the
barbarities of common law as classical was to mediæval Latin; and
Roman law supplanted indigenous systems in France and in Germany, in
Spain and in Scotland. Both the Roman imperial law and the Roman
imperial constitution were useful models for kings of the New
Monarchy; the Roman Empire was a despotism; quod principi placuit
legis habet vigorem ran the fundamental principle of Roman
Empire.[66]
Nor was this all; Roman emperors were habitually deified,
and men in the sixteenth century seemed to pay to their kings while
alive the Divine honours which Romans paid to their emperors when
dead. “Le nouveau Messie,” says Michelet, “est le
roi.”[67]

Nowhere was the king more emphatically the saviour of society than in
England. The sixty years of Lancastrian rule were in the seventeenth
century represented as the golden age of parliamentary government, a
sort of time before the fall to which popular orators appealed when
they wished to paint in vivid colours the evils of Stuart tyranny. But
to keen observers of the time the pre-eminent characteristic of
Lancastrian rule appeared to be its “lack of governance” or, in modern
phrase, administrative
anarchy.[68]
There was no subordination in the
State. The weakness of the Lancastrian title left the king at the
mercy of Parliament, and the limitations of Parliament
(p. 033)
were
never more apparent than when its powers stood highest. Even in the
realm of legislation, the statute book has seldom been so barren. Its
principal acts were to narrow the county electorate to an oligarchy,
to restrict the choice of constituencies to resident knights and
burgesses, and to impair its own influence as a focus of public
opinion. It was not content with legislative authority; it interfered
with an executive which it could hamper but could not control. It was
possessed by the inveterate fallacy that freedom and strong government
are things incompatible; that the executive is the natural enemy of
the Legislature; that if one is strong, the other must be weak; and of
the two alternatives it vastly preferred a weak executive. So, to
limit the king’s power, it sought to make him “live of his own,” when
“his own” was absolutely inadequate to meet the barest necessities of
government. Parliament was in fact irresponsible; the connecting link
between it and the executive had yet to be found. Hence the
Lancastrian “lack of governance”; it ended in a generation of civil
war, and the memory of that anarchy explains much in Tudor history.

The problems of Henry VIII.’s reign can indeed only be solved by
realising the misrule of the preceding century, the failure of
parliamentary government, and the strength of the popular demand for a
firm and masterful hand. It is a modern myth that Englishmen have
always been consumed with enthusiasm for parliamentary government and
with a thirst for a parliamentary vote. The interpretation of history,
like that of the Scriptures, varies from age to age; and present
political theories colour our views of the past. The political
development of the nineteenth century created a parliamentary legend;
and civil
(p. 034)
and religious liberty became the inseparable stage
properties of the Englishman. Whenever he appeared on the boards, he
was made to declaim about the rights of the subject and the privileges
of Parliament. It was assumed that the desire for a voice in the
management of his own affairs had at all times and all seasons been
the mainspring of his actions; and so the story of Henry’s rule was
made into a political mystery. In reality, love of freedom has not
always been, nor will it always remain, the predominant note in the
English mind. At times the English people have pursued it through
battle and murder with grim determination, but other times have seen
other ideals. On occasion the demand has been for strong government
irrespective of its methods, and good government has been preferred to
self-government. Wars of expansion and wars of defence have often
cooled the love of liberty and impaired the faith in parliaments; and
generally English ideals have been strictly subordinated to a passion
for material prosperity.

Never was this more apparent than under the Tudors. The parliamentary
experiment of the Lancastrians was premature and had failed.
Parliamentary institutions were discredited and people were
indifferent to parliamentary rights and privileges: “A plague on both
your Houses,” was the popular feeling, “give us peace, above all peace
at home to pursue new avenues of wealth, new phases of commercial
development, peace to study new problems of literature, religion, and
art”; and both Houses passed out of the range of popular imagination,
and almost out of the sphere of independent political action.
Parliament played during the sixteenth century a modester part than it
had played since its creation. Towards
(p. 035)
the close of the
period Shakespeare wrote his play of King John, and in that play
there is not the faintest allusion to Magna
Carta.[69]
Such an
omission would be inconceivable now or at any time since the death of
Elizabeth; for the Great Charter is enshrined in popular imagination
as the palladium of the British constitution. It was the fetish to
which Parliament appealed against the Stuarts. But no such appeal
would have touched a Tudor audience. It needed and desired no weapon
against a sovereign who embodied national desires, and ruled in accord
with the national will. References to the charter are as rare in
parliamentary debates as they are in the pages of Shakespeare. The
best hated instruments of Stuart tyranny were popular institutions
under the Tudors; and the Star Chamber itself found its main
difficulty in the number of suitors which flocked to a court where the
king was judge, the law’s delays minimised, counsel’s fees moderate,
and justice rarely denied merely because it might happen to be
illegal. England in the sixteenth century put its trust in its princes
far more than it did in its parliaments; it invested them with
attributes almost Divine. By Tudor majesty the poet was inspired with
thoughts of the divinity that doth hedge a king. “Love for the King,”
wrote a Venetian of Henry VIII. in the early years of his reign, “is
universal with all who see him, for his Highness does not seem a
person of this world, but
(p. 036)
one descended from
heaven.”[70]
Le nouveau Messie est le Roi.

Such were the tendencies which Henry VII. and Henry VIII. crystallised
into practical weapons of absolute government. Few kings have attained
a greater measure of permanent success than the first of the Tudors;
it was he who laid the unseen foundations upon which Henry VIII.
erected the imposing edifice of his personal authority. An orphan from
birth and an exile from childhood, he stood near enough to the throne
to invite Yorkist proscription, but too far off to unite in his favour
Lancastrian support. He owed his elevation to the mistakes of his
enemies and to the cool, calculating craft which enabled him to use
those mistakes without making mistakes of his own. He ran the great
risk of his life in his invasion of England, but henceforth he left
nothing to chance. He was never betrayed by passion or enthusiasm into
rash adventures, and he loved the substance, rather than the pomp and
circumstance of power. Untrammelled by scruples, unimpeded by
principles, he pursued with constant fidelity the task of his life, to
secure the throne for himself and his children, to pacify his country,
and to repair the waste of the civil wars. Folly easily glides into
war, but to establish a permanent peace required all Henry’s patience,
clear sight and far sight, caution and tenacity. A full exchequer, not
empty glory, was his first requisite, and he found in his foreign wars
a mine of money. Treason at home was turned to like profit, and the
forfeited estates of rebellious lords accumulated in the hands of the
royal family and filled the national coffers. Attainder, the
characteristic instrument of
(p. 037)
Tudor policy, was employed to
complete the ruin of the old English peerage which the Wars of the
Roses began: and by 1509 there was only one duke and one marquis left
in the whole of
England.[71]
Attainder not only removed the particular
traitor, but disqualified his family for place and power; and the
process of eliminating feudalism from the region of government,
started by Edward I., was finished by Henry VII. Feudal society has
been described as a pyramid; the upper slopes were now washed away
leaving an impassable precipice, with the Tudor monarch alone in his
glory at its summit. Royalty had become a caste apart. Marriages
between royal children and English peers had hitherto been no uncommon
thing; since Henry VII.’s accession there have been but four, two of
them in our own day. Only one took place in the sixteenth century, and
the Duke of Suffolk was by some thought worthy of death for his
presumption in marrying the sister of Henry VIII. The peerage was
weakened not only by diminishing numbers, but by the systematic
depression of those who remained. Henry VII., like Ferdinand of
Aragon,[72]
preferred to govern by means of lawyers and churchmen;
they could be rewarded by judgeships and bishoprics, and required no
grants from the royal estates. Their occupancy of office kept out
territorial magnates who abused it for private ends. Of the sixteen
regents nominated by Henry VIII. in his will, not one could boast a
peerage of twelve years’
standing;[73]
and all the great Tudor
ministers,
(p. 038)
Wolsey and Cromwell, Cecil and Walsingham, were
men of comparatively humble birth. With similar objects Henry VII.
passed laws limiting the number of retainers and forbidding the
practice of maintenance. The courts of Star Chamber and Requests were
developed to keep in order his powerful subjects and give poor men
protection against them. Their civil law procedure, influenced by
Roman imperial maxims, served to enhance the royal power and dignity,
and helped to build up the Tudor autocracy.

To the office of king thus developed and magnified, the young Prince
who stood upon the steps of the throne brought personal qualities of
the highest order, and advantages to which his father was completely a
stranger. His title was secure, his treasury overflowed, and he
enjoyed the undivided affections of his people. There was no
alternative claimant. The White Rose, indeed, had languished in the
Tower since his surrender by Philip, and the Duke of Buckingham had
some years before been mentioned as a possible successor to the
throne;[74]
but their claims only served to remind men that nothing
but Henry’s life stood between them and anarchy, for his young brother
Edmund, Duke of Somerset, had preceded Arthur to an early grave. Upon
the single thread of Henry’s life hung the peace of the realm; no
other could have secured the throne without a second civil war. It was
small wonder if England regarded Henry with a somewhat extravagant
loyalty. Never had king ascended the throne more richly endowed with
mental and physical gifts. He was ten weeks short of his
(p. 039)
eighteenth year. From both his parents he inherited grace of mind and
of person. His father in later years was broken in health and soured
in spirit, but in the early days of his reign he had charmed the
citizens of York with his winning smile. His mother is described by
the Venetian ambassador as a woman of great beauty and ability. She
transmitted to Henry many of the popular characteristics of her
father, Edward IV., though little of the military genius of that
consummate commander who fought thirteen pitched battles and lost not
one. Unless eye-witnesses sadly belied themselves, Henry VIII. must
have been the desire of all eyes. “His Majesty,” wrote one a year or
two later,[75]
“is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above
the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg; his
complexion fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short
in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it
would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and
thick…. He speaks French, English, Latin, and a little Italian;
plays well on the lute and harpsichord, sings from the book at sight,
draws the bow with greater strength than any man in England, and
jousts marvellously.” Another foreign resident in
1519[76]
described
him as “extremely handsome. Nature could not have done more for him.
He is much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom; a great
deal handsomer than the King of France; very fair and his whole frame
admirably proportioned. On hearing that Francis I. wore a beard, he
allowed his own to grow, and
(p. 040)
as it is reddish, he has now
got a beard that looks like gold. He is very accomplished, a good
musician, composes well, is a capital horseman, a fine jouster, speaks
French, Latin, and Spanish…. He is very fond of hunting, and never
takes his diversion without tiring eight or ten horses which he causes
to be stationed beforehand along the line of country he means to take,
and when one is tired he mounts another, and before he gets home they
are all exhausted. He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is
the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin
glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.”

The change from the cold suspicious Henry VII. to such a king as this
was inevitably greeted with a burst of rapturous enthusiasm. “I have
no fear,” wrote Mountjoy to
Erasmus,[77]
“but when you heard that our
Prince, now Henry the Eighth, whom we may well call our Octavius, had
succeeded to his father’s throne, all your melancholy left you at
once. For what may you not promise yourself from a Prince, with whose
extraordinary and almost Divine character you are well acquainted….
But when you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he
behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he
bears to the learned, I will venture to swear that you will need no
wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you
could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so
great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not
contain your tears for joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all
things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar! Avarice is expelled the
country. Liberality
(p. 041)
scatters wealth with a bounteous hand.
Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue,
glory, immortality.” The picture is overdrawn for modern taste, but
making due allowance for Mountjoy’s turgid efforts to emulate his
master’s eloquence, enough remains to indicate the impression made by
Henry on a peer of liberal education. His unrivalled skill in national
sports and martial exercises appealed at least as powerfully to the
mass of his people. In archery, in wrestling, in joust and in tourney,
as well as in the tennis court or on the hunting field, Henry was a
match for the best in his kingdom. None could draw a bow, tame a
steed, or shiver a lance more deftly than he, and his single-handed
tournaments on horse and foot with his brother-in-law, the Duke of
Suffolk, are likened by one who watched them to the combats of
Achilles and Hector. These are no mere trifles below the dignity of
history; they help to explain the extraordinary hold Henry obtained
over popular imagination. Suppose there ascended the throne to-day a
young prince, the hero of the athletic world, the finest oar, the best
bat, the crack marksman of his day, it is easy to imagine the
enthusiastic support he would receive from thousands of his people who
care much for sport, and nothing at all for politics. Suppose also
that that prince were endowed with the iron will, the instinctive
insight into the hearts of his people, the profound aptitude for
government that Henry VIII. displayed, he would be a rash man who
would guarantee even now the integrity of parliamentary power or the
continuance of cabinet rule. In those days, with thirty years of civil
war and fifteen more of conspiracy fresh in men’s minds, with no
alternative to anarchy
(p. 042)
save Henry VIII., with a peerage
fallen from its high estate, and a Parliament almost lost to respect,
royal autocracy was not a thing to dread or distrust. “If a lion knew
his strength,” said Sir Thomas More of his master to Cromwell, “it
were hard for any man to rule him.” Henry VIII. had the strength of a
lion; it remains to be seen how soon he learnt it, and what use he
made of that strength when he discovered the secret.

CHAPTER III.
(p. 043)

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF HENRY VIII.

Quietly and peacefully, without a threat from abroad or a murmur at
home, the crown, which his father had won amid the storm and stress of
the field of battle, devolved upon Henry VIII. With an eager profusion
of zeal Ferdinand of Aragon placed at Henry’s disposal his army, his
fleet, his personal
services.[78]
There was no call for this
sacrifice. For generations there had been no such tranquil demise of
the crown. Not a ripple disturbed the surface of affairs as the old
King lay sick in April, 1509, in Richmond Palace at Sheen. By his
bedside stood his only surviving son; and to him the dying monarch
addressed his last words of advice. He desired him to complete his
marriage with Catherine, he exhorted him to defend the Church, and to
make war on the infidel; he commended to him his faithful councillors,
and is believed to have urged upon him the execution of De la Pole,
Earl of Suffolk, the White Rose of England. On the 22nd he was dead. A
fortnight later the funeral procession wended its way from Sheen to
St. Paul’s, where the illustrious John Fisher, cardinal and martyr,
preached the
(p. 044)
éloge. Thence it passed down the Strand,
between hedges and willows clad in the fresh green of spring, to

That acre sown indeed
With the richest, royallest seed
That the earth did e’er drink in.

There, in the vault beneath the chapel in Westminster Abbey, which
bears his name and testifies to his magnificence in building, Henry
VII. was laid to rest beside his Queen; dwelling, says Bacon, “more
richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond
or any of his palaces”. For years before and after, Torrigiano, the
rival of Buonarotti, wrought at its “matchless altar,” not a stone of
which survived the Puritan fury of the civil war.

On the day of his father’s death, or the next, the new King removed
from Richmond Palace to the Tower, whence, on 23rd April, was dated
the first official act of his reign. He confirmed in ampler form the
general pardon granted a few days before by Henry VII.; but the ampler
form was no bar to the exemption of fourscore offenders from the act
of grace.[79]
Foremost among them were the three brothers De la Pole,
Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. The exclusion of Empson and
Dudley from the pardon was more popular than the pardon itself. If
anything could have enhanced Henry’s favour with his subjects, it was
the condign punishment of the tools of his father’s extortion. Their
death was none the less welcome for being unjust. They were not merely
refused pardon and brought to the block; a more costly concession was
made when their bonds for the payment of loans were
cancelled.[80]
Their victims, so runs
(p. 045)
the official record, had been
“without any ground or matter of truth, by the undue means of certain
of the council of our said late father, thereunto driven contrary to
law, reason and good conscience, to the manifest charge and peril of
the soul of our said late father”.

If filial piety demanded the delivery of his father’s soul from peril,
it counselled no less the fulfilment of his dying requests, and the
arrangements for Catherine’s marriage were hurried on with an almost
indecent haste. The instant he heard rumours of Henry VII.’s death,
Ferdinand sent warning to his envoy in England that Louis of France
and others would seek by all possible means to break off the
match.[81]
To further it, he would withdraw his objections to the
union of Charles and Mary; and a few days later he wrote again to
remove any scruples Henry might entertain about marrying his deceased
brother’s wife; while to Catherine herself he declared with brutal
frankness that she would get no other husband than
Henry.[82]
All his
paternal anxiety might have been spared. Long before Ferdinand’s
persuasions could reach Henry’s ears, he had made up his mind to
consummate the marriage. He would not, he wrote to Margaret of
Savoy,[83]
disobey his father’s commands, reinforced as they were by
the dispensation of the Pope and by the friendship between the two
families contracted by his sister Mary’s betrothal to Catherine’s
nephew Charles. There were other reasons besides those he alleged. A
council trained by Henry VII. was loth to lose the gold of Catherine’s
dower; it was of the utmost importance to strengthen at once the royal
line; and a full-blooded youth of Henry’s temperament was not likely
to
(p. 046)
repel a comely wife ready to his hand, when the dictates
of his father’s policy no longer stood between them. So on 11th June,
barely a month after Henry VII.’s obsequies, the marriage, big with
destinies, of Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon was privately
solemnised by Archbishop Warham “in the Queen’s closet” at
Greenwich.[84]
On the same day the commission of claims was appointed
for the King’s and Queen’s coronation. A week then sufficed for its
business, and on Sunday, 24th June, the Abbey was the scene of a
second State function within three months. Its splendour and display
were emblematic of the coming reign. Warham placed the crown on the
King’s head; the people cried, “Yea, yea!” in a loud voice when asked
if they would have Henry as King; Sir Robert Dymock performed the
office of champion; and a banquet, jousts and tourneys concluded the
ceremonies.

Though he had wedded a wife and been crowned a king, Henry was as yet
little more than a boy. A powerful mind ripens slowly in a vigorous
frame, and Henry’s childish precocity had given way before a youthful
devotion to physical sports. He was no prodigy of early development.
His intellect, will and character were of a gradual, healthier growth;
they were not matured for many years after he came to the throne. He
was still in his eighteenth year; and like most young Englishmen of
means and muscle, his interests centred rather in the field than in
the study. Youth sat on the prow and pleasure at the helm. “Continual
feasting” was the phrase in which Catherine described their early
married life.
(p. 047)
In the winter evenings there were masks and
comedies, romps and revels, in which Henry himself, Bessie Blount and
other young ladies of his Court played
parts.[85]
In the spring and
summer there were archery and tennis. Music, we are told, was
practised day and night. Two months after his accession Henry wrote to
Ferdinand that he diverted himself with jousts, birding, hunting, and
other innocent and honest pastimes, in visiting various parts of his
kingdom, but that he did not therefore neglect affairs of
State.[86]
Possibly he was as assiduous in his duties as modern university
athletes in their studies; the neglect was merely comparative. But
Ferdinand’s ambassador remarked on Henry’s aversion to business, and
his councillors complained that he cared only for the pleasures of his
age. Two days a week, said the Spaniard, were devoted to single
combats on foot, initiated in imitation of the heroes of romance,
Amadis and
Lancelot;[87]
and if Henry’s other innocent and honest
pastimes were equally exacting, his view of the requirements of State
may well have been modest. From the earliest days of his reign the
general outline of policy was framed in accord with his sentiments,
and he was probably consulted on most questions of importance. But it
was not always so; in August, 1509, Louis XII. acknowledged a letter
purporting to come from the English King with a request for friendship
and peace. “Who wrote this letter?” burst out Henry. “I ask peace of
the King of France, who dare not look me in the face, still less make
war on
me!”[88]
His pride at the age of eighteen was not less than his
ignorance of what passed
(p. 048)
in his name. He had yet to learn
the secret that painful and laborious mastery of detail is essential
to him who aspires not merely to reign but to rule; and matters of
detail in administration and diplomacy were still left in his
ministers’ hands.

With the exception of Empson and Dudley, Henry made little or no
change in the council his father bequeathed him. Official precedence
appertained to his Chancellor, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Like
most of Henry VII.’s prelates, he received his preferment in the
Church as a reward for services to the State. Much of the diplomatic
work of the previous reign had passed through his hands; he helped to
arrange the marriage of Arthur and Catherine, and was employed in the
vain attempt to obtain Margaret of Savoy as a bride for Henry VII. As
Archbishop he crowned and married Henry VIII., and as Chancellor he
delivered orations at the opening of the young King’s first three
Parliaments.[89]
They are said to have given general satisfaction, but
apart from them, Warham, for some unknown reason, took little part in
political business. So far as Henry can be said at this time to have
had a Prime Minister, that title belongs to Fox, his Lord Privy Seal
and Bishop of Winchester. Fox had been even more active than Warham in
politics, and more closely linked with the personal fortunes of the
two Tudor kings. He had shared the exile of Henry of Richmond; the
treaty of Étaples, the Intercursus Magnus, the marriage of Henry’s
elder daughter to James IV., and the betrothal of his younger to
Charles, were largely the work of his hands. Malicious gossip
described him as willing to consent to his
(p. 049)
own father’s
death to serve the turn of his king, and a better founded belief
ascribed to his wit the invention of “Morton’s
fork”.[90]
He was
Chancellor of Cambridge in 1500, as Warham was of Oxford, but won more
enduring fame by founding the college of Corpus Christi in the
university over which the Archbishop presided. He had baptised Henry
VIII. and advocated his marriage to Catherine; and to him the King
extended the largest share in his confidence. Badoer, the Venetian
ambassador, called him “alter
rex,”[91]
and Carroz, the Spaniard, said
Henry trusted him most; but Henry was not blind to the failings of his
most intimate councillors, and he warned Carroz that the Bishop of
Winchester was, as his name implied, a fox
indeed.[92]
A third
prelate, Ruthal of Durham, divided with Fox the chief business of
State; and these clerical advisers were supposed to be eager to guide
Henry’s footsteps in the paths of peace, and counteract the more
adventurous tendencies of their lay colleagues.

At the head of the latter stood Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, soon to
be rewarded for his victory at Flodden by his restoration to the
dukedom of Norfolk. He and his son, the third duke, were Lord High
Treasurers throughout Henry’s reign; but jealousy of their past, Tudor
distrust of their rank, or personal limitations, impaired the
authority that would otherwise have attached to their official
position; and Henry never trusted them as he did ministers whom he
himself had raised from the dust. Surrey had served under Edward IV.
and Richard III.; he had fought against Henry at Bosworth, been
attainted
(p. 050)
and sent to the Tower. Reflecting that it was
better to be a Tudor official at Court than a baronial magnate in
prison, he submitted to the King and was set up as a beacon to draw
his peers from their feudal ways. The rest of the council were men of
little distinction. Shrewsbury, the Lord High Steward, was a pale
reflex of Surrey, and illustrious in nought but descent. Charles
Somerset, Lord Herbert, who was Chamberlain and afterwards Earl of
Worcester, was a Beaufort
bastard,[93]
and may have derived some
little influence from his harmless kinship with Henry VIII. Lovell,
the Treasurer, Poynings the Controller of the Household, and Harry
Marney, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, were tried and trusty
officials. Bishop Fisher was great as a Churchman, a scholar, a patron
of learning, but not as a man of affairs; while Buckingham, the only
duke in England, and his brother, the Earl of Wiltshire, were rigidly
excluded by dynastic jealousy from all share in political authority.

The most persistent of Henry’s advisers was none of his council. He
was Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Aragon; and to his inspiration has
been ascribed[94]
the course of foreign policy during the first five
years of his son-in-law’s reign. He worked through his daughter; the
only thing she valued in life, wrote Catherine a month after her
marriage, was her father’s confidence. When Membrilla was recalled
because he failed to satisfy Catherine’s somewhat exacting temper, she
was herself formally
(p. 051)
commissioned to act in his place as
Ferdinand’s ambassador at Henry’s Court; Henry was begged to give her
implicit credence and communicate with Spain through her mediation!
“These kingdoms of your highness,” she wrote to her father, “are in
great
tranquillity.”[95]
Well might Ferdinand congratulate himself on
the result of her marriage, and the addition of fresh, to his already
extensive, domains. He needed them all to ensure the success of his
far-reaching schemes. His eldest grandson, Charles, was heir not only
to Castile and Aragon, Naples and the Indies, which were to come to
him from his mother, Ferdinand’s imbecile daughter, Juaña, but to
Burgundy and Austria, the lands of his father, Philip, and of Philip’s
father, the Emperor Maximilian. This did not satisfy Ferdinand’s
grasping ambition; he sought to carve out for his second grandson,
named after himself, a kingdom in Northern
Italy.[96]
On the Duchy of
Milan, the republics of Venice, Genoa and Florence, his greedy eyes
were fixed. Once conquered, they would bar the path of France to
Naples; compensated by these possessions, the younger Ferdinand might
resign his share in the Austrian inheritance to Charles; while Charles
himself was to marry the only daughter of the King of Hungary, add
that to his other dominions, and revive the
(p. 052)
empire of
Charlemagne. Partly with these objects in view, partly to draw off the
scent from his own track, Ferdinand had, in 1508, raised the hue and
cry after Venice. Pope and Emperor, France and Spain, joined in the
chase, but of all the parties to the league of Cambrai, Louis XII. was
in a position to profit the most. His victory over Venice at Agnadello
(14th May, 1509), secured him Milan and Venetian territory as far as
the Mincio; it also dimmed the prospects of Ferdinand’s Italian scheme
and threatened his hold on Naples; but the Spanish King was restrained
from open opposition to France by the fact that Louis was still
mediating between him and Maximilian on their claims to the
administration of Castile, the realm of their daughter and
daughter-in-law, Juaña.

Such was the situation with which Henry VIII. and his council were
required to deal. The young King entered the arena of Europe, a child
of generous impulse in a throng of hoary intriguers—Ferdinand,
Maximilian, Louis XII., Julius II.—each of whom was nearly three
times his age. He was shocked to see them leagued to spoil a petty
republic, a republic, too, which had been for ages the bulwark of
Christendom against the Turk and from time immemorial the ally of
England. Venice had played no small part in the revival of letters
which appealed so strongly to Henry’s intellectual sympathies.
Scholars and physicians from Venice, or from equally threatened
Italian republics, frequented his Court and Cabinet. Venetian
merchants developed the commerce of London; Venetian galleys called
twice a year at Southampton on their way to and from Flanders, and
their
(p. 053)
trade was a source of profit to both nations.
Inevitably Henry’s sympathies went out to the sore-pressed republic.
They were none the less strong because the chief of the spoilers was
France, for Henry and his people were imbued with an inborn antipathy
to everything
French.[97]
Before he came to the throne he was reported
to be France’s enemy; and speculations were rife as to the chances of
his invading it and imitating the exploits of his ancestor Henry V. It
needed no persuasion from Ferdinand to induce him to intervene in
favour of Venice. Within a few weeks of his accession he refused to
publish the papal bull which cast the halo of crusaders over the
bandits of Cambrai. The day after his coronation he deplored to Badoer
Louis’ victory at Agnadello, and a week later he wrote to the
sovereigns of Europe urging the injustice of their Venetian crusade.
In September he sent Bainbridge, Cardinal-Archbishop of York, to
reside at the Papal Court, and watch over the interests of Venice as
well as of England. “Italy,” wrote Badoer, “was entirely rescued from
the barbarians by the movements of the English King; and, but for
that, Ferdinand would have done
nothing.”[98]
Henry vainly endeavoured
to persuade Maximilian, the Venetian’s lifelong foe, to accept
arbitration; but he succeeded in inducing the Doge to make his peace
with the Pope, and Julius to remove his ecclesiastical censures. To
Ferdinand he declared that Venice must be preserved as a wall against
the Turk, and he hinted that Ferdinand’s own dominions in Italy would,
if Venice were destroyed, “be unable to resist
(p. 054)
the ambitious
designs of certain Christian
princes”.[99]
The danger was as patent to
Julius and Ferdinand as it was to Henry; and as soon as Ferdinand had
induced Louis to give a favourable verdict in his suit with the
Emperor, the Catholic King was ready to join Henry and the Pope in a
league of defence.

But, in spite of Venetian, Spanish and papal instigations to “recover
his noble inheritance in France,” in spite of his own indignation at
the treatment of Venice, and the orders issued in the first year of
his reign to his subjects to furnish themselves with weapons of war,
for which the long peace had left them
unprepared,[100]
Henry, or the
peace party in his council, was unwilling to resort to the arbitrament
of arms. He renewed his father’s treaties not only with other powers,
but, much to the disgust of Ferdinand, Venice and the Pope, with Louis
himself. His first martial exploit, apart from 1,500 archers whom he
was bound by treaty to send to aid the Netherlands against the Duke of
Guelders,[101]
was an expedition for the destruction of the enemies of
the faith.[102]
Such an expedition, he once said, he owed to God for
his peaceful accession; at another time he
declared[103]
that he
cherished, like an heirloom, the ardour against the infidel which he
inherited from his father. He repressed that ardour, it must be added,
with as much success as Henry VII.; and apart from this one youthful
indiscretion, he did not suffer his ancestral zeal to escape into
action. His generous illusions soon vanished before the sordid
realities of European statecraft; and the defence of Christendom
(p. 055)
became with him, as with others, a hollow pretence, a diplomatic
fiction, the infinite varieties of which age could not wither nor
custom stale. Did a monarch wish for peace? Peace at once was
imperative to enable Christian princes to combine against the Turk.
Did he desire war? War became a disagreeable necessity to restrain the
ambition of Christian princes who, “worse than the infidel,” disturbed
the peace of Christendom and opened a door for the enemies of the
Church. Nor did the success of Henry’s first crusade encourage him to
persist in similar efforts. It sailed from Plymouth in May, 1511, to
join in Ferdinand’s attack on the Moors, but it had scarcely landed
when bickerings broke out between the Christian allies, and Ferdinand
informed the English commanders that he had made peace with the
Infidel, to gird his loins for war with the Most Christian King.

In the midst of their preparation against infidels, so runs the
preamble to the treaty in which Henry and Ferdinand signified their
adhesion to the Holy League, they heard that Louis was besieging the
Pope in
Bologna.[104]
The thought of violent hands being laid on the
Vicar of Christ stirred Henry to a depth of indignation which no
injuries practised against a temporal power could rouse. His ingenuous
deference to the Papacy was in singular contrast to the contempt with
which it was treated by more experienced sovereigns, and they traded
on the weight which Henry always attached to the words of the Pope. He
had read Maximilian grave lectures on his conduct in countenancing the
schismatic conciliabulum assembled by Louis at
Pisa.[105]
He wrote
to Bainbridge at the Papal Court that he was ready to sacrifice goods,
life
(p. 056)
and kingdom for the Pope and the
Church;[106]
and to
the Emperor that at the beginning of his reign he thought of nothing
else than an expedition against the Infidel. But now he was called by
the Pope and the danger of the Church in another direction; and he
proceeded to denounce the impiety and schism of the French and their
atrocious deeds in Italy. He joined Ferdinand in requiring Louis to
desist from his impious work. Louis turned a deaf ear to their
demands; and in November, 1511, they bound themselves to defend the
Church against all aggression and make war upon the aggressor.

This reversal of the pacific policy which had marked the first two and
a half years of Henry’s reign was not exclusively due to the King’s
zeal for the Church. The clerical party of peace in his council was
now divided by the appearance of an ecclesiastic who was far more
remarkable than any of his colleagues, and to whose turbulence and
energy the boldness of English policy must, henceforth, for many years
be mainly ascribed. Thomas Wolsey had been appointed Henry’s almoner
at the beginning of his reign, but he exercised no apparent influence
in public affairs. It was not till 1511 that he joined the council,
though during the interval he must have been gradually building up his
ascendancy over the King’s mind. To Wolsey, restlessly ambitious for
himself, for Henry, and England, was attributed the responsibility for
the sudden adoption of a spirited foreign policy; and it was in the
preparations for the war of 1512 that his marvellous industry and
grasp of detail first found full scope.

The
(p. 057)
main attack of the English and Spanish monarchs was to be
on
Guienne,[107]
and in May, 1512, Henry went down to Southampton to
speed the departing
fleet.[108]
It sailed from Cowes under Dorset’s
command on 3rd June, and a week later the army disembarked on the
coast of
Guipuscoa.[109]
There it remained throughout the torrid
summer, awaiting the Spanish King’s forces to co-operate in the
invasion of France. But Ferdinand was otherwise occupied. Navarre was
not mentioned in the treaty with Henry, but Navarre was what Ferdinand
had in his mind. It was then an independent kingdom, surrounded on
three sides by Spanish territory, and an easy prey which would serve
to unite all Spain beyond the Pyrenees under Ferdinand’s rule. Under
pretence of restoring Guienne to the English crown, Dorset’s army had
been enticed to Passages, and there it was used as a screen against
the French, behind which Ferdinand calmly proceeded to conquer
Navarre. It was, he said, impossible to march into France with Navarre
unsubdued in his rear. Navarre was at peace, but it might join the
French, and he invited Dorset to help in securing the prey. Dorset
refused to exceed his commission, but the presence of his army at
Passages was admitted by the Spaniards to be “quite
providential,”[110]
as it prevented the French from assisting Navarre.
English indignation was loud and deep; men and officers vowed that,
but for Henry’s displeasure, they would have called to account the
perfidious King. Condemned to inactivity, the troops almost mutinied;
they found it impossible to live on their wages of sixpence a day
(equivalent now to at least six
(p. 058)
shillings), drank Spanish
wine as if it were English beer, and died of dysentery like flies in
the autumn. Discipline relaxed; drill was neglected. Still Ferdinand
tarried, and in October, seeing no hope of an attempt on Guienne that
year, the army took matters into its own hands and embarked for
England.[111]

Henry’s first military enterprise had ended in disgrace and disaster.
The repute of English soldiers, dimmed by long peace, was now further
tarnished. Henry’s own envoys complained of the army’s
insubordination, its impatience of the toils, and inexperience of the
feats, of war; and its ignominious return exposed him to the taunts of
both friends and foes. He had been on the point of ordering it home,
when it came of its own accord; but the blow to his authority was not,
on that account, less severe. His irritation was not likely to be
soothed when he realised the extent to which he had been duped by his
father-in-law. Ferdinand was loud in complaints and
excuses.[112]
September and October were, he said, the proper months for a campaign
in Guienne, and he was marching to join the English army at the moment
of its desertion. In reality, it had served his purpose to perfection.
Its presence had diverted French levies from Italy, and enabled him,
unmolested, to conquer Navarre. With that he was content. Why should
he wish to see Henry in Guienne? He was too shrewd to involve his own
forces in that hopeless adventure, and the departure of the English
furnished him with an excuse for entering into secret negotiations
with Louis. His
(p. 059)
methods were eloquent of sixteenth-century
diplomacy. He was, he ordered Carroz to tell Henry many months
later,[113]
when concealment was no longer possible or necessary,
sending a holy friar to his daughter in England; the friar’s health
did not permit of his going by sea; so he went through France, and was
taken prisoner. Hearing of his fame for piety, the French Queen
desired his ghostly advice, and took the opportunity of the interview
to persuade the friar to return to Spain with proposals of peace.
Ferdinand was suddenly convinced that death was at hand; his confessor
exhorted him to forgive and make peace with his enemies. This work of
piety he could not in conscience neglect. So he agreed to a
twelvemonth’s truce, which secured Navarre. In spite of his conscience
he would never have consented, had he not felt that the truce was
really in Henry’s interests. But what weighed with him most was, he
said, the reformation of the Church. That should be Henry’s first and
noblest work; he could render no greater service to God. No
reformation was possible without peace, and so long as the Church was
unreformed, wars among princes would never cease.

Such reasoning, he thought, would appeal to the pious and
unsophisticated Henry. To other sovereigns he used arguments more
suited to their experience of his diplomacy. He told
Maximilian[114]
that his main desire was to serve the Emperor’s interests, to put a
curb on the Italians, and to frustrate their design of driving
himself, Louis and Maximilian across the Alps. But the most monumental
falsehood he reserved for the Pope; his
(p. 060)
ambassador at the
Papal Court was to assure Julius that he had failed in his efforts to
concert with Henry a joint invasion of France, that Henry was not in
earnest over the war and that he had actually made a
truce[115]
with
France. This had enabled Louis to pour fresh troops into Italy, and
compelled him, Ferdinand, to consult his own interests and make peace!
Two days later he was complaining to Louis that Henry refused to join
in the
truce.[116]
To punish Henry for his refusal he was willing to
aid Louis against him, but he would prefer to settle the differences
between the French and the English kings by a still more treacherous
expedient. Julius was to be induced to give a written promise that, if
the points at issue were submitted to his arbitration, he would
pronounce no verdict till it had been secretly sanctioned by Ferdinand
and Louis. This promise obtained, Louis was publicly to appeal to the
Pope; Henry’s devotion to the Church would prevent his refusing the
Supreme Pontiff’s mediation; if he did, ecclesiastical censures could
be invoked against
him.[117]
Such was the plot Ferdinand was hatching
for the benefit of his daughter’s husband. The Catholic King had ever
deceit in his heart and the name of God on his lips. He was accused by
a rival of having cheated him twice; the charge was repeated to
Ferdinand. “He lies,” he broke out, “I cheated him three times.” He
was faithful to one principle only, self-aggrandisement by fair means
or foul. His favourite scheme was a kingdom in Northern Italy; but in
the way of its realisation his own overreaching ambition placed an
insuperable bar. Italy had been excluded from his truce with France to
leave him free
(p. 061)
to pursue that
design;[118]
but in July,
1512, the Italians already suspected his motives, and a papal legate
declared that they no more wished to see Milan Spanish than
French.[119]
In the following November, Spanish troops in the pay and
alliance of Venice drove the French out of Brescia. By the terms of
the Holy League, it should have been restored to its owner, the
Venetian Republic. Ferdinand kept it himself; it was to form the
nucleus of his North Italian dominion. Venice at once took alarm and
made a compact with France which kept the Spaniards at bay until after
Ferdinand’s
death.[120]
The friendship between Venice and France
severed that between France and the Emperor; and, in 1513, the war
went on with a rearrangement of partners, Henry and Maximilian on one
side,[121]
against France and Venice on the other, with Ferdinand
secretly trying to trick them all.

For many months Henry knew not, or refused to credit, his
father-in-law’s perfidy. To outward appearance, the Spanish King was
as eager as ever for the war in Guienne. He was urging Henry to levy
6,000 Germans
(p. 062)
to serve for that purpose in conjunction with
Spanish forces; and, in April, Carroz, in ignorance of his master’s
real intentions, signed on his behalf a treaty for the joint invasion
of France.[122]
This forced the Catholic King to reveal his hand. He
refused his
ratification;[123]
now he declared the conquest of Guienne
to be a task of such magnitude that preparations must be complete
before April, a date already past; and he recommended Henry to come
into the truce with Louis, the existence of which he had now to
confess. Henry had not yet fathomed the depths; he even appealed to
Ferdinand’s feelings and pathetically besought him, as a good father,
not to forsake him
entirely.[124]
But in vain; his father-in-law
deserted him at his sorest hour of need. To make peace was out of the
question. England’s honour had suffered a stain that must at all costs
be removed. No king with an atom of spirit would let the dawn of his
reign be clouded by such an admission of failure. Wolsey was there to
stiffen his temper in case of need; with him it was almost a matter of
life and death to retrieve the disaster. His credit was pledged in the
war. In their moments of anger under the Spanish sun, the English
commanders had loudly imputed to Wolsey the origin of the war and the
cause of all the
mischief.[125]
Surrey, for whose banishment from
Court the new favourite had expressed to Fox a wish, and other “great
men” at home, repeated the
charge.[126]
Had Wolsey failed to bring
honour with peace, his name would not have been numbered among the
greatest of England’s statesmen.

Henry’s
(p. 063)
temper required no spur. Tudors never flinched in the
face of danger, and nothing could have made Henry so resolved to go on
as Ferdinand’s desertion and advice to desist. He was prepared to
avenge his army in person. There were to be no expeditions to distant
shores; there was to be war in the Channel, where Englishmen were at
home on the sea; and Calais was to be the base of an invasion of
France over soil worn by the tramp of English troops. In March, 1513,
Henry, to whom the navy was a weapon, a plaything, a passion, watched
his fleet sail down the Thames; its further progress was told him in
letters from its gallant admiral, Sir Edmund Howard, who had been
strictly charged to inform the King of the minutest details in the
behaviour of every one of the
ships.[127]
Never had such a display of
naval force left the English shores; twenty-four ships ranging
downwards from the 1,600 tons of the Henry Imperial, bore nearly
5,000 marines and 3,000
mariners.[128]
The French dared not venture
out, while Howard swept the Channel, and sought them in their ports.
Brest was blockaded. A squadron of Mediterranean galleys coming to its
relief anchored in the shallow water off Conquêt. Howard determined to
cut them out; he grappled and boarded their admiral’s galley. The
grappling was cut away, his boat swept out in the tide, and Howard,
left unsupported, was thrust overboard by the Frenchmen’s
pikes.[129]
His death was regarded as a national disaster, but he had retrieved
England’s reputation for foolhardy valour.

Meanwhile,
(p. 064)
Henry’s army was gathering at
Calais.[130]
On 30th
June, at 7 p.m., the King himself landed. Before his departure, the
unfortunate Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was brought to the
block for an alleged correspondence with his brother in Louis’
service, but really because rumours were rife of Louis’ intention to
proclaim the White Rose as King of
England.[131]
On 21st July, Henry
left Calais to join his army, which had already advanced into French
territory. Heavy rains impeded its march and added to its discomfort.
Henry, we are told, did not put off his clothes, but rode round the
camp at three in the morning, cheering his men with the remark, “Well,
comrades, now that we have suffered in the beginning, fortune promises
us better things, God
willing”.[132]
Near Ardres some German
mercenaries, of whom there were 8,000 with Henry’s forces, pillaged
the church; Henry promptly had three of them hanged. On 1st August the
army sat down before Thérouanne; on the 10th, the Emperor arrived to
serve as a private at a hundred crowns a day under the English
banners. Three days later a large French force arrived at Guinegate to
raise the siege; a panic seized it, and the bloodless rout that
followed was named the Battle of Spurs. Louis d’Orléans, Duc de
Longueville, the famous Chevalier Bayard, and others of the noblest
blood in France, were among the
captives.[133]
Ten days after this
defeat
(p. 065)
Thérouanne surrendered; and on the 24th Henry made
his triumphal entry into the first town captured by English arms since
the days of Jeanne Darc. On the 26th he removed to Guinegate, where he
remained a week, “according,” says a curious document, “to the laws of
arms, for in case any man would bid battle for the besieging and
getting of any city or town, then the winner (has) to give battle, and
to abide the same certain
days”.[134]
No challenge was forthcoming,
and on 15th September Henry besieged Tournay, then said to be the
richest city north of Paris. During the progress of the siege the Lady
Margaret of Savoy, the Regent of the Netherlands, joined her father,
the Emperor, and Henry, at Lille. They discussed plans for renewing
the war next year and for the marriage of Charles and Mary. To please
the Lady Margaret and to exhibit his skill Henry played the gitteron,
the lute and the cornet, and danced and jousted before
her.[135]
He
“excelled every one as much in agility in breaking spears as in
nobleness of stature”. Within a week Tournay fell; on 13th October
Henry commenced his return, and on the 21st he re-embarked at Calais.

Thérouanne, the Battle of Spurs, and Tournay were not the only, or the
most striking, successes in this year of war. In July, Catherine, whom
Henry had left as Regent in England, wrote that she was “horribly busy
with making standards, banners, and
badges”[136]
for the army in the
North; for war with France had brought, as usual, the Scots upon the
English backs. James IV., though Henry’s brother-in-law, preferred to
be the cat’s paw of the King of France; and in August the Scots
forces
(p. 066)
poured over the Border under the command of James
himself. England was prepared; and on 9th September, “at Flodden
hills,” sang Skelton, “our bows and bills slew all the flower of their
honour”. James IV. was left a mutilated corpse upon the field of
battle.[137]
“He has paid,” wrote Henry, “a heavier penalty for his
perfidy than we would have wished.” There was some justice in the
charge. James was bound by treaty not to go to war with England; he
had not even waited for the Pope’s answer to his request for
absolution from his oath; and his challenge to Henry, when he was in
France and could not meet it, was not a knightly deed. Henry wrote to
Leo for permission to bury the excommunicated Scottish King with royal
honours in St.
Paul’s.[138]
The permission was granted, but the
interment did not take place. In Italy, Louis fared no better; at
Novara, on 6th June, the Swiss infantry broke in pieces the grand army
of France, drove the fragments across the Alps, and restored the Duchy
of Milan to the native house of Sforza.

The results of the campaign of 1513 were a striking vindication of the
refusal of Henry VIII. and Wolsey to rest under the stigma of their
Spanish expedition of 1512. English prestige was not only restored,
but raised higher than it had stood since the death of Henry V., whose
“name,” said Pasqualigo, a Venetian in London, “Henry VIII. would now
renew”. He styled him “our great
King”.[139]
Peter Martyr, a resident
at Ferdinand’s Court, declared
(p. 067)
that the Spanish King was
“afraid of the over-growing power of
England”.[140]
Another Venetian
in London reported that “were Henry ambitious of dominion like others,
he would soon give law to the world”. But, he added, “he is good and
has a good council. His quarrel was a just one, he marched to free the
Church, to obtain his own, and to liberate Italy from the
French.”[141]
The pomp and parade of Henry’s wars have, indeed,
somewhat obscured the fundamentally pacific character of his reign.
The correspondence of the time bears constant witness to the peaceful
tendencies of Henry and his council. “I content myself,” he once said
to Giustinian, “with my own, I only wish to command my own subjects;
but, on the other hand, I do not choose that any one shall have it in
his power to command
me.”[142]
On another occasion he said: “We want
all potentates to content themselves with their own territories; we
are content with this island of ours”; and Giustinian, after four
years’ residence at Henry’s Court, gave it as his deliberate opinion
to his Government, that Henry did not covet his neighbours’ goods, was
satisfied with his own dominions, and “extremely desirous of
peace”.[143]
Ferdinand said, in 1513, that his pensions from France
and a free hand in Scotland were all that Henry really
desired;[144]
and Carroz, his ambassador, reported that Henry’s councillors did not
like to be at war with any
one.[145]
Peace, they told Badoer, suited
England better than
war.[146]

But
(p. 068)
Henry’s actions proclaimed louder than the words of
himself or of others that he believed peace to be the first of English
interests. He waged no wars on the continent except against France;
and though he reigned thirty-eight years, his hostilities with France
were compressed into as many months. The campaigns of 1512-13,
Surrey’s and Suffolk’s inroads of 1522 and 1523, and Henry’s invasion
of 1544, represent the sum of his military operations outside Great
Britain and Ireland. He acquired Tournay in 1513 and Boulogne in 1544,
but the one was restored in five years for an indemnity, and the other
was to be given back in eight for a similar consideration. These facts
are in curious contrast with the high-sounding schemes of recovering
the crown of France, which others were always suggesting to Henry, and
which he, for merely conventional reasons, was in the habit of
enunciating before going to war; and in view of the tenacity which
Henry exhibited in other respects, and the readiness with which he
relinquished his regal pretensions to France, it is difficult to
believe that they were any real expression of settled policy. They
were, indeed, impossible of achievement, and Henry saw the fact
clearly
enough.[147]
Modern phenomena such as huge armies sweeping
over Europe, and capitals from Berlin to Moscow, Paris to Madrid,
falling before them, were quite beyond military science of the
sixteenth century. Armies fought, as a rule, only in the five summer
months; it was difficult enough to victual them for even that time;
and lack of commissariat or transport crippled all
(p. 069)
the
invasions of Scotland. Hertford sacked Edinburgh, but he went by sea.
No other capital except Rome saw an invading army. Neither Henry nor
Maximilian, Ferdinand nor Charles, ever penetrated more than a few
miles into France, and French armies got no further into Spain, the
Netherlands, or Germany. Machiavelli points out that the chief
safeguard of France against the Spaniards was that the latter could
not victual their army sufficiently to pass the
Pyrenees.[148]
If in
Italy it was different, it was because Italy herself invited the
invaders, and was mainly under foreign dominion. Henry knew that with
the means at his disposal he could never conquer France; his claims to
the crown were transparent conventions, and he was always ready for
peace in return for the status quo and a money indemnity, with a
town or so for security.

The fact that he had only achieved a small part of the conquest he
professed to set out to accomplish was, therefore, no bar to
negotiations for peace. There were many reasons for ending the war;
the rapid diminution of his father’s treasures; the accession to the
papal throne of the pacific Leo in place of the warlike Julius; the
absolution of Louis as a reward for renouncing the council of Pisa;
the interruption of the trade with Venice; the attention required by
Scotland now that her king was Henry’s infant nephew; and lastly, his
betrayal first by Ferdinand and now by the Emperor. In October, 1513,
at Lille, a treaty had been drawn up binding Henry, Maximilian and
Ferdinand to a combined invasion of France before the following
June.[149]
On 6th December, Ferdinand
(p. 070)
wrote to Henry to say
he had signed the treaty. He pointed out the sacrifices he was making
in so doing; he was induced to make them by considering that the war
was to be waged in the interests of the Holy Church, of Maximilian,
Henry, and Catherine, and by his wish and hope to live and die in
friendship with the Emperor and the King of England. He thought,
however, that to make sure of the assistance of God, the allies ought
to bind themselves, if He gave them the victory, to undertake a
general war on the
infidel.[150]
Ferdinand seems to have imagined that
he could dupe the Almighty as easily as he hoped to cheat his allies,
by a pledge which he never meant to fulfil. A fortnight after this
despatch he ordered Carroz not to ratify the treaty he himself had
already
signed.[151]
The reason was not far to seek. He was deluding
himself with the hope, which Louis shrewdly encouraged, that the
French King would, after his recent reverses, fall in with the
Spaniard’s Italian
plans.[152]
Louis might even, he thought, of his
own accord cede Milan and Genoa, which would annihilate the French
King’s influence in Italy, and greatly facilitate the attack on
Venice.

That design had occupied him throughout the summer, before Louis had
become so amenable; then he was urging Maximilian that the Pope must
be kept on their side and persuaded “not to forgive the great sins
committed by the King of France”; for if he removed his ecclesiastical
censures, Ferdinand and Maximilian “would be deprived of a plausible
excuse for confiscating the territories they intended to
conquer”.[153]
Providence was, as
(p. 071)
usual, to be bribed into
assisting in the robbery of Venice by a promise to make war on the
Turk. But now that Louis was prepared to give his daughter Renée in
marriage to young Ferdinand and to endow the couple with Milan and
Genoa and his claims on Naples, his sins might be forgiven. The two
monarchs would not be justified in making war upon France in face of
these offers. Venice remained a difficulty, for Louis was not likely
to help to despoil his faithful ally; but Ferdinand had a suggestion.
They could all make peace publicly guaranteeing the Republic’s
possessions, but Maximilian and he could make a “mental reservation”
enabling them to partition Venice, when France could no longer prevent
it.[154]

So on 13th March, 1514, Ferdinand renewed his truce with France, and
Maximilian joined it soon
after.[155]
The old excuses about the
reformation of the Church, his death-bed desire to make peace with his
enemies, could scarcely be used again; so Ferdinand instructed his
agent to say, if Henry asked for an explanation, that there was a
secret conspiracy in
Italy.[156]
If he had said no more, it would have
been literally true, for the conspiracy was his own; but he went on to
relate that the conspiracy was being hatched by the Italians to drive
him and the Emperor out of the peninsula. The two were alike in their
treachery; both secretly entered the truce with France and broke their
promise to Henry. Another engagement of longer standing was ruptured.
Since 1508, Henry’s sister Mary had been betrothed to Maximilian’s
(p. 072)
grandson Charles. The marriage was to take place when Charles
was fourteen; the pledge had been renewed at Lille, and the nuptials
fixed not later than 15th May,
1514.[157]
Charles wrote to Mary
signing himself votre mari, while Mary was styled Princess of
Castile, carried about a bad portrait of
Charles,[158]
and
diplomatically sighed for his presence ten times a day. But winter
wore on and turned to spring; no sign was forthcoming of Maximilian’s
intention to keep his grandson’s engagement, and Charles was reported
as having said that he wanted a wife and not a
mother.[159]
All
Henry’s inquiries were met by excuses; the Ides of May came and went,
but they brought no wedding between Mary and Charles.

Henry was learning by bitter experience. Not only was he left to face
single-handed the might of Louis; but Ferdinand and Maximilian had
secretly bound themselves to make war on him, if he carried out the
treaty to which they had all three publicly agreed. The man whom he
said he loved as a natural father, and the titular sovereign of
Christendom, had combined to cheat the boy-king who had come to the
throne with youthful enthusiasms and natural, generous instincts. “Nor
do I see,” said Henry to Giustinian, “any faith in the world save in
me, and therefore God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my
affairs.”[160]
This absorbing belief in himself and his righteousness
led to strange aberrations in later years, but in 1514 it had some
justification. “Je vous assure,”
(p. 073)
wrote Margaret of Savoy to
her father, the Emperor, “qu’en lui n’a nulle faintise.” “At any
rate,” said Pasqualigo, “King Henry has done himself great honour, and
kept faith
single-handed.”[161]
A more striking testimony was
forthcoming a year or two later. When Charles succeeded Ferdinand, the
Bishop of Badajos drew up for Cardinal Ximenes a report on the state
of the Prince’s affairs. In it he says: “The King of England has been
truer to his engagements towards the House of Austria than any other
prince. The marriage of the Prince with the Princess Mary, it must be
confessed, did not take place, but it may be questioned whether it was
the fault of the King of England or of the Prince and his advisers.
However that may be, with the exception of the marriage, the King of
England has generally fulfilled his obligations towards the Prince,
and has behaved as a trusty friend. An alliance with the English can
be trusted most of
all.”[162]

But the meekest and saintliest monarch could scarce pass unscathed
through the baptism of fraud practised on Henry; and Henry was at no
time saintly or meek. Ferdinand, he complained, induced him to enter
upon the war, and urged the Pope to use his influence with him for
that purpose; he had been at great expense, had assisted Maximilian,
taken Tournay, and reduced France to extremities; and now, when his
enemy was at his feet, Ferdinand talked of truce: he would never trust
any one
again.[163]
“Had the King of Spain,” wrote a Venetian attaché,
“kept his promise to the King of England, the latter would never have
made peace with France; and the promises of the Emperor were equally
false,
(p. 074)
for he had received many thousands of pounds from
King Henry, on condition that he was to be in person at Calais in the
month of May, with a considerable force in the King’s pay; but the
Emperor pocketed the money and never came. His failure was the cause
of all that took place, for, as King Henry was deceived in every
direction, he thought fit to take this other
course.”[164]
He
discovered that he, too, could play at the game of making peace behind
the backs of his nominal friends; and when once he had made up his
mind, he played the game with vastly more effect than Maximilian or
Ferdinand. It was he who had been really formidable to Louis, and
Louis was therefore prepared to pay him a higher price than to either
of the others. In February Henry had got wind of his allies’ practices
with France. In the same month a nuncio started from Rome to mediate
peace between Henry and
Louis;[165]
but, before his arrival, informal
advances had probably been made through the Duc de Longueville, a
prisoner in England since the Battle of
Spurs.[166]
In January Louis’
wife, Anne of Brittany, had died. Louis was fifty-two years old, worn
out and decrepit; but at least half a dozen brides were proposed for
his hand. In March it was rumoured in Rome that he would choose
Henry’s sister Mary, the rejected of
Charles.[167]
But Henry waited
till May had passed, and Maximilian had proclaimed to the world his
breach of promise. Negotiations for the alliance and marriage with
Louis then proceeded apace. Treaties for both were signed in August.
Tournay remained in Henry’s hands, Louis increased the pensions paid
by France
(p. 075)
to England since the Treaty of Étaples, and both
kings bound themselves to render mutual aid against their common
foes.[168]

Maximilian and Ferdinand were left out in the cold. Louis not only
broke off his negotiations with them, but prepared to regain Milan and
discussed with Henry the revival of his father’s schemes for the
conquest of Castile. Henry was to claim part of that kingdom in right
of his wife, the late Queen’s daughter; later on a still more shadowy
title by descent was suggested. As early as 5th October, the Venetian
Government wrote to its ambassador in France, “commending extremely
the most sage proceeding of Louis in exhorting the King of England to
attack
Castile”.[169]
Towards the end of the year it declared that
Louis had wished to attack Spain, and sought to arrange details in an
interview with Henry; but the English King would not consent, delayed
the interview, and refused the six thousand infantry required for the
purpose.[170]
But Henry had certainly urged Louis to reconquer
Navarre,[171]
and from the tenor of Louis’ reply to Henry, late in
November, it would be inferred that the proposed conquest of Castile
also emanated from the English King or his ministers. Louis professed
not to know the laws of succession in Spain, but he was willing to
join the attack, apart from the merits of the case on which it was
based. Whether the suggestion originated in France or in England,
whether Henry eventually refused it or not, its serious discussion
shows how far Henry had travelled in his resentment at the double
dealing
(p. 076)
of Ferdinand. Carroz complained that he was treated
by the English “like a bull at whom every one throws
darts,”[172]
and
that Henry himself behaved in a most offensive manner whenever
Ferdinand’s name was mentioned. “If,” he added, “Ferdinand did not put
a bridle on this young colt,” it would afterwards become impossible to
control him. The young colt was, indeed, already meditating a project,
to attain which he, in later years, took the bit in his teeth and
broke loose from control. He was not only betrayed into casting in
Catherine’s teeth her father’s ill faith, but threatening her with
divorce.[173]

Henry had struck back with a vengeance. His blow shivered to fragments
the airy castles which Maximilian and Ferdinand were busy
constructing. Their plans for reviving the empire of Charlemagne,
creating a new kingdom in Italy, inducing Louis to cede Milan and
Genoa and assist in the conquest of Venice, disappeared like empty
dreams. The younger Ferdinand found no provision in Italy; he was
compelled to retain his Austrian inheritance, and thus to impair the
power of the future Charles V.; while the children’s grandparents were
left sadly reflecting on means of defence against the Kings of England
and France. The blot on the triumph was Henry’s desertion of
Sforza,[174]
who, having gratefully acknowledged that to Henry he owed
his restoration of
Milan,[175]
was now left to the uncovenanted
mercies of Louis.
(p. 077)
But neither the credit nor discredit is
due mainly to Henry. He had learnt much, but his powers were not yet
developed enough to make him a match for the craft and guile of his
rivals. The consciousness of the fact made him rely more and more upon
Wolsey, who could easily beat both Maximilian and Ferdinand at their
own game. He was not more deceitful than they, but in grasp of detail,
in boldness and assiduity, he was vastly superior. While Ferdinand
hawked, and Maximilian hunted the chamois, Wolsey worked often for
twelve hours together at the cares of the State. Possibly, too, his
clerical profession and the cardinalate which he was soon to hold gave
him an advantage which they did not possess; for, whenever he wanted
to obtain credence for a more than usually monstrous perversion of
truth, he swore “as became a cardinal and on the honour of the
cardinalate”.[176]
His services were richly rewarded; besides livings,
prebends, deaneries and the Chancellorship of Cambridge University, he
received the Bishoprics of Lincoln and of Tournay, the Archbishopric
of York, and finally, in 1515, Cardinalate. This dignity he had
already, in May of the previous year, sent Polydore Vergil to claim
from the Pope; Vergil’s mission was unknown to Henry, to whom the
grant of the Cardinal’s hat was to be represented as Leo’s own
idea.[177]

CHAPTER IV.
(p. 078)

THE THREE RIVALS.

The edifice which Wolsey had so laboriously built up was, however,
based on no surer foundation than the feeble life of a sickly monarch
already tottering to his grave. In the midst of his preparations for
the conquest of Milan and his negotiations for an attack upon Spain,
Louis XII. died on 1st January, 1515; and the stone which Wolsey had
barely rolled up the hill came down with a rush. The bourgeois Louis
was succeeded by the brilliant, ambitious and warlike Francis I., a
monarch who concealed under the mask of chivalry and the culture of
arts and letters a libertinism beside which the peccadilloes of Henry
or Charles seem virtue itself; whose person was tall and whose
features were described as handsome; but of whom an observer wrote
with unwonted candour that he “looked like the
Devil”.[178]
The first
result of the change was an episode of genuine romance. The old King’s
widow, “la reine blanche,” was one of the most fascinating women of
the Tudor epoch. “I think,” said a Fleming, “never man saw a more
beautiful creature, nor one having so much grace and
sweetness.”[179]
“He had never seen so beautiful a lady,” repeated Maximilian’s
ambassador, “her deportment is
(p. 079)
exquisite, both in
conversation and in dancing, and she is very
lovely.”[180]
“She is
very beautiful,” echoed the staid old Venetian, Pasqualigo, “and has
not her match in England; she is tall, fair, of a light complexion
with a colour, and most affable and graceful”; he was warranted, he
said, in describing her as “a nymph from
heaven”.[181]
A more critical
observer of feminine beauty thought her eyes and eyebrows too
light,[182]
but, as an Italian, he may have been biassed in favour of
brunettes, and even he wound up by calling Mary “a Paradise”. She was
eighteen at the time; her marriage with a dotard like Louis had
shocked public
opinion;[183]
and if, as was hinted, the gaieties in
which his youthful bride involved him, hastened the French King’s end,
there was some poetic justice in the retribution. She had, as she
reminded Henry herself, only consented to marry the “very aged and
sickly” monarch on condition that, if she survived him, she should be
allowed to choose her second husband herself. And she went on to
declare, that “remembering the great virtue” in him, she had, as Henry
himself was aware, “always been of good mind to my Lord of
Suffolk”.[184]

She was probably fascinated less by Suffolk’s virtue than by his bold
and handsome bearing. A bluff Englishman after the King’s own heart,
he shared, as none else did, in Henry’s love of the joust and tourney,
in his skill with the lance and the sword; he was the Hector of
combat, on foot and on horse, to Henry’s Achilles. His father, plain
William Brandon, was Henry of Richmond’s standard-bearer on Bosworth
field; and as such he had been
(p. 080)
singled out and killed in
personal encounter by Richard III. His death gave his son a claim on
the gratitude of Henry VII. and Henry VIII.; and similarity of tastes
secured him rapid promotion at the young King’s Court. Created
Viscount Lisle, he served in 1513 as marshal of Henry’s army
throughout his campaign in France. With the King there were said to be
“two obstinate men who governed
everything”;[185]
one was Wolsey, the
other was Brandon. In July he was offering his hand to Margaret of
Savoy, who was informed that Brandon was “a second king,” and that it
would be well to write him “a kind letter, for it is he who does and
undoes”.[186]
At Lille, in October, he continued his assault on
Margaret as a relief from the siege of Tournay; Henry favoured his
suit, and when Margaret called Brandon a larron for stealing a ring
from her finger, the King was called in to help Brandon out with his
French. Possibly it was to smooth the course of his wooing that
Brandon, early in 1514, received an extraordinary advancement in rank.
There was as yet only one duke in England, but now Brandon was made
Duke of Suffolk, at the same time that the dukedom of Norfolk was
restored to Surrey for his victory at Flodden. Even a dukedom could
barely make the son of a simple esquire a match for an emperor’s
daughter, and the suit did not prosper. Political reasons may have
interfered. Suffolk, too, is accused by the Venetian ambassador of
having already had three
wives.[187]
This seems to be an exaggeration,
but
(p. 081)
the intricacy of the Duke’s marital relationships, and
the facility with which he renounced them might well have served as a
precedent to his master in later years.

In January, 1515, the Duke was sent to Paris to condole with Francis
on Louis’ death, to congratulate him on his own accession, and renew
the league with England. Before he set out, Henry made him promise
that he would not marry Mary until their return. But Suffolk was not
the man to resist the tears of a beautiful woman in trouble, and he
found Mary in sore distress. No sooner was Louis dead than his
lascivious successor became, as Mary said, “importunate with her in
divers matters not to her honour,” in suits “the which,” wrote
Suffolk, “I and the Queen had rather be out of the world than
abide”.[188]
Every evening Francis forced his attentions upon the
beautiful
widow.[189]
Nor was this the only trouble which threatened
the lovers. There were reports that the French would not let Mary go,
but marry her somewhere to serve their own political
purposes.[190]
Henry, too, might want to betroth her again to Charles; Maximilian was
urging this course, and telling Margaret that Mary must be recovered
for Charles, even at the point of the
sword.[191]
Early in January,
Wolsey had written to her, warning her not to make any fresh promise
of marriage. Two friars from England, sent apparently by Suffolk’s
secret enemies, told Mary the same tale, that if she returned to
England she would never be suffered to marry the Duke, but made to
take Charles for her husband, “than which,” she declared, “I
(p. 082)
would rather be torn in
pieces”.[192]
Suffolk tried in vain to soothe
her fears. She refused to listen, and brought him to his knees with
the announcement that unless he would wed her there and then, she
would continue to believe that he had come only to entice her back to
England and force her into marriage with Charles. What was the poor
Duke to do, between his promise to Henry and the pleading of Mary? He
did what every other man with a heart in his breast and warm blood in
his veins would have done, he cast prudence to the winds and secretly
married the woman he loved.

The news could not be long concealed, but unfortunately we have only
Wolsey’s account of how it was received by Henry. He took it, wrote
the cardinal to Suffolk, “grievously and displeasantly,” not only on
account of the Duke’s presumption, but of the breach of his promise to
Henry.[193]
“You are,” he added, “in the greatest danger man was ever
in;” the council were calling for his ruin. To appease Henry and
enable the King to satisfy his council, Suffolk must induce Francis to
intervene in his favour, to pay Henry two hundred thousand crowns as
Mary’s dowry, and to restore the plate and jewels she had received;
the Duke himself was to return the fortune with which Henry had
endowed his sister and pay twenty-four thousand pounds in yearly
instalments for the expenses of her marriage. Francis proved
unexpectedly willing; perhaps his better nature was touched by the
lovers’ distress. He also saw that Mary’s
(p. 083)
marriage with
Suffolk prevented her being used as a link to bind Charles to Henry;
and he may have thought that a service to Suffolk would secure him a
powerful friend at the English Court, a calculation that was partly
justified by the suspicion under which Suffolk henceforth laboured, of
being too partial to Francis. Yet it was with heavy hearts that the
couple left Paris in April and wended their way towards Calais. Henry
had given no sign; from Calais, Mary wrote to him saying she would go
to a nunnery rather than marry against her
desire.[194]
Suffolk threw
himself on the King’s mercy; all the council, he said, except Wolsey,
were determined to put him to
death.[195]
Secretly, against his
promise, and without Henry’s consent, he had married the King’s
sister, an act the temerity of which no one has since ventured to
rival. He saw the executioner’s axe gleam before his eyes, and he
trembled.

At Calais, Mary said she would stay until she heard from the
King.[196]
His message has not been preserved, but fears were never
more strangely belied than when the pair crossed their Rubicon. So far
from any attempt being made to separate them, their marriage was
publicly solemnised before Henry and all his Court on 13th May, at
Greenwich.[197]
In spite of all that happened, wrote the Venetian
ambassador, Henry retained his friendship for
Suffolk;[198]
and a few
months later he asserted, with some exaggeration, that the Duke’s
authority was scarcely less than
(p. 084)
the King’s.[199]
He and
Mary were indeed required to return all the endowment, whether in
money, plate, jewels or furniture, that she received on her marriage.
But both she and the Duke had agreed to these terms before their
offence.[200]
They were not unreasonable. Henry’s money had been laid
out for political purposes which could no longer be served; and Mary
did not expect the splendour, as Duchess of Suffolk, which she had
enjoyed as Queen of France. The only stipulation that looks like a
punishment was the bond to repay the cost of her journey to France;
though not only was this modified later on, but the Duke received
numerous grants of land to help to defray the charge. They were indeed
required to live in the country; but the Duke still came up to joust
as of old with Henry on great occasions, and Mary remained his
favourite sister, to whose issue, in preference to that of Margaret,
he left the crown by will. The vindictive suspicions which afterwards
grew to rank luxuriance in Henry’s mind were scarcely budding as yet;
his favour to Suffolk and affection for Mary were proof against the
intrigues in his Court. The contrast was marked between the event and
the terrors which Wolsey had painted; and it is hard to believe that
the Cardinal played an entirely disinterested part in the
matter.[201]
It was obviously his cue to exaggerate the King’s anger, and to
represent to the Duke that its mitigation was due to the Cardinal’s
influence; and it is more than possible that Wolsey found in Suffolk’s
indiscretion the means of removing a dangerous rival. The “two
obstinate
(p. 085)
men” who had ruled in Henry’s camp were not likely
to remain long united; Wolsey could hardly approve of any “second
king” but himself, especially a “second king” who had acquired a
family bond with the first. The Venetian ambassador plainly hints that
it was through Wolsey that Suffolk lost
favour.[202]
In the occasional
notices of him during the next few years it is Wolsey, and not Henry,
whom Suffolk is trying to appease; and we even find the Cardinal
secretly warning the King against some designs of the Duke that
probably existed only in his own
imagination.[203]

This episode threw into the shade the main purpose of Suffolk’s
embassy to France. It was to renew the treaty concluded the year
before, and apparently also the discussions for war upon Spain.
Francis was ready enough to confirm the treaty, particularly as it
left him free to pursue his designs on Milan. With a similar object he
made terms with the Archduke Charles, who this year assumed the
government of the Netherlands, but was completely under the control of
Chièvres, a Frenchman by birth and sympathy, who signed his letters to
Francis “your humble servant and
vassal”.[204]
Charles bound himself
to marry Louis XII.’s daughter Renée, and to give his grandfather
Ferdinand no aid unless he restored Navarre to Jean d’Albret. Thus
safeguarded from attack on his rear, Francis set out for Milan. The
Swiss had locked all the passes they thought practicable; but the
French generals, guided by chamois hunters and overcoming almost
insuperable obstacles, transported their artillery
(p. 086)
over the
Alps near Embrun; and on 13th September, at Marignano, the great
“Battle of the Giants” laid the whole of Northern Italy at the French
King’s feet. At Bologna he met Leo X., whose lifelong endeavour was to
be found on both sides at once, or at least on the side of the bigger
battalions; the Pope recognised Francis’s claim to Milan, while
Francis undertook to support the Medici in Florence, and to
countenance Leo’s project for securing the Duchy of Urbino to his
nephew Lorenzo.

Henry watched with ill-concealed jealousy his rival’s victorious
progress; his envy was personal, as well as political. “Francis,”
wrote the Bishop of Worcester in describing the interview between the
French King and the Pope at Bologna, “is tall in stature,
broad-shouldered, oval and handsome in face, very slender in the legs
and much inclined to
corpulence.”[205]
His appearance was the subject
of critical inquiry by Henry himself. On May Day, 1515,
Pasqualigo[206]
was summoned to Greenwich by the King, whom he found
dressed in green, “shoes and all,” and mounted on a bay Frieslander
sent him by the Marquis of Mantua; his guard were also dressed in
green and armed with bows and arrows for the usual May Day sports.
They breakfasted in green bowers some distance from the palace. “His
Majesty,” continues Pasqualigo, “came into our arbor, and addressing
me in French, said: ‘Talk with me awhile. The King of France, is he as
tall as I am?’ I told him there was but little difference. He
continued, ‘Is he as stout?’ I said he was not; and he then inquired,
‘What sort of legs
(p. 087)
has he?’ I replied ‘Spare’. Whereupon he
opened the front of his doublet, and placing his hand on his thigh,
said: ‘Look here; and I also have a good calf to my leg’. He then told
me he was very fond of this King of France, and that on more than
three occasions he was very near him with his army, but that he would
never allow himself to be seen, and always retreated, which His
Majesty attributed to deference for King Louis, who did not choose an
engagement to take place.” After dinner, by way of showing his
prowess, Henry “armed himself cap-à-pie and ran thirty courses,
capsizing his opponent, horse and all”. Two months later, he said to
Giustinian: “I am aware that King Louis, although my brother-in-law,
was a bad man. I know not what this youth may be; he is, however, a
Frenchman, nor can I say how far you should trust
him;”[207]
and
Giustinian says he at once perceived the great rivalry for glory
between the two young kings.

Henry now complained that Francis had concealed his Italian enterprise
from him, that he was ill-treating English subjects, and interfering
with matters in Scotland. The last was his real and chief ground for
resentment. Francis had no great belief that Henry would keep the
peace, and resist the temptation to attack him, if a suitable
opportunity were to arise. So he had sent the Duke of Albany to
provide Henry with an absorbing disturbance in Scotland. Since the
death of James IV. at Flodden, English influence had, in Margaret’s
hands, been largely increased. Henry took upon himself to demand a
voice in Scotland’s internal affairs. He claimed the title of
“Protector of Scotland”; and wrote to
(p. 088)
the Pope asking him to
appoint no Scottish bishops without his consent, and to reduce the
Archbishopric of St. Andrews to its ancient dependence on
York.[208]
Many urged him to complete the conquest of Scotland, but this
apparently he refused on the ground that his own sister was really its
ruler and his own infant nephew its king. Margaret, however, as an
Englishwoman, was hated in Scotland, and she destroyed much of her
influence by marrying the Earl of Angus. So the Scots clamoured for
Albany, who had long been resident at the French Court and was heir to
the Scottish throne, should James IV.’s issue fail. His appearance was
the utter discomfiture of the party of England; Margaret was besieged
in Stirling and ultimately forced to give up her children to Albany’s
keeping, and seek safety in flight to her brother’s
dominions.[209]

Technically, Francis had not broken his treaty with England, but he
had scarcely acted the part of a friend; and if Henry could retaliate
without breaking the peace, he would eagerly seize any opportunity
that offered. The alliance with Ferdinand and Maximilian was renewed,
and a new Holy League formed under Leo’s auspices. But Leo soon
afterwards made his peace at Bologna with France. Charles was under
French influence, and Henry’s council and people were not prepared for
war. So he refused, says Giustinian, Ferdinand’s invitations to join
in an invasion of France. He did so from no love of Francis, and it
was probably Wolsey’s ingenuity which suggested the not very
scrupulous means of gratifying Henry’s
(p. 089)
wish for revenge.
Maximilian was still pursuing his endless quarrel with Venice; and the
seizure of Milan by the French and Venetian allies was a severe blow
to Maximilian himself, to the Swiss, and to their protégé, Sforza.
Wolsey now sought to animate them all for an attempt to recover the
duchy, and Sforza promised him 10,000 ducats a year from the date of
his restoration. There was nothing but the spirit of his treaty with
France to prevent Henry spending his money as he thought fit; and it
was determined to hire 20,000 Swiss mercenaries to serve under the
Emperor in order to conquer Milan and revenge
Marignano.[210]
The
negotiation was one of great delicacy; not only was secrecy absolutely
essential, but the money must be carefully kept out of Maximilian’s
reach. “Whenever,” wrote Pace, “the King’s money passed where the
Emperor was, he would always get some portion of it by force or false
promises of
restitution.”[211]
The accusation was justified by
Maximilian’s order to Margaret, his daughter, to seize Henry’s
treasure as soon as he heard it was on the way to the
Swiss.[212]
“The
Emperor,” said Julius II., “is light and inconstant, always begging
for other men’s money, which he wastes in hunting the
chamois.”[213]

The envoy selected for this difficult mission was Richard Pace,
scholar and author, and friend of Erasmus and More. He had been in
Bainbridge’s service at Rome, was then transferred to that of Wolsey
and Henry, and as the King’s secretary, was afterwards thought to be
treading too close on the Cardinal’s heels. He set out in October, and
arrived in Zurich just in time to prevent the
(p. 090)
Swiss from
coming to terms with Francis. Before winter had ended the plans for
invasion were settled. Maximilian came down with the snows from the
mountains in March; on the 23rd he crossed the
Adda;[214]
on the 25th
he was within nine miles of Milan, and almost in sight of the army of
France. On the 26th he turned and fled without striking a blow. Back
he went over the Adda, over the Oglio, up into Tyrol, leaving the
French and Venetians in secure possession of Northern Italy. A year
later they had recovered for Venice the last of the places of which it
had been robbed by the League of Cambrai.

Maximilian retreated, said Pace, voluntarily and shamefully, and was
now so degraded that it signified little whether he was a friend or an
enemy.[215]
The cause of his ignominious flight still remains a
mystery; countless excuses were made by Maximilian and his friends. He
had heard that France and England had come to terms; 6,000 of the
Swiss infantry deserted to the French on the eve of the battle.
Ladislaus of Hungary had died, leaving him guardian of his son, and he
must go to arrange matters there. He had no money to pay his troops.
The last has an appearance of verisimilitude. Money was at the bottom
of all his difficulties, and drove him to the most ignominious shifts.
He had served as a private in Henry’s army for 100 crowns a day. His
councillors robbed him; on one occasion he had not money to pay for
his
dinner;[216]
on another he sent down to Pace, who was ill in bed,
and extorted a loan
(p. 091)
by force. He had apparently seized
30,000 crowns of Henry’s pay for the
Swiss;[217]
the Fuggers, Welzers
and Frescobaldi, were also accused of failing to keep their
engagements, and only the first month’s pay had been received by the
Swiss when they reached Milan. On the Emperor’s retreat the wretched
Pace was seized by the Swiss and kept in prison as security for the
remainder.[218]
His task had been rendered all the more difficult by
the folly of Wingfield, ambassador at Maximilian’s Court, who, said
Pace, “took the Emperor for a god and believed that all his deeds and
thoughts proceeded ex Spiritu
Sancto“.[219]
There was no love lost
between them; the lively Pace nicknamed his colleague “Summer shall be
green,” in illusion perhaps to Wingfield’s unending platitudes, or to
his limitless belief in the Emperor’s integrity and
wisdom.[220]
Wingfield opened Pace’s letters and discovered the gibe, which he
parried by avowing that he had never known the time when summer was
not green.[221]
On another occasion he forged Pace’s signature, with a
view of obtaining funds for
Maximilian;[222]
and he had the hardihood
to protest against Pace’s appointment as Henry’s secretary. At last
his conduct brought down a stinging rebuke from
Henry;[223]
but the
King’s long-suffering was not yet exhausted, and Wingfield continued
as ambassador to the Emperors Court.

The failure of the Milan expedition taught Wolsey and Henry a bitter
but salutary lesson. It was their first attempt to intervene in a
sphere of action so distant from English
(p. 092)
shores and so
remote from English interests as the affairs of Italian States.
Complaints in England were loud against the waste of money; the
sagacious Tunstall wrote that he did not see why Henry should bind
himself to maintain other men’s
causes.[224]
All the grandees, wrote
Giustinian, were opposed to Wolsey’s policy, and its adoption was
followed by what Giustinian called a change of ministry in
England.[225]
Warham relinquished the burdens of the Chancellorship
which he had long unwillingly borne; Fox sought to atone for
twenty-eight years’ neglect of his diocese by spending in it the rest
of his
days.[226]
Wolsey succeeded Warham as Chancellor, and Ruthal,
who “sang treble to Wolsey’s
bass,”[227]
became Lord Privy Seal in
place of Fox. Suffolk was out of favour, and the neglect of his and
Fox’s advice was, according to the Venetian, resented by the people,
who murmured against the taxes which Wolsey’s intervention in foreign
affairs involved.

But Wolsey still hoped that bribes would keep Maximilian faithful to
England and induce him to counteract the French influences with which
his grandson Charles was surrounded. Ferdinand had died in January,
1516,[228]
having, said the English envoy at his Court, wilfully
shortened his life by hunting and hawking in all weathers, and
following the advice of his falconers rather than that of his
physicians. Charles thus succeeded to Castile, Aragon and
(p. 093)
Naples;[229]
but Naples was seriously threatened by the failure of
Maximilian’s expedition and the omnipotence of Francis in Italy. “The
Pope is French,” wrote an English diplomatist, “and everything from
Rome to
Calais.”[230]
To save Naples, Charles, in July, 1516, entered
into the humiliating Treaty of Noyon with
France.[231]
He bound
himself to marry Francis’s infant daughter, Charlotte, to do justice
to Jean d’Albret in the matter of Navarre, and to surrender Naples,
Navarre, and Artois, if he failed to keep his engagement. Such a
treaty was not likely to stand; but, for the time, it was a great
feather in Francis’s cap, and a further step towards the isolation of
England. It was the work of Charles’s Gallicised ministry, and
Maximilian professed the utmost disgust at their doings. He was eager
to come down to the Netherlands with a view to breaking the Treaty of
Noyon and removing his grandson’s advisers, but of course he must have
money from England to pay his expenses. The money accordingly came
from the apparently bottomless English
purse;[232]
and in January,
1517, the Emperor marched down to the Netherlands, breathing, in his
despatches to Henry, threatenings and slaughter against Charles’s
misleaders. His descent on Flanders eclipsed his march on Milan. “Mon
fils,” he said to Charles, “vous allez tromper les Français, et moi,
je vais tromper les
Anglais.”[233]
So far from breaking the
(p. 094)
Treaty of Noyon, he joined it himself, and at Brussels solemnly swore
to observe its provisions. He probably thought he had touched the
bottom of Henry’s purse, and that it was time to dip into Francis’s.
Seventy-five thousand crowns was his price for betraying
Henry.[234]

In conveying the news to Wolsey, Tunstall begged him to urge Henry “to
refrain from his first passions” and “to draw his foot out of the
affair as gently as if he perceived it not, giving good words for good
words which they yet give us, thinking our heads to be so gross that
we perceive not their
abuses”.[235]
Their persistent advances to
Charles had, he thought, done them more harm than good; let the King
shut his purse in time, and he would soon have Charles and the Emperor
again at his
feet.[236]
Tunstall was ably seconded by Dr. William
Knight, who thought it would be foolish for England to attempt to undo
the Treaty of Noyon; it contained within itself the seeds of its own
dissolution. Charles would not wait to marry Francis’s daughter, and
then the breach would
come.[237]
Henry and Wolsey had the good sense
to act on this sound advice. Maximilian, Francis and Charles formed at
Cambrai a fresh league for the partition of
Italy,[238]
but they were
soon at enmity and too much involved with their own affairs to think
of the conquest of others. Disaffection was rife in Spain, where a
party wished Ferdinand, Charles’s brother, to be
King.[239]
If Charles
was to retain his Spanish kingdoms, he must visit them at once. He
could not go unless England provided
(p. 095)
the means. His request
for a loan was graciously accorded and his ambassadors were treated
with magnificent
courtesy.[240]
“One day,” says
Chieregati,[241]
the
papal envoy in England, “the King sent for these ambassadors, and kept
them to dine with him privately in his chamber with the Queen, a very
unusual proceeding. After dinner he took to singing and playing on
every musical instrument, and exhibited a part of his very excellent
endowments. At length he commenced dancing,” and, continues another
narrator, “doing marvellous things, both in dancing and jumping,
proving himself, as he is in truth, indefatigable.” On another day
there was “a most stately joust.” Henry was magnificently attired in
“cloth of silver with a raised pile, and wrought throughout with
emblematic letters”. When he had made the usual display in the lists,
the Duke of Suffolk entered from the other end, with well-nigh equal
array and pomp. He was accompanied by fourteen other jousters. “The
King wanted to joust with all of them; but this was forbidden by the
council, which, moreover, decided that each jouster was to run six
courses and no more, so that the entertainment might be ended on that
day…. The competitor assigned to the King was the Duke of Suffolk;
and they bore themselves so bravely that the spectators fancied
themselves witnessing a joust between Hector and Achilles.” “They
tilted,” says Sagudino, “eight courses, both shivering their lances at
every time, to the great applause of the spectators.” Chieregati
continues: “On arriving in the lists the King presented himself before
the
(p. 096)
Queen and the ladies, making a thousand jumps in the
air, and after tiring one horse, he entered the tent and mounted
another… doing this constantly, and reappearing in the lists until
the end of the jousts”. Dinner was then served, amid a scene of
unparalleled splendour, and Chieregati avers that the “guests remained
at table for seven hours by the clock”. The display of costume on the
King’s part was equally varied and gorgeous. On one occasion he wore
“stiff brocade in the Hungarian fashion,” on another, he “was dressed
in white damask in the Turkish fashion, the above-mentioned robe all
embroidered with roses, made of rubies and diamonds”; on a third, he
“wore royal robes down to the ground, of gold brocade lined with
ermine”; while “all the rest of the Court glittered with jewels and
gold and silver, the pomp being unprecedented”.

All this riot of wealth would no doubt impress the impecunious
Charles. In September he landed in Spain, so destitute that he was
glad to accept the offer of a hobby from the English
ambassador.[242]
At the first meeting of his Cortes, they demanded that he should marry
at once, and not wait for Francis’s daughter; the bride his subjects
desired was the daughter of the King of
Portugal.[243]
They were no
more willing to part with Navarre; and Charles was forced to make to
Francis the feeble excuse that he was not aware, when he was in the
Netherlands, of his true title to Navarre, but had learnt it since his
arrival in Spain; he also declined the personal interview to which
Francis invited
him.[244]
A rupture between Francis and Charles was
only a question of time; and, to
(p. 097)
prepare for it, both were
anxious for England’s alliance. Throughout the autumn of 1517 and
spring of 1518, France and England were feeling their way towards
friendship. Albany had left Scotland, so that source of irritation was
gone. Henry had now a daughter, Mary, and Francis a son. “I will unite
them,” said
Wolsey;[245]
and in October, 1518, not only was a treaty
of marriage and alliance signed between England and France, but a
general peace for Europe. Leo X. sent Campeggio with blessings of
peace from the Vicar of Christ, though he was kept chafing at Calais
for three months, till he could bring with him Leo’s appointment of
Wolsey as legate and the deposition of Wolsey’s enemy, Hadrian, from
the Bishopric of Bath and
Wells.[246]
The ceremonies exceeded in
splendour even those of the year before. They included, says
Giustinian, a “most sumptuous supper” at Wolsey’s house, “the like of
which, I fancy, was never given by Cleopatra or Caligula; the whole
banqueting hall being so decorated with huge vases of gold and silver,
that I fancied myself in the tower of
Chosroes,[247]
when that monarch
caused Divine honours to be paid him. After supper… twelve male and
twelve female dancers made their appearance in the richest and most
sumptuous array possible, being all dressed alike…. They were
disguised in one suit of fine green satin, all over covered with cloth
of gold, undertied together with laces of gold, and had masking hoods
on their heads; the ladies had tires made of braids of damask gold,
with long hairs of white gold. All these maskers danced at one time,
and after they had danced they put off
(p. 098)
their visors, and
then they were all known…. The two leaders were the King and the
Queen Dowager of France, and all the others were lords and
ladies.”[248]
These festivities were followed by the formal
ratification of
peace.[249]
Approval of it was general, and the old
councillors who had been alienated by Wolsey’s Milan expedition,
hastened to applaud. “It was the best deed,” wrote Fox to Wolsey,
“that ever was done for England, and, next to the King, the praise of
it is due to
you.”[250]
Once more the wheel had come round, and the
stone of Sisyphus was lodged more secure than before some way up the
side of the hill.

This general peace, which closed the wars begun ten years before by
the League of Cambrai, was not entirely due to a universal desire to
beat swords into ploughshares or to even turn them against the Turk.
That was the everlasting pretence, but eighteen months before,
Maximilian had suffered a stroke of apoplexy; men, said Giustinian,
commenting on the fact, did not usually survive such strokes a year,
and rivals were preparing to enter the lists for the Empire.
Maximilian himself, faithful to the end to his guiding principle,
found a last inspiration in the idea of disposing of his succession
for ready money. He was writing to Charles that it was useless to
expect the Empire unless he would spend at least as much as the
French.[251]
“It would be lamentable,” he said, “if we should now lose
all through some pitiful omission or penurious neglect;” and Francis
was “going about
(p. 099)
covertly and laying many
baits,”[252]
to
attain the imperial crown. To Henry himself Maximilian had more than
once offered the prize, and Pace had declared that the offer was only
another design for extracting Henry’s gold “for the electors would
never allow the crown to go out of their
nation”.[253]
The Emperor had
first proposed it while serving under Henry’s banners in
France.[254]
He renewed the suggestion in 1516, inviting Henry to meet him at
Coire. The brothers in arms were thence to cross the Alps to Milan,
where the Emperor would invest the English King with the duchy; he
would then take him on to Rome, resign the Empire himself, and have
Henry crowned. Not that Maximilian desired to forsake all earthly
authority; he sought to combine a spiritual with a temporal glory; he
was to lay down the imperial crown and place on his brows the papal
tiara.[255]
Nothing was too fantastic for the Emperor Maximilian; the
man who could not wrest a few towns from Venice was always deluding
himself with the hope of leading victorious hosts to the seat of the
Turkish Empire and the Holy City of Christendom; the sovereign whose
main incentive in life was gold, informed his daughter that he
intended to get himself canonised, and that after his death she would
have to adore him. He died at Welz on 12th January, 1519, neither Pope
nor saint, with Jerusalem still in the hands of the Turk, and the
succession to the Empire still undecided.

The contest now broke out in earnest, and the electors prepared
(p. 100)
to garner their harvest of gold. The price of a vote was a
hundredfold more than the most corrupt parliamentary elector could
conceive in his wildest dreams of avarice. There were only seven
electors and the prize was the greatest on earth. Francis I. said he
was ready to spend 3,000,000 crowns, and Charles could not afford to
lag far
behind.[256]
The Margrave of Brandenburg, “the father of all
greediness,” as the Austrians called him, was particularly influential
because his brother, the Archbishop of Mainz, was also an elector and
he required an especially exorbitant bribe. He was ambitious as well
as covetous, and the rivals endeavoured to satisfy his ambitions with
matrimonial prizes. He was promised Ferdinand’s widow, Germaine de
Foix; Francis sought to parry this blow by offering to the Margrave’s
son the French Princess Renée; Charles bid higher by offering his
sister
Catherine.[257]
Francis relied much on his personal graces, the
military renown he had won by the conquest of Northern Italy, and the
assistance of Leo. With the Pope he concluded a fresh treaty that year
for the conquest of Ferrara, the extension of the papal States, and
the settlement of Naples on Francis’s second son, on condition that it
was meanwhile to be administered by papal
legates,[258]
and that its
king was to abstain from all interference in spiritual matters.
Charles, on the other hand, owed his advantages to his position and
not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none of the
physical or intellectual graces
(p. 101)
of Francis I. and Henry
VIII. He excelled in no sport, was unpleasant in features and
repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity or chivalry lightened
his character, no deeds in war or statecraft yet sounded his fame. He
was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations
had worn the imperial crown; as such, too, he was a German prince, and
the Germanic constitution forbade any other the sovereignty of the
Holy Roman Empire. Against this was the fact that his enormous
dominions, including Naples and Spain, would preclude his continued
residence in Germany and might threaten the liberties of the German
people.

But was there no third candidate? Leo at heart regarded the election
of either as an absolute
evil.[259]
He had always dreaded Maximilian’s
claims to the temporal power of the Church, though Maximilian held not
a foot of Italian soil. How much more would he dread those claims in
the hands of Francis or Charles! One threatened the papal States from
Milan, and the other from Naples. Of the two, he feared Francis the
less;[260]
for the union of Naples with the Empire had been such a
terror to the Popes, that before granting the investiture of that
kingdom, they bound its king by oath not to compete for the
Empire.[261]
But a third candidate would offer an escape from between
the upper and the nether mill-stone; and Leo suggested at one time
Charles’s brother
Ferdinand,[262]
at another a German elector.
Precisely the same recommendations had been secretly made by Henry
VIII. In public he followed the course he commended to
(p. 102)
Leo;
he advocated the claims of both Charles and Francis, when asked so to
do, but sent trusty envoys with his testimonials to explain that no
credence was to be given
them.[263]
He told the French King that he
favoured the election of Francis, and the Spanish King the election of
Charles, but like Leo he desired in truth the election of neither. Why
should he not come forward himself? His dominions were not so
extensive that, when combined with the imperial dignity, they would
threaten to dominate Europe; and his election might seem to provide a
useful check in the balance of power. In March he had already told
Francis that his claims were favoured by some of the electors, though
he professed a wish to promote the French King’s pretensions. In May,
Pace was sent to Germany with secret instructions to endeavour to
balance the parties and force the electors into a deadlock, from which
the only escape would be the election of a third candidate, either
Henry himself or some German prince. It is difficult to believe that
Henry really thought his election possible or was seriously pushing
his claim. He had repeatedly declined Maximilian’s offers; he had been
as often warned by trusty advisers that no non-German prince stood a
chance of election; he had expressed his content with his own islands,
which, Tunstall told him with truth, were an Empire worth more than
the barren imperial
crown.[264]
Pace went far too late to secure a
party for Henry, and, what was even more fatal, he went without the
persuasive of money. Norfolk told Giustinian, after Pace’s departure,
that the election would fall on a German prince, and such, said the
Venetian, was the
(p. 103)
universal belief and desire in
England.[265]
After the election, Leo expressed his “regret that Henry
gave no attention to a project which would have made him a near,
instead of a distant, neighbour of the papal States”. Under the
circumstances, it seems more probable that the first alternative in
Pace’s instructions no more represented a settled design in Henry’s
mind than his often-professed intention of conquering France, and that
the real purport of his mission was to promote the election of the
Duke of Saxony or another German
prince.[266]

Whether that was its object or not the mission was foredoomed to
failure. The conclusion was never really in doubt. Electors might
trouble the waters in order to fish with more success. They might
pretend to Francis that if he was free with his money he might be
elected, and to Charles that unless he was free with his money he
would not, but no sufficient reason had been shown why they should
violate national prejudices, the laws of the Empire, and prescriptive
hereditary right, in order to place Henry or Francis instead of a
German upon the imperial throne. Neither people nor princes nor
barons, wrote Leo’s envoys, would permit the election of the Most
Christian
King;[267]
and even if the electors wished to elect him, it
was not in their power to do so. The whole of the nation, said Pace,
was in arms and furious for Charles; and had Henry been elected, they
would in their indignation have killed Pace and all his
servants.[268]
The voice of the German people spoke in no uncertain tones; they would
have Charles and no other to be their ruler. Leo himself saw
(p. 104)
the futility of resistance, and making a virtue of necessity, he sent
Charles an absolution from his oath as King of Naples. As soon as it
arrived, the electors unanimously declared Charles their Emperor on
28th June.[269]

Thus was completed the shuffling of the cards for the struggle which
lasted till Henry’s death. Francis had now succeeded to Louis, Charles
to both his grandfathers, and Henry at twenty-eight was the doyen of
the princes of Europe. He was two years older than Francis and eight
years older than Charles. Europe had passed under the rule of youthful
triumvirs whose rivalry troubled its peace and guided its destinies
for nearly thirty years. The youngest of all was the greatest in
power. His dominions, it is true, were disjointed, and funds were
often to seek, but these defects have been overrated. It was neither
of these which proved his greatest embarrassment. It was a cloud in
Germany, as yet no bigger than a man’s hand, but soon to darken the
face of Europe. Ferdinand and Maximilian had at times been dangerous;
Charles wielded the power of both. He ruled over Castile and Aragon,
the Netherlands and Naples, Burgundy and Austria; he could command the
finest military forces in Europe; the infantry of Spain, the science
of Italy, the lance-knights of Germany, for which Ferdinand sighed,
were at his disposal; and the wealth of the Indies was poured out at
his feet. He bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus, and the only
hope of lesser men lay in the maintenance of Francis’s power. Were
that to fail, Charles would become arbiter of Christendom, Italy a
Spanish kingdom, and the Pope little
(p. 105)
more than the Emperor’s
chaplain. “Great masters,” said Tunstall, with reference to a papal
brief urged by Charles in excuse for his action in 1517, “could get
great clerks to say what they
liked.”[270]
The mastery of Charles in
1517 was but the shadow of what it became ten years later; and if
under its dominance “the great clerk” were called upon to decide
between “the great master” and Henry, it was obvious already that all
Henry’s services to the Papacy would count for nothing.

For the present, those services were to be remembered. They were not,
indeed, inconsiderable. It would be absurd to maintain that, since his
accession, Henry had been actuated by respect for the Papacy more than
by another motive; but it is indisputable that that motive had entered
more largely into his conduct than into that of any other monarch.
James IV. and Louis had been excommunicated, Maximilian had
obstinately countenanced a schismatic council and wished to arrogate
to himself the Pope’s temporal power. Ferdinand’s zeal for his house
had eaten him up and left little room for less selfish impulses; his
anxiety for war with the Moor or the Turk was but a cloak; and the
value of his frequent demands for a Reformation may be gauged by his
opinion that never was there more need for the Inquisition, and by his
anger with Leo for refusing the Inquisitors the preferments he
asked.[271]
From hypocrisy like Ferdinand’s Henry was, in his early
years, singularly free, and the devotion to the Holy See, which he
inherited, was of a more than conventional type. “He is very
religious,” wrote
(p. 106)
Giustinian, “and hears three masses daily
when he hunts, and sometimes five on other days. He hears the office
every day in the Queen’s chamber, that is to say, vesper and
compline.”[272]
The best theologians and doctors in his kingdom were
regularly required to preach at his Court, when their fee for each
sermon was equivalent to ten or twelve pounds. He was generous in his
almsgiving, and his usual offering on Sundays and saints’ days was six
shillings and eightpence or, in modern currency, nearly four pounds;
often it was double that amount, and there were special offerings
besides, such as the twenty shillings he sent every year to the shrine
of St. Thomas at Canterbury. In January, 1511, the gentlemen of the
King’s chapel were paid what would now be seventy-five pounds for
praying for the Queen’s safe delivery, and similar sums were no doubt
paid on other
occasions.[273]
In 1513, Catherine thought Henry’s
success was all due to his zeal for
religion,[274]
and a year or two
later Erasmus wrote that Henry’s Court was an example to all
Christendom for learning and
piety.[275]

Piety went hand in hand with a filial respect for the head of the
Church. Not once in the ten years is there to be found any expression
from Henry of contempt for the Pope, whether he was Julius II. or Leo
X. There had been no occasion on which Pope and King had been brought
into conflict, and almost throughout they had acted in perfect
harmony. It was the siege of Julius by Louis that drew Henry from his
peaceful policy to intervene as
(p. 107)
the champion of the Papal
See, and it was as the executor of papal censures that he made war on
France.[276]
If he had ulterior views on that kingdom, he could plead
the justification of a brief, drawn up if not published, by Julius
II., investing him with the French
crown.[277]
A papal envoy came to
urge peace in 1514, and a Pope claimed first to have suggested the
marriage between Mary and
Louis.[278]
The Milan expedition of 1516 was
made under cover of a new Holy League concluded in the spring of the
previous year, and the peace of 1518 was made with the full approval
and blessings of Leo. Henry’s devotion had been often acknowledged in
words, and twice by tangible tokens of gratitude, in the gift of the
golden rose in 1510 and of the sword and cap in
1513.[279]
But did not
his services merit some more signal mark of favour? If Ferdinand was
“Catholic,” and Louis “Most Christian,” might not some title be found
for a genuine friend? And, as early as 1515, Henry was pressing the
Pope for “some title as protector of the Holy
See”.[280]
Various names
were suggested, “King Apostolic,” “King Orthodox,” and others; and in
January, 1516, we find the first mention of “Fidei
Defensor”.[281]
But
the prize was to be won by services more appropriate to the title than
even ten years’ maintenance of the Pope’s temporal interests. His
championship of the Holy See had been the most unselfish part of
Henry’s policy since he came to the throne; and his whole conduct had
been an example, which others were slow to follow, and which Henry
himself was soon to neglect.

CHAPTER V.
(p. 108)

KING AND CARDINAL.

“Nothing,” wrote Giustinian of Wolsey in 1519, “pleases him more than
to be called the arbiter of
Christendom.”[282]
Continental statesmen
were inclined to ridicule and resent the Cardinal’s claim. But the
title hardly exaggerates the part which the English minister was
enabled to play during the next few years by the rivalry of Charles
and Francis, and by the apparently even balance of their powers. The
position which England held in the councils of Europe in 1519 was a
marvellous advance upon that which it had occupied in 1509. The first
ten years of Henry’s reign had been a period of fluctuating, but
continual, progress. The campaign of 1513 had vindicated England’s
military prowess, and had made it possible for Wolsey, at the peace of
the following year, to place his country on a level with France and
Spain and the Empire. Francis’s conquest of Milan, and the haste with
which Maximilian, Leo and Charles sought to make terms with the
victor, caused a temporary isolation of England and a consequent
decline in her influence. But the arrangements made between Charles
and Francis contained, in themselves, as acute English diplomatists
saw, the seeds of future disruption; and, in 1518, Wolsey was
(p. 109)
able so to play off these mutual jealousies as to reassert
England’s position. He imposed a general peace, or rather a truce,
which raised England even higher than the treaties of 1514 had done,
and made her appear as the conservator of the peace of Europe. England
had almost usurped the place of the Pope as mediator between rival
Christian
princes.[283]

These brilliant results were achieved with the aid of very moderate
military forces and an only respectable navy. They were due partly to
the lavish expenditure of Henry’s treasures, partly to the extravagant
faith of other princes in the extent of England’s wealth, but mainly
to the genius for diplomacy displayed by the great English Cardinal.
Wolsey had now reached the zenith of his power; and the growth of his
sense of his own importance is graphically described by the Venetian
ambassador. When Giustinian first arrived in England, Wolsey used to
say, “His Majesty will do so and so”. Subsequently, by degrees,
forgetting himself, he commenced saying, “We shall do so and so”. In
1519 he had reached such a pitch that he used to say, “I shall do so
and so”.[284]
Fox had been called by Badoer “a second King,” but
Wolsey was now “the King
himself”.[285]
“We have to deal,” said Fox,
“with the Cardinal, who is not Cardinal, but King; and no one in the
realm dares attempt aught in opposition to his
interests.”[286]
On
another occasion Giustinian remarks: “This Cardinal is King, nor does
(p. 110)
His Majesty depart in the least from the opinion and counsel
of his
lordship”.[287]
Sir Thomas More, in describing the negotiations
for the peace of 1518, reports that only after Wolsey had concluded a
point did he tell the council, “so that even the King hardly knows in
what state matters
are”.[288]
A month or two later there was a curious
dispute between the Earl of Worcester and West, Bishop of Ely, who
were sent to convey the Treaty of London to Francis. Worcester, as a
layman, was a partisan of the King, West of the Cardinal. Worcester
insisted that their detailed letters should be addressed to Henry, and
only general ones to Wolsey. West refused; the important letters, he
thought, should go to the Cardinal, the formal ones to the King; and,
eventually, identical despatches were sent to
both.[289]
In
negotiations with England, Giustinian told his Government, “if it were
necessary to neglect either King or Cardinal, it would be better to
pass over the King; he would therefore make the proposal to both, but
to the Cardinal first, lest he should resent the precedence conceded
to the
King“.[290]
The popular charge against Wolsey, repeated by
Shakespeare, of having written Ego et rex meus, though true in
fact,[291]
is false in intention, because no Latin scholar could put
the words in any other order; but the Cardinal’s mental attitude is
faithfully represented in the meaning which the familiar phrase was
supposed to convey.

His
(p. 111)
arrogance does not rest merely on the testimony of
personal enemies like the historian, Polydore Vergil, and the poet
Skelton, or of chroniclers like Hall, who wrote when vilification of
Wolsey pleased both king and people, but on the despatches of
diplomatists with whom he had to deal, and on the reports of observers
who narrowly watched his demeanour. “He is,” wrote one, “the proudest
prelate that ever
breathed.”[292]
During the festivities of the
Emperor’s visit to England, in 1520, Wolsey alone sat down to dinner
with the royal party, while peers, like the Dukes of Suffolk and
Buckingham, performed menial offices for the Cardinal, as well as for
Emperor, King and
Queen.[293]
When he celebrated mass at the Field of
Cloth of Gold, bishops invested him with his robes and put sandals on
his feet, and “some of the chief noblemen in England” brought water to
wash his
hands.[294]
A year later, at his meeting with Charles at
Bruges, he treated the Emperor as an equal. He did not dismount from
his mule, but merely doffed his cap, and embraced as a brother the
temporal head of
Christendom.[295]
When, after a dispute with the
Venetian ambassador, he wished to be friendly, he allowed Giustinian,
with royal condescension, and as a special mark of favour, to kiss his
hand.[296]
He never granted audience either to English peers or
foreign ambassadors until the third or fourth time of
asking.[297]
In
1515 it was the custom of ambassadors to dine with Wolsey before
presentation at Court, but four years later they were never served
until the viands had been removed from
(p. 112)
the Cardinal’s
table.[298]
A Venetian, describing Wolsey’s embassy to France in 1527,
relates that his “attendants served cap in hand, and, when bringing
the dishes, knelt before him in the act of presenting them. Those who
waited on the Most Christian King, kept their caps on their heads,
dispensing with such exaggerated
ceremonies.”[299]

Pretenders to royal honours seldom acquire the grace of genuine
royalty, and the Cardinal pursued with vindictive ferocity those who
offended his sensitive dignity. In 1515, Polydore Vergil said, in
writing to his friend, Cardinal Hadrian, that Wolsey was so tyrannical
towards all men that his influence could not last, and that all
England abused
him.[300]
The letter was copied by Wolsey’s secretary,
Vergil was sent to the
Tower,[301]
and only released after many months
at the repeated intercession of Leo X. His correspondent, Cardinal
Hadrian, was visited with Wolsey’s undying hatred. A pretext for his
ruin was found in his alleged complicity in a plot to poison the Pope;
the charge was trivial, and Leo forgave
him.[302]
Not so Wolsey, who
procured Hadrian’s deprivation of the Bishopric of Bath and Wells,
appropriated the see for himself, and in 1518 kept Campeggio, the
Pope’s legate, chafing at Calais until he could bring with him the
papal confirmation of these
measures.[303]
Venice had the temerity to
intercede with Leo on Hadrian’s behalf; Wolsey thereupon overwhelmed
Giustinian with “rabid and insolent language”; ordered him not
(p. 113)
to put anything in his despatches without his consent; and
revoked the privileges of Venetian merchants in
England.[304]
In these
outbursts of fury, he paid little respect to the sacrosanct character
of ambassadors. He heard that the papal nuncio, Chieregati, was
sending to France unfavourable reports of his conduct. The nuncio “was
sent for by Wolsey, who took him into a private chamber, laid rude
hands upon him, fiercely demanding what he had written to the King of
France, and what intercourse he had held with Giustinian and his son,
adding that he should not quit the spot until he had confessed
everything, and, if fair means were not sufficient, he should be put
upon the
rack”.[305]
Nine years later, Wolsey nearly precipitated war
between England and the Emperor by a similar outburst against
Charles’s ambassador, De Praet. He intercepted De Praet’s
correspondence, and confined him to his house. It was a flagrant
breach of international law. Tampering with diplomatic correspondence
was usually considered a sufficient cause for war; on this occasion
war did not suit Charles’s purpose, but it was no fault of Wolsey’s
that his fury at an alleged personal slight did not provoke
hostilities with the most powerful prince in
Christendom.[306]

Englishmen fared no better than others at Wolsey’s hands. He used the
coercive power of the State to revenge his private wrongs as well as
to secure the peace of the realm. In July, 1517, Sir Robert
Sheffield,[307]
who had been Speaker in two Parliaments, was sent to
the Tower for complaining of Wolsey, and to point the moral of
(p. 114)
Fox’s assertion, that none durst do ought in opposition to the
Cardinal’s
interests.[308]
Again, the idea reflected by Shakespeare,
that Wolsey was jealous of Pace, has been described as absurd; but it
is difficult to draw any other inference from the relations between
them after 1521. While Wolsey was absent at Calais, he accused Pace,
without ground, of misrepresenting his letters to Henry, and of
obtaining Henry’s favour on behalf of a canon of
York;[309]
he
complained that foreign powers were trusting to another influence than
his over the King; and, when he returned, he took care that Pace
should henceforth be employed, not as secretary to Henry, but on
almost continuous missions to Italy. In 1525, when the Venetian
ambassador was to thank Henry for making a treaty with Venice, which
Pace had concluded, he was instructed not to praise him so highly, if
the Cardinal were present, as if the oration were made to Henry
alone;[310]
and, four years later, Wolsey found an occasion for
sending Pace to the Tower—treatment which eventually caused Pace’s
mind to become
unhinged.[311]

Wolsey’s
(p. 115)
pride in himself, and his jealousy of others, were
not more conspicuous than his thirst after riches. His fees as
Chancellor were reckoned by Giustinian at five thousand ducats a year.
He made thrice that sum by New Year’s presents, “which he receives
like the
King”.[312]
His demand for the Bishopric of Bath and Wells,
coupled with the fact that it was he who petitioned for Hadrian’s
deprivation, amazed even the Court at Rome, and, “to avoid
murmurs,”[313]
compliance was deferred for a time. But these scruples
were allowed no more than ecclesiastical law to stand in the way of
Wolsey’s preferment. One of the small reforms decreed by the Lateran
Council was that no bishoprics should be held in commendam; the ink
was scarcely dry when Wolsey asked in commendam for the see of the
recently conquered
Tournay.[314]
Tournay was restored to France in
1518, but the Cardinal took care that he should not be the loser. A
sine qua non of the peace was that Francis should pay him an annual
pension of twelve thousand livres as compensation for the loss of a
bishopric of which he had never obtained
possession.[315]
He drew
other pensions for political services, from both Francis and Charles;
and, from the Duke of Milan, he obtained the
(p. 116)
promise of ten
thousand ducats a year before Pace set out to recover the
duchy.[316]
It is scarcely a matter for wonder that foreign diplomatists, and
Englishmen, too, should have accused Wolsey of spending the King’s
money for his own profit, and have thought that the surest way of
winning his favour was by means of a
bribe.[317]
When England, in
1521, sided with Charles against Francis, the Emperor bound himself to
make good to Wolsey all the sums he would lose by a breach with
France; and from that year onwards Charles paid—or owed—Wolsey
eighteen thousand livres a
year.[318]
It was nine times the pensions
considered sufficient for the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk; and even
so it does not include the revenue Wolsey derived from two Spanish
bishoprics. These were not bribes in the sense that they affected
Wolsey’s policy; they were well enough known to the King; to spoil the
Egyptians was considered fair game, and Henry was generous enough not
to keep all the perquisites of peace or war for himself.

Two years after the agreement with Charles, Ruthal, Bishop of Durham,
died, and Wolsey exchanged Bath and Wells for the richer see formerly
held by his political ally
(p. 117)
and friend. But Winchester was
richer even than Durham; so when Fox followed Ruthal to the grave, in
1528, Wolsey exchanged the northern for the southern see, and begged
that Durham might go to his natural son, a youth of
eighteen.[319]
All
these were held in commendam with the Archbishopric of York, but
they did not satisfy Wolsey; and, in 1521, he obtained the grant of
St. Albans, the greatest abbey in England. His palaces outshone in
splendour those of Henry himself, and few monarchs have been able to
display such wealth of plate as loaded the Cardinal’s table. Wolsey is
supposed to have conceived vast schemes of ecclesiastical reform,
which time and opportunity failed him to
effect.[320]
If he had ever
seriously set about the work, the first thing to be reformed would
have been his own ecclesiastical practice. He personified in himself
most of the clerical abuses of his age. Not merely an “unpreaching
prelate,” he rarely said mass; his commendams and absenteeism were
alike violations of canon law. Three of the bishoprics he held he
never visited at all; York, which he had obtained fifteen years
before, he did not visit till the year of his death, and then through
no wish of his own. He was equally negligent of the vow of chastity;
he cohabited with the daughter of “one Lark,” a relative of the Lark
who is mentioned in the correspondence of the time as “omnipotent”
with the Cardinal, and as resident
(p. 118)
in his household.[321] By
her he left two children, a
son,[322]
for whom he obtained a deanery,
four archdeaconries, five prebends, and a chancellorship, and sought
the Bishopric of Durham, and a daughter who became a nun. The
accusation brought against him by the Duke of Buckingham and others,
of procuring objects for Henry’s sensual appetite, is a scandal, to
which no credence would have been attached but for Wolsey’s own moral
laxity, and the fact that the governor of Charles V. performed a
similar office.[323]

Repellent as was Wolsey’s character in many respects, he was yet the
greatest, as he was the last, of the ecclesiastical statesmen who have
governed England. As a diplomatist, pure and simple, he has never been
surpassed, and as an administrator he has had few equals. “He is,”
says Giustinian, “very handsome, learned, extremely eloquent, of vast
ability and indefatigable. He alone transacts the same business as
that which occupies all the magistracies, offices, and councils of
Venice, both civil and criminal; and all State affairs are managed by
him, let their nature be what it may. He is thoughtful, and has the
reputation of being extremely just; he favours the people exceedingly,
and especially the poor, hearing their suits and seeking to despatch
them instantly. He also makes the lawyers plead gratis for all poor
suitors. He is in very great repute, seven times more so
(p. 119)
than if he were
Pope.”[324]
His sympathy with the poor was no idle
sentiment, and his commission of 1517, and decree against enclosures
in the following year, were the only steps taken in Henry’s reign to
mitigate that curse of the agricultural population.

The Evil May Day riots of 1517 alone disturbed the peace of Wolsey’s
internal administration; and they were due merely to anti-foreign
prejudice, and to the idea that strangers within the gates monopolised
the commerce of England and diverted its profits to their own
advantage. “Never,” wrote Wolsey to a bishop at Rome in 1518, “was the
kingdom in greater harmony and repose than now; such is the effect of
my administration of justice and
equity.”[325]
To Henry his strain was
less arrogant. “And for your realm,” he says, “our Lord be thanked, it
was never in such peace nor tranquillity; for all this summer I have
had neither of riot, felony, nor forcible entry, but that your laws be
in every place indifferently ministered without leaning of any manner.
Albeit, there hath lately been a fray betwixt Pygot, your Serjeant,
and Sir Andrew Windsor’s servants for the seisin of a ward, whereto
they both pretend titles; in the which one man was slain. I trust the
next term to learn them the law of the Star Chamber that they shall
ware how from henceforth they shall redress their matter with their
hands. They be both learned in the temporal law, and I doubt not good
example shall ensue to see them learn the new law of the Star Chamber,
which, God willing, they shall have indifferently
(p. 120)
administered to them, according to their
deserts.”[326]

Wolsey’s “new law of the Star Chamber,” his stern enforcement of the
statutes against livery and maintenance, and his spasmodic attempt to
redress the evils of
enclosures,[327]
probably contributed as much as
his arrogance and ostentation to the ill-favour in which he stood with
the nobility and landed gentry. From the beginning there were frequent
rumours of plots to depose him, and his enemies abroad often talked of
the universal hatred which he inspired in England. The classes which
benefited by his justice complained bitterly of the impositions
required to support his spirited foreign policy. Clerics who regarded
him as a bulwark on the one hand against heresy, and, on the other,
against the extreme view which Henry held from the first of his
authority over the Church, were alienated by the despotism Wolsey
wielded by means of his legatine powers. Even the mild and aged Warham
felt his lash, and was threatened with Præmunire for having wounded
Wolsey’s legatine authority by calling a council at
Lambeth.[328]
Peers, spiritual no less than temporal, regarded him as “the great
tyrant”. Parliament he feared and distrusted; he had urged the speedy
dissolution of that of 1515; only one sat during the fourteen years of
his supremacy, and with that the Cardinal quarrelled. He possessed no
hold over the nation, but only over the King, in whom alone he put his
trust.

For
(p. 121)
the time he seemed secure enough. No one could touch a
hair of his head so long as he was shielded by Henry’s power, and
Henry seemed to have given over his royal authority to Wolsey’s hands
with a blind and undoubting confidence. “The King,” said one, in 1515,
“is a youngling, cares for nothing but girls and hunting, and wastes
his father’s
patrimony.”[329]
“He gambled,” reported Giustinian in
1519, “with the French hostages, occasionally, it was said, to the
amount of six or eight thousand ducats a
day.”[330]
In the following
summer Henry rose daily at four or five in the morning and hunted till
nine or ten at night; “he spares,” said Pace, “no pains to convert the
sport of hunting into a
martyrdom”.[331]
“He devotes himself,” wrote
Chieregati, “to accomplishments and amusements day and night, is
intent on nothing else, and leaves business to Wolsey, who rules
everything.”[332]
Wolsey, it was remarked by Leo X., made Henry go
hither and thither, just as he
liked,[333]
and the King signed State
papers without knowing their contents. “Writing,” admitted Henry, “is
to me somewhat tedious and
painful.”[334]
When Wolsey thought it
essential that autograph letters in Henry’s hand should be sent to
other crowned heads, he composed the letters and sent them to Henry to
copy out.[335]
Could the most constitutional monarch have been more
dutiful? But constitutional monarchy was not then invented, and it is
not surprising that Giustinian, in 1519, found it impossible to
(p. 122)
say much for Henry as a statesman. Agere cum rege, he said,
est nihil
agere;[336]
anything told to the King was either useless
or was communicated to Wolsey. Bishop West was sure that Henry would
not take the pains to look at his and Worcester’s despatches; and
there was a widespread impression abroad and at home that the English
King was a negligible quantity in the domestic and foreign affairs of
his own kingdom.

For ten years Henry had reigned while first his council, and then
Wolsey, governed. Before another decade had passed, Henry was King and
Government in one; and nobody in the kingdom counted for much but the
King. He stepped at once into Wolsey’s place, became his own prime
minister, and ruled with a vigour which was assuredly not less than
the Cardinal’s. Such transformations are not the work of a moment, and
Henry’s would have been impossible, had he in previous years been so
completely the slave of Vanity Fair, as most people thought. In
reality, there are indications that beneath the superficial gaiety of
his life, Henry was beginning to use his own judgment, form his own
conclusions, and take an interest in serious matters. He was only
twenty-eight in 1519, and his character was following a normal course
of development.

From the earliest years of his reign Henry had at least two serious
preoccupations, the New Learning and his navy. We learn from Erasmus
that Henry’s Court was an example to Christendom for learning and
piety;[337]
that the King sought to promote learning among the clergy;
and on one occasion defended “mental and ex tempore prayer” against
those who apparently thought laymen should,
(p. 123)
in their private
devotions, confine themselves to formularies prescribed by the
clergy.[338]
In 1519 there were more men of learning at the English
Court than at any
university;[339]
it was more like a museum, says the
great humanist, than a
Court;[340]
and in the same year the King
endeavoured to stop the outcry against Greek, raised by the
reactionary “Trojans” at Oxford. “You would say,” continues Erasmus,
“that Henry was a universal genius. He has never neglected his
studies; and whenever he has leisure from his political occupations,
he reads, or disputes—of which he is very fond—with remarkable
courtesy and unruffled temper. He is more of a companion than a king.
For these little trials of wit, he prepares himself by reading
schoolmen, Thomas, Scotus or
Gabriel.”[341]
His theological studies
were encouraged by Wolsey, possibly to divert the King’s mind from an
unwelcome interference in politics, and it was at the Cardinal’s
instigation that Henry set to work on his famous book against
Luther.[342]
He seems to have begun it, or some similar treatise,
which may afterwards have been adapted to Luther’s particular case,
before the end of the year in which the German reformer published his
original theses. In September, 1517, Erasmus heard that Henry had
returned to his
studies,[343]
and, in the following June, Pace writes
to Wolsey that, with respect to the commendations given by the
Cardinal to the King’s book, though Henry does not think it worthy
such great praise as it has had from him and from all other “great
learned”
(p. 124)
men, yet he says he is very glad to have “noted in
your grace’s letters that his reasons be called inevitable,
considering that your grace was sometime his adversary herein and of
contrary
opinion”.[344]
It is obvious that this “book,” whatever it
may have been, was the fruit of Henry’s own mind, and that he adopted
a line of argument not entirely relished by Wolsey. But, if it was the
book against Luther, it was laid aside and rewritten before it was
given to the world in its final form. Nothing more is heard of it for
three years. In April, 1521, Pace explains to Wolsey the delay in
sending him on some news-letters from Germany “which his grace had not
read till this day after his dinner; and thus he commanded me to write
unto your grace, declaring he was otherwise occupied; i.e., in
scribendo contra Lutherum, as I do
conjecture”.[345]
Nine days later
Pace found the King reading a new book of Luther’s, “which he
dispraised”; and he took the opportunity to show Henry Leo’s bull
against the Reformer. “His grace showed himself well contented with
the coming of the same; howbeit, as touching the publication thereof,
he said he would have it well examined and diligently looked to afore
it were
published.”[346]
Even in the height of his fervour against
heresy, Henry was in no mood to abate one jot or one tittle of his
royal authority in ecclesiastical matters.

His book was finished before 21st May, 1521, when the King wrote to
Leo, saying that “ever since he knew Luther’s heresy in Germany, he
had made it his study how to extirpate it. He had called the learned
of his kingdom to consider these errors and denounce them, and
(p. 125)
exhort others to do the same. He had urged the Emperor and
Electors, since this pestilent fellow would not return to God, to
extirpate him and his heretical books. He thought it right still
further to testify his zeal for the faith by his writings, that all
might see he was ready to defend the Church, not only with his arms,
but with the resources of his mind. He dedicated therefore, to the
Pope, the first offerings of his intellect and his little
erudition.”[347]
The letter had been preceded, on 12th May, by a
holocaust of Luther’s books in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Wolsey sat in
state on a scaffold at St. Paul’s Cross, with the papal nuncio and the
Archbishop of Canterbury at his feet on the right, and the imperial
ambassador and Tunstall, Bishop of London, at his feet on the left;
and while the books were being devoured by the flames, Fisher preached
a sermon denouncing the errors contained
therein.[348]
But it was July
before the fair copy of Henry’s book was ready for presentation to
Leo; possibly the interval was employed by learned men in polishing
Henry’s style, but the substance of the work was undoubtedly of
Henry’s authorship. Such is the direct testimony of Erasmus, and there
is no evidence to indicate the collaboration of
others.[349]
Pace was
then the most intimate of Henry’s counsellors, and Pace, by his own
confession, was not in the secret. Nor is the book so remarkable as to
preclude the possibility of Henry’s authorship. Its arguments are
respectable and give evidence of an intelligent and fairly extensive
acquaintance with the writings of the fathers and schoolmen; but they
reveal no profound depth of theological learning nor
(p. 126)
genius
for abstract speculation. It does not rank so high in the realm of
theology, as do some of Henry’s compositions in that of music. In
August it was sent to Leo, with verses composed by Wolsey and copied
out in the royal
hand.[350]
In September the English ambassador at
Rome presented Leo his copy, bound in cloth of gold. The Pope read
five leaves without interruption, and remarked that “he would not have
thought such a book should have come from the King’s grace, who hath
been occupied, necessarily, in other feats, seeing that other men
which hath occupied themselves in study all their lives cannot bring
forth the
like”.[351]
On 2nd October it was formally presented in a
consistory of cardinals; and, on the 11th, Leo promulgated his bull
conferring on Henry his coveted title, “Fidei Defensor”.

Proud as he was of his scholastic achievement and its reward at the
hands of the Pope, Henry was doing more for the future of England by
his attention to naval affairs than by his pursuit of high-sounding
titles. His intuitive perception of England’s coming needs in this
respect is, perhaps, the most striking illustration of his political
foresight. He has been described as the father of the British navy;
and, had he not laid the foundations of England’s naval power, his
daughter’s victory over Spain and entrance on the path that led to
empire would have been impossible. Under Henry, the navy was first
organised as a permanent force; he founded the royal dockyards at
Woolwich and Deptford, and the corporation of Trinity
House;[352] he
encouraged the planting of timber for
(p. 127)
shipbuilding, enacted
laws facilitating inland navigation, dotted the coast with
fortifications, and settled the constitution of the naval service upon
a plan from which it has ever since steadily developed. He owed his
inspiration to none of his councillors, least of all to Wolsey, who
had not the faintest glimmering of the importance of securing
England’s naval supremacy, and who, during the war of 1522-23,
preferred futile invasions on land to Henry’s “secret designs” for
destroying the navy of
France.[353]
The King’s interest in ships and
shipbuilding was strong, even amid the alluring diversions of the
first years of his reign. He watched his fleet sail for Guienne in
1512, and for France in 1513; he knew the speed, the tonnage and the
armament of every ship in his navy; he supervised the minutest details
of their construction. In 1520 his ambassador at Paris tells him that
Francis is building a ship, “and reasoneth in this mystery of
shipman’s craft as one which had understanding in the same. But, sir,
he approacheth not your highness in that
science.”[354]
A French envoy
records how, in 1515, the whole English Court went down to see the
launch of the Princess Mary. Henry himself “acted as pilot and wore
a sailor’s coat and trousers, made of cloth of gold, and a gold chain
with the inscription, ‘Dieu est mon droit,’ to which was suspended a
whistle, which he blew nearly as loud as a
trumpet”.[355]
The launch
of a ship was then almost a religious ceremony, and the place of the
modern bottle of champagne was taken by a mass, which was said by the
Bishop of Durham. In 1518 Giustinian tells how Henry went to
Southampton to see the Venetian galleys,
(p. 128)
and caused some new
guns to be “fired again and again, marking their range, as he is very
curious about matters of this
kind”.[356]

It was not long before Henry developed an active participation in
serious matters other than theological disputes and naval affairs. It
is not possible to trace its growth with any clearness because no
record remains of the verbal communications which were sufficient to
indicate his will during the constant attendance of Wolsey upon him.
But, as soon as monarch and minister were for some cause or another
apart, evidence of Henry’s activity in political matters becomes more
available. Thus, in 1515, we find Wolsey sending the King, at his own
request, the Act of Apparel, just passed by Parliament, for Henry’s
“examination and
correction”.[357]
He also desires Henry’s
determination about the visit of the Queen of Scotland, that he may
make the necessary arrangements. In 1518 Henry made a prolonged stay
at Abingdon, partly from fear of the plague, and partly, as he told
Pace, because at Abingdon people were not continually coming to tell
him of deaths, as they did daily in London. During this absence from
London, Henry insisted upon the attendance of sufficient councillors
to enable him to transact business; he established a relay of posts
every seven hours between himself and Wolsey; and we hear of his
reading “every word of all the letters” sent by his
minister.[358]
Every week Wolsey despatched an account of such State business as he
had transacted; and on one occasion, “considering the importance of
Wolsey’s letters,” Henry paid a secret and flying visit to
London.[359]
(p. 129)
In 1519 there was a sort of revolution at
Court, obscure enough now, but then a subject of some comment at home
and abroad. Half a dozen of Henry’s courtiers were removed from his
person and sent into honourable exile, receiving posts at Calais, at
Guisnes, and
elsewhere.[360]
Giustinian thought that Henry had been
gambling too much and wished to turn over a new leaf. There were also
rumours that these courtiers governed Henry after their own appetite,
to the King’s dishonour; and Henry, annoyed at the report and jealous
as ever of royal prestige, promptly cashiered them, and filled their
places with grave and reverend seniors.

Two years later Wolsey was abroad at the conference of Calais, and
again Henry’s hand in State affairs becomes apparent. Pace, defending
himself from the Cardinal’s complaints, tells him that he had done
everything “by the King’s express commandment, who readeth all your
letters with great diligence”. One of the letters which angered Wolsey
was the King’s, for Pace “had devised it very different”; but the King
would not approve of it; “and commanded me to bring your said letters
into his privy chamber with pen and ink, and there he would declare
unto me what I should write. And when his grace had your said letters,
he read the same three times, and marked such places as it pleased him
to make answer unto, and commanded me to write and rehearse as liked
him, and not further to meddle with that answer; so that I herein
nothing did but obeyed the King’s commandment,
(p. 130)
and
especially at such time as he would upon good grounds be obeyed,
whosoever spake to the
contrary.”[361]
Wolsey might say in his pride
“I shall do so and so,” and foreign envoys might think that the
Cardinal made the King “go hither and thither, just as he liked”; but
Wolsey knew perfectly well that when he thought fit, Henry “would be
obeyed, whosoever spake to the contrary”. He might delegate much of
his authority, but men were under no misapprehension that he could and
would revoke it whenever he chose. For the time being, King and
Cardinal worked together in general harmony, but it was a partnership
in which Henry could always have the last word, though Wolsey did most
of the work. As early as 1518 he had nominated Standish to the
bishopric of St. Asaph, disregarding Wolsey’s candidate and the
opposition of the clerical party at Court, who detested Standish for
his advocacy of Henry’s authority in ecclesiastical matters, and
dreaded his promotion as an evil omen for the independence of the
Church.[362]

Even in the details of administration, the King was becoming
increasingly vigilant. In 1519 he drew up a “remembrance of such
things” as he required the Cardinal to “put in effectual
execution”.[363]
They were twenty-one in number and ranged over every
variety of subject. The household was to be arranged; “views to be
made and books kept”; the ordnance seen to; treasurers were to make
monthly reports of their receipts and payments, and send counterparts
to the King; the surveyor of lands was to make a yearly declaration;
and Wolsey
(p. 131)
himself and the judges were to make quarterly
reports to Henry in person. There were five points “which the King
will debate with his council,” the administration of justice, reform
of the exchequer, Ireland, employment of idle people, and maintenance
of the frontiers. The general plan of Wolsey’s negotiations at Calais
in 1521 was determined by King and Cardinal in consultation, and every
important detail in them and in the subsequent preparations for war
was submitted to Henry. Not infrequently they differed. Wolsey wanted
Sir William Sandys to command the English contingent; Henry declared
it would be inconsistent with his dignity to send a force out of the
realm under the command of any one of lower rank than an earl. Wolsey
replied that Sandys would be cheaper than an
earl,[364]
but the
command was entrusted to the Earl of Surrey. Henry thought it unsafe,
considering the imminence of a breach with France, for English wine
ships to resort to Bordeaux; Wolsey thought otherwise, and they
disputed the point for a month. Honours were divided; the question was
settled for the time by twenty ships sailing while the dispute was in
progress.[365]
Apparently they returned in safety, but the seizure of
English ships at Bordeaux in the following March justified Henry’s
caution.[366]
The King was already an adept in statecraft, and there
was at least an element of truth in the praise which Wolsey bestowed
on his pupil. “No man,” he wrote, “can more groundly consider the
politic governance of your said realm, nor more assuredly look to the
preservation thereof, than ye yourself.” And again, “surely, if all
your
(p. 132)
whole council had been assembled together, they could
not have more deeply perceived or spoken
therein”.[367]

The Cardinal “could not express the joy and comfort with which he
noted the King’s prudence”; but he can scarcely have viewed Henry’s
growing interference without some secret misgivings. For he was
developing not only Wolsey’s skill and lack of scruple in politics,
but also a choleric and impatient temper akin to the Cardinal’s own.
In 1514 Carroz had complained of Henry’s offensive behaviour, and had
urged that it would become impossible to control him, if the “young
colt” were not bridled. In the following year Henry treated a French
envoy with scant civility, and flatly contradicted him twice as he
described the battle of Marignano. Giustinian also records how Henry
went “pale with anger” at unpleasant
news.[368]
A few years later his
successor describes Henry’s “very great rage” when detailing Francis’s
injuries; Charles made the same complaints against the French King,
“but not so angrily, in accordance with his gentler
nature”.[369]
On
another occasion Henry turned his back upon a diplomatist and walked
away in the middle of his speech, an incident, we are told, on which
much comment was made in
Rome.[370]

But these outbursts were rare and they grew rarer; in 1527 Mendoza,
the Spanish ambassador, remarks that it was “quite the reverse of the
King’s ordinary manner” to be more violent than
Wolsey;[371]
and
throughout the period of strained relations with the Emperor, Chapuys
constantly refers to the unfailing courtesy and graciousness with
(p. 133)
which Henry received him. He never forgot himself so far as to
lay rude hands on an ambassador, as Wolsey did; and no provocation
betrayed him in his later years, passionate though he was, into a
neglect of the outward amenities of diplomatic and official
intercourse. Outbursts of anger, of course, there were; but they were
often like the explosions of counsel in law courts, and were “to a
great extent diplomatically
controlled”.[372]
Nor can we deny the
consideration with which Henry habitually treated his councillors, the
wide discretion he allowed them in the exercise of their duties, and
the toleration he extended to contrary opinions. He was never
impatient of advice even when it conflicted with his own views. His
long arguments with Wolsey, and the freedom with which the Cardinal
justified his recommendations, even after Henry had made up his mind
to an opposite course, are a sufficient proof of the fact. In 1517,
angered by Maximilian’s perfidy, Henry wrote him some very
“displeasant” letters. Tunstall thought they would do harm, kept them
back, and received no censure for his conduct. In 1522-23 Wolsey
advised first the siege of Boulogne and then its abandonment. “The
King,” wrote More, “is by no means displeased that you have changed
your opinion, as his highness esteemeth nothing in counsel more
perilous than one to persevere in the maintenance of his advice
because he hath once given it. He therefore commendeth and most
affectuously thanketh your faithful diligence and high wisdom in
advertising him of the reasons which have moved you to change your
opinion.”[373]
No king knew better than Henry how to get good work
from his ministers, and his
(p. 134)
warning against persevering in
advice, merely because it has once been given, is a political maxim
for all time.

A lesson might also be learnt from a story of Henry and Colet told by
Erasmus on Colet’s own
authority.[374]
In 1513 war fever raged in
England. Colet’s bishop summoned him “into the King’s Court for
asserting, when England was preparing for war against France, that an
unjust peace was preferable to the most just war; but the King
threatened his persecutor with vengeance. After Easter, when the
expedition was ready against France, Colet preached on Whitsunday
before the King and the Court, exhorting men rather to follow the
example of Christ their prince than that of Cæsar and Alexander. The
King was afraid that this sermon would have an ill effect upon the
soldiers and sent for the Dean. Colet happened to be dining at the
Franciscan monastery near Greenwich. When the King heard of it, he
entered the garden of the monastery, and on Colet’s appearance
dismissed his attendants; then discussed the matter with him, desiring
him to explain himself, lest his audience should suppose that no war
was justifiable. After the conversation was over he dismissed him
before them all, drinking to Colet’s health and saying ‘Let every man
have his own doctor, this is mine’.” The picture is pleasing evidence
of Henry’s superiority to some vulgar passions. Another instance of
freedom from popular prejudice, which he shared with his father, was
his encouragement of foreign scholars, diplomatists and merchants; not
a few of the ablest of Tudor agents were of alien birth. He was
therefore intensely annoyed at the rabid fury against them that broke
out in the riots of Evil
(p. 135)
May Day; yet he pardoned all the
ringleaders but one. Tolerance and clemency were no small part of his
character in early
manhood;[375]
and together with his other mental
and physical graces, his love of learning and of the society of
learned men, his magnificence and display, his supremacy in all the
sports that were then considered the peculiar adornment of royalty,
they contributed scarcely less than Wolsey’s genius for diplomacy and
administration to England’s renown. “In short,” wrote Chieregati to
Isabella d’Este in 1517, “the wealth and civilisation of the world are
here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render
themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme
decorum, and very great politeness. And amongst other things there is
this most invincible King, whose accomplishments and qualities are so
many and excellent that I consider him to surpass all who ever wore a
crown; and blessed and happy may this country call itself in having as
its lord so worthy and eminent a sovereign; whose sway is more bland
and gentle than the greatest liberty under any
other.”[376]

CHAPTER VI.
(p. 136)

FROM CALAIS TO ROME.

The wonderful success that had attended Wolsey’s policy during his
seven years’ tenure of power, and the influential position to which he
had raised England in the councils of Christendom, might well have
disturbed the mental balance of a more modest and diffident man than
the Cardinal; and it is scarcely surprising that he fancied himself,
and sought to become, arbiter of the destinies of Europe. The
condition of continental politics made his ambition seem less than
extravagant. Power was almost monopolised by two young princes whose
rivalry was keen, whose resources were not altogether unevenly
matched, and whose disputes were so many and serious that war could
only be averted by a pacific determination on both sides which neither
possessed. Francis had claims on Naples, and his dependant, D’Albret,
on Navarre. Charles had suzerain rights over Milan and a title to
Burgundy, of which his great-grandfather Charles the Bold had been
despoiled by Louis XI. Yet the Emperor had not the slightest intention
of compromising his possession of Naples or Navarre, and Francis was
quite as resolute to surrender neither Burgundy nor Milan. They both
became eager competitors for the friendship of England, which, if its
resources were inadequate to support the position
(p. 137) of
arbiter, was at least a most useful makeweight. England’s choice of
policy was, however, strictly limited. She could not make war upon
Charles. It was not merely that Charles had a staunch ally in his aunt
Catherine of Aragon, who is said to have “made such representations
and shown such reasons against” the alliance with Francis “as one
would not have supposed she would have dared to do, or even to
imagine”.[377]
It was not merely that in this matter Catherine was
backed by the whole council except Wolsey, and by the real
inclinations of the King. It was that the English people were firmly
imperialist in sympathy. The reason was obvious. Charles controlled
the wool-market of the Netherlands, and among English exports wool was
all-important. War with Charles meant the ruin of England’s export
trade, the starvation or impoverishment of thousands of Englishmen;
and when war was declared against Charles eight years later, it more
nearly cost Henry his throne than all the fulminations of the Pope or
religious discontents, and after three months it was brought to a
summary end. England remained at peace with Spain so long as Spain
controlled its market for wool; when that market passed into the hands
of the revolted Netherlands, the same motive dictated an alliance with
the Dutch against Philip II. War with Charles in 1520 was out of the
question; and for the next two years Wolsey and Henry were
endeavouring to make Francis and the Emperor bid against each other,
in order that England might obtain the maximum of concession from
Charles
(p. 138)
when it should declare in his favour, as all along
was intended.

By the Treaty of London Henry was bound to assist the aggrieved
against the aggressor. But that treaty had been concluded between
England and France in the first instance; Henry’s only daughter was
betrothed to the Dauphin; and Francis was anxious to cement his
alliance with Henry by a personal
interview.[378]
It was Henry’s
policy to play the friend for the time; and, as a proof of his desire
for the meeting with Francis, he announced, in August, 1519, his
resolve to wear his beard until the meeting took
place.[379] He
reckoned without his wife. On 8th November Louise of Savoy, the
queen-mother of France, taxed Boleyn, the English ambassador, with a
report that Henry had put off his beard. “I said,” writes Boleyn,
“that, as I suppose, it hath been by the Queen’s desire; for I told my
lady that I have hereafore time known when the King’s grace hath worn
long his beard, that the Queen hath daily made him great instance, and
desired him to put it off for her
sake.”[380]
Henry’s inconstancy in
the matter of his beard not only caused diplomatic inconvenience, but,
it may be parenthetically remarked, adds to the difficulty of dating
his portraits. Francis, however, considered the Queen’s interference a
sufficient excuse, or was not inclined to stick at such trifles; and
on 10th January, 1520, he nominated Wolsey his proctor to make
arrangements for the
interview.[381]
As Wolsey was also agent for
Henry, the French King saw no further cause for delay.

The
(p. 139)
delay came from England; the meeting with Francis would
be a one-sided pronouncement without some corresponding favour to
Charles. Some time before Henry had sent Charles a pressing invitation
to visit England on his way from Spain to Germany; and the Emperor,
suspicious of the meeting between Henry and Francis, was only too
anxious to come and forestall it. The experienced Margaret of Savoy
admitted that Henry’s friendship was essential to
Charles;[382]
but
Spaniards were not to be hurried, and it would be May before the
Emperor’s convoy was ready. So Henry endeavoured to postpone his
engagement with Francis. The French King replied that by the end of
May his Queen would be in the eighth month of her pregnancy, and that
if the meeting were further prorogued she must perforce be
absent.[383]
Henry was nothing if not gallant, at least on the
surface. Francis’s argument clinched the matter. The interview,
ungraced by the presence of France’s Queen, would, said Henry, be
robbed of most of its
charm;[384]
and he gave Charles to understand
that, unless he reached England by the middle of May, his visit would
have to be cancelled. This intimation produced an unwonted despatch in
the Emperor’s movements; but fate was against him, and contrary winds
rendered his arrival in time a matter of doubt till the last possible
moment. Henry must cross to Calais on the 31st of May, whether Charles
came or not; and it was the 26th before the Emperor’s ships appeared
off the cliffs of Dover. Wolsey put out in a small boat to meet him,
and conducted Charles to the castle where he lodged. During
(p. 140)
the night Henry arrived. Early next day, which was Whitsunday, the two
sovereigns proceeded to Canterbury, where the Queen and Court had come
on the way to France to spend their Pentecost. Five days the Emperor
remained with his aunt, whom he now saw for the first time; but the
days were devoted to business rather than to elaborate ceremonial and
show, for which there had been little time to
prepare.[385]

On the last day of May Charles took ship at Sandwich for Flanders.
Henry embarked at Dover for France. The painting at Hampton Court
depicting the scene has, like almost every other picture of Henry’s
reign, been ascribed to Holbein; but six years were to pass before the
great artist visited England. The King himself is represented as being
on board the four-masted Henry Grace à Dieu, commonly called the
Great Harry, the finest ship afloat; though the vessel originally
fitted out for his passage was the Katherine
Pleasaunce.[386]
At
eleven o’clock he landed at Calais. On Monday, the 4th of June, Henry
and all his Court proceeded to Guisnes. There a temporary palace of
art had been erected, the splendour of which is inadequately set forth
in pages upon pages of contemporary descriptions. One Italian likened
it to the palaces described in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; another declared that it could not have
been better designed by Leonardo da Vinci
himself.[387]
Everything was
(p. 141)
in harmony with this architectural pomp. Wolsey was
accompanied, it was said in Paris, by two hundred gentlemen clad in
crimson velvet, and had a body-guard of two hundred archers. He was
himself clothed in crimson satin from head to foot, his mule was
covered with crimson velvet, and her trappings were all of gold.
Henry, “the most goodliest prince that ever reigned over the realm of
England,” appeared even to Frenchmen as a very handsome prince,
“honnête, hault et
droit,”[388]
in manner gentle and gracious, rather
fat, and—in spite of his Queen—with a red beard, large enough and
very becoming. Another eye-witness adds the curious remark that, while
Francis was the taller of the two, Henry had the handsomer and more
feminine
face![389]
On the 7th of June the two Kings started
simultaneously from Guisnes and Ardres for their personal meeting in
the valley mid-way between the two towns, already known as the Val
Doré. The obscure but familiar phrase, Field of Cloth of
Gold,[390] is
a mistranslation of the French Camp du Drap d’Or. As they came in
sight a temporary suspicion of French designs seized the English, but
it was overcome. Henry and Francis rode forward alone, embraced each
other first on horseback and then again on foot, and made show of
being the closest friends in Christendom. On Sunday the 10th Henry
dined with the French Queen, and Francis with Catherine of Aragon. The
following week was devoted to tourneys, which the two Kings opened by
holding the field against all comers. The official accounts are
naturally silent on the royal wrestling
(p. 142)
match, recorded in
French memoirs and
histories.[391]
On the 17th Francis, as a final
effort to win Henry’s alliance, paid a surprise visit to him at
breakfast with only four attendants. The jousts were concluded with a
solemn mass said by Wolsey in a chapel built on the field. The
Cardinal of Bourbon presented the Gospel to Francis to kiss; he
refused, offering it to Henry who was too polite to accept the honour.
The same respect for each other’s dignity was observed with the Pax,
and the two Queens behaved with a similarly courteous punctilio. After
a friendly dispute as to who should kiss the Pax first, they kissed
each other
instead.[392]
On the 24th Henry and Francis met to
interchange gifts, to make their final professions of friendship, and
to bid each other adieu. Francis set out for Abbeville, and Henry
returned to Calais.

The Field of Cloth of Gold was the last and most gorgeous display of
the departing spirit of chivalry; it was also perhaps the most
portentous deception on record. “These sovereigns,” wrote a Venetian,
“are not at peace. They adapt themselves to circumstances, but they
hate each other very
cordially.”[393]
Beneath the profusion of
friendly pretences lay rooted suspicions and even deliberate hostile
intentions. Before Henry left England the rumour of ships fitting out
in French ports had stopped preparations for the interview; and they
were not resumed till a promise under the broad seal of France was
given that no French ship should sail before Henry’s
return.[394] On
the eve of the meeting Henry is said to have discovered that three or
four thousand French troops were
(p. 143)
concealed in the
neighbouring
country;[395]
he insisted on their removal, and Francis’s
unguarded visit to Henry was probably designed to disarm the English
distrust.[396]
No sooner was Henry’s back turned than the French began
the fortification of
Ardres,[397]
while Henry on his part went to
Calais to negotiate a less showy but genuine friendship with Charles.
No such magnificence adorned their meeting as had been displayed at
the Field of Cloth of Gold, but its solid results were far more
lasting. On 10th July Henry rode to Gravelines where the Emperor was
waiting. On the 11th they returned together to Calais, where during a
three days’ visit the negotiations begun at Canterbury were completed.
The ostensible purport of the treaty signed on the 14th was to bind
Henry to proceed no further in the marriage between the Princess Mary
and the Dauphin, and Charles no further in that between himself and
Francis’s daughter,
Charlotte.[398]
But more topics were discussed
than appeared on the surface; and among them was a proposal to marry
Mary to the Emperor
himself.[399]
The design proves that Henry and
Wolsey had already made up their minds to side with Charles, whenever
his disputes with Francis should develop into open hostilities.

That consummation could not be far off. Charles had scarcely turned
his back upon Spain when murmurs of disaffection were heard through
the length and breadth of the land; and while he was discussing with
Henry at Calais the prospects of a war with France, his commons in
Spain broke out into open
revolt.[400]
The rising had attained
(p. 144)
such dimensions by February, 1521, that Henry thought Charles was
likely to lose his Spanish dominions. The temptation was too great for
France to resist; and in the early spring of 1521 French forces
overran Navarre, and restored to his kingdom the exile D’Albret.
Francis had many plausible excuses, and sought to prove that he was
not really the aggressor. There had been confused fighting between the
imperialist Nassau and Francis’s allies, the Duke of Guelders and
Robert de la Marck, which the imperialists may have begun. But Francis
revealed his true motive, when he told Fitzwilliam that he had many
grievances against Charles and could not afford to neglect this
opportunity for taking his
revenge.[401]

War between Emperor and King soon spread from Navarre to the borders
of Flanders and to the plains of Northern Italy. Both sovereigns
claimed the assistance of England in virtue of the Treaty of London.
But Henry would not be prepared for war till the following year at
least; and he proposed that Wolsey should go to Calais to mediate
between the two parties and decide which had been the aggressor.
Charles, either because he was unprepared or was sure of Wolsey’s
support, readily agreed; but Francis was more reluctant, and only the
knowledge that, if he refused, Henry would at once side with Charles,
induced him to consent to the conference. So on 2nd August, 1521, the
Cardinal again crossed the
Channel.[402]
His first interview was with
the imperial
envoys.[403]
They announced that Charles had given them
no power to treat for a truce. Wolsey refused to proceed without this
authority;
(p. 145)
and he obtained the consent of the French
chancellor, Du Prat, to his proposal to visit the Emperor at Bruges,
and secure the requisite powers. He was absent more than a fortnight,
and not long after his return fell ill. This served to pass time in
September, and the extravagant demands of both parties still further
prolonged the proceedings. Wolsey was constrained to tell them the
story of a courtier who asked his King for the grant of a forest; when
his relatives denounced his presumption, he replied that he only
wanted in reality eight or nine
trees.[404]
The French and imperial
chancellors not merely demanded their respective forests, but made the
reduction of each single tree a matter of lengthy dispute; and as soon
as a fresh success in the varying fortune of war was reported, they
returned to their early pretensions. Wolsey was playing his game with
consummate skill; delay was his only desire; his illness had been
diplomatic; his objects were to postpone for a few months the breach
and to secure the pensions from France due at the end of
October.[405]

The conference at Calais was in fact a monument of perfidy worthy of
Ferdinand the Catholic. The plan was Wolsey’s, but Henry had expressed
full approval. As early as July the King was full of his secret design
for destroying the navy of France, though he did not propose to
proceed with the enterprise till Wolsey had completed the arrangements
with
Charles.[406]
The subterfuge about
(p. 146)
Charles refusing his
powers and the Cardinal’s journey to Bruges had been arranged between
Henry, Wolsey and Charles before Wolsey left England. The object of
that visit, so far from being to facilitate an agreement, was to
conclude an offensive and defensive alliance against one of the two
parties between whom Wolsey was pretending to mediate. “Henry agrees,”
wrote Charles’s ambassador on 6th July, “with Wolsey’s plan that he
should be sent to Calais under colour of hearing the grievances of
both parties: and when he cannot arrange them, he should withdraw to
the Emperor to treat of the matters
aforesaid”.[407]
The treaty was
concluded at Bruges on 25th
August[408]
before he returned to Calais;
the Emperor promised Wolsey the
Papacy;[409]
the details of a joint
invasion were settled. Charles was to marry Mary; and the Pope was to
dispense the two from the disability of their kinship, and from
engagements with others which both had contracted. The Cardinal might
be profuse in his protestations of friendship for France, of devotion
to peace, and of his determination to do justice to the parties before
him. But all his painted words could not long conceal the fact that
behind the mask of the judge were hidden the features of a
conspirator. It was an unpleasant time for Fitzwilliam, the English
ambassador at the French Court. The King’s sister, Marguerite de
Valois, taxed Fitzwilliam with Wolsey’s proceedings, hinting that
deceit was being practised on Francis.
(p. 147)
The ambassador grew
hot, vowed Henry was not a dissembler, and that he would prove it on
any gentleman who dared to maintain that he
was.[410]
But he knew
nothing of Wolsey’s intrigues; nor was the Cardinal, to whom
Fitzwilliam denounced the insinuation, likely to blush, though he knew
that the charge was true.

Wolsey returned from Calais at the end of November, having failed to
establish the truce to which the negotiations had latterly been in
appearance directed. But the French half-yearly pensions were paid,
and England had the winter in which to prepare for war. No attempt had
been made to examine impartially the mutual charges of aggression
urged by the litigants, though a determination of that point could
alone justify England’s intervention. The dispute was complicated
enough. If, as Charles contended, the Treaty of London guaranteed the
status quo, Francis, by invading Navarre, was undoubtedly the
offender. But the French King pleaded the Treaty of Noyon, by which
Charles had bound himself to do justice to the exiled King of Navarre,
to marry the French King’s daughter, and to pay tribute for Naples.
That treaty was not abrogated by the one concluded in London, yet
Charles had fulfilled none of his promises. Moreover, the Emperor
himself had, long before the invasion of Navarre, been planning a war
with France, and negotiating with Leo to expel the French from Milan,
and to destroy the predominant French faction in
Genoa.[411] His
(p. 148)
ministers were making little secret of Charles’s warlike
intentions, when the Spanish revolt placed irresistible temptation in
Francis’s way, and provoked that attack on Navarre, which enabled
Charles to plead, with some colour, that he was not the aggressor.
This was the ground alleged by Henry for siding with Charles, but it
was not his real reason for going to war. Nearly a year before Navarre
was invaded, he had discussed the rupture of Mary’s engagement with
the Dauphin and the transference of her hand to the Emperor.

The real motives of England’s policy do not appear on the surface.
“The aim of the King of England,” said Clement VII. in
1524,[412] “is
as incomprehensible as the causes by which he is moved are futile. He
may, perhaps, wish to revenge himself for the slights he has received
from the King of France and from the Scots, or to punish the King of
France for his disparaging language; or, seduced by the flattery of
the Emperor, he may have nothing else in view than to help the
Emperor; or he may, perhaps, really wish to preserve peace in Italy,
and therefore declares himself an enemy of any one who disturbs it. It
is even not impossible that the King of England expects to be rewarded
by the Emperor after the victory, and hopes, perhaps, to get
Normandy.” Clement three years before, when Cardinal de Medici, had
admitted that he knew little of English
politics;[413]
and his
ignorance may explain his inability to give a more satisfactory reason
for Henry’s conduct than these tentative and far-fetched suggestions.
But after the publication of Henry’s State papers, it is not easy to
arrive at any more definite conclusion. The only motive Wolsey
(p. 149)
alleges, besides the ex post facto excuses of Francis’s
conduct, is the recovery of Henry’s rights to the crown of France; and
if this were the real object, it reduces both King and Cardinal to the
level of political charlatans. To conquer France was a madcap scheme,
when Henry himself was admitting the impossibility of raising 30,000
foot or 10,000 horse, without hired contingents from Charles’s
domains;[414]
when, according to Giustinian, it would have been hard
to levy 100 men-at-arms or 1000 light cavalry in the whole
island;[415]
when the only respectable military force was the archers,
already an obsolete arm. Invading hosts could never be victualled for
more than three months, or stand a winter campaign; English troops
were ploughmen by profession and soldiers only by chance; Henry VII.’s
treasure was exhausted, and efforts to raise money for fitful and
futile inroads nearly produced a revolt. Henry VIII. himself was
writing that to provide for these inroads would prevent him keeping an
army in Ireland; and Wolsey was declaring that for the same reason
English interests in Scotland must take care of themselves, that
border warfare must be confined to the strictest defensive, and that a
“cheap” deputy must be found for Ireland, who would rule it, like
Kildare, without English
aid.[416]
It is usual to lay the folly of the
pretence to the crown of France at Henry’s door. But it is a curious
fact that when Wolsey was gone, and Henry was his own prime minister,
this spirited foreign policy took a very subordinate place, and Henry
turned his attention to the cultivation of his own garden instead of
seeking to annex
(p. 150)
his neighbour’s. It is possible that he was
better employed in wasting his people’s blood and treasure in the
futile devastation of France, than in placing his heel on the Church
and sending Fisher and More to the scaffold; but his attempts to
reduce Ireland to order, and to unite England and Scotland, violent
though his methods may have been, were at least more sane than the
quest for the crown of France, or even for the possession of
Normandy.[417]

Yet if these were not Wolsey’s aims, what were his motives? The
essential thing for England was the maintenance of a fairly even
balance between Francis and Charles; and if Wolsey thought that would
best be secured by throwing the whole of England’s weight into the
Emperor’s scale, he must have strangely misread the political
situation. He could not foresee, it may be said, the French debacle.
If so, it was from no lack of omens. Even supposing he was ignorant,
or unable to estimate the effects, of the moral corruption of Francis,
the peculations of his mother Louise of Savoy, the hatred of the war,
universal among the French lower classes, there were definite warnings
from more careful
observers.[418]
As early as 1517 there were bitter
complaints in France of the gabelle and other taxes, and a Cordelier
denounced the
(p. 151)
French King as worse than
Nero.[419]
In 1519
an anonymous Frenchman wrote that Francis had destroyed his own
people, emptied his kingdom of money, and that the Emperor or some
other would soon have a cheap bargain of the kingdom, for he was more
unsteady on his throne than people
thought.[420]
Even the treason of
Bourbon, which contributed so much to the French King’s fall, was
rumoured three years before it occurred, and in 1520 he was known to
be “playing the
malcontent”.[421]
At the Field of Cloth of Gold Henry
is said to have told Francis that, had he a subject like Bourbon, he
would not long leave his head on his
shoulders.[422]
All these details
were reported to the English Government and placed among English
archives; and, indeed, at the English Court the general anticipation,
justified by the event, was that Charles would carry the day.

No possible advantage could accrue to England from such a destruction
of the balance of power; her position as mediator was only tenable so
long as neither Francis nor Charles had the complete mastery. War on
the Emperor was, no doubt, out of the question, but that was no reason
for war on France. Prudence counselled England to make herself strong,
to develop her resources, and to hold her strength in reserve, while
the two rivals weakened each other by war. She would then be in a far
better position to make her voice heard in the settlement, and would
probably have been able to extract from it all the benefits she could
with reason or justice demand. So obvious was the advantage of this
policy that for some time acute French statesmen refused to credit
Wolsey
(p. 152)
with any other. They said, reported an English envoy
to the Cardinal, “that your grace would make your profit with them and
the Emperor both, and proceed between them so that they might continue
in war, and that the one destroy the other, and the King’s highness
may remain and be their arbiter and
superior”.[423]
If it is urged
that Henry was bent on the war, and that Wolsey must satisfy the King
or forfeit his power, even the latter would have been the better
alternative. His fall would have been less complete and more
honourable than it actually was. Wolsey’s failure to follow this
course suggests that, by involving Henry in dazzling schemes of a
foreign conquest, he was seeking to divert his attention from urgent
matters at home; that he had seen a vision of impending ruin; and that
his actions were the frantic efforts of a man to turn a steed, over
which he has imperfect control, from the gulf he sees yawning ahead.
The only other explanation is that Wolsey sacrificed England’s
interests in the hope of securing from Charles the gift of the papal
tiara.[424]

However that may be, it was not for Clement VII. to deride England’s
conduct. The keen-sighted Pace had remarked in 1521 that, in the event
of Charles’s victory, the Pope would have to look to his affairs in
time.[425]
The Emperor’s triumph was, indeed, as fatal to the Papacy
as it was to Wolsey. Yet Clement VII., on whom the full force of the
blow was to fall, had, as Cardinal de Medici, been one of the chief
promoters of the war. In August, 1521,
(p. 153)
the Venetian,
Contarini, reports Charles as saying that Leo rejected both the peace
and the truce speciously urged by Wolsey, and adds, on his own
account, that he believes it the
truth.[426]
In 1522 Francis asserted
that Cardinal de Medici “was the cause of all this
war”;[427]
and in
1527 Clement VII. sought to curry favour with Charles by declaring
that as Cardinal de Medici he had in 1521 caused Leo X. to side
against
France.[428]
In 1525 Charles declared that he had been mainly
induced to enter on the war by the persuasions of
Leo,[429]
over whom
his cousin, the Cardinal, then wielded supreme influence. So complete
was his sway over Leo, that, on Leo’s death, a cardinal in the
conclave remarked that they wanted a new Pope, not one who had already
been Pope for years; and the gibe turned the scale against the future
Clement VII. Medici both, Leo and the Cardinal regarded the Papacy
mainly as a means for family aggrandisement. In 1518 Leo had
fulminated against Francis Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, as “the
son of iniquity and child of
perdition,”[430]
because he desired to
bestow the duchy on his nephew Lorenzo. In the family interest he was
withholding Modena and Reggio from Alfonso d’Este, and casting envious
eyes on Ferrara. In March, 1521, the French marched to seize some
Milanese exiles, who were harboured at
Reggio.[431]
Leo took the
opportunity to form an alliance with Charles for the expulsion of
Francis from Italy. It was signed at Worms on the 8th of May, the day
on which Luther was
outlawed;[432]
and a war broke
(p. 154)
out in
Italy, the effects of which were little foreseen by its principal
authors. A veritable Nemesis attended this policy conceived in perfidy
and greed. The battle of Pavia made Charles more nearly dictator of
Europe than any ruler has since been, except Napoleon Bonaparte. It
led to the sack of Rome and the imprisonment of Clement VII. by
Charles’s troops. The dependence of the Pope on the Emperor made it
impossible for Clement to grant Henry’s petition for divorce, and his
failure to obtain the divorce precipitated Wolsey’s fall.

Leo, meanwhile, had gone to his account on the night of 1st-2nd
December, 1521, singing “Nunc dimittis” for the expulsion of the
French from
Milan;[433]
and amid the clangour of war the cardinals met
to choose his successor. Their spirit belied their holy profession.
“All here,” wrote Manuel, Charles’s representative, “is founded on
avarice and
lies;”[434]
and again “there cannot be so much hatred and
so many devils in hell as among these cardinals”. “The Papacy is in
great decay” echoed the English envoy Clerk, “the cardinals brawl and
scold; their malicious, unfaithful and uncharitable demeanour against
each other increases every
day.”[435]
Feeling between the French and
imperial factions ran high, and the only question was whether an
adherent of Francis or Charles would secure election. Francis had
promised Wolsey fourteen French votes; but after the conference of
Calais he would have been forgiving indeed had he wielded his
influence on behalf of the English candidate. Wolsey
(p. 155)
built
more upon the promise of Charles at
Bruges;[436]
but, if he really
hoped for Charles’s assistance, his sagacity was greatly to seek. The
Emperor at no time made any effort on Wolsey’s behalf; he did him the
justice to think that, were Wolsey elected, he would be devoted more
to English than to imperial interests; and he preferred a Pope who
would be undividedly imperialist at heart. Pace was sent to join Clerk
at Rome in urging Wolsey’s suit, and they did their best; but English
influence at the Court of Rome was infinitesimal. In spite of
Campeggio’s flattering assurance that Wolsey’s name appeared in every
scrutiny, and that sometimes he had eight or nine votes, and Clerk’s
statement that he had nine at one time, twelve at another, and
nineteen at a
third,[437]
Wolsey’s name only appears in one of the
eleven scrutinies, and then he received but seven out of eighty-one
votes.[438]
The election was long and keenly contested. The conclave
commenced on the 28th of December, and it was not till the 9th of
January, 1522, that the cardinals, conscious of each other’s defects,
agreed to elect an absentee, about whom they knew little. Their choice
fell on Adrian, Cardinal of Tortosa; and it is significant of the
extent of Charles’s influence, that the new Pope had been his tutor,
and was proposed as a candidate by the imperial ambassador on the day
that the conclave
opened.[439]

Neither the expulsion of the French from Milan, nor the election of
Charles’s tutor as Pope, opened Wolsey’s eyes
(p. 156)
to the danger
of further increasing the Emperor’s
power.[440]
He seems rather to
have thrown himself into the not very chivalrous design of completing
the ruin of the weaker side, and picking up what he could from the
spoils. During the winter of 1521-22 he was busily preparing for war,
while endeavouring to delay the actual breach till his plans were
complete. Francis, convinced of England’s hostile intentions, let
Albany loose upon Scotland and refused to pay the pensions to Henry
and Wolsey. They made these grievances the excuse for a war on which
they had long been determined. In March Henry announced that he had
taken upon himself the protection of the Netherlands during Charles’s
impending visit to Spain. Francis asserted that this was a plain
declaration of war, and seized the English wine-ships at Bordeaux. But
he was determined not to take the formal offensive, and, in May,
Clarencieux herald proceeded to France to bid him
defiance.[441]
In
the following month Charles passed through England on his way to the
south, and fresh treaties were signed for the invasion of France, for
the marriage of Mary and for the extirpation of heresy. At
Windsor[442]
Wolsey constituted his legatine court to bind the
contracting parties by oaths enforced by ecclesiastical censures. He
arrogated to himself a function usually reserved for the Pope, and
undertook to arbitrate between Charles and Henry if disputes arose
about the observance
(p. 157)
of their engagements. But he obviously
found difficulty in raising either money or men; and one of the
suggestions at Windsor was that a “dissembled peace” or a two years’
truce should be made with France, to give England time for more
preparations for war.

Nothing came of this last nefarious suggestion. In July Surrey
captured and burnt
Morlaix;[443]
but, as he wrote from on board the
Mary Rose, Fitzwilliam’s ships were without flesh or fish, and
Surrey himself had only beer for twelve days. Want of victuals
prevented further naval successes, and, in September, Surrey was sent
into Artois, where the same lack of organisation was equally fatal. It
did not, however, prevent him from burning farms and towns wherever he
went; and his conduct evoked from the French commander a just rebuke
of his “foul
warfare”.[444]
Henry himself was responsible; for Wolsey
wrote on his behalf urging the destruction of Dourlens and the
adjacent
towns.[445]
If Henry really sought to make these territories
his own, it was an odd method of winning the affections and developing
the wealth of the subjects he hoped to acquire. Nothing was really
accomplished except devastation in France. Even this useless warfare
exhausted English energies, and left the Borders defenceless against
one of the largest armies ever collected in Scotland. Wolsey and Henry
were only saved, from what might have been a most serious invasion, by
Dacre’s dexterity and Albany’s cowardice. Dacre, the warden of the
marches, signed a truce without waiting for instructions, and before
it expired the Scots army disbanded. Henry and Wolsey might reprimand
Dacre for acting on his own responsibility, but
(p. 158)
they knew
well enough that Dacre had done them magnificent
service.[446]

The results of the war from the English point of view had as yet been
contemptible, but great things were hoped for the following year.
Bourbon, Constable of France, and the most powerful peer in the
kingdom, intent on the betrayal of Francis, was negotiating with Henry
and Charles the price of his
treason.[447]
The commons in France, worn
to misery by the taxes of Francis and the ravages of his enemies, were
eager for anything that might promise some alleviation of their lot.
They would even, it appears, welcome a change of dynasty; everywhere,
Henry was told, they cried “Vive le roi
d’Angleterre!”[448]
Never,
said Wolsey, would there be a better opportunity for recovering the
King’s right to the French crown; and Henry exclaimed that he trusted
to treat Francis as his father did Richard III. “I pray God,” wrote
Sir Thomas More to Wolsey, “if it be good for his grace and for this
realm, that then it may prove so, and else in the stead thereof, I
pray God send his grace an honourable and profitable
peace.”[449] He
could scarcely go further in hinting his preference for peace to the
fantastic design which now occupied the minds of his masters. Probably
his opinion of the war was not far from that of old Bishop Fox, who
declared: “I have determined, and, betwixt God and me, utterly
renounced the meddling with worldly matters, specially concerning war
or anything to it appertaining (whereof, for the many intolerable
enormities
(p. 159)
that I have seen ensue by the said war in time
past, I have no little remorse in my conscience), thinking that if I
did continual penance for it all the days of my life, though I should
live twenty years longer than I may do, I could not yet make
sufficient recompense therefor. And now, my good lord, to be called to
fortifications of towns and places of war, or to any matter concerning
the war, being of the age of seventy years and above, and looking
daily to die, the which if I did, being in any such meddling of the
war, I think I should die in
despair.”[450]
Protests like this and
hints like More’s were little likely to move the militant Cardinal,
who hoped to see the final ruin of France in 1523. Bourbon was to
raise the standard of revolt, Charles was to invade from Spain and
Suffolk from Calais. In Italy French influence seemed irretrievably
ruined. The Genoese revolution, planned before the war, was effected;
and the persuasions of Pace and the threats of Charles at last
detached Venice and Ferrara from the alliance of
France.[451]

The usual delays postponed Suffolk’s invasion till late in the year.
They were increased by the emptiness of Henry’s treasury. His father’s
hoard had melted away, and it was absolutely necessary to obtain
lavish supplies from Parliament. But Parliament proved ominously
intractable. Thomas Cromwell, now rising to notice, in a temperate
speech urged the folly of indulging in impracticable schemes of
foreign conquest, while Scotland remained a thorn in England’s
side.[452]
It was three months from the meeting of Parliament before
the subsidies were
(p. 160)
granted, and nearly the end of August
before Suffolk crossed to Calais with an army, “the largest which has
passed out of this realm for a hundred
years”.[453]
Henry and Suffolk
wanted it to besiege Boulogne, which might have been some tangible
result in English
hands.[454]
But the King was persuaded by Wolsey and
his imperial allies to forgo this scheme, and to order Suffolk to
march into the heart of France. Suffolk was not a great general, but
he conducted the invasion with no little skill, and desired to conduct
it with unwonted humanity. He wished to win the French by abstaining
from pillage and proclaiming liberty, but Henry thought only the hope
of plunder would keep the army
together.[455]
Waiting for the imperial
contingent under De Buren, Suffolk did not leave Calais till 19th
September. He advanced by Bray, Roye and Montdidier, capturing all the
towns that offered resistance. Early in November, he reached the Oise
at a point less than forty miles from the French
capital.[456]
But
Bourbon’s treason had been discovered; instead of joining Suffolk with
a large force, he was a fugitive from his country. Charles contented
himself with taking
Fuentarabia,[457]
and made no effort at invasion.
The imperial contingent with Suffolk’s army went home; winter set in
with unexampled severity, and Vendôme
advanced.[458]
The English were
compelled to retire; their retreat was effected without loss, and by
the middle of December the army was back at Calais. Suffolk is
represented as being in disgrace for this retreat, and Wolsey as
saving him from the
(p. 161)
effects of his
failure.[459]
But even
Wolsey can hardly have thought that an army of twenty-five thousand
men could maintain itself in the heart of France, throughout the
winter, without support and with unguarded communications. The Duke’s
had been the most successful invasion of France since the days of
Henry V. from a military point of view. That its results were negative
is due to the policy by which it was directed.

Meanwhile there was another papal election. Adrian, one of the most
honest and unpopular of Popes, died on 14th September, 1523, and by
order of the cardinals there was inscribed on his tomb: Hic jacet
Adrianus Sextus cui nihil in vita infelicius contigit quam quod
imperaret. With equal malice and keener wit the Romans erected to his
physician, Macerata, a statue with the title Liberatori
Patriæ.[460]
Wolsey was again a candidate. He told Henry he would rather continue
in his service than be ten
Popes.[461]
That did not prevent him
instructing Pace and Clerk to further his claims. They were to
represent to the cardinals Wolsey’s “great experience in the causes of
Christendom, his favour with the Emperor, the King, and other princes,
his anxiety for Christendom, his liberality, the great promotions to
be vacated by his election, his frank, pleasant and courteous
inclinations, his freedom from all ties of family or party, and the
hopes of a great expedition against the
infidel”.[462]
Charles was, as
usual, profuse in his promise of aid. He actually wrote a letter in
Wolsey’s favour; but he took the precaution to
(p. 162)
detain the
bearer in Spain till the election was
over.[463]
He had already
instructed his minister at Rome to procure the election of Cardinal de
Medici. That ambassador mocked at Wolsey’s hopes; “as if God,” he
wrote, “would perform a miracle every
day”.[464]
The Holy Spirit, by
which the cardinals always professed to be moved, was not likely to
inspire the election of another absentee after their experience of
Adrian. Wolsey had not the remotest chance, and his name does not
occur in a single scrutiny. After the longest conclave on record, the
imperial influence prevailed; on 18th November De Medici was
proclaimed Pope, and he chose as his title Clement
VII.[465]

Suffolk’s invasion was the last of England’s active participation in
the war. Exhausted by her efforts, discontented with the Emperor’s
failure to render assistance in the joint enterprise, or perceiving at
last that she had little to gain, and much to lose, from the overgrown
power of Charles, England, in 1524, abstained from action, and even
began to make overtures to Francis. Wolsey repaid Charles’s inactivity
of the previous year by standing idly by, while the imperial forces
with Bourbon’s contingent invaded Provence and laid siege to
Marseilles. But Francis still held command of the sea; the spirit of
his people rose with the danger; Marseilles made a stubborn and
successful defence; and, by October, the invading army was in headlong
retreat towards
Italy.[466]
Had Francis been content with defending
his kingdom, all
(p. 163)
might have been well; but ambition lured
him on to destruction. He thought he had passed the worst of the
trouble, and that the prize of Milan might yet be his. So, before the
imperialists were well out of France, he crossed the Alps and sat down
to besiege Pavia. It was brilliantly defended by Antonio de Leyva. In
November Francis’s ruin was thought to be certain; astrologers
predicted his death or
imprisonment.[467]
Slowly and surely Pescara,
the most consummate general of his age, was pressing north with
imperial troops to succour Pavia. Francis would not raise the siege.
On 24th February, 1525, he was attacked in front by Pescara and in the
rear by De Leyva. “The victory is complete,” wrote the Abbot of Najera
to Charles from the field of battle, “the King of France is made
prisoner…. The whole French army is annihilated…. To-day is feast
of the Apostle St. Mathias, on which, five and twenty years ago, your
Majesty is said to have been born. Five and twenty thousand times
thanks and praise to God for His mercy! Your Majesty is, from this
day, in a position to prescribe laws to Christians and Turks,
according to your
pleasure.”[468]

Such was the result of Wolsey’s policy since 1521, Francis a prisoner,
Charles a dictator, and Henry vainly hoping that he might be allowed
some share in the victor’s spoils. But what claim had he? By the most
extraordinary misfortune or fatuity, England had not merely helped
Charles to a threatening supremacy, but had
(p. 164)
retired from the
struggle just in time to deprive herself of all claim to benefit by
her mistaken policy. She had looked on while Bourbon invaded France,
fearing to aid lest Charles would reap all the fruits of success. She
had sent no force across the channel to threaten Francis’s rear. Not a
single French soldier had been diverted from attacking Charles in
Italy through England’s interference. One hundred thousand crowns had
been promised the imperial troops, but the money was not paid; and
secret negotiations had been going on with France. In spite of all,
Charles had won, and he was naturally not disposed to divide the
spoils. England’s policy since 1521 had been disastrous to herself, to
Wolsey, to the Papacy, and even to Christendom. For the falling out of
Christian princes seemed to the Turk to afford an excellent
opportunity for the faithful to come by his own. After an heroic
defence by the knights of St. John, Rhodes, the bulwark of
Christendom, had surrendered to Selim. Belgrade, the strongest citadel
in Eastern Europe, followed. In August, 1526, the King and the flower
of Hungarian nobility perished at the battle of Mohacz; and the
internecine strife of Christians seemed doomed to be sated only by
their common subjugation to the Turk.

Henry and Wolsey began to pay the price of their policy at home as
well as abroad. War was no less costly for being ineffective, and it
necessitated demands on the purses of Englishmen, to which they had
long been unused. In the autumn of 1522 Wolsey was compelled to have
recourse to a loan from both spiritualty and
temporalty.[469]
It seems
to have met with a response which,
(p. 165)
compared with later
receptions, may be described as almost cheerful. But the loan did not
go far, and before another six months had elapsed it was found
necessary to summon Parliament to make further
provision.[470]
The
Speaker was Sir Thomas More, who did all he could to secure a
favourable reception of Wolsey’s demands. An unwonted spirit of
independence animated the members; the debates were long and stormy;
and the Cardinal felt called upon to go down to the House of Commons,
and hector it in such fashion that even More was compelled to plead
its privileges. Eventually, some money was reluctantly granted; but it
too was soon swallowed up, and in 1525 Wolsey devised fresh
expedients. He was afraid to summon Parliament again, so he proposed
what he called an Amicable Grant. It was necessary, he said, for Henry
to invade France in person; if he went, he must go as a prince; and he
could not go as a prince without lavish supplies. So he required what
was practically a graduated income-tax. The Londoners resisted till
they were told that resistance might cost them their heads. In Suffolk
and elsewhere open insurrection broke out. It was then proposed to
withdraw the fixed ratio, and allow each individual to pay what he
chose as a benevolence. A common councillor of London promptly
retorted that benevolences were illegal by statute of Richard III.
Wolsey cared little for the constitution, and was astonished that any
one should quote the laws of a wicked usurper; but the common
councillor was a sound constitutionalist, if Wolsey was not. “An it
please your grace,” he replied, “although King Richard did evil, yet
in
(p. 166)
his time were many good acts made, not by him only, but
by the consent of the body of the whole realm, which is
Parliament.”[471]
There was no answer; the demand was withdrawn. Never
had Henry suffered such a rebuff, and he never suffered the like
again. Nor was this all; the whole of London, Wolsey is reported to
have said, were traitors to
Henry.[472]
Informations of “treasonable
words”—that ominous phrase—became
frequent.[473]
Here, indeed, was a
contrast to the exuberant loyalty of the early years of Henry’s reign.
The change may not have been entirely due to Wolsey, but he had been
minister, with a power which few have equalled, during the whole
period in which it was effected, and Henry may well have begun to
think that it was time for his removal.

Whether Wolsey was now anxious to repair his blunder by siding with
Francis against Charles, or to snatch some profit from the Emperor’s
victory by completing the ruin of France, the refusal of Englishmen to
find more money for the war left him no option but peace. In April,
1525, Tunstall and Sir Richard Wingfield were sent to Spain with
proposals for the exclusion of Francis and his children from the
French throne and the dismemberment of his
kingdom.[474]
It is
doubtful if Wolsey himself desired the fulfilment of so preposterous
and iniquitous a scheme. It is certain that Charles was in no mood to
abet it. He had no wish to extract profit for England out of the
abasement of Francis, to see Henry King of France, or lord of any
French provinces. He
(p. 167)
had no intention of even performing his
part of the Treaty of Windsor. He had pledged himself to marry the
Princess Mary, and the splendour of that match may have contributed to
Henry’s desire for an alliance with Charles. But another matrimonial
project offered the Emperor more substantial advantages. Ever since
1517 his Spanish subjects had been pressing him to marry the daughter
of Emmanuel, King of Portugal. The Portuguese royal family had claims
to the throne of Castile which would be quieted by Charles’s marriage
with a Portuguese princess. Her dowry of a million crowns was, also,
an argument not to be lightly disregarded in Charles’s financial
embarrassments; and in March, 1526, the Emperor’s wedding with
Isabella of Portugal was solemnised.

Wolsey, on his part, was secretly negotiating with Louise of Savoy
during her son’s imprisonment in Spain. In August, 1525, a treaty of
amity was signed, by which England gave up all its claims to French
territory in return for the promise of large sums of money to Henry
and his
minister.[475]
The impracticability of enforcing Henry’s
pretensions to the French crown or to French provinces, which had been
urged as excuses for squandering English blood and treasure, was
admitted, even when the French King was in prison and his kingdom
defenceless. But what good could the treaty do Henry or Francis?
Charles had complete control over his captive, and could dictate his
own terms. Neither the English nor the French King was in a position
to continue the war; and the English alliance with France could abate
no iota of the concessions which Charles extorted
(p. 168)
from
Francis in January, 1526, by the Treaty of
Madrid.[476]
Francis
surrendered Burgundy; gave up his claims to Milan, Genoa and Naples;
abandoned his allies, the King of Navarre, the Duke of Guelders and
Robert de la Marck; engaged to marry Charles’s sister Eleanor, the
widowed Queen of Portugal; and handed over his two sons to the Emperor
as hostages for the fulfilment of the treaty. But he had no intention
of keeping his promises. No sooner was he free than he protested that
the treaty had been extracted by force, and that his oath to keep it
was not binding. The Estates of France readily refused their assent,
and the Pope was, as usual, willing, for political reasons, to absolve
Francis from his oath. For the time being, consideration for the
safety of his sons and the hope of obtaining their release prevented
him from openly breaking with Charles, or listening to the proposals
for a marriage with the Princess Mary, held out as a bait by
Wolsey.[477]
The Cardinal’s object was merely to injure the Emperor as
much as he could without involving England in war; and by negotiations
for Mary’s marriage, first with Francis, and then with his second son,
the Duke of Orléans, he was endeavouring to draw England and France
into a closer alliance. For similar reasons he was extending his
patronage to the Holy League, formed by Clement VII. between the
princes of Italy to liberate that distressful country from the grip of
the Spanish forces.

The policy of Clement, of Venice, and of other Italian States had been
characterised by as much blindness as that of England. Almost without
exception they had united, in 1523, to expel the French from Italy.
The result
(p. 169)
was to destroy the balance of power south of the
Alps, and to deliver themselves over to a bondage more galling than
that from which they sought to escape. Clement himself had been
elected Pope by imperial influence, and the Duke of Sessa, Charles’s
representative in Rome, described him as entirely the Emperor’s
creature.[478]
He was, wrote Sessa, “very reserved, irresolute, and
decides few things himself. He loves money and prefers persons who
know where to find it to any other kind of men. He likes to give
himself the appearance of being independent, but the result shows that
he is generally governed by
others.”[479]
Clement, however, after his
election, tried to assume an attitude more becoming the head of
Christendom than slavish dependence on Charles. His love for the
Emperor, he told Charles, had not diminished, but his hatred for
others had
disappeared;[480]
and throughout 1524 he was seeking to
promote concord between Christian princes. His methods were
unfortunate; the failure of the imperial invasion of Provence and
Francis’s passage of the Alps, convinced the Pope that Charles’s star
was waning, and that of France was in the ascendant. “The Pope,” wrote
Sessa to Charles V., “is at the disposal of the
conqueror.”[481] So,
on 19th January, 1525, a Holy League between Clement and Francis was
publicly proclaimed at Rome, and joined by most of the Italian
States.[482]
It was almost the eve of Pavia.

Charles received the news of that victory with astonishing humility.
But he was not likely to forget that at the critical moment he had
been deserted by most of his Italian allies; and it was with fear and
trembling that
(p. 170)
the Venetian ambassador besought him to use
his victory with
moderation.[483]
Their conduct could hardly lead them
to expect much from the Emperor’s clemency. Distrust of his intentions
induced the Holy League to carry on desultory war with the imperial
troops; but mutual jealousies, the absence of effective aid from
England or France, and vacillation caused by the feeling that after
all it might be safer to accept the best terms they could obtain,
prevented the war from being waged with any effect. In September,
1526, Hugo de Moncada, the imperial commander, concerted with
Clement’s bitter foes, the Colonnas, a means of overawing the Pope. A
truce was concluded, wrote Moncada, “that the Pope, having laid down
his arms, may be taken
unawares”.[484]
On the 19th he marched on Rome.
Clement, taken unawares, fled to the castle of St. Angelo; his palace
was sacked, St. Peter’s rifled, and the host profaned. “Never,” says
Casale, “was so much cruelty and
sacrilege.”[485]

It was soon thrown into the shade by an outrage at which the whole
world stood aghast. Charles’s object was merely to render the Pope his
obedient slave; neither God nor man, said Moncada, could resist with
impunity the Emperor’s victorious
arms.[486]
But he had little control
over his own irresistible forces. With no enemy to check them, with no
pay to content them, the imperial troops were ravaging, pillaging,
sacking cities and churches throughout Northern Italy without let or
hindrance.
(p. 171)
At length a sudden frenzy seized them to march
upon Rome. Moncada had shown them the way, and on 6th May, 1527, the
Holy City was taken by storm. Bourbon was killed at the first assault;
and the richest city in Christendom was given over to a motley,
leaderless horde of German, Spanish and Italian soldiery. The Pope
again fled to the castle of St. Angelo; and for weeks Rome endured an
orgy of sacrilege, blasphemy, robbery, murder and lust, the horrors of
which no brush could depict nor tongue recite. “All the churches and
the monasteries,” says a cardinal who was present, “both of friars and
nuns, were sacked. Many friars were beheaded, even priests at the
altar; many old nuns beaten with sticks; many young ones violated,
robbed and made prisoners; all the vestments, chalices, silver, were
taken from the churches…. Cardinals, bishops, friars, priests, old
nuns, infants, pages and servants—the very poorest—were tormented
with unheard-of cruelties—the son in the presence of his father, the
babe in the sight of its mother. All the registers and documents of
the Camera Apostolica were sacked, torn in pieces, and partly
burnt.”[487]
“Having entered,” writes an imperialist to Charles, “our
men sacked the whole Borgo and killed almost every one they found….
All the monasteries were rifled, and the ladies who had taken refuge
in them carried off. Every person was compelled by torture to pay a
ransom…. The ornaments of all the churches were pillaged and the
relics and other things thrown into the sinks and cesspools. Even the
holy places were sacked. The Church of St. Peter and the papal palace,
from the basement to the top, were turned into stables for horses….
Every one
(p. 172)
considers that it has taken place by the just
judgment of God, because the Court of Rome was so ill-ruled…. We are
expecting to hear from your Majesty how the city is to be governed and
whether the Holy See is to be retained or not. Some are of opinion it
should not continue in Rome, lest the French King should make a
patriarch in his kingdom, and deny obedience to the said See, and the
King of England find all other Christian princes do the
same.”[488]

So low was brought the proud city of the Seven Hills, the holy place,
watered with the blood of the martyrs and hallowed by the steps of the
saints, the goal of the earthly pilgrim, the seat of the throne of the
Vicar of God. No Jew saw the abomination of desolation standing where
it ought not with keener anguish than the devout sons of the Church
heard of the desecration of Rome. If a Roman Catholic and an
imperialist could term it the just judgment of God, heretics and
schismatics, preparing to burst the bonds of Rome and “deny obedience
to the said See,” saw in it the fulfilment of the woes pronounced by
St. John the Divine on the Rome of Nero, and by Daniel the Prophet on
Belshazzar’s Babylon. Babylon the great was fallen, and become the
habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit; her ruler was
weighed in the balances and found wanting; his kingdom was divided and
given to kings and peoples who came, like the Medes and the Persians,
from the hardier realms of the North.

CHAPTER VII.
(p. 173)

THE ORIGIN OF THE DIVORCE.[489]

Matrimonial discords have, from the days of Helen of Troy, been the
fruitful source of public calamities; and one of the most decisive
events in English history, the breach with the Church of Rome, found
its occasion in the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. Its origin has
been traced to various circumstances. On one hand, it is attributed to
Henry’s passion for Anne Boleyn, on the other, to doubts of the
validity of Henry’s marriage, raised by the Bishop of Tarbes in 1527,
while negotiating a matrimonial alliance between the Princess Mary and
Francis I. These are the two most popular theories, and both are
demonstrably
false.[490]
Doubts of the legality of Henry’s marriage
had existed long before the Bishop of Tarbes paid his visit to
England, and even before Anne Boleyn was born. They were urged, not
only on the eve of the completion of the marriage, but when it was
first suggested. In 1503, when Henry VII. applied to Julius II. for a
dispensation to enable his second son to
(p. 174)
marry his brother’s
widow, the Pope replied that “the dispensation was a great matter; nor
did he well know, prima facie, if it were competent for the Pope to
dispense in such a
case”.[491]
He granted the dispensation, but the
doubts were not entirely removed. Catherine’s confessor instilled them
into her mind, and was recalled by Ferdinand on that account. The
Spanish King himself felt it necessary to dispel certain “scruples of
conscience” Henry might entertain as to the “sin” of marrying his
brother’s
widow.[492]
Warham and Fox debated the matter, and Warham
apparently opposed the
marriage.[493]
A general council had pronounced
against the Pope’s dispensing
power;[494]
and, though the Popes had,
in effect, established their superiority over general councils, those
who still maintained the contrary view can hardly have failed to doubt
the legality of Henry’s marriage.

So good a papalist as the young King, however, would hardly allow
theoretical doubts of the general powers of the Pope to outweigh the
practical advantages of a marriage in his own particular case; and it
is safe to assume that his confidence in its validity would have
remained unshaken, but for extraneous circumstances of a definite and
urgent nature. On the 31st of January, 1510, seven months after his
marriage with Catherine, she gave birth to her first child; it was a
daughter, and was
still-born.[495]
On
(p. 175)
the 27th of May
following she told her father that the event was considered in England
to be of evil omen, but that Henry took it cheerfully, and she thanked
God for having given her such a husband. “The King,” wrote Catherine’s
confessor, “adores her, and her highness him.” Less than eight months
later, on the 1st of January, 1511, she was delivered of her
first-born
son.[496]
A tourney was held to celebrate the joyous event,
and the heralds received a handsome largess at the christening. The
child was named Henry, styled Prince of Wales, and given a
serjeant-at-arms on the 14th, and a clerk of the signet on the 19th of
February. Three days later he was dead; he was buried at the cost of
some ten thousand pounds in Westminster Abbey. The rejoicings were
turned to grief, which, aggravated by successive disappointments, bore
with cumulative force on the mind of the King and his people. In
September, 1513, the Venetian ambassador announced the birth of
another
son,[497]
who was either still-born, or died immediately
afterwards. In June, 1514, there is again a reference to the
christening of the “King’s new
son,”[498]
but he, too, was no sooner
christened than dead.

Domestic griefs were now embittered by political resentments.
Ferdinand valued his daughter mainly as a political emissary; he had
formally accredited her as his ambassador at Henry’s Court, and she
naturally used her influence to maintain the political union between
her father and her husband. The arrangement had serious drawbacks;
when relations between sovereigns grew strained,
(p. 176)
their
ambassadors could be recalled, but Catherine had to stay. In 1514
Henry was boiling over with indignation at his double betrayal by the
Catholic king; and it is not surprising that he vented some of his
rage on the wife who was Ferdinand’s representative. He reproached
her, writes Peter Martyr from Ferdinand’s Court, with her father’s
ill-faith, and taunted her with his own conquests. To this brutality
Martyr attributes the premature birth of Catherine’s fourth son
towards the end of
1514.[499]
Henry, in fact, was preparing to cast
off, not merely the Spanish alliance, but his Spanish wife. He was
negotiating for a joint attack on Castile with Louis XII. and
threatening the divorce of
Catherine.[500]
“It is said,” writes a
Venetian from Rome in August, 1514, “that the King of England means to
repudiate his present wife, the daughter of the King of Spain and his
brother’s widow, because he is unable to have children by her, and
intends to marry a daughter of the French Duke of Bourbon…. He
intends to annul his own marriage, and will obtain what he wants from
the Pope as France did from Pope Julius
II.”[501]

But the death of Louis XII. (January, 1515) and the consequent
loosening of the Anglo-French alliance made Henry and Ferdinand again
political allies; while, as the year wore on, Catherine was known to
be once more pregnant, and Henry’s hopes of issue revived. This time
they were not disappointed; the Princess Mary was born on the 18th of
February,
1516.[502]
Ferdinand had died on the 23rd of January, but
the news was kept from Catherine,
(p. 177)
lest it might add to the
risks of her
confinement.[503]
The young princess seemed likely to
live, and Henry was delighted. When Giustinian, amid his
congratulations, said he would have been better pleased had it been a
son, the King replied: “We are both young; if it was a daughter this
time, by the grace of God the sons will
follow”.[504]
All thoughts of
a divorce passed away for the time, but the desired sons did not
arrive. In August, 1517, Catherine was reported to be again expecting
issue, but nothing more is heard of the matter, and it is probable
that about this time the Queen had various miscarriages. In July,
1518, Henry wrote to Wolsey from Woodstock that Catherine was once
more pregnant, and that he could not move the Court to London, as it
was one of the Queen’s “dangerous
times”.[505]
His precautions were
unavailing, and, on the 10th of November, his child arrived
still-born. Giustinian notes the great vexation with which the people
heard the news, and expresses the opinion that, had it occurred a
month or two earlier, the Princess Mary would not have been betrothed
to the French dauphin, “as the one fear of England was lest it should
pass into subjection to France through that
marriage”.[506]

The child was the last born of Catherine. For some years Henry went on
hoping against every probability that he might still have male issue
by his Queen; and in 1519 he undertook to lead a crusade against the
Turk in person if he should have an
heir.[507]
But physicians summoned
(p. 178)
from Spain were no more successful than their
English colleagues. By 1525 the last ray of hope had flickered out.
Catherine was then forty years old; and Henry at the age of
thirty-four, in the full vigour of youthful manhood, seemed doomed by
the irony of fate and by his union with Catherine to leave a disputed
inheritance. Never did England’s interests more imperatively demand a
secure and peaceful succession. Never before had there been such
mortality among the children of an English king; never before had an
English king married his brother’s widow. So striking a coincidence
could be only explained by the relation of cause and effect. Men who
saw the judgment of God in the sack of Rome, might surely discern in
the fatality that attended the children of Henry VIII. a fulfilment of
the doom of childlessness pronounced in the Book of the Law against
him who should marry his brother’s wife. “God,” wrote the French
ambassador in 1528, “has long ago Himself passed sentence on
it;”[508]
and there is no reason to doubt Henry’s assertion, that he had come to
regard the death of his children as a Divine judgment, and that he was
impelled to question his marriage by the dictates of conscience. The
“scruples of conscience,” which Henry VII. had urged as an excuse for
delaying the marriage, were merely a cloak for political reasons; but
scruples of conscience are dangerous playthings, and the pretence of
Henry VII. became, through the death of his children, a terrible
reality to Henry VIII.

Queen Catherine, too, had scruples of conscience about the marriage,
though of a different sort. When she first heard of Henry’s intention
to seek a divorce, she is reported to
(p. 179)
have said that “she
had not offended, but it was a judgment of God, for that her former
marriage was made in blood”; the price of it had been the head of the
innocent Earl of Warwick, demanded by Ferdinand of
Aragon.[509] Nor
was she alone in this feeling. “He had heard,” witnessed Buckingham’s
chancellor in 1521, “the Duke grudge that the Earl of Warwick was put
to death, and say that God would punish it, by not suffering the
King’s issue to prosper, as appeared by the death of his sons; and
that his daughters prosper not, and that he had no issue
male.”[510]

Conscience, however, often moves men in directions indicated by other
than conscientious motives, and, of the other motives which influenced
Henry’s mind, some were respectable and some the reverse. The most
legitimate was his desire to provide for the succession to the throne.
It was obvious to him and his council that, if he died with no
children but Mary, England ran the risk of being plunged into an
anarchy worse than that of the civil wars. “By English law,” wrote
Falier, the Venetian ambassador, in 1531, “females are excluded from
the throne;”[511]
that was not true, but it was undoubtedly a
widespread impression, based upon the past history of England. No
Queen-Regnant had asserted a right to the English throne but one, and
that one precedent provided the most effective argument for avoiding a
repetition of the experiment. Matilda was never crowned, though she
had the same claim to the throne as Mary, and
(p. 180)
her attempt to
enforce her title involved England in nineteen years of anarchy and
civil war. Stephen stood to Matilda in precisely the same relation as
James V. of Scotland stood to the Princess Mary; and in 1532, as soon
as he came of age, James was urged to style himself “Prince of
England” and Duke of York, in manifest derogation of Mary’s
title.[512]
At that time Charles V. was discussing alternative plans
for deposing Henry VIII. One was to set up James V., the other to
marry Mary to some great English noble and proclaim them King and
Queen;[513]
Mary by herself was thought to have no chance of success.
John of Gaunt had maintained in Parliament that the succession
descended only through
males;[514]
the Lancastrian case was that Henry
IV., the son of Edward III.’s fourth son, had a better title to the
throne than Philippa, the daughter of the third; an Act limiting the
succession to the male line was passed in
1406;[515]
and Henry VII.
himself only reigned through a tacit denial of the right of women to
sit on the English throne.

The objection to female sovereigns was grounded not so much on male
disbelief in their personal qualifications, as upon the inevitable
consequence of matrimonial and dynastic
problems.[516]
If the Princess Mary succeeded, was
(p. 181)
she to marry? If not, her death would
leave the kingdom no better provided with heirs than before; and in
her weak state of health, her death seemed no distant prospect. If, on
the other hand, she married, her husband must be either a subject or a
foreign prince. To marry a subject would at once create discords like
those from which the Wars of the Roses had sprung; to marry a foreign
prince was to threaten Englishmen, then more jealous than ever of
foreign influence, with the fear of alien domination. They had before
their eyes numerous instances in which matrimonial alliances had
involved the union of states so heterogeneous as Spain and the
Netherlands; and they had no mind to see England absorbed in some
continental empire. In the matrimonial schemes arranged for the
princess, it was generally stipulated that she should, in default of
male heirs, succeed to the throne of England; her succession was
obviously a matter of doubt, and it is quite certain that her marriage
in France or in Spain would have proved a bar in the way of her
succession to the English throne, or at least have given rise to
conflicting claims.

These rival pretensions began to be heard as soon as it became evident
that Henry VIII. would have no male heirs by Catherine of Aragon. In
1519, a year after the birth of the Queen’s last child, Giustinian
reported to the Venetian signiory on the various nobles who had hopes
of the crown. The Duke of Norfolk had expectations in right of his
wife, a daughter of Edward IV., and the Duke of Suffolk in right of
his Duchess, the sister of Henry VIII. But the Duke of Buckingham was
the most formidable: “It was thought that, were the King to die
without male heirs, that Duke might easily obtain the
(p. 182)
crown”.[517]
His claims had been canvassed in 1503, when the issue of
Henry VII. seemed likely to
fail,[518]
and now that the issue of Henry
VIII. was in even worse plight, Buckingham’s claims to the crown
became again a matter of comment. His hopes of the crown cost him his
head; he had always been discontented with Tudor rule, especially
under Wolsey; he allowed himself to be encouraged with hopes of
succeeding the King, and possibly spoke of asserting his claim in case
of Henry’s death. This was to touch Henry on his tenderest spot, and,
in 1521, the Duke was tried by his peers, found guilty of high
treason, and sent to the
block.[519]
In this, as in all the great
trials of Henry’s reign, and indeed in most state trials of all ages,
considerations of justice were subordinated to the real or supposed
dictates of political expediency. Buckingham was executed, not because
he was a criminal, but because he was, or might become, dangerous; his
crime was not treason, but descent from Edward III. Henry VIII., like
Henry VII., showed his grasp of the truth that nothing makes a
government so secure as the absence of all alternatives.

Buckingham’s execution is one of the symptoms that, as early as 1521,
the failure of his issue had made Henry nervous and susceptible about
the succession. Even in 1519,
(p. 183)
when Charles V.’s minister,
Chièvres, was proposing to marry his niece to the Earl of Devonshire,
a grandson of Edward IV., Henry was suspicious, and Wolsey inquired
whether Chièvres was “looking to any chance of the Earl’s succession
to the throne of
England.”[520]
If further proof were needed that
Henry’s anxiety about the succession was not, as has been represented,
a mere afterthought intended to justify his divorce from Catherine, it
might be found in the extraordinary measures taken with regard to his
one and only illegitimate son. The boy was born in 1519. His mother
was Elizabeth Blount, sister of Erasmus’s friend, Lord Mountjoy; and
she is noticed as taking part in the Court revels during the early
years of Henry’s
reign.[521]
Outwardly, at any rate, Henry’s Court was
long a model of decorum; there was no parade of vice as in the days of
Charles II., and the existence of this royal bastard was so
effectually concealed that no reference to him occurs in the
correspondence of the time until 1525, when it was thought expedient
to give him a position of public importance. The necessity of
providing some male successor to Henry was considered so urgent that,
two years before the divorce is said to have occurred to him, he and
his council were meditating a scheme for entailing the succession on
the King’s illegitimate son. In 1525 the child was created Duke of
Richmond and Somerset. These titles were significant; Earl of Richmond
had been Henry VII.’s title before he came to the throne; Duke of
Somerset had been that of his grandfather and of his youngest son.
Shortly afterwards the boy
(p. 184)
was made Lord High Admiral of
England, Lord Warden of the Marches, and Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland,[522]
the two latter being offices which Henry VIII. himself
had held in his early youth. In January, 1527, the Spanish ambassador
reported that there was a scheme on foot to make the Duke King of
Ireland;[523]
it was obviously a design to prepare the way for his
succession to the kingdom of England. The English envoys in Spain were
directed to tell the Emperor that Henry proposed to demand some noble
princess of near blood to the Emperor as a wife for the Duke of
Richmond. The Duke, they were to say, “is near of the King’s blood and
of excellent qualities, and is already furnished to keep the state of
a great prince, and yet may be easily, by the King’s means, exalted to
higher
things”.[524]
The lady suggested was Charles’s niece, a
daughter of the Queen of Portugal; she was already promised to the
Dauphin of France, but the envoys remarked that, if that match were
broken off, she might find “another dauphin” in the Duke of Richmond.
Another plan for settling the succession was that the Duke should, by
papal dispensation, marry his half-sister Mary! Cardinal Campeggio saw
no moral objection to this. “At first I myself,” he writes on his
arrival in England in October, 1528, “had thought of this as a means
of establishing the succession, but I do not believe that this design
would suffice to satisfy the King’s
desires.”[525]
The Pope was
equally willing
(p. 185)
to facilitate the scheme, on condition that
Henry abandoned his divorce from
Catherine.[526]
Possibly Henry saw
more objections than Pope or Cardinal to a marriage between brother
and sister. At all events Mary was soon betrothed to the French
prince, and the Emperor recorded his impression that the French
marriage was designed to remove the Princess from the Duke of
Richmond’s path to the
throne.[527]

The conception of this violent expedient is mainly of interest as
illustrating the supreme importance attached to the question of
providing for a male successor to Henry. He wanted an heir to the
throne, and he wanted a fresh wife for that reason. A mistress would
not satisfy him, because his children by a mistress would hardly
succeed without dispute to the throne, not because he laboured under
any moral scruples on the point. He had already had two mistresses,
Elizabeth Blount, the mother of the Duke of Richmond, and Anne’s
sister, Mary Boleyn. Possibly, even probably, there were other lapses
from conjugal fidelity, for, in 1533, the Duke of Norfolk told Chapuys
that Henry was always inclined to
amours;[528]
but none are capable of
definite proof, and if Henry had other illegitimate children besides
the Duke of Richmond it is difficult to understand why their existence
should have been so effectually concealed when such publicity was
given their brother. The King is said to have had ten mistresses in
1528, but the statement is based on a misrepresentation of the only
document adduced in its
support.[529]
(p. 186)
It is a list of New
Year’s
presents,[530]
which runs “To thirty-three noble ladies” such
and such gifts, then “to ten mistresses” other gifts; it is doubtful
if the word then bore its modern sinister signification; in this
particular instance it merely means “gentlewomen,” and differentiates
them from the noble ladies. Henry’s morals, indeed, compare not
unfavourably with those of other sovereigns. His standard was neither
higher nor lower than that of Charles V., who was at this time
negotiating a marriage between his natural daughter and the Pope’s
nephew; it was not lower than those of James II., of William III., or
of the first two Georges; it was infinitely higher than the standard
of Francis I., of Charles II., or even of Henry of Navarre and Louis
XIV.

The gross immorality so freely imputed to Henry seems to have as
little foundation as the theory that his sole object in seeking the
divorce from Catherine and separation from Rome was the gratification
of his passion for Anne Boleyn. If that had been the case, there would
be no adequate explanation of the persistence with which he pursued
the divorce. He was “studying the matter so diligently,” Campeggio
says, “that I believe in this case he knows more than a great
theologian and jurist”; he was so convinced of the justice of his
cause “that an angel descending from heaven would be unable to
persuade him
otherwise”.[531]
He sent embassy after embassy to Rome;
he risked the enmity of Catholic Europe; he defied the authority of
the vicar of Christ; and lavished vast sums to obtain verdicts in his
favour from most of the
(p. 187)
universities in Christendom. It is
not credible that all this energy was expended merely to satisfy a
sensual passion, which could be satisfied without a murmur from Pope
or Emperor, if he was content with Anne Boleyn as a mistress, and is
believed to have been already satisfied in 1529, four years before the
divorce was
obtained.[532]
So, too, the actual sentence of divorce in
1533 was precipitated not by Henry’s passion for Anne, but by the
desire that her child should be legitimate. She was pregnant before
Henry was married to her or divorced from Catherine. But, though the
representation of Henry’s passion for Anne Boleyn as the sole fons et
origo of the divorce is far from convincing, that passion introduced
various complications into the question; it was not merely an
additional incentive to Henry’s desires; it also brought Wolsey and
Henry into conflict; and the unpopularity of the divorce was increased
by the feeling that Henry was losing caste by seeking to marry a lady
of the rank and character of Anne Boleyn.

The Boleyns were wealthy merchants of London, of which one of them had
been Lord-Mayor, but Anne’s mother was of noble blood, being daughter
and co-heir of the Earl of
Ormonde,[533]
and it is a curious fact that
all of Henry’s wives could trace their descent from
Edward I.[534]
Anne’s
(p. 188)
age is uncertain, but she is generally believed to
have been born in
1507.[535]
Attempts have been made to date her
influence over the King by the royal favours bestowed on her father,
Sir Thomas, afterwards Viscount Rochford and Earl of Wiltshire, but,
as these favours flowed in a fairly regular stream from the beginning
of the reign, as Sir Thomas’s services were at least a colourable
excuse for them, and as his other daughter Mary was Henry’s mistress
before he fell in love with Anne, these grants are not a very
substantial ground upon which to build. Of Anne herself little is
known except that, about 1519, she was sent as maid of honour to the
French Queen, Claude; five years before, her sister Mary had
accompanied Mary Tudor in a similar capacity on her marriage with
Louis XII.[536]
In 1522, when war with France was on the eve of
breaking out, Anne was recalled to the English
Court,[537]
where she
took part in revels and love-intrigues. Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet,
although a married man, sued for her
favours;[538]
Henry, Lord Percy
made her more honest proposals, but was
(p. 189)
compelled to desist
by the King himself, who had arranged for her marriage with Piers
Butler, son of the Earl of Ormond, as a means to end the feud between
the Butler and the Boleyn families.

None of these projects advanced any farther, possibly because they
conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King
himself. As Wyatt complained in a
sonnet,[539]

There is written her fair neck round about
Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

But, for any definite documentary evidence to the contrary, it might
be urged that Henry’s passion for Anne was subsequent to the
commencement of his proceedings for a divorce from Catherine. Those
proceedings began at least as early as March, 1527, while the first
allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn occurs in
the instructions to Dr. William Knight, sent in the following autumn
to procure a dispensation for her marriage with
Henry.[540]
The King’s
famous love-letters, the earliest of which are conjecturally assigned
to July,
1527,[541]
are without date and with but slight internal
indications of the time at which they were written; they may be
earlier than 1527, they may be as late as the following winter. It is
unlikely that Henry
(p. 190)
would have sought for the Pope’s
dispensation to marry Anne until he was assured of her consent, of
which in some of the letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other
hand, it is difficult to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an
offer of marriage made by her sovereign. Her reluctance was to fill a
less honourable position, into which Henry was not so wicked as to
think of forcing her. “I trust,” he writes in one of his letters,
“your absence is not wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament
my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great
folly.”[542]
His love
for Anne Boleyn was certainly his “great folly,” the one overmastering
passion of his life. There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in
the letters themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year
been “wounded with the dart of love,” and is uncertain whether Anne
returns his affection. In others he bewails her briefest absence as
though it were an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to
Court; is torn with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts
her with the assurance that few women have had it, and sends her a
hart killed by his own hand, making the inevitable play on the word.
Later on, he alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the
shortness of a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over
the book he was writing in his own
defence[543]
and has a pain in his
head. The series ends with an announcement that he has been fitting up
apartments for her, and with congratulations to himself and to her
that the “well-wishing” Legate, Campeggio, who has
(p. 191)
been sent
from Rome to try the case, has told him he was not so “imperial” in
his sympathies as had been alleged.

The secret of her fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers.
“Madame Anne,” wrote a Venetian, “is not one of the handsomest women
in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long
neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but
the King’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and
beautiful”.[544]
She had probably learnt in France the art of using
her beautiful eyes to the best advantage; her hair, which was long and
black, she wore loose, and on her way to her coronation Cranmer
describes her as “sitting in her
hair”.[545]
Possibly this was one
of the French customs, which somewhat scandalised the staider ladies
of the English Court. She is said to have had a slight defect on one
of her nails, which she endeavoured to conceal behind her other
fingers.[546]
Of her mental accomplishments there is not much
evidence; she naturally, after some years’ residence at the Court of
France, spoke French, though she wrote it in an orthography that was
quite her own. Her devotion to the Gospel is the one great virtue with
which Foxe and other Elizabethans strove to invest the mother of the
Good Queen Bess. But it had no nobler foundation than the facts that
Anne’s position drove her into hostility to the Roman jurisdiction,
and that her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the
nobility and
(p. 192)
the gentry of the
time.[547]
Her place in
English history is due solely to the circumstance that she appealed to
the less refined part of Henry’s nature; she was pre-eminent neither
in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to
command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.

It is otherwise with her rival, Queen Catherine, the third of the
principal characters involved in the divorce. If Henry’s motives were
not so entirely bad as they have often been represented, neither they
nor Anne Boleyn’s can stand a moment’s comparison with the unsullied
purity of Catherine’s life or the lofty courage with which she
defended the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic
figure in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No
breath of scandal touched her fair name, or impugned her devotion to
Henry. If she had the misfortune to be identified with a particular
policy, the alliance with the House of Burgundy, the fault was not
hers; she had been married to Henry in consideration of the advantages
which that alliance was supposed to confer; and, if she used her
influence to further Spanish interest, it was a natural feeling as
near akin to virtue as to vice, and Carroz at least complained, in
1514, that she had completely identified herself with her husband and
her husband’s
subjects.[548] If
(p. 193)
her miscarriages and the
death of her children were a grief to Henry, the pain and the sorrow
were hers in far greater measure; if they had made her old and
deformed, as Francis brutally described her in
1519,[549]
the fact
must have been far more bitter to her than it was unpleasant to Henry.
There may have been some hardship to Henry in the circumstance that,
for political motives, he had been induced by his council to marry a
wife who was six years his senior; but to Catherine herself a divorce
was the height of injustice. The question was in fact one of justice
against a real or supposed political necessity, and in such cases
justice commonly goes to the wall. In politics, men seek to colour
with justice actions based upon considerations of expediency. They
first convince themselves, and then they endeavour with less success
to persuade mankind.

So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by
Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to
Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother’s wife was
sin. “The King,” he instructed his ambassador to tell Charles V. in
1533, “taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it,
but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right…. The
justice of our cause is so rooted in our breast that nothing can
remove it, and even the canons say that a man should rather endure all
the censures of the Church than offend his
conscience.”[550]
No man
was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set
(p. 194)
greater store on his own private judgment. To that extent he was a
Protestant; “though,” he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell the Lutheran
princes, “the law of every man’s conscience be but a private court,
yet it is the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice”. God
and his conscience, he told Chapuys in 1533, were on very good
terms.[551]
On another occasion he wrote to Charles Ubi Spiritus
Domini, ibi
libertas,[552]
with the obvious implication that he
possessed the spirit of the Lord, and therefore he might do as he
liked. To him, as to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and Henry’s
appeals to the Pope, to learned divines, to universities at home and
abroad, were not for his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions
to the profane herd, unskilled in royal learning and unblessed with a
kingly conscience. Against that conviction, so firmly rooted in the
royal breast, appeals to pity were vain, and attempts to shake it were
perilous. It was his conscience that made Henry so dangerous. Men are
tolerant of differences about things indifferent, but conscience makes
bigots of us all; theological hatreds are proverbially bitter, and
religious wars are cruel. Conscience made Sir Thomas More persecute,
and glory in the persecution of
heretics,[553]
and conscience earned
Mary her epithet “Bloody”. They were moved by conscientious belief in
the Catholic faith, Henry by conscientious belief in himself; and
conscientious scruples are none the less exigent for being reached by
crooked paths.

CHAPTER VIII.
(p. 195)

THE POPE’S DILEMMA.

In February, 1527, in pursuance of the alliance with France, which
Wolsey, recognising too late the fatal effects of the union with
Charles, was seeking to make the basis of English policy, a French
embassy arrived in England to conclude a marriage between Francis I.
and the Princess Mary. At its head was Gabriel de Grammont, Bishop of
Tarbes; and in the course of his negotiations he is alleged to have
first suggested those doubts of the validity of Henry’s marriage,
which ended in the divorce. The allegation was made by Wolsey three
months later, and from that time down to our own day it has done duty
with Henry’s apologists as a sufficient vindication of his conduct. It
is now denounced as an impudent fiction, mainly on the ground that no
hint of these doubts occurs in the extant records of the negotiations.
But unfortunately we have only one or two letters relating to this
diplomatic
mission.[554]
There exists,
(p. 196)
indeed, a detailed
narrative, drawn up some time afterwards by Claude Dodieu, the French
secretary; but the silence, on so confidential a matter, of a third
party who was not present when the doubts were presumably suggested,
proves little or nothing. Du Bellay, in 1528, reported to the French
Government Henry’s public assertion that Tarbes had mentioned these
doubts;[555]
the statement was not repudiated; Tarbes himself believed
in the validity of Henry’s case and was frequently employed in efforts
to win from the Pope an assent to Henry’s divorce. It is rather a
strong assumption to suppose in the entire absence of positive
evidence that Henry and Wolsey were deliberately lying. There is
nothing impossible in the supposition that some such doubts were
expressed; indeed, Francis I. had every reason to encourage doubts of
Henry’s marriage as a means of creating a breach between him and
Charles V. In return for Mary’s hand, Henry was endeavouring to obtain
various advantages from Francis in the way of pensions, tribute and
territory. Tarbes represented that the French King was so good a match
for the English princess, that there was little need for further
concession; to which Henry replied that Francis was no doubt an
excellent match for his daughter, but was he free to marry? His
precontract with Charles V.’s sister, Eleanor, was a complication
which seriously diminished the value of Francis’s offer; and the papal
dispensation, which he hoped
(p. 197)
to obtain, might not be
forthcoming or
valid.[556]
As a counter to this stroke, Tarbes may
well have hinted that the Princess Mary was not such a prize as Henry
made out. Was the dispensation for Henry’s own marriage beyond cavil?
Was Mary’s legitimacy beyond question? Was her succession to the
English throne, a prospect Henry dangled before the Frenchman’s eyes,
so secure? These questions were not very new, even at the time of
Tarbes’s mission. The divorce had been talked about in 1514, and now,
in 1527, the position of importance given to the Duke of Richmond was
a matter of public comment, and inevitably suggested doubts of Mary’s
succession. There is no documentary evidence that this argument was
ever employed, beyond the fact that, within three months of Tarbes’s
mission, both Henry and Wolsey asserted that the Bishop had suggested
doubts of the validity of Henry’s
marriage.[557]
Henry, however, does
not say that Tarbes first suggested the doubts, nor does Wolsey. The
Cardinal declares that the Bishop objected to the marriage with the
Princess Mary on the ground of these doubts; and some time later, when
Henry explained his position to the Lord-Mayor and aldermen of London,
he said, according to Du Bellay, that the scruple of conscience, which
he had long entertained, had terribly increased upon him since
Tarbes had spoken of
it.[558]

However
(p. 198)
that may be, before the Bishop’s negotiations were
completed the first steps had been taken towards the divorce, or, as
Wolsey and Henry pretended, towards satisfying the King’s scruples as
to the validity of his marriage. Early in April, 1527, Dr. Richard
Wolman was sent down to Winchester to examine old Bishop Fox on the
subject.[559]
The greatest secrecy was observed and none of the
Bishop’s councillors were allowed to be present. Other evidence was
doubtless collected from various sources, and, on 17th May, a week
after Tarbes’s departure, Wolsey summoned Henry to appear before him
to explain his conduct in living with his brother’s
widow.[560]
Wolman
was appointed promoter of the suit; Henry
(p. 199)
put in a
justification, and, on 31st May, Wolman replied. With that the
proceedings terminated. In instituting them Henry was following a
precedent set by his brother-in-law, the Duke of
Suffolk.[561]
In very
early days that nobleman had contracted to marry Sir Anthony Browne’s
daughter, but for some reason the match was broken off, and he sought
the hand of one Margaret Mortimer, to whom he was related in the
second and third degrees of consanguinity; he obtained a dispensation,
completed the marriage, and cohabited with Margaret Mortimer. But,
like Henry VIII., his conscience or other considerations moved him to
regard his marriage as sin, and the dispensation as invalid. He caused
a declaration to that effect to be made by “the official of the
Archdeacon of London, to whom the cognisance of such causes of old
belongs,” married Ann Browne, and, after her death, Henry’s sister
Mary. A marriage, the validity of which depended, like Henry’s, upon a
papal dispensation, and which, like Henry’s, had been consummated, was
declared null and void on exactly the same grounds as those upon which
Henry himself sought a divorce, namely, the invalidity of the previous
dispensation. On 12th May, 1528, Clement VII. issued a bull confirming
Suffolk’s divorce and pronouncing ecclesiastical censures on all who
called in question the Duke’s subsequent marriages. That is precisely
the course Henry wished to be followed. Wolsey was to declare the
marriage invalid on the ground of the insufficiency of the papal
dispensation; Henry might then marry whom he pleased; the Pope was to
confirm the sentence, and censure all who should dispute the second
marriage or the legitimacy of its possible issue.

Another
(p. 200)
precedent was also forced on Henry’s mind. On 11th
March, 1527, two months before Wolsey opened his court, a divorce was
granted at Rome to Henry’s sister Margaret, Queen of
Scotland.[562]
Her pretexts were infinitely more flimsy than Henry’s own. She alleged
a precontract on the part of her husband, Angus, which was never
proved. She professed to believe that James IV. had survived Flodden
three years, and was alive when she married Angus. Angus had been
unfaithful, but that was no ground for divorce by canon law; and she
herself was living in shameless adultery with Henry Stewart, who had
also procured a divorce to be free to marry his Queen. No objection
was found at Rome to either of these divorces; but neither Angus nor
Margaret Mortimer had an Emperor for a nephew; no imperial armies
would march on Rome to vindicate the validity of their marriages, and
Clement could issue his bulls without any fear that their justice
would be challenged by the arms of powerful princes. Not so with
Henry; while the secret proceedings before Wolsey were in progress,
the world was shocked by the sack of Rome, and Clement was a prisoner
in the hands of the Emperor’s troops. There was no hope that a Pope in
such a plight would confirm a sentence to the detriment of his
master’s aunt. “If the Pope,” wrote Wolsey to Henry on receipt of the
news, “be slain or taken, it will hinder the King’s affairs not a
little, which have hitherto been going on so
well.”[563]
A little
later he declared that, if Catherine repudiated his authority, it
would be necessary to have the assent of the Pope or of the cardinals
to the divorce. To obtain the former the Pope must be liberated; to
secure
(p. 201)
the latter the cardinals must be assembled in
France.[564]

To effect the Pope’s liberation, or rather to call an assembly of
cardinals in France during Clement’s captivity, was the real object of
the mission to France, on which Wolsey started in July. Such a body,
acting under Wolsey’s presidency and in the territories of the French
King, was as likely to favour an attack upon the Emperor’s aunt as the
Pope in the hands of Charles’s armies was certain to oppose it. Wolsey
went in unparalleled splendour, not as Henry’s ambassador but as his
lieutenant; and projects for his own advancement were, as usual, part
of the programme. Louise of Savoy, the queen-mother of France,
suggested to him that all Christian princes should repudiate the
Pope’s authority so long as he remained in captivity, and the Cardinal
replied that, had the overture not been made by her, it would have
been started by himself and by
Henry.[565]
It was rumoured in Spain
that Wolsey “had gone into France to separate the Church of England
and of France from the Roman, not merely during the captivity of the
Pope and to effect his liberation, but for a perpetual
division,”[566]
and that Francis was offering Wolsey the patriarchate of the two
schismatic churches. To win over the Cardinal to the interest of
Spain, it was even suggested that Charles should depose Clement and
offer the Papacy to
Wolsey.[567]
The project of a schism was not found
feasible; the cardinals at Rome were too numerous, and Wolsey only
succeeded in gaining four, three French and one Italian, to join him
in signing a protest repudiating Clement’s authority
(p. 202)
so long
as he remained in the Emperor’s power. It was necessary to fall back
after all on the Pope for assent to Henry’s divorce, and the news that
Charles had already got wind of the proceedings against Catherine made
it advisable that no time should be lost. The Emperor, indeed, had
long been aware of Henry’s intentions; every care had been taken to
prevent communication between Catherine and her nephew, and a plot had
been laid to kidnap a messenger she was sending in August to convey
her appeal for protection. All was in vain, for the very day after
Wolsey’s court had opened in May, Mendoza wrote to Charles that Wolsey
“as the finishing stroke to all his iniquities, had been scheming to
bring about the Queen’s divorce”; and on the 29th of July, some days
before Wolsey had any suspicion that a hint was abroad, Charles
informed Mendoza that he had despatched Cardinal Quignon to Rome, to
act on the Queen’s behalf and to persuade Clement to revoke Wolsey’s
legatine
powers.[568]

In ignorance of all this, Wolsey urged Henry to send Ghinucci, the
Bishop of Worcester, and others to Rome with certain demands, among
which was a request for Clement’s assent to the abortive proposal for
a council in
France.[569]
But now a divergence became apparent between
the policy of Wolsey and that of his king. Both were working for a
divorce, but Wolsey wanted Henry to marry as his second wife Renée,
the daughter of Louis XII., and thus bind more closely the two kings,
upon whose union the Cardinal’s personal and political schemes were
now exclusively based. Henry, however, had determined that
(p. 203)
his second wife was to be Anne Boleyn, and of this determination
Wolsey was as yet uninformed. The Cardinal had good reason to dread
that lady’s ascendancy over Henry’s mind; for she was the hope and the
tool of the anti-clerical party, which had hitherto been kept in check
by Wolsey’s supremacy. The Duke of Norfolk was her uncle, and he was
hostile to Wolsey for both private and public reasons; her father,
Viscount Rochford, her cousins, Sir William Fitzwilliam and Sir
Francis Brian, and many more distant connections, were anxious at the
first opportunity to lead an attack on the Church and Cardinal. Before
the divorce case began Wolsey’s position had grown precarious; taxes
at home and failure abroad had turned the loyalty of the people to
sullen discontent, and Wolsey was mainly responsible. “Disaffection to
the King,” wrote Mendoza in March, 1527, “and hatred of the Legate are
visible everywhere…. The King would soon be obliged to change his
councillors, were only a leader to present himself and head the
malcontents;” and in May he reported a general rumour to the effect
that Henry intended to relieve the Legate of his share in the
administration.[570]
The Cardinal had incurred the dislike of nearly
every section of the community; the King was his sole support and the
King was beginning to waver. In May there were high words between
Wolsey and Norfolk in Henry’s
presence;[571]
in July King and Cardinal
were quarrelling over ecclesiastical patronage at
Calais,[572]
and,
long before the failure of the
(p. 204)
divorce suit, there were
other indications that Henry and his minister had ceased to work
together in harmony.

It is, indeed, quite a mistake to represent Wolsey’s failure to obtain
a sentence in Henry’s favour as the sole or main cause of his fall.
Had he succeeded, he might have deferred for a time his otherwise
unavoidable ruin, but it was his last and only chance. He was driven
to playing a desperate game, in which the dice were loaded against
him. If his plan failed, he told Clement over and over again, it would
mean for him irretrievable ruin, and in his fall he would drag down
the Church. If it succeeded, he would be hardly more secure, for
success meant the predominance of Anne Boleyn and of her
anti-ecclesiastical kin. Under the circumstances, it is possible to
attach too much weight to the opinion of the French and Spanish
ambassadors, and of Charles V. himself, that Wolsey suggested the
divorce as the means of breaking for ever the alliance between England
and the House of Burgundy, and substituting for it a union with
France.[573]
The divorce fitted in so well with Wolsey’s French
policy, that the suspicion was natural; but the same observers also
recorded the impression that Wolsey was secretly opposing the divorce
from fear of the ascendancy of Anne
Boleyn.[574]
That suspicion had
been brought to Henry’s mind as early as June, 1527. It was probably
due to the facts that Wolsey was not blinded by passion, as Henry was,
to the difficulties in the way, and that it was he who persuaded Henry
to have recourse to the Pope in the first
instance,[575]
when the King
(p. 205)
desired to follow Suffolk’s precedent, obtain a
sentence in England, marry again, and trust to the Pope to confirm his
proceedings.

It is not, however, impossible to trace Wolsey’s real designs behind
these conflicting reports. He knew that Henry was determined to have a
divorce and that this was one of those occasions upon which “he would
be obeyed, whosoever spoke to the contrary”. As minister he must
therefore either resign—a difficult thing in the sixteenth
century—or carry out the King’s policy. For his own part he had no
objection to the divorce in itself; he was no more touched by the
pathos of Catherine’s fate than was her nephew Charles V., he wished
to see the succession strengthened, he thought that he might restore
his tottering influence by obtaining gratification for the King, and
he was straining every nerve to weaken Charles V., either because the
Emperor’s power was really too great, or out of revenge for his
betrayal over the papal election. But he was strenuously hostile to
Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn for two excellent reasons: firstly
she and her kin belonged to the anti-ecclesiastical party which Wolsey
had dreaded since 1515, and secondly he desired Henry to marry the
French Princess Renée in order to strengthen his anti-imperial policy.
Further, he was anxious that the divorce problem should be solved by
means of the Papacy, because its solution by merely national action
would create a breach between England and Rome, would ruin Wolsey’s
chances of election as Pope, would threaten his ecclesiastical
supremacy in England,
(p. 206)
which was merely a legatine authority
dependent on the
Pope,[576]
and would throw Clement into the arms of
Charles V., whereas Wolsey desired him to be an effective member of
the anti-imperial alliance. Thus Wolsey was prepared to go part of the
way with Henry VIII., but he clearly saw the point at which their
paths would diverge; and his efforts on Henry’s behalf were hampered
by his endeavours to keep the King on the track which he had marked
out.

Henry’s suspicions, and his knowledge that Wolsey would be hostile to
his marriage with Anne Boleyn, induced him to act for the time
independently of the Cardinal; and, while Wolsey was in France hinting
at a marriage between Henry and Renée, the King himself was secretly
endeavouring to remove the obstacles to his union with Anne Boleyn.
Instead of adopting Wolsey’s suggestion that Ghinucci should be sent
to Rome as an Italian versed in the ways of the Papal Curia, he
despatched his secretary, Dr. William Knight, with two extraordinary
commissions, the second of which he thought would not be revealed “for
any craft the Cardinal or any other can
find”.[577]
The first was to
obtain from the Pope a dispensation to marry a second wife, without
being divorced from Catherine, the issue from both marriages to be
legitimate. This “licence to commit bigamy” has naturally been the
subject of much righteous indignation.
(p. 207)
But marriage-laws
were lax in those days, when Popes could play fast and loose with them
for political purposes; and, besides the “great reasons and
precedents, especially in the Old Testament,” to which Henry
referred,[578]
he might have produced a precedent more pertinent, more
recent, and better calculated to appeal to Clement VII. In 1521
Charles V.’s Spanish council drew up a memorial on the subject of his
marriage, in which they pointed out that his ancestor, Henry IV. of
Castile, had, in 1437, married Dona Blanca, by whom he had no
children; and that the Pope thereupon granted him a dispensation to
marry a second wife on condition that, if within a fixed time he had
no issue by her, he should return to his
first.[579]
A licence for
bigamy, modelled after this precedent, would have suited Henry
admirably, but apparently he was unaware of this useful example, and
was induced to countermand Knight’s commission before it had been
communicated to Clement. The demand would not, however, have shocked
the Pope so much as his modern defenders, for on 18th September, 1530,
Casale writes to Henry: “A few days since the Pope secretly proposed
to me that your Majesty might be allowed two wives. I told him I could
not undertake to make any such proposition, because I did not know
whether it would satisfy your Majesty’s conscience. I made this answer
because I know that the Imperialists have this in view, and are urging
it; but why, I know
not.”[580]
Ghinucci and Benet were equally
cautious, and thought the Pope’s suggestion was only a ruse; whether
a
(p. 208)
ruse or not, it is a curious illustration of the moral
influence Popes were then likely to exert on their flock.

The second commission, with which Knight was entrusted, was hardly
less strange than the first. By his illicit relations with Mary
Boleyn, Henry had already contracted affinity in the first degree with
her sister Anne, in fact precisely the same affinity (except that it
was illicit) as that which Catherine was alleged to have contracted
with him before their marriage. The inconsistency of Henry’s conduct,
in seeking to remove by the same method from his second marriage the
disability which was held to invalidate his first, helps us to define
the precise position which Henry took up and the nature of his
peculiar conscience. Obviously he did not at this stage deny the
Pope’s dispensing power; for he was invoking its aid to enable him to
marry Anne Boleyn. He asserted, and he denied, no principle whatever,
though it must be remembered that his own dispensation was an almost,
if not quite, unprecedented stretch of papal power. To dispense with
the “divine” law against marrying the brother’s wife, and to dispense
with the merely canonical obstacle to his marriage with Anne arising
out of his relations with Mary Boleyn, were very different matters;
and in this light the breach between England and Rome might be
represented as caused by a novel extension of papal claims. Henry,
however, was a casuist concerned exclusively with his own case. He
maintained merely that the particular dispensation, granted for his
marriage with Catherine, was null and void. As a concession to others,
he condescended to give a number of reasons, none of them affecting
any principle, but only the legal technicalities of the case—the
causes
(p. 209)
for which the dispensation was granted, such as his
own desire, and the political necessity for the marriage were
fictitious; he had himself protested against the marriage, and so
forth. For himself, his own conviction was ample sanction; he knew he
was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but
one, and that was a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The
capacity for convincing himself of his own righteousness is the most
effective weapon in the egotist’s armoury, and Henry’s egotism touched
the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might
think of the maze of apparent inconsistencies in which he was
involved. In 1528 he was in some fear of death from the plague; fear
of death is fatal to the peace of a guilty conscience, and it might
well have made Henry pause in his pursuit after the divorce and Anne
Boleyn. But Henry never wavered; he went on in serene assurance,
writing his love letters to Anne, as a conscientiously unmarried man
might do, making his
will,[581]
“confessing every day and receiving
his Maker at every
feast,”[582]
paying great attention to the morals
of monasteries, and to charges of malversation against Wolsey, and
severely lecturing his sister Margaret on the sinfulness of her
life.[583]
He hopes she will turn “to God’s word, the vively doctrine
of Jesu Christ, the only ground of salvation—1 Cor. 3, etc.”; he
reminds her of “the divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony first
instituted in Paradise,” and urges her to avoid “the inevitable
(p. 210)
damnation threatened against advoutrers”. Henry’s conscience was
convenient and skilful. He believed in the “ordinance of inseparable
matrimony,” so, when he wished to divorce a wife, his conscience
warned him that he had never really been married to her. Hence his
nullity suits with Catherine of Aragon, with Anne Boleyn and with Anne
of Cleves. Moreover, if he had never been married to Catherine, his
relations with Mary Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount were obviously not
adultery, and he was free to denounce that sin in Margaret with a
clear conscience.