Henry VIII Part 29

[Footnote 933: _L. and P._, viii., 52; Rymer, xiv., 549.]

[Footnote 934: The general idea that Fisher and More were executed for refusing to take an oath prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical officers. The Act under which they were executed was 26 Henry VIII., c. 13, and the common mistake arises from a confusion between the oath to the succession and the oath of supremacy.]

[Footnote 935: _L. and P._, viii., 876.]

[Footnote 936: _L. and P._, iv., 6199; vi., 1164, 1249. He told Chapuys that if Charles invaded England he would be doing "a work as agreeable to G.o.d as going against the Turk," and suggested that the Emperor should make use of Reginald Pole "to whom, according to many, the kingdom would belong"

(Chapuys to Charles, 27th September, 1533). Again, says Chapuys, "the holy Bishop of Rochester would like you to take active measures immediately, as I wrote in my last; which advice he has sent to me again lately to repeat" (10th October, 1533). Canon Whitney, in criticising Froude (_Engl. Hist. Rev._, xii., 353), a.s.serts that "nothing Chapuys says justifies the charge against Fisher!"]

[Footnote 937: This statement has been denounced as "astounding" in a Roman Catholic periodical; yet if More believed individual conscience (_i.e._, private judgment) to be superior to the voice of the Church, how did he differ from a Protestant?

The statement in the text is merely a paraphrase of More's own, where he says that men are "not bound on pain of G.o.d's displeasure to change their conscience for any particular law made anywhere _except by a general council or a general faith growing by the working of G.o.d universally through all Christian nations_" (More's _English Works_, p.

1434; _L. and P._, vii., 432).]

[Footnote 938: [Greek: Ou gar ti moi Zeus en ho keruxas tade oud he xunoikos ton kato theon Dike.]

Sophocles, _Antigone_, 450.]

It was the personal eminence of the victims rather than the merits of their case that made Europe thrill with horror at the news of their death; for thousands of others were sacrificing their lives in a similar cause in most of the countries of Christendom. For the first and last time in English history a cardinal's head had rolled from an English scaffold; and Paul III. made an effort to bring into play the artillery of his temporal powers. As supreme lord over all the princes of the earth, he arrogated to himself the right to deprive Henry VIII.

of his kingdom; and he sent couriers to the various courts to seek their co-operation in executing his judgment. But the weapons of Innocent III. were rusty with age. Francis denounced the Pope's claim as a most impudent attack on monarchical dignity; and Charles was engaged in the conquest of Tunis. Thus Henry was able to take a high tone in reply to the remonstrances addressed to him, and to proceed undisturbed with the work of enforcing his royal supremacy. The autumn was occupied mainly by a visitation of the monasteries and of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others were deposed from the seat of authority they had held for so many centuries, and efforts were made to subst.i.tute studies like that of the civil law, more in harmony with the King's doctrine and with his views of royal authority.

The more boldly Henry defied the Fates, the more he was favoured by Fortune. "Besides his trust in his subjects," wrote Chapuys in (p. 335) 1534, "he has great hope in the Queen's death;"[939] and the year 1536 was but eight days old when the unhappy Catherine was released from her trials, resolutely refusing to the last to acknowledge in any way the invalidity of her marriage with Henry. She had derived some comfort from the papal sentence in her favour, but that was not calculated to soften the harshness with which she was treated. Her pious soul, too, was troubled with the thought that she had been the occasion, innocent though she was, of the heresies that had arisen in England, and of the enormities which had been practised against the Church. Her last days were cheered by a visit from Chapuys,[940] who went down to Kimbolton on New Year's Day and stayed until the 5th of January, when the Queen seemed well on the road to recovery. Three days later she pa.s.sed away, and on the 29th she was buried with the state of a princess dowager in the church of the Benedictine abbey at Peterborough. Her physician told Chapuys that he suspected poison, but the symptoms are now declared, on high medical authority, to have been those of cancer of the heart.[941] The suspicion was the natural result of the circ.u.mstance that her death relieved the King of a pressing anxiety. "G.o.d be praised!" he exclaimed, "we are free from all suspicion of war;"[942] and on the following day he proclaimed his joy by appearing at a ball, clad in yellow from head to foot.[943] Every inch a King, Henry VIII. never attained to the stature of a gentleman, but even Bishop Gardiner wrote that by Queen Catherine's death (p. 336) "G.o.d had given sentence" in the divorce suit between her and the King.[944]

[Footnote 939: _L. and P._, vii., 83.]

[Footnote 940: _Ibid._, x., 28, 59, 60, 141.]

[Footnote 941: Dr. Norman Moore in _Athenaeum_, 1885, i., 152, 215, 281.]

[Footnote 942: _L. and P._, x., 51.]

[Footnote 943: _Ibid._ Hall only tells his readers that Anne Boleyn wore yellow for the mourning (_Chronicle_, p. 818).]

[Footnote 944: _L. and P._, x., 256.]

A week later, the Reformation Parliament met for its seventh and last session. It sat from 4th February to 14th April, and in those ten weeks succeeded in pa.s.sing no fewer than sixty-two Acts. Some were local and some were private, but the residue contained not a few of public importance. The fact that the King obtained at last his Statute of Uses[945] may indicate that Henry's skill and success had so impressed Parliament, that it was more willing to acquiesce in his demands than it had been in its earlier sessions. But, if the drafts in the Record Office are to be taken as indicating the proposals of Government, and the Acts themselves are those proposals as modified in one or other House, Parliament must have been able to enforce views of its own to a certain extent; for those drafts differ materially from the Acts as finally pa.s.sed.[946] Not a few of the bills were welcome, if unusual, concessions to the clergy. They were relieved from paying tenths in the year they paid their first-fruits. The payment of t.i.thes, possibly rendered doubtful in the wreck of canon law, was enjoined by Act of Parliament. An attempt was made to deal with the poor, and another, if not to check enclosures, at least to extract some profit for the King from the process. It was made high treason to counterfeit the King's sign-manual, privy signet, or privy seal; and Henry was empowered by Parliament, as he had before been by (p. 337) Convocation, to appoint a commission to reform the canon law. But the chief acts of the session were for the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and for the erection of a Court of Augmentations in order to deal with the revenues which were thus to accrue to the King.

[Footnote 945: This Act has generally been considered a failure, but recent research does not confirm this view (see Joshua Williams, _Principles of the Law of Real Property_, 18th ed., 1896).]

[Footnote 946: _L. and P._, x., 246.]

The way for this great revolution had been carefully prepared during the previous autumn and winter. In virtue of his new and effective supremacy, Henry had ordered a general visitation of the monasteries throughout the greater part of the kingdom; and the reports of these visitors were made the basis of parliamentary action. On the face of them they represent a condition of human depravity which has rarely been equalled;[947] and the extent to which those reports are worthy of credit will always remain a point of contention. The visitors themselves were men of doubtful character; indeed, respectable men could hardly have been persuaded to do the work. Their methods were certainly harsh; the object of their mission was to get up a case for the Crown, and they probably used every means in their power to induce the monks and the nuns to incriminate themselves. Perhaps, too, an entirely false impression may be created by the fact that in most cases only the guilty are mentioned; the innocent are often pa.s.sed over in silence, and the proportion between the two is not recorded.

Some of the terms employed in the reports are also open to dispute; it is possible that in many instances the stigma of unchast.i.ty (p. 338) attached to a nun merely meant that she had been unchaste before entering religion,[948] and it is known that nunneries were considered the proper resort for ladies who had not been careful enough of their honour.

[Footnote 947: See the doc.u.ments in _L. and P._, vols. ix., x. The most elaborate criticism of the Dissolution is contained in Gasquet's _Henry VIII.

and the Monasteries_, 2 vols., 4th ed. 1893; some additional details and an excellent monastic map will be found in Gairdner's _Church History_, 1902.]

[Footnote 948: "Religion" of course in the middle ages and sixteenth century was a term almost exclusively applied to the monastic system, and the most ludicrous mistakes are often made from ignorance of this fact; "religiosi" are sharply distinguished from "clerici".]

On the other hand, the lax state of monastic morality does not depend only upon the visitors' reports; apart from satires like those of Skelton, from ballads and from other mirrors of popular opinion or prejudice, the correspondence of Henry VIII.'s reign is, from its commencement, full of references, by bishops and other unimpeachable witnesses, to the necessity of drastic reform. In 1516, for instance, Bishop West of Ely visited that house, and found such disorder that he declared its continuance would have been impossible but for his visitation.[949] In 1518 the Italian Bishop of Worcester writes from Rome that he had often been struck by the necessity of reforming the monasteries.[950] In 1521 Henry VIII., then at the height of his zeal for the Church, thanks the Bishop of Salisbury for dissolving the nunnery of Bromehall because of the "enormities" practised there.[951]

Wolsey felt that the time for reform had pa.s.sed, and began the process of suppression, with a view to increasing the number of cathedrals and devoting other proceeds to educational endowments. Friar Peto, afterwards a cardinal, who had fled abroad to escape Henry's anger for his bold denunciation of the divorce, and who had no possible (p. 339) motive for cloaking his conscientious opinion, admitted that there were grave abuses, and approved of the dissolution of monasteries, if their endowments were used for proper ends.[952] There is no need to multiply instances, because a commission of cardinals, appointed by Paul III. himself, reported in 1537 that scandals were frequent in religious houses.[953] The reports of the visitors, too, can hardly be entirely false, though they may not be entirely true. The charges they make are not vague, but very precise. They specify names of the offenders, and the nature of their offences; and an air of verisimilitude, if nothing more, is imparted to the condemnations they p.r.o.nounce against the many, by the commendations they bestow on the few.[954]

[Footnote 949: _L. and P._, ii., 1733.]

[Footnote 950: _Ibid._, ii., 4399.]

[Footnote 951: _Ibid._, iii., 1863; see also iii., 77, 533, 567, 569, 600, 693, 1690; iv. 4900.]

[Footnote 952: _D.N.B._, xlv., 89. Chapuys had stated in 1532 that the Cistercian monasteries were greatly in need of dissolution (_L. and P._, iii., 361).]

[Footnote 953: _Cambridge Modern History_, ii., 643.]

[Footnote 954: Nor, of course, were the symptoms peculiar to England; it is absurd to attribute the dissolution of the monasteries solely to Henry VIII. and Cromwell, because monasteries were dissolved in many countries of Europe, Catholic as well as Protestant. So, too, the charges are not naturally incredible, because the kind of vice alleged against the monks has unfortunately been far from unknown wherever and whenever numbers of men, young or middle-aged, have lived together in enforced celibacy.]

Probably the staunchest champion of monasticism would acknowledge that in the reign of Henry VIII. there was at least a plausible case for mending monastic morals. But that was not then the desire of the Government of Henry VIII.; and the case for mending their morals was tacitly a.s.sumed to be the same as a case for ending the monasteries.

It would be unjust to Henry to deny that he had always shown himself careful of the appearance, at least, of morality in the Church; but it requires a robust faith in the King's disinterestedness to (p. 340) believe that dissolution was not the real object of the visitation, and that it was merely forced upon him by the reports of the visitors.

The moral question afforded a good excuse, but the monasteries fell, not so much because their morals were lax, as because their position was weak. Moral laxity contributed no doubt to the general result, but there were other causes at work. The monasteries themselves had long been conscious that their possession of wealth was not, in the eyes of the middle-cla.s.s laity, justified by the use to which it was put; and, for some generations at least, they had been seeking to make friends with Mammon by giving up part of their revenues, in the form of pensions and corrodies to courtiers, in the hope of being allowed to retain the remainder.[955] It had also become the custom to entrust the stewards.h.i.+p of their possessions to secular hands; and, possibly as a result, the monasteries were soon so deeply in debt to the neighbouring gentry that their lay creditors saw no hope of recovering their claims except by extensive foreclosures.[956] There had certainly been a good deal of private spoliation before the King gave the practice a national character. The very privileges of the monasteries were now turned to their ruin. Their immunity from episcopal jurisdiction deprived them of episcopal aid; their exemption from all authority, save that of the Pope, left them without support when the papal jurisdiction was abolished. Monastic orders knew no distinction (p. 341) of nationality. The national character claimed for the mediaeval Church in England could scarcely cover the monasteries, and no place was found for them in the Church when it was given a really national garb.

[Footnote 955: See Fortescue, _Governance of England_, ed. Plummer, cap. xviii., and notes, pp.

337-40.]

[Footnote 956: _E.g._, Christ Church, London, which surrendered to Henry in 1532, was deeply in debt to him (_L. and P._, v., 823).]

Their dissolution is probably to be connected with Cromwell's boast that he would make his king the richest prince in Christendom. That was not its effect, because Henry was compelled to distribute the greater part of the spoils among his n.o.bles and gentry. One rash reformer suggested that monastic lands should be devoted to educational purposes;[957] had that plan been followed, education in England would have been more magnificently endowed than in any other country of the world, and England might have become a democracy in the seventeenth century. From this point of view Henry spoilt one of the greatest opportunities in English history; from another, he saved England from a most serious danger. Had the Crown retained the wealth of the monasteries, the Stuarts might have made themselves independent of Parliament. But this service to liberty was not voluntary on Henry's part. The dissolution of the monasteries was in effect, and probably in intention, a gigantic bribe to the laity to induce them to acquiesce in the revolution effected by Henry VIII. When he was gone, his successors might desire, or fail to prevent, a reaction; something more permanent than Henry's iron hand was required to support the (p. 342) fabric he had raised. That support was sought in the wealth of the Church. The prospect had, from the very opening of the Reformation Parliament, been dangled before the eyes of the new n.o.bles, the members of Parliament, the justices of the peace, the rich merchants who thirsted for lands wherewith to make themselves gentlemen. Chapuys again and again mentions a scheme for distributing the lands of the Church among the laity as a project for the ensuing session; but their time was not yet; not until their work was done were the labourers to reap their reward.[958] The dissolution of the monasteries harmonised well with the secular principles of these predominant cla.s.ses. The monastic ideal of going out of the world to seek something, which cannot be valued in terms of pounds, s.h.i.+llings and pence, is abhorrent to a busy, industrial age; and every principle is hated most at the time when it most is needed.

[Footnote 957: _The Complaynt of Roderick Mors_ (Early Eng. Text Soc.), pp. 47-52. The author, Henry Brinkelow (see _D.N.B._, vi., 346), also suggested that both Houses of Parliament should sit together as one a.s.sembly "for it is not rytches or autoryte that bringeth wisdome" (_Complaynt_, p.

8). Some of the political literature of the later part of Henry's reign is curiously modern in its ideas.]

Intimately a.s.sociated as they were in their lives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn were not long divided by death; and, piteous as is the story of the last years of Catherine, it pales before the hideous tragedy of the ruin of Anne Boleyn. "If I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will become of her," wrote Anne of the Princess Mary.[959]

On 29th January, 1536, the day of her rival's funeral, Anne Boleyn was prematurely delivered of a dead child, and the result was fatal to Anne herself. This was not her first miscarriage,[960] and Henry's (p. 343) old conscience began to work again. In Catherine's case the path of his conscience was that of a slow and laborious pioneer; now it moved easily on its royal road to divorce. On 29th January, Chapuys, ignorant of Anne's miscarriage, was retailing to his master a court rumour that Henry intended to marry again. The King was reported to have said that he had been seduced by witchcraft when he married his second queen, and that the marriage was null for this reason, and because G.o.d would not permit them to have male issue.[961] There was no peace for her who supplanted her mistress. Within six months of her marriage Henry's roving fancy had given her cause for jealousy, and, when she complained, he is said to have brutally told her she must put up with it as her betters had done before.[962] These disagreements, however, were described by Chapuys as mere lovers' quarrels, and they were generally followed by reconciliations, after which Anne's influence seemed (p. 344) as secure as ever. But by January, 1536, the imperial amba.s.sador and others were counting on a fresh divorce. The rumour grew as spring advanced, when suddenly, on 2nd May, Anne was arrested and sent to the Tower. She was accused of incest with her brother, Lord Rochford, and of less criminal intercourse with Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris, William Brereton, and Mark Smeaton. All were condemned by juries to death for high treason on 12th May. Three days later Anne herself was put on her trial by a panel of twenty-six peers, over which her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, presided.[963] They returned a unanimous verdict of guilty, and, on the 19th, the Queen's head was struck off with the sword of an executioner brought for the purpose from St. Omer.[964]

[Footnote 958: "The King," says Chapuys in September, 1534, "will distribute among the gentlemen of the kingdom the greater part of the ecclesiastical revenues to gain their good-will"

(_L. and P._, vii., 1141).]

[Footnote 959: _Ibid._, x., 307.]

[Footnote 960: Anne was pregnant in Feb., 1534, when Henry told Chapuys he thought he should have a son soon (_L. and P._, vii., 232; _cf._, vii., 958).]

[Footnote 961: _Ibid._, x., 199.]

[Footnote 962: _Ibid._, vi., 1054, 1069. As early as April, 1531, Chapuys reports that Anne "was becoming more arrogant every day, using words and authority towards the King of which he has several times complained to the Duke of Norfolk, saying that she was not like the Queen [Catherine] who never in her life used ill words to him" (_ibid._, v., 216). In Sept., 1534, Henry was reported to be in love with another lady (_ibid._, vii., 1193, 1257). Probably this was Jane Seymour, as the lady's kindness to the Princess Mary--a marked characteristic of Queen Jane--is noted by Chapuys.

This intrigue, we are told, was furthered by many lords with the object of separating the King from Anne Boleyn, who was disliked by the lords on account of her pride and that of her kinsmen and brothers (_ibid._, vii., 1279). Henry's behaviour to the Princess was becoming quite benevolent, and Chapuys begins to speak of his "amiable and cordial nature" (_ibid._, vii., 1297).]

[Footnote 963: In 1533 Anne had accused her uncle of having too much intercourse with Chapuys and of maintaining the Princess Mary's t.i.tle to the throne (_L. and P._, vi., 1125).]

[Footnote 964: _Ibid._, x., 902, 910, 919. The Regent Mary of the Netherlands writes: "That the vengeance might be executed by the Emperor's subjects, he sent for the executioner of St. Omer, as there were none in England good enough"

(_ibid._, x., 965). It is perhaps well to be reminded that even at this date there were more practised executioners in the Netherlands than in England.]

Two days before Anne's death her marriage with Henry had been declared invalid by a court of ecclesiastical lawyers with Cranmer at its head.