England under the Tudors Part 8

[Sidenote 1: Clerical privileges]

[Sidenote 2: Tentative reforms]

In another respect however there was a serious demand for reform; namely the legal and judicial privileges which the ecclesiastical body had acquired in the course of centuries, and which had gradually become the source of serious abuses. The administration of certain branches of the Civil Law had been absorbed by the Clerics, who were charged with converting their functions into an elaborate machinery for extorting fees; and on the Criminal side, what was known as Benefit of Clergy, as well as the rules of Sanctuary, had become not merely anomalous but an actual encouragement to crime. Any criminal or accused person who succeeded in reaching Sanctuary was safe from the secular arm; and any one who could produce evidence, even of the flimsiest character, that he was a cleric could claim to be tried by the ecclesiastical instead of the secular courts. Originally these privileges had been of very great service in the wild days when judicial treatment was at least more readily obtainable from the Clergy, when trial by ordeal was common, and the merciless punishments of the ordinary law gave place to the milder but not ineffective penalties of Ecclesiastical discipline. Even the legal fictions by which evildoers were allowed to claim Benefit of Clergy as Clerics had their justification.

But when even murderers could escape with a moderate penance as Clerics, because they could read, the general public were hardly the better. A beginning of reform in this direction had been made when Henry VII.

obtained a Bull diminishing the rights of Sanctuary in cases of treason; and again in 1511 when the rights both of Sanctuary and Benefit of Clergy were withdrawn from murderers. It was noteworthy however that there was a protest against even this made by the Clergy in 1515; when one Dr.

Standish, for justifying the measure, was attacked by the Bishops in Convocation. Warham and Fox both supported the old privileges. The temporal lords on a commission appointed to enquire into the matter sided with Standish, and declared that the Bishops had incurred the penalties of praemunire. Wolsey tried to persuade the King to refer the question to the Pope, but the King a.s.serted the rights of the Crown in uncompromising terms. The Bishops had to submit to a sharp rebuke, and Standish was made a Dean not long after. The episode was a premonition of future events.

[Sidenote: The Educational Movement]

It does not appear that the writings or the preaching of the scholars had any marked effect on the conduct of the clergy, or aroused any general reforming zeal. But in one direction, that of education, they exercised a very material influence on the intellectual att.i.tude of the younger generation. Dean Colet is known to-day to many even of those who take little interest in his times, as the founder of St. Paul's School, where he endeavoured to make the teaching of the young a real training instead of a drill in pedagogic formulae. And as he set the example which was by degrees followed in other grammar schools, so the example he had already set at Oxford was followed both there and at Cambridge by his disciples. To him, more than to any other man, was due the practical application of the new knowledge of Greek to the study of the New Testament, resulting primarily in the treatment of the Pauline Epistles as organic structures; as connected treatises, instead of collected texts according to the custom of the schoolmen; who, dragging phrases from their context, expanded, interpreted and harmonised them with other phrases for fresh expansion and interpretation; neglecting the apostolic argument to ill.u.s.trate their own theses or those of the mediaeval doctors. Fox, of Winchester, when he founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Fisher in the Lady Margaret foundations at Cambridge, put into them men of the new school. Wolsey himself had evidently been influenced by the new methods, for his active connexion with Oxford had not ceased when Colet was there; and when in later years he founded Cardinal College, afterwards Christ Church, the men he appointed to it were chosen from the disciples of the school of Colet and Erasmus. To this higher ideal of University education, perhaps the strongest impulse was given by Erasmus himself, during the brief time about 1512 when he was Professor of Greek at Cambridge, where he proved himself the most brilliant exponent of the principles which in part at least he had imbibed from the Dean. Cranmer, his great rival Gardiner, and many others among the protagonists in the coming religious struggle, received their training under the new conditions--conditions very markedly affected by that edition of the New Testament, to which reference has already been made, issued by Erasmus from Basle in 1516 after he had left England: a work in which the Greek text appeared side by side with a new Latin translation, in place of the orthodox "Vulgate" whereof the stereotyped phraseology had acquired, through centuries of authorised interpretation, a meaning often very far removed from that of the original.

[Sidenote: Wolsey and the Reformation]

Thus what the Scholars accomplished was not Reform but the preparation of men's minds for Reform. What Wolsey the Statesman might have done, if foreign affairs had not occupied the best of his energies, we can only guess. His point of view was that of a Politician, not that of a man of religion. Such reforms as he might have been prepared to introduce would not have been the outcome of any lofty idealism, but only such as seemed to be dictated by public decency. As a Statesman, he was alive to the advantages of education, desired much of the wealth of the Church to be turned into that channel, and founded colleges, which he staffed with men of the new school and financed in part from the proceeds of suppressed religious houses. He went so far as to procure a papal Bull for the abolition of all Houses numbering less than seven inmates. But it may be doubted whether the real motive of the suppression was not rather the appropriation of funds for his favourite schemes than zeal for monastic morality. As Cardinal and Legate and an aspirant to the Papacy, he could never have lent himself to a policy calculated to weaken the ecclesiastical organisation; he could never have a.s.sociated himself with Colet's campaign against clerical worldliness, of which there was no more conspicuous example in the kingdom than he. Having children himself by an illicit union, he could hardly have taken high ground as a reformer of morals. In brief, he must have confined his treatment of the situation within the limits of the work of a politician with educational leanings. What he actually did was to renew the monastic visitations set on foot by Cardinal Morton, to suppress some few small houses as corrupt or superfluous, and to encourage the new school of teaching which no one of authority had hitherto condemned as heretical. As to actual heresy, he looked on it with the eyes not of a theologian but of a politician; as a thing to be suppressed if it threatened public order, but otherwise negligible. He sought also to diminish the abuses connected with the ecclesiastical courts by the establishment of a Legatine Court of his own. But there is no sign that he was ever alive to the volcanic forces at work; or recognised that sooner or later the revolution which Luther initiated in Europe would have to be reckoned with in England also. Even at the time when the great Cardinal fell from power, there were but slight signs within the realm of the coming revolt, mutterings of a growing storm. No prophet had arisen denouncing the evil of the times convincingly, no statesman propounding drastic remedies; only the scholars had been preaching amendment, and occasional zealots had been bringing discredit on the cause of reformation by the violence of their incriminations. The far-reaching political effect of the religious differences was long in being realised on the Continent; in England it was still longer in making itself felt. Yet the Lutheran revolt was destined vitally to influence both the international relations and the internal order of every State in Christendom.

[Sidenote: The Lutheran Revolt, 1517]

In 1517 Pope Leo X. was in want of money: and one of the recognised methods of obtaining it was the sale of Indulgences--that is to say, remissions in the duration of Purgatorial sufferings, ratified by His Holiness, and purchasable for cash. The whole thing being simply a commercial transaction, the Indulgences were offered at popular prices. There was nothing new in the method. The Lay Princes had no objections to the sale in their territories, since they could demand a share in the profits as the condition of their permission. The system moreover had been held up to ridicule before. But on this occasion, there were two novel features: one, the unprecedented scale on which the transaction was to be worked, the other the nature of the opposition it aroused. Doctor Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and Professor at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony had been coming to the conclusion that the practices of the Church were not what they should be, and that much of her teaching was false. The affair of the Indulgences brought things to a head; and when Tetzel the Papal Commissioner was approaching Saxony, Luther drew up a counterblast in the form of a series of propositions which he nailed up publicly on the Church doors. Moreover he received unexpected support from the "Good Elector"

Frederick, who forbade Tetzel to enter his dominions.

[Sidenote: Luther's defiance, 1520]

Leo was occupied with political affairs, which seemed for the time to be more important than the heretical vagaries of an obscure monk. Wolsey's diplomacy was working up to the point at which in 1518 he attached France to England in the alliance which culminated in the "Universal Peace," the Cardinal having supplanted the Pope as the moderator in the disputes of the great Powers. Then Maximilian died, and the Imperial Election absorbed political attention, with the ensuing complications described in a previous chapter. Meantime however, Luther was waxing increasingly determined; instead of quailing at threats, he was fully resolved to maintain his convictions and fight the matter out. As to what he had done, he appealed to a General Council; what he was going to do he made clear by exhorting the German Princes to stop their tributes to Rome. The advice had a natural attraction for the German Princes though they might lack enthusiasm on questions of theology. Leo issued a Bull condemning Luther. Luther answered by publicly burning the Bull (December 10th, 1520).

[Sidenote: The Diet of Worms, 1521]

The young Emperor, fresh from his coronation at Aachen, was about to hold the Diet of the Empire at Worms. It was his policy to maintain friendly relations with Rome; and Luther was summoned to the Diet under a safe-conduct. The precedent of Huss showed how little such a safe-conduct was worth; but the great Reformer was undaunted. Frederick of Saxony, encouraged by Erasmus, was known to be on his side. He faced the Diet, reaffirmed his heresies, and emphasised his flat repudiation of Papal Authority. He had fiery supporters and fiery opponents. His life was in the gravest danger, and his death would have been followed by a b.l.o.o.d.y collision between the two parties. The disaster was averted by the Elector Frederick who kidnapped him for his own sake and carried him off to a secure retreat in the Wartburg: where he remained for nearly a year, working at his translation of the Bible. The Diet however confirmed an edict condemning Luther and his doctrines. The English King moreover, who accounted himself no mean theologian, issued a refutation of the Lutheran heresies which won for him from Pope Leo the t.i.tle of Defender of the Faith.

At this time, and for some time to come, the Papacy regarded Francis I.

with hostility, and looked upon his Italian ambitions as dangerous to itself. Hence there was a natural tendency to alliance between Rome and the Emperor. 1521 was the year of the ineffectual Conference of Calais, followed by the death of Leo X., the election of the (Imperial) Pope Adrian in the next year, and the embroilment of England in the European wars.

Charles was sufficiently occupied with these high political matters, and was personally withdrawn from Germany, whose affairs were more or less controlled by an Imperial Council in which Frederick of Saxony was the guiding spirit; popular sentiment was on Luther's side, and the Worms edict was practically a dead letter. But the seclusion of the great Reformer threw the movement largely into the hands of extremists such as Carlstadt and Munzer to whose anarchical theories he was opposed as vehemently as to Rome.

[Sidenote: 1524 The German peasant rising]

Now we shall presently see that in England itself there was strong ground for discontent with the prevailing social order and the relations between the peasantry and the landed cla.s.ses: but in Germany matters were very much worse. In England there had always been a tendency for the religious reformers to a.s.sociate their movements with demands for social reform; and so it was now to an exaggerated degree in Germany. Social revolution was no part of the scheme of Luther and his lieutenant Melanchthon; but in defying the authority of Rome they had awakened the revolutionary spirit. Fired with religious fanaticism, the demagogues acquired a new character, a devouring zeal, a reckless courage. At last in 1524 the peasants rose demanding redress for their grievances. What they asked was indeed bare justice according to any intelligent modern view; yet the granting of their demands would have been completely subversive of the existing social order.

The upper cla.s.ses were united against them, Luther and his a.s.sociates denounced them. The fiercest pa.s.sions broke loose: there were ghastly ma.s.sacres and ghastly reprisals, ending in the slaughter of scores of thousands of peasants, and the complete suppression of the rising.

[Sidenote: Its effect in England]

The Lutherans proper had emphatically dissociated themselves from the zealots who stirred up the "peasants' war," which did not alter the general att.i.tude of the Germans on the religious question. But in England, these things had a serious effect. The Lutheran heresies were condemned as heresies in this country before the outbreak, and a considerable number of heretically inclined Englishmen took refuge in the German States, where they looked to find countenance. Being for the most part men of extreme tendencies, those tendencies were quickened; whence it resulted that in importing the new religious doctrines from Germany they combined them more or less with the doctrines of social revolution. Thus the distinction between the two movements was lost sight of, and the profession of the new doctrines was regarded as not merely heretical but in itself anarchical--a thing which must be suppressed in the interests of public order. Hence we find the curious paradox of Thomas More, the one-time advocate of a toleration which was obviously in accord with his instincts, becoming in course of time the advocate and agent of a rigorous intolerance and a relentless persecution.

[Sidenote 1: 1525 The Empire and the papacy]

[Sidenote 2: 1527 The sack of Rome]

The Peasants' Revolt was crushed in the summer of 1525. Before this end was accomplished, the Good Elector pa.s.sed away--a wise, kindly, tolerant man who had exercised an immense moderating influence by simple benignity, shrewdness, and force of character. A little earlier, the ambitious schemes of Francis I. had been shattered by the disaster of Pavia. In effect, the whole European situation was changed completely since the death of Leo X.

in 1521. His successor Adrian was a man of good intentions but limited purview; the great issues at stake were beyond his grasp, and his attempts at disciplinary reforms were made nugatory by the stolid immobility of the hierarchy. After a brief reign he was succeeded by Clement VII., a man of considerable talent and inconsiderable ability: a man shifty and fearful, not fitted to cope with the stubborn wills of the reigning princes and their ministers, or with the moral and intellectual forces which were threatening the supremacy of the historic Church. The collapse of the French in Italy gave Charles a power which filled Clement with alarm, since his friendliness was no longer of political moment to the Emperor, while sentimental considerations would certainly not suffice to retain the active support of Wolsey and England. In 1526 the insecurity of his position was emphasised by the att.i.tude of the Imperial Diet held at Spires, where Charles through his brother Ferdinand withdrew from the position of anti-Lutheranism to adopt that of impartial toleration, and it was decreed in effect that each Prince might sanction what religion he would, within his own territories; thus cancelling the Decree of Worms. The capture and occupation of Rome by troops mainly Spanish in the same year, despite the Emperor's repudiation, was another alarming symptom; which received a terrifying confirmation in 1527, when the Imperial troops, Spanish and German, headed by the "Lutheran" Frundsberg and the Constable of Bourbon, turned their arms upon the Holy City, stormed it, sacked it with a savage thoroughness unparalleled since the days of Alaric, and held the Pope himself a prisoner.

[Sidenote: 1530 Diet of Augsburg]

Thus the Pope himself was now not merely dominated by the Emperor but actually in his hands. The successes of Charles however urged Francis--who had been liberated in 1526--to renewed activity, and for a time it seemed not unlikely that he would recover his ascendency in Italy, a consummation as little to Clement's taste as the Imperial dominance. But the French King misused his opportunities and his armies met with fresh disasters. In 1529, the Pope and the Emperor were reconciled, with the result that at another Diet of Spires the Worms edict was revived and the last Spires edict revoked, in face of the protest of the Lutheran Princes which earned for them the t.i.tle of Protestants. That party however was sufficiently strong to prevent its opponents from enforcing the decree over the Empire. At the Diet of Augsburg next year (1530) the decree was confirmed: the Protestants replying by drawing up the Confession of Augsburg, formulating their doctrines, a doc.u.ment which became the definite expression of Protestantism in the least general sense of the term--while they bound themselves for mutual support in the League of Schmalkald. The two parties seemed to be on the verge of war; but the sentiment of nationality in face of the threatening of a Turkish advance and of the non-German leanings of Charles --a sentiment most zealously preached by Luther who was a typical German patriot as well as a religious reformer--deferred the rupture till after Luther's death.

[Sidenote: The Swiss Reformers, 1520-1530]

The active aggressive Reformation began in Germany with Luther's attack on Indulgences. In France it made no headway for many years; in Spain and Italy none at all; in England none, till the meeting of Parliament in 1529.

But the movement in Switzerland was as marked as that in Germany, and hardly less important in the influence ultimately exercised by the Swiss teachers, though of less direct political weight. Nor is it possible to follow the course of the Reformation in England, unless the separate existence of the Swiss School is duly appreciated. Switzerland was not a Political ent.i.ty which could rank effectively as a make-weight in international rivalries; but its geographical conditions preserved it from interference, and permitted it, so to speak, to work out its own salvation.

The country was a federation of small democratic States or Cantons, with no Princes and no n.o.bility. It followed that when once the question of ecclesiastical reform was raised, the theories of Church Government which would find acceptance would be democratic in principle: and accordingly it was from Switzerland that the vital opposition to Episcopal systems sprang.

But the main fact to be observed at this stage is, that the Swiss Reformers were not the outcome of the Lutheran movement; their movement was spontaneous, independent, and parallel. Their leader Zwingli antic.i.p.ated rather than followed Luther. But an agitator who appealed to Germany and an agitator who appealed to Switzerland seemed to be of very different degrees of public importance. Hence comparatively speaking Zwingli was ignored by the authorities. Half Switzerland might--and did--revolt from the Pope, without greatly exercising the Papal mind. But in the process Zurich became hardly less important as a teaching centre and an asylum for heretical refugees than Wittenberg; and in many respects, the teaching of Zurich departed from the teaching of Rome more seriously than did the teaching of Luther. The element of Mysticism, to which the German genius is generally p.r.o.ne, had no attraction for the Swiss mind, while it was essential in the eyes of the Wittenberg school; so that Luther and the Zurich Reformers a.s.sailed each other with hardly less virulence than they both lavished on the Papal party. It was a long time before the term "Protestant" was extended so as to include the disciples of Zurich and Geneva.

[Sidenote: English heretics abroad]

Alike to Switzerland and to the German States which may by antic.i.p.ation be called Protestant, there gathered during these first years an appreciable number of Englishmen, who were either already touched with Lollardry, or found themselves in revolt against prevailing doctrines or practices, or were discovering by the light of the New Learning discrepancies between the teaching of the Gospels and the current interpretation. In these territories they were for the time a.s.sured of such liberty as enabled them to issue pamphlets, dissertations, and commentaries, which found their way into England and not infrequently received effective advertis.e.m.e.nt by being publicly condemned and burnt, with the result that the few copies which escaped acquired an advent.i.tious interest and influence. Considering the violence of the invective often conspicuous in them, and the extravagance of the controversial methods usually adopted, the treatment they met with can hardly be condemned as oppressive; whether it was politic is another question. The modern English view generally is that such repressive acts tend to defeat their own ends. On the whole however it would seem that it was the manner rather than the matter of these productions which caused the authorities to treat them and their authors with such severity, though it was done largely at the instigation of theological partisans. Thus Tindal's translation of the Bible was attacked as being _per se_ dangerous; but it was the accompanying commentary which ensured its suppression.

[Sidenote: Contrasted aims]

The fundamental fact, however, which must be borne in mind in the early stages of the Reformation in England is this: that whereas the cause to which both Luther and Zwingli devoted themselves was primarily a revision of dogmas and of the practices a.s.sociated with them, the work which Henry VIII. and Thomas Cromwell were to take in hand was the revision of the relations between Church and State--of the position of the Clerical organisation as a part of the body politic; not the introduction of Lutheran or Zwinglian doctrines. Such countenance as was given to Lutheranism was given for purely political reasons. Luther's was a Religious Reformation with political consequences: Henry's was a Political Reconstruction entailing ultimately a reformed religion.

CHAPTER VII

HENRY VIII (iii), 1527-29--THE FALL OF WOLSEY

[Sidenote: "The King's affair"]

The whole prolonged episode concerned with the "Divorce" of Queen Katharine is singularly unattractive; the character of almost every leading person a.s.sociated with it is damaged in the course of it--save that of the unhappy Queen. Unfortunately it is an episode which demands close attention and examination, because its vicissitudes exercised a supreme influence on the course of the Reformation initiated by the King, besides bringing into powerful relief the nature of that strange historical phenomenon, the Conscience of Henry VIII. Moreover it has received from the pen of a particularly brilliant writer a colouring which is so misleading and so plausible that the evidence as to facts requires to be presented with exceptional care.

[Sidenote 1: Story of the marriage]

[Sidenote 2: Anne Boleyn]

It is not till 1527 that the project of a Divorce emerges definitely, so to speak, into the open; but the evolution of the project had its origin at a considerably earlier date. We have to begin with a review of the conjugal relations between the King and the Queen. Arthur, Prince of Wales had celebrated his marriage with Katharine, daughter of Ferdinand of Spain and aunt of the infant who was to become Charles V. A few months later he died.

The young widow was thereafter betrothed to Henry; a dispensation being obtained in 1504 from the Pope, Julius II, since marriage with a brother's widow is forbidden by the laws of the Church. Henry VII. however, who never liked to make any pledges without providing himself with some pretext by which they might be evaded, instructed his son to make a sort of protest at the time. The second marriage was not carried out till Henry VIII. was on the throne: the bride being robed in the manner customary for maidens, not for widows, on such occasions. She was older than her husband, and not particularly attractive; but they lived together with apparent affection.

It is uncertain how many children were actually born; but none lived long after birth until Mary (1516), when the King showed himself conspicuously fond of his infant daughter. Henry does not in fact seem to have displayed that extreme licentiousness which characterised most of the monarchs of the time, though one illegitimate son was born to him, three years after Mary, by Mistress Elizabeth Blount--"mistress" being the courtesy t.i.tle of unmarried ladies. The Court however was undoubtedly licentious, and many of his favourite companions were notoriously profligate. In 1522 Anne Boleyn, then an attractive girl of sixteen, the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, came to Court. At what time Henry became seriously enamoured of her is uncertain; but from 1522 her father became the recipient of numerous favours; and in 1525 was made a peer. It was a symptom of alienation between Henry and his wife that the six-year-old son of Elizabeth Blount was at the same time created Duke of Richmond and Lord High Admiral, with much pomp. [Footnote: Brewer, ii., 102. _L.& P._ iv., 639.]

[Sidenote: 1527 The King prepares]

Apart from expressions in letters of 1526 which can only be reasonably interpreted as having reference to a contemplated divorce, letters of Wolsey's and the King's in the early months of 1527 prove incontestably that Henry had at that time determined that he would marry Anne, and that Wolsey [Footnote: Brewer, ii., 182, 184; _S. P. Henry VIII._, i, 194.

_L. & P._, iv., 1467.] was elaborating a case, for presentation to the Pope, against the validity of the dispensation under which the marriage with Katharine had been contracted.

What, then, was the King's att.i.tude? In April 1527, he had made up his mind to break with Charles, Katharine's nephew, and concluded a treaty with France; but under this the French King's second son, the Duke of Orleans, was to marry the Princess Mary. It is difficult to believe that when this was done, the King was actually intending at a later stage to have Mary declared illegitimate. He would hardly have proposed to alienate Charles and Francis simultaneously. Possibly he antic.i.p.ated no difficulty in legitimating Mary while annulling her mother's marriage--as was ultimately done. It may be noted that it is absolutely impossible to maintain that _both_ Mary and Elizabeth were born in lawful wedlock; yet the country accepted both as legitimate without demur. But this French treaty darkens rather than illuminates the problem.

The only fact definitely apparent in the papers of 1527 is that Henry had determined to make Anne his wife. There is no hint of the conscientious scruples or the patriotic motives afterwards alleged, though that of course does not preclude their having been present. Those two alleged motives require to be examined merely as _a priori_ hypotheses.

[Sidenote: Theoretical excuses]

There was one possible plea, then, for urging that a divorce was necessary: namely that political considerations made it imperative for the good of the nation that the King should take to himself a wife who might bear him a male heir to the throne. And there was one possible plea for demanding a formal enquiry into the validity of the dispensation: namely a conscientious doubt on the part of the King or Queen whether the union with a brother's widow was contrary to the Moral Law. No doubt existed as to the Pope's power of abrogating a law, made by the Church for the public good, in a specific case; but it was not claimed that he could abrogate the Law of G.o.d in like manner. If this was a case in which the Pope possessed the dispensing power, the dispensation held; if it was not, the marriage was no marriage however innocently the parties entered upon it. One or other of these pleas must be made the pretext of any public action.

[Sidenote: The need of an heir]