Henry VIII Part 1

Henry VIII.

by A. F. Pollard.

PREFACE.

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 ill.u.s.trates 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 achieve them. As with his policy, so with his character. (p. vi) 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.

[Footnote 1: The edition cited in the text is that of 1672.]

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 and events which lie outside the scope of Mr. (p. vii) 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 doc.u.ments in twenty thousand closely printed pages, and, when completed, will const.i.tute 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 amba.s.sadors have been published under the auspices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at Paris.[7] Still further information has been (p. viii) provided by the labours of the Historical Ma.n.u.scripts Commission,[8]

the Camden,[9] the Royal Historical,[10] and other learned Societies.

[Footnote 2: This series, unlike the _Calendars of State Papers_, includes doc.u.ments not preserved at the Record Office; it is often inaccurately cited as _Calendar of State Papers_, but the word "Calendar" does not appear in the t.i.tle and it includes much besides State papers; such a description also tends to confuse it with the eleven volumes of Henry VIII.'s State papers published _in extenso_ in 1830-51. The series now extends to Dec., 1544, and is cited in the text as _L. and P._.]

[Footnote 3: Cited as _Spanish Calendar_; the volume completing Henry's reign was published in 1904.]

[Footnote 4: Cited as _Ven. Cal._; this correspondence diminishes in importance as the reign proceeds, and also, after 1530, the doc.u.ments are epitomised afresh in _L. and P._.]

[Footnote 5: Three series, _viz._, that edited by Thorp (2 vols., 1858), a second edited by Bain (2 vols., 1898) and the _Hamilton Papers_ (2 vols., 1890-92).]

[Footnote 6: Vol. i. of the _Irish Calendar_, and also of the _Carew MSS._; see also the _Calendar of Fiants_ published by the Deputy-Keeper of Records for Ireland.]

[Footnote 7: _Correspondance de MM. Castillon et Marillac_, edited by Kaulek, and of _Odet de Selve_, 1888.]

[Footnote 8: The most important of these is vol. i.

of Lord Salisbury's MSS.; other papers of Henry VIII.'s reign are scattered up and down the Appendices to a score and more of reports.]

[Footnote 9: _E.g._, Wriothesley's _Chronicle_, _Chron. of Calais_, and _Greyfriars Chron_.]

[Footnote 10: _E.g._, Leadam, _Domesday of Inclosures_, and _Transactions_, _pa.s.sim_.]

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 new wealth of contemporary evidence (p. ix) does not solve the problems of Henry's reign. It elucidates some points. .h.i.therto 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 _Romische Dok.u.mente_.[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 remains to be written. Here it is possible to deal with (p. x) 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_.

[Footnote 11: Paderborn, 1893; _cf. Engl. Hist.

Rev._, xix., 632-45.]

[Footnote 12: _Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries_, 2 vols., 1888.]

[Footnote 13: Of these the most important are Polydore Vergil (Basel, 1534), Hall's _Chronicle_ (1548) and Fabyan's _Chronicle_ (edited by Ellis, 1811). Holinshed and Stow are not quite contemporary, but they occasionally add to earlier writers on apparently good authority.]

[Footnote 14: I have in this edition added references to those which seem most important; for a collected bibliography see Dr. Gairdner in _Cambridge Modern History_, ii., 789-94. I have also for the purpose of this edition added references to the original sources--a task of some labour when nearly every fact is taken from a different doc.u.ment. The text has been revised, some errors removed, and notes added on special points, especially those on which fresh light has recently been thrown.]

[Footnote 15: In _Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History_, 1887.]

CHAPTER I.

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 third (p. 002) 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.semble 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, in which kings and (p. 003) 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 h.e.l.l. 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.

[Footnote 16: Bainbridge, Wolsey, Fisher, Pole.

Bainbridge was a cardinal after Julius II's own heart, and he received the red hat for military services rendered to that warlike Pope (_Ven.

Cal._, ii., 104).]

[Footnote 17: There were two Dukes of Norfolk, the second of whom was attainted, as was the Duke of Buckingham; the fourth Duke was Henry's brother-in-law, Suffolk.]

[Footnote 18: Empson and Dudley.]

[Footnote 19: "Sua cuique civitati religio est, nostra n.o.bis." Cicero, _Pro Flacco_, 28; _cf._ E.

Bourre, _Des Inequalites de condition resultant de la religion en droit Romain_, Paris, 1895.]

[Footnote 20: _Cf._ Bishop Scory to Edward VI. in Strype, _Eccl. Mem._, II., ii., 482; Fortescue, ed.

Plummer, pp. 137-142.]

[Footnote 21: _E.g._, _L. and P._, i., 679.]

What manner of man was this, and wherein lay the secret of his (p. 004) 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 ign.o.ble pa.s.sions, 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 paeans 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 circ.u.mstance 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 were a (p. 005) 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 Henry's council. (p. 006) 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.

[Footnote 22: _Archaeologia Cambrensis_, 1st ser., iv., 267; 3rd ser., xv., 278, 379.]

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 a.s.similate 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 t.i.tle, 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, the (p. 007) 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 pa.s.sed, the murder of Henry VI. and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor in undisputed possession of the Lancastrian t.i.tle. 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 for (p. 008) 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 t.i.tles 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle, and, as a rule, they remembered the fact; they were _de facto_ kings, and they left the _de jure_ arguments to the Stuarts.

Peace, however, could not be obtained at once, nor the embers of (p. 009) 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 t.i.tle of Henry's Juno by hara.s.sing him as vindictively as the Queen of Heaven vexed the pious aeneas. 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 p.a.w.ns 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 the volcano which gave vent to the subterranean flood; (p. 010) 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.

[Footnote 23: See the present writer in _D.N.B._, lii., 261.]