Henry VIII Part 16

[Footnote 505: _Cotton MS._, Vespasian, F, iii., fol. 34, _b_; _cf. L. and P._, ii., 4074, 4288.]

[Footnote 506: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1103.]

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 from Spain were no more successful than their English colleagues. (p. 178) 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nounced in the Book of the Law against him who should marry his brother's wife. "G.o.d," wrote the French amba.s.sador in 1528, "has long ago Himself pa.s.sed sentence on it;"[508] and there is no reason to doubt Henry's a.s.sertion, 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.

[Footnote 507: _L. and P._, iii., 432.]

[Footnote 508: Du Bellay to Montmorenci, 1st Nov., 1528, _L. and P._, iv., 4899.]

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 have said that "she had (p. 179) not offended, but it was a judgment of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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]

[Footnote 509: _Sp. Cal._, i., 249; _L. and P. of Richard III. and Henry VII._, vol. i., pp. x.x.xiii., 113; Hall, _Chron_., p. 491; Bacon, _Henry VII._, ed. 1870, p. 376; _Transactions of the Royal Hist.

Soc._, N.S., xviii., 187.]

[Footnote 510: _L. and P._, iii., 1284.]

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 amba.s.sador, 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 a.s.serted a right to the English throne but one, and that one precedent provided the most effective argument for avoiding a repet.i.tion of the experiment. Matilda was never crowned, though she had the same claim to the throne as Mary, and her attempt to (p. 180) enforce her t.i.tle 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 t.i.tle.[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 n.o.ble 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 t.i.tle to the throne than Philippa, the daughter of the third; an Act limiting the succession to the male line was pa.s.sed in 1406;[515] and Henry VII. himself only reigned through a tacit denial of the right of women to sit on the English throne.

[Footnote 511: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 300.]

[Footnote 512: _L. and P._, v., 609, 817.]

[Footnote 513: _Ibid._, vi., 446.]

[Footnote 514: _Chronicon Angliae_, Rolls Ser., p.

92, _s.a._, 1376; _D.N.B._, xxix., 421. This became the orthodox Lancastrian theory (_cf._ Fortescue, _Governance of England_, ed. Plummer, pp. 352-55).]

[Footnote 515: Stubbs, _Const. Hist._, iii., 58.

This Act was, however, repealed before the end of the same year.]

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 she to marry? If not, her death would leave (p. 181) 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.

[Footnote 516: Professor Maitland has spoken of the "Byzantinism" of Henry's reign, and possibly the objection to female sovereigns was strengthened by the prevalent respect for Roman imperial and Byzantine custom (_cf._ Hodgkin, _Charles the Great_, p. 180).]

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 n.o.bles 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 crown".[517] (p. 182) His claims had been canva.s.sed 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 a.s.serting 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.

[Footnote 517: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1287. Buckingham's end was undoubtedly hastened by Wolsey's jealousy; before the end of 1518 the Cardinal had been instilling into Henry's ear suspicions of Buckingham (_L. and P._, iii., 1; _cf. ibid._, ii., 3973, 4057). Brewer regards the hostility of Wolsey to Buckingham as one of Polydore Vergil's "calumnies" (_ibid._, vol. iii., Introd., p.

lxvi.).]

[Footnote 518: _L. and P. of Richard III. and Henry VII._, i., 233.]

[Footnote 519: See detailed accounts in _L. and P._, iii., 1284, 1356. Shakespeare's account in "Henry VIII." is remarkably accurate, except in matters of date.]

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, when Charles V.'s minister, (p. 183) Chievres, was proposing to marry his niece to the Earl of Devonshire, a grandson of Edward IV., Henry was suspicious, and Wolsey inquired whether Chievres 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 t.i.tles were significant; Earl of Richmond had been Henry VII.'s t.i.tle before he came to the throne; Duke of Somerset had been that of his grandfather and of his youngest son. Shortly afterwards the boy was made Lord (p. 184) 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 amba.s.sador 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 n.o.ble 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 to facilitate the scheme, on (p. 185) 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]

[Footnote 520: _L. and P._, iii., 386.]

[Footnote 521: _Ibid._, ii., p. 1461.]

[Footnote 522: See G.E. C[okayne]'s and Doyle's _Peerages_, _s.v._ "Richmond".]

[Footnote 523: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 109; _L. and P._, iv., 2988, 3028, 3140.]

[Footnote 524: _L. and P._, iv., 3051. In _ibid._, iv., 3135, Richmond is styled "The Prince".]

[Footnote 525: Laemmer, _Monumenta Vaticana_, p.

29; _L. and P._, iv., 4881. It was claimed that the Pope's dispensing power was unlimited, extending even to marriages between brothers and sisters (_ibid._, v., 468). Campeggio told Du Bellay in 1528 that the Pope's power was "infinite" (_ibid._, iv., 4942).]

[Footnote 526: _L. and P._, iv., 5072.]

[Footnote 527: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 482.]

The conception of this violent expedient is mainly of interest as ill.u.s.trating 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 doc.u.ment adduced in its support.[529] It is a list of New Year's (p. 186) presents,[530] which runs "To thirty-three n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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.

[Footnote 528: _L. and P._, vi., 241.]

[Footnote 529: E.L. Taunton, _Wolsey_, 1902, p.

173, where the words are erroneously given as "To the King's ten mistresses"; "the King's" is an interpolation.]

[Footnote 530: _L. and P._, iv., 3748.]

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 pa.s.sion 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 emba.s.sy after emba.s.sy 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 universities in Christendom. It is not (p. 187) credible that all this energy was expended merely to satisfy a sensual pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion for Anne Boleyn as the sole _fons et origo_ of the divorce is far from convincing, that pa.s.sion 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.

[Footnote 531: _Ibid._, iv., 4858.]

[Footnote 532: No conclusive evidence on this point is possible; the French amba.s.sador, Clement VII.

and others believed that Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn had been cohabiting since 1529. On the other hand, if such was the case, it is singular that no child should have been born before 1533; for after that date Anne seems to have had a miscarriage nearly every year. Ortiz, indeed, reports from Rome that she had a miscarriage in 1531 (_L. and P._, v., 594), but the evidence is not good.]

The Boleyns were wealthy merchants of London, of which one of them had been Lord-Mayor, but Anne's mother was of n.o.ble 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 age is uncertain, but she is generally believed to have (p. 188) 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 compelled to desist by the King himself, who (p. 189) 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.

[Footnote 533: See Friedmann's _Anne Boleyn_, 2 vols., 1884, and articles on the Boleyn family in _D.N.B._, vol. v.]

[Footnote 534: See George Fisher, _Key to the History of England_, Table xvii.; _Gentleman's Magazine_, May, 1829.]

[Footnote 535: Henry would then be fifteen, yet a fable was invented and often repeated that Henry VIII. was Anne Boleyn's father. Nicholas Sanders, whose _De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani_ became the basis of Roman Catholic histories of the English Reformation, gave currency to the story; and some modern writers prefer Sanders' veracity to Foxe's.]

[Footnote 536: The error that it was Anne who accompanied Mary Tudor in 1514 was exposed by Brewer more than forty years ago, but it still lingers and was repeated with innumerable others in the Catalogue of the New Gallery Portrait Exhibition of 1902.]

[Footnote 537: _L. and P._, iii., 1994.]