Henry VIII Part 20

[Footnote 639: _Ibid._, iv., 5179.]

[Footnote 640: _Ibid._, iv., 4680-84.]

[Footnote 641: _L. and P._, iv., 4900.]

[Footnote 642: _Ibid._, iv., 5447.]

[Footnote 643: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 875.]

[Footnote 644: _L. and P._, iv., 5209.]

[Footnote 645: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 890.]

[Footnote 646: _Ibid._, iv., 72.]

That nuncio had gone to Barcelona to negotiate an alliance between the Pope and the Emperor; and the success of his mission completed Clement's conversion. The revocation was only delayed, thought Charles's representative at Rome, to secure better terms for the Pope.[647] On 21st June, the French commander, St. Pol, was utterly defeated at Landriano; "not a vestige of the army is left," (p. 226) reported Casale.[648] A few days later the Treaty of Barcelona between Clement and Charles was signed.[649] Clement's nephew was to marry the Emperor's natural daughter; the Medici tyranny was to be re-established in Florence; Ravenna, Cervia and other towns were to be restored to the Pope; His Holiness was to crown Charles with the imperial crown, and to absolve from ecclesiastical censures all those who were present at, or consented to, the sack of Rome. It was, in effect, a family compact; and part of it was the quashing of the legates' proceedings against the Emperor's aunt, with whom the Pope was now to be allied by family ties. "We found out secretly," write the English envoys at Rome, on the 16th of July, "that the Pope signed the revocation yesterday morning, as it would have been dishonourable to have signed it after the publication of the new treaty with the Emperor, which will be published here on Sunday."[650] Clement knew that his motives would not bear scrutiny, and he tried to avoid public odium by a characteristic subterfuge. Catherine could hope for no justice in England, Henry could expect no justice at Rome. Political expediency would dictate a verdict in Henry's favour in England; political expediency would dictate a verdict for Catherine at Rome. Henry's amba.s.sadors were instructed to appeal from Clement to the "true Vicar of Christ," but where was the true Vicar of Christ to be found on (p. 227) earth?[651] There was no higher tribunal. It was intolerable that English suits should be decided by the chances and changes of French or Habsburg influence in Italy, by the hopes and the fears of an Italian prince for the safety of his temporal power. The natural and inevitable result was the separation of England from Rome.

[Footnote 647: _Ibid._, iv., 154.]

[Footnote 648: _L. and P._, iv., 5705, 5767; _cf.

Sp. Cal._, iv., 150.]

[Footnote 649: _L. and P._, iv., 5779; _Sp. Cal._, iv., 117, 161.]

[Footnote 650: _L. and P._, iv., 5780; _Sp. Cal._, iv., 156. Another detail was the excommunication of Zapolya, the rival of the Habsburgs in Hungary--a step which Henry VIII. denounced as "letting the Turk into Hungary" (_L. and P._, v., 274).]

[Footnote 651: _L. and P._, iv., 5650, 5715.]

CHAPTER IX. (p. 228)

THE CARDINAL'S FALL.[652]

[Footnote 652: See, besides the doc.u.ments cited, Busch, _Der Sturz des Cardinals Wolsey_ (Hist.

Taschenbuch, VI., ix., 39-114).]

The loss of their spiritual jurisdiction in England was part of the price paid by the Popes for their temporal possessions in Italy. The papal domains were either too great or too small. If the Pope was to rely on his temporal power, it should have been extensive enough to protect him from the dictation and resentment of secular princes; and from this point of view there was no little justification for the aims of Julius II. Had he succeeded in driving the barbarians across the Alps or into the sea, he and his successors might in safety have judged the world, and the breach with Henry might never have taken place. If the Pope was to rely on his spiritual weapons, there was no need of temporal states at all. In their existing extent and position, they were simply the heel of Achilles, the vulnerable spot, through which secular foes might wound the Vicar of Christ. France threatened him from the north and Spain from the south; he was ever between the upper and the nether mill-stone. Italy was the c.o.c.kpit of Europe in the sixteenth century, and the eyes of the Popes were perpetually bent on the worldly fray, seeking to save or extend their dominions.

Through the Pope's temporal power, France and Spain exerted their (p. 229) pressure. He could only defend himself by playing off one against the other, and in this game his spiritual powers were his only effective pieces. More and more the spiritual authority, with which he was entrusted, was made to serve political ends. Temporal princes were branded as "sons of iniquity and children of perdition," not because their beliefs or their morals were worse than other men's, but because they stood in the way of the family ambitions of various popes. Their frequent use and abuse brought ecclesiastical censures into public contempt, and princes soon ceased to be frightened with false fires.

James IV., when excommunicated, said he would appeal to Prester John, and that he would side with any council against the Pope, even if it contained only three bishops.[653] The Vicar of Christ was lost in the petty Italian prince. _Corruptio optimi pessima_. The lower dragged the higher nature down. If the Papal Court was distinguished from the courts of other Italian sovereigns, it was not by exceptional purity.

"In this Court as in others," wrote Silvester de Giglis from Rome, "nothing can be effected without gifts."[654] The election of Leo X.

was said to be free from bribery; a cardinal himself was amazed, and described the event as _Phoenix et rara avis_.[655] If poison was not a frequent weapon at Rome, popes and cardinals at least believed it to be. Alexander VI. was said to have been poisoned; one cardinal was accused of poisoning his fellow-cardinal, Bainbridge; and others were charged with an attempt on the life of Leo X.[656] In 1517, Pace (p. 230) described the state of affairs at Rome as _plane monstra, omni dedecore et infamia plena; omnis fides, omnis honestas, una c.u.m religione, a mundo abvola.s.se videntur_.[657] Ten years later, the Emperor himself declared that the sack of Rome was the just judgment of G.o.d, and one of his amba.s.sadors said that the Pope ought to be deprived of his temporal states, as they had been at the bottom of all the dissensions.[658] Clement himself claimed to have been the originator of that war which brought upon him so terrible and so just a punishment.

[Footnote 653: _L. and P._, i., 3838, 3876.]

[Footnote 654: _Ibid._, ii., 3781; _cf._, i., 4283, "all here have regard only to their own honour and profit".]

[Footnote 655: _Ibid._, ii., 2362.]

[Footnote 656: _L. and P._, ii., 3277, 3352.]

[Footnote 657: _Ibid._, ii., 3523.]

[Footnote 658: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 209, 210, 309; _cf._, _L. and P._, iv., 3051, 3352. Clement had given away Sicily and Naples to one of Charles's va.s.sals "which dealing may make me not take him as Pope, no, not for all the excommunications that he can make; for I stand under appellation to the next general council". Every one--Charles V., Henry VIII., Cranmer--played an appeal to the next general council against the Pope's excommunication.]

Another result of the merging of the Pope in the Italian prince was the practical exclusion of the English and other Northern nations from the supreme council of Christendom. There was no apparent reason why an Englishman should not be the head of the Christian Church just as well as an Italian; but there was some incongruity in the idea of an Englishman ruling over Italian States, and no Englishman had attained the Papacy for nearly four centuries. The double failure of Wolsey made it clear that the door of the Papacy was sealed to Englishmen, whatever their claims might be. The roll of cardinals tells a similar tale; the Roman curia graciously conceded that there should generally be one English cardinal in the sacred college, but one in a body (p. 231) of forty or fifty was thought as much as England could fairly demand.

It is not so very surprising that England repudiated the authority of a tribunal in which its influence was measured on such a contemptible scale. The other nations of Europe thought much the same, and it is only necessary to add up the number of cardinals belonging to each nationality to arrive at a fairly accurate indication of the peoples who rejected papal pretensions. The nations most inadequately represented in the college of cardinals broke away from Rome; those which remained faithful were the nations which controlled in the present, or might hope to control in the future, the supreme ecclesiastical power. Spain and France had little temptation to abolish an authority which they themselves wielded in turn; for if the Pope was a Spaniard to-day, he might well be a Frenchman to-morrow. There was no absurdity in Frenchmen or Spaniards ruling over the papal States; for France and Spain already held under their sway more Italian territory than Italian natives themselves. It was the subjection of the Pope to French and Spanish domination that prejudiced his claims in English eyes. His authority was tolerable so long as the old ideal of the unity of Christendom under a single monarch retained its force, or even so long as the Pope was Italian pure and simple. But when Italy was either Spanish or French, and the Pope the chaplain of one or the other monarch, the growing spirit of nationality could bear it no longer; it responded at once to Henry's appeals against the claims of a foreign jurisdiction.

It was a mere accident that the breach with Rome grew out of Spanish control of the Pope. The separation was nearly effected more than (p. 232) a century earlier, as a result of the Pope's Babylonish captivity in France; and the wonder is, not that the breach took place when it did, but that it was deferred for so long. At the beginning of the fifteenth century all the elements were present but one for the ecclesiastical revolution which was reserved for Henry VIII. to effect. The Papacy had been discredited in English eyes by subservience to France, just as it had in 1529 by subservience to Charles. Lollardy was more powerful in England in the reign of Henry IV. than heresy was in the middle of that of Henry VIII. There was as strong a demand for the secularisation of Church property on the part of the lay peers and gentry; and Wycliffe himself had antic.i.p.ated the cardinal point of the later movement by appealing to the State to reform the Church. But great revolutions depend on a number of causes working together, and often fail for the lack of one. The element lacking in the reign of Henry IV. was the King himself. The Lancastrians were orthodox from conviction and from the necessities of their position; they needed the support of the Church to bolster up a weak t.i.tle to the crown. The civil wars followed; and Henry VII. was too much absorbed in securing his throne to pursue any quarrels with Rome. But when his son began to rule as well as to reign, it was inevitable that not merely questions of Church property and of the relations with the Papacy should come up for revision, but also those issues between Church and State which had remained in abeyance during the fifteenth century. The divorce was the spark which ignited the flame, but the combustible materials had been long existent. If the divorce had been all, there would have been no Reformation in England. After the death of Anne Boleyn, Henry (p. 233) might have done some trifling penance at his subjects' expense, made the Pope a present, or waged war on one of Clement's orthodox foes, and that would have been the end. Much had happened since the days of Hildebrand, and Popes were no longer able to exact heroic repentance.

The divorce, in fact, was the occasion, and not the cause, of the Reformation.

That movement, so far as Henry VIII. was concerned, was not in essence doctrinal; neither was it primarily a schism between the English and Roman communions. It was rather an episode in the eternal dispute between Church and State. Throughout the quarrel, Henry and Elizabeth maintained that they were merely rea.s.serting their ancient royal prerogative over the Church, which the Pope of Rome had usurped.

English revolutions have always been based on specious conservative pleas, and the only method of inducing Englishmen to change has been by persuasions that the change is not a change at all, or is a change to an older and better order. The Parliaments of the seventeenth century regarded the Stuart pretensions, as Henry and Elizabeth did those of the Pope, in the light of usurpations upon their own imprescriptible rights; and more recently, movements to make the Church Catholic have been based on the ground that it has never been anything else. The Tudor contention that the State was always supreme over the Church has been transformed into a theory that the Church was always at least semi-independent of Rome. But it is not so clear that the Church has always been anti-papal, as that the English laity have always been anti-clerical.

The English people were certainly very anti-sacerdotal from the (p. 234) the very beginning of Henry VIII.'s reign. In 1512 James IV. complained to Henry that Englishmen seized Scots merchants, ill-treated them, and abused them as "the Pope's men".[659] At the end of the same year Parliament deprived of their benefit of clergy all clerks under the rank of sub-deacon who committed murder or felony.[660] This measure at once provoked a cry of "the Church in danger". The Abbot of Winchcombe preached that the act was contrary to the law of G.o.d and to the liberties of the Church, and that the lords, who consented thereto, had incurred a liability to spiritual censures. Standish, warden of the Mendicant Friars of London, defended the action of Parliament, while the temporal peers requested the bishops to make the Abbot of Winchcombe recant.[661] They refused, and, at the Convocation of 1515, Standish was summoned before it to explain his conduct. He appealed to the King; the judges p.r.o.nounced that all who had taken part in the proceedings against Standish had incurred the penalties of _praemunire_. They also declared that the King could hold a Parliament without the spiritual lords, who only sat in virtue of their temporalties. This opinion seems to have nothing to do with (p. 235) the dispute, but it is remarkable that, in one list of the peers attending the Parliament of 1515, there is not a single abbot.[662]

[Footnote 659: _L. and P._, i., 3320. In 1516 one Humphrey Bonner preached a sermon ridiculing the Holy See (_ibid._, ii., 2692).]

[Footnote 660: In this, as in many other reforms, the English Parliament only antic.i.p.ated the action of the Church; for on 12th February, 1516, Leo X.

issued a bull prohibiting any one from being admitted, for the next five years, into minor orders unless he were simultaneously promoted to be sub-deacon; as many persons, to avoid appearing before the civil courts and to enjoy immunity, received the tonsure and minor orders without proceeding to the superior (_L. and P._, ii., 1532).]

[Footnote 661: _L. and P._, ii., 1313. Brewer impugns the authority of Keilway's report of this incident on the ground that he lived in Elizabeth's reign; that is true, but according to the _D.N.B._ he was born in 1497, which makes him a strictly contemporary authority.]

[Footnote 662: _L. and P._, ii., 1131.]

With regard to the Abbot of Winchcombe and Friar Standish, the prelates claimed the same liberty of speech for Convocation as was enjoyed by Parliament; so that they could, without offence, have maintained certain acts of Parliament to be against the laws of the Church.[663] Wolsey interceded on their behalf, and begged that the matter might be left to the Pope's decision, while Henry contented himself with a declaration that he would maintain intact his royal jurisdiction. This was not all that pa.s.sed during that session of Parliament and Convocation. At the end of his summary of the proceedings, Dr. John Taylor, who was both clerk of Parliament and prolocutor of Convocation, remarks: "In this Parliament and Convocation the most dangerous quarrels broke out between the clergy and the secular power, respecting the Church's liberties";[664] and there exists a remarkable pet.i.tion presented to this Parliament against clerical exactions; it complained that the clergy refused burial until after the gift of the deceased's best jewel, best garment or the like, and demanded that every curate should administer the sacrament when required to do so.[665] It was no wonder that Wolsey advised "the more speedy dissolution" of this Parliament,[666] and that, except in 1523, when financial straits compelled him, he did not call another while he remained in power. His fall was the sign (p. 236) for the revival of Parliament, and it immediately took up the work where it was left in 1515.

[Footnote 663: _Ibid._, ii., 1314.]

[Footnote 664: _Ibid._, ii., 1312.]

[Footnote 665: _Ibid._, ii., 1315; _cf._ another pet.i.tion to the same effect from the inhabitants of London (_ibid._, i., 5725 (i.)).]

[Footnote 666: _Ibid._, ii., 1223.]

These significant proceedings did not stand alone. In 1515 the Bishop of London's chancellor was indicted for the murder of a citizen who had been found dead in the Bishop's prison.[667] The Bishop interceded with Wolsey to prevent the trial; any London jury would, he said, convict any clerk, "be he innocent as Abel; they be so maliciously set _in favorem haereticae pravitatis_".[668] The heresy was no matter of belief, but hatred of clerical immunities. The _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_, wrote More to Erasmus in 1516, was "popular everywhere";[669]

and no more bitter a satire had yet been penned on the clergy. In this matter Henry and his lay subjects were at one. Standish, whom Taylor describes as the promoter and instigator of all these evils, was a favourite preacher at Henry's Court. The King, said Pace, had "often praised his doctrine".[670] But what was it? It was no advocacy of Henry's loved "new learning," for Standish denounced the Greek Testament of Erasmus, and is held up to ridicule by the great Dutch humanist;[671] Standish, too, was afterwards a stout defender of the Pope's dispensing power, and followed Fisher in his protest against the divorce before the legatine Court. The doctrine, which pleased the King so much, was Standish's denial of clerical immunity from State control, and his a.s.sertion of royal prerogatives over the Church. (p. 237) In 1518 the Bishopric of St. Asaph's fell vacant. Wolsey, who was then at the height of his power, recommended Bolton,[672] prior of St.

Bartholomew's, a learned man; but Henry was resolved to reward his favourite divine, and Standish obtained the see. Pace, a good churchman, expressed himself to Wolsey as "mortified" at the result, but said it was inevitable, as besides the King's good graces, Standish enjoyed "the favour of all the courtiers for the singular a.s.sistance he has rendered towards subverting the Church of England".[673]

[Footnote 667: See Dr. Gairdner, _History of English Church in Sixteenth Century_, ch. iii., where the story of Richard Hunne is critically examined in detail. Its importance consists, however, not in the question whether Hunne was or was not murdered by the Bishop's chancellor Horsey, but in the popular hostility to the clergy revealed by the incident.]

[Footnote 668: _L. and P._, ii., 2.]

[Footnote 669: _Ibid._, ii., 2492.]