Henry VIII Part 23

[Footnote 733: "Parliament," says Brewer, "faithfully reflected the King's wishes." It is equally true to say that the King reflected the wishes of Parliament; and the accusation of servility is based on the a.s.sumption that Parliament must either be in chronic opposition to the Crown or servile. One of Brewer's reasons for Henry's power is that he "required no grants of money"! (_L. and P._, iv., Introd., p. dcxlv.).]

[Footnote 734: "Henry," writes Chapuys in 1532, "has been trying to obtain from Parliament the grant of a third of the feudal property of deceased lords, but as yet has got nothing" (_L. and P._, v., 805). Various other instances are mentioned in the following pages, and they could doubtless be multiplied if the Journals of the House of Commons were extant for this period.]

The general harmony between King and Parliament was based on a fundamental similarity of interests; the harmony in detail was worked out, not by the forcible exertion of Henry's will, but by his careful and skilful manipulation of both Houses. No one was ever a greater adept in the management of the House of Commons, which is easy (p. 263) to humour but hard to drive. Parliaments are jealous bodies, but they are generally pleased with attentions; and Henry VIII. was very a.s.siduous in the attentions he paid to his lay Lords and Commons. From 1529 he suffered no intermediary to come between Parliament and himself. Cromwell was more and more employed by the King,[735] but only in subordinate matters, and when important questions were at issue Henry managed the business himself. He constantly visited both Houses and remained within their precincts for hours at a time,[736]

watching every move in the game and taking note of every symptom of parliamentary feeling. He sent no royal commands to his faithful Commons; in this respect he was less arbitrary than his daughter, Queen Elizabeth. He submitted points for their consideration, argued with them, and frankly gave his reasons. It was always done, of course, with a magnificent air of royal condescension, but with such grace (p. 264) as to carry the conviction that he was really pleased to condescend and to take counsel with his subjects, and that he did so because he trusted his Parliament, and expected his Parliament to place an equal confidence in him. Henry VIII. acted more as the leader of both Houses than as a King; and, like modern parliamentary leaders, he demanded the bulk of their time for measures which he himself proposed.

[Footnote 735: Cromwell used to report to the King on the feeling of Parliament; thus in 1534 (_L. and P._, vii., 51) he tells Henry how far members were willing to go in the creation of fresh treasons, "they be contented that deed and writing shall be treason," but words were to be only misprision; they refused to include an heir's rebellion or disobedience in the bill, "as rebellion is already treason and disobedience is no cause of forfeiture of inheritance," and they thought "that the King of Scots should in no wise be named" (there is in the Record Office a draft of the Treasons Bill of 1534 materially differing from the Act as pa.s.sed.

Therefore either the bill did not originate with the Government and was modified under Government pressure, or it did originate with the Government and was modified under parliamentary pressure).

This is how Henry's legislation was evolved; there is no foundation for the a.s.sertion that Parliament merely registered the King's edicts.]

[Footnote 736: _E.g._, _L. and P._, v., 120. At other times Parliament visited him. "On Thursday last,"

writes one on 8th March, 1534, "the whole Parliament were with the King at York Place for three hours" (_ibid._, vii., 304).]

The fact that the legislation of Henry's reign was initiated almost entirely by Government is not, however, a conclusive proof of the servility of Parliament. For, though it may have been the theory that Parliament existed to pa.s.s laws of its own conception, such has never been the practice, except when there has been chronic opposition between the executive and the legislature. Parliament has generally been the instrument of Government, a condition essential to strong and successful administration; and it is still summoned mainly to discuss such measures as the executive thinks fit to lay before it. Certainly the proportion of Government bills to other measures pa.s.sed in Henry's reign was less than it is to-day. A private member's bill then stood more chance of becoming law, and a Government bill ran greater risks of being rejected. That, of course, is not the whole truth. One of the reasons why Henry's House of Commons felt at liberty to reject bills proposed by the King, was that such rejection did not involve the fall of a Government which on other grounds the House wished to support. It did not even entail a dissolution. Not that general elections possessed any terrors for sixteenth-century Parliaments. A seat in the House of Commons was not considered a very great prize. The cla.s.ses, from (p. 265) which its members were drawn, were much more bent on the pursuit of their own private fortunes than on partic.i.p.ation in public affairs.

Their membership was not seldom a burden,[737] and the long sessions of the Reformation Parliament const.i.tuted an especial grievance. One member complained that those sessions cost him equivalent to about five hundred pounds over and above the wages paid him by his const.i.tuents.[738] Leave to go home was often requested, and the imperial amba.s.sador records that Henry, with characteristic craft, granted such licences to hostile members, but refused them to his own supporters.[739] That was a legitimate parliamentary stratagem. It was not Henry's fault if members preferred their private concerns to the interests of Catherine of Aragon or to the liberties of the Catholic Church.

[Footnote 737: Some at least of the royal nominations to Parliament were due to the fact that nothing less than a royal command could produce a representative at all.]

[Footnote 738: _L. and P._, vii., 302.]

[Footnote 739: _Ibid._, v., 120.]

Henry's greatest advantage lay, however, in a circ.u.mstance which const.i.tutes the chief real difference between the Parliaments of the sixteenth century and those of to-day. His members of Parliament were representatives rather than delegates. They were elected as fit and proper persons to decide upon such questions as should be submitted to them in the Parliament House, and not merely as fit and proper persons to register decisions already reached by their const.i.tuents. Although they were in the habit of rendering to their const.i.tuents an account of their proceedings at the close of each session,[740] and although the fact that they depended upon their const.i.tuencies for their wages prevented their acting in opposition to their const.i.tuents' (p. 266) wishes, they received no precise instructions. They went to Parliament unfettered by definite pledges. They were thus more susceptible, not only to pressure, but also to argument; and it is possible that in those days votes were sometimes affected by speeches. The action of members was determined, not by previous engagements or party discipline, but by their view of the merits and necessities of the case before them. Into that view extraneous circ.u.mstances, such as fear of the King, might to a certain extent intrude; but such evidence as is available points decisively to the conclusion that co-operation between the King and Parliament was secured, partly by Parliament doing what Henry wanted, and partly by Henry doing what Parliament wanted. Parliament did not always do as the King desired, nor did the King's actions always commend themselves to Parliament. Most of the measures of the Reformation Parliament were matters of give and take.

It was due to Henry's skill, and to the circ.u.mstances of the time that the King's taking was always to his own profit, and his giving at the expense of the clergy. He secured the support of the Commons for his own particular ends by promising the redress of their grievances against the bishops and priests. It is said that he inst.i.tuted the famous pet.i.tions urged against the clergy in 1532, and it is hinted that the abuses, of which those pet.i.tions complained, had no real existence. No doubt Henry encouraged the Commons' complaints; he had every reason to do so, but he did not invent the abuses. If the Commons did not feel the grievances, the King's promise to redress them would be no inducement to Parliament to comply with the royal demands. The hostility of the laity to the clergy, arising out (p. 267) of these grievances, was in fact the lever with which Henry overthrew the papal authority, and the basis upon which he built his own supremacy over the Church.

[Footnote 740: _Cf. ibid._, iv., App. 1.]

This anti-ecclesiastical bias on the part of the laity was the dominant factor in the Reformation under Henry VIII. But the word in its modern sense is scarcely applicable to the ecclesiastical policy of that King. Its common acceptation implies a purification of doctrine, but it is doubtful whether any idea of interfering with dogma ever crossed the minds of the monarchs, who, for more than a generation, had been proclaiming the need for a reformation. Their proposal was to reform the practice of the clergy; and the method they favoured most was the abolition of clerical privileges and the appropriation of ecclesiastical property. The Reformation in England, so far as it was carried by Henry VIII., was, indeed, neither more nor less than a violent self-a.s.sertion of the laity against the immunities which the Church had herself enjoyed, and the restraints which she imposed upon others. It was not primarily a breach between the Church of England and the Roman communion, a repudiation on the part of English ecclesiastics of a hara.s.sing papal yoke; for it is fairly obvious that under Henry VIII. the Church took no measures against Rome that were not forced on it by the State. It was not till the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth that the Church accorded a consent, based on conviction, to a settlement originally extorted by force. The Reformation was rather a final a.s.sertion by the State of its authority over the Church in England. The breach with the Roman Church, the repudiation of papal influence in English ecclesiastical affairs, was not a spontaneous clerical movement; it was the effect of the (p. 268) subjection of the Church to the national temporal power. The Church in England had hitherto been a semi-independent part of the political community. It was semi-national, semi-universal; it owed one sort of fealty to the universal Pope, and another to the national King. The rising spirit of nationality could brook no divided allegiance; and the universal gave way to the national idea. There was to be no _imperium in imperio_, but "one body politic,"[741] with one Supreme Head. Henry VIII. is reported by Chapuys as saying that he was King, Emperor and Pope, all in one, so far as England was concerned.[742]

The Church was to be nationalised; it was to compromise its universal character, and to become the Church _of_ England, rather than a branch of the Church universal _in_ England.

[Footnote 741: The phrase occurs in Cromwell's draft bill for the submission of Convocation (_L.

and P._, v., 721).]

[Footnote 742: _Ibid._, v., 361. This was in reference to Henry's refusal to allow a visitation of the Cistercian monasteries, of which Chapuys thought they stood in great need (31st July, 1531).]

The revolution was inevitably effected through the action of the State rather than that of the Church. The Church, which, like religion itself, is in essence universal and not national, regarded with abhorrence the prospect of being narrowed and debased to serve political ends. The Church in England had moreover no means and no weapons wherewith to effect an internal reformation independent of the Papacy; as well might the Court of King's Bench endeavour to reform itself without the authority of King and Parliament. The whole jurisdiction of the Church was derived in theory from the Pope; when Wolsey wished to reform the monasteries he had to seek authority from Leo X.; the Archbishop of Canterbury held a court at Lambeth and (p. 269) exercised juridical powers, but he did so as _legatus natus_ of the Apostolic See, and not as archbishop, and this authority could at any time be superseded by that of a legate _a latere_, as Warham's was by Wolsey's. It was not his own but the delegated jurisdiction of another.[743] Bishops and archbishops were only the channels of a jurisdiction flowing from a papal fountain. Henry charged Warham in 1532 with _praemunire_ because he had consecrated the Bishop of St.

Asaph before the Bishop's temporalties had been restored.[744] The Archbishop in reply stated that he merely acted as commissary of the Pope, "the act was the Pope's act," and he had no discretion of his own. He was bound to consecrate as soon as the Bishop had been declared such in consistory at Rome. Chapters might elect, the Archbishop might consecrate, and the King might restore the temporalties; but none of these things gave a bishop jurisdiction.

There were in fact two and only two sources of power and jurisdiction, the temporal sovereign and the Pope; reformation must be effected by the one or the other. Wolsey had ideas of a national ecclesiastical reformation, but he could have gone no farther than the Pope, who gave him his authority, permitted. Had the Church in England transgressed that limit, it would have become dead in schism, and Wolsey's jurisdiction would have _ipso facto_ ceased. Hence the fundamental (p. 270) impossibility of Wolsey's scheme; hence the ultimate resort to the only alternative, a reformation by the temporal sovereign, which Wycliffe had advocated and which the Anglicans of the sixteenth century justified by deriving the royal supremacy from the authority conceded by the early Fathers to the Roman Emperor--an authority prior to the Pope's.

[Footnote 743: _Cf._ Maitland, _Roman Canon Law_; Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, i., 90 (Bracton regards the Pope as the Englishman's "Ordinary"); and Leadam, _Select Cases from the Star Chamber_, Introd., pp. lx.x.xvi.-viii.]

[Footnote 744: _L. and P._, v., 1247. A curious point about this doc.u.ment, unnoticed by the editor, is that the Bishop of St. Asaph had been consecrated as far back as 1518, and that he was the Standish who had played so conspicuous a part in the early Church and State disputes of Henry's reign. This is an echo of the "Invest.i.ture"

controversy (Luchaire, _Manuel_, pp. 509, 510).]

Hence, too, the agency employed was Parliament and not Convocation.[745] The representatives of the clergy met of course as frequently as those of the laity, but their activity was purely defensive. They suggested no changes themselves, and endeavoured without much success to resist the innovations forced upon them by King and by Parliament. They had every reason to fear both Henry and the Commons. They were conscious that the Church had lost its hold upon the nation. Its impotence was due in part to its own corruption, in part to the fact that thriving commercial and industrial cla.s.ses, like those which elected Tudor Parliaments, are as a rule impatient of religious or at least sacerdotal dictation. G.o.d and Mammon, in spite of all efforts at compromise, do not really agree. In 1529, before the meeting of Parliament, Campeggio had appealed to Henry to prevent the ruin of the Church; he felt that without State protection the Church could hardly stand. In 1531 Warham, the successor of Becket and Langton, excused his compliance with Henry's demands by pleading (p. 271) _Ira principis mors est_.[746] In the draft of a speech he drew up just before his death,[747] the Archbishop referred to the case of St.

Thomas, hinted that Henry VIII. was going the way of Henry II., and compared his policy with the const.i.tutions of Clarendon. The comparison was extraordinarily apt; Henry VIII. was doing what Henry II. had failed to do, and the fate that attended the Angevin king might have befallen the Tudor had Warham been Becket and the Church of the sixteenth been the same as the Church of the twelfth century. But they were not, and Warham appealed in vain to the liberties of the Church granted by Magna Carta, and to the "ill end" of "several kings who violated them". Laymen, he complained, now "advanced" their own laws rather than those of the Church. The people, admitted so staunch a churchman as Pole, were beginning to hate the priests.[748] "There were," wrote Norfolk, "infinite clamours of the temporalty here in Parliament against the misuse of the spiritual jurisdiction.... This realm did never grudge the tenth part against the abuses of the Church at no Parliament in my days, as they do now."[749]

[Footnote 745: "It was not from Parliament," says Brewer (_L. and P._, iv., Introd., p. dcxlvii.), "but from Convocation that the King had to antic.i.p.ate any show of independence or opposition."

True, to some extent; but the fact does not prove, as Brewer alleges, that Convocation was more independent than Parliament, but that Henry was doing what Parliament liked and Convocation disliked.]

[Footnote 746: "The Queen replied that they were all fine councillors, for when she asked advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he replied that he would not meddle in these affairs, saying frequently, _Ira principis mors est_" (Chapuys to Charles V., 6th June, 1531). Warham was one of the counsel a.s.signed to the Queen for the divorce question.]

[Footnote 747: _L. and P._, v., 1247. Warham also made a formal protest against the legislation of 1529-32 (_ibid._, v., 818). The likeness between Henry VIII. and Henry II. extended beyond their policy to their personal characteristics, and the great Angevin was much in the Tudor's mind at this period. Chapuys also called Henry VIII.'s attention to the fate of Henry II. (_ibid._, vii., 94).]

[Footnote 748: _L. and P._, v., App. 10.]

[Footnote 749: _Ibid._, v., 831; _cf._ v., 898, 989, App. 28.]

These infinite clamours and grudging were not the result of the (p. 272) conscientious rejection of any Catholic or papal doctrine. Englishmen are singularly free from the bondage of abstract ideas, and they began their Reformation not with the enunciation of some new truth, but with an attack on clerical fees. Reform was stimulated by a practical grievance, closely connected with money, and not by a sense of wrong done to the conscience. No dogma plays such a part in the English Reformation as Justification by Faith did in Germany, or Predestination in Switzerland. Parliament in 1530 had not been appreciably affected by Tyndale's translation of the Bible or by any of Luther's works.

Tyndale was still an exile in the Netherlands, pleading in vain for the same toleration in England as Charles V. permitted across the sea.

Frith was in the Tower--a man, wrote the lieutenant, Walsingham, whom it would be a great pity to lose, if only he could be reconciled[750]--and Bilney was martyred in 1531. A parliamentary inquiry was threatened in the latter case, not because Parliament sympathised with Bilney's doctrine, but because it was said that the clergy had procured his burning before obtaining the State's consent.[751] Parliament was as zealous as Convocation against heresy, but wanted the punishment of heretics left in secular hands.

[Footnote 750: _L. and P._, v., 1458.]

[Footnote 751: _Ibid._, v., 522; vii., 171.]

In this, as in other respects, the King and his Parliament were in the fullest agreement. Henry had already given proof of his anti-clerical bias by subst.i.tuting laymen for churchmen in those great offices of State which churchmen had usually held. From time immemorial the Lord Chancellor had been a Bishop,[752] but in 1529 Wolsey was succeeded by More, and, later on, More by Audley. Similarly, the privy seal (p. 273) had been held in Henry's reign by three bishops successively, Fox, Ruthal and Tunstall: now it was entrusted to the hands of Anne Boleyn's father, the Earl of Wiltshire. Gardiner remained secretary for the time, but Du Bellay thought his power would have increased had he abandoned his clerical vows,[753] and he, too, was soon superseded by Cromwell. Even the clerkship of Parliament was now given up to a layman. During the first half of Henry's reign clerical influence had been supreme in Henry's councils; during the second it was almost entirely excluded. Like his Parliament, he was now impugning the jurisdiction of the clergy in the matter of heresy; they were doctors, he said, of the soul, and had nothing to do with the body.[754] He was even inclining to the very modern theory that marriage is a civil contract, and that matrimonial suits should therefore be removed from clerical cognisance.[755] As early as 1529 he ordered Wolsey to release the Prior of Reading, who had been imprisoned for Lutheranism, "unless the matter is very heinous".[756] In 1530 he was praising Latimer's sermons;[757] and in the same year the Bishop of Norwich complained of a general report in his diocese that Henry favoured heretical books.[758] "They say that, wherever they go, they hear that the King's pleasure is that the New Testament in English shall (p. 274) go forth." There seems little reason to doubt Hall's statement that Henry now commanded the bishops, who, however, did nothing, to prepare an English translation of the Bible to counteract the errors of Tyndale's version.[759] He wrote to the German princes extolling their efforts towards the reformation of the Church;[760] and many advisers were urging him to begin a similar movement in England. Anne Boleyn and her father were, said Chapuys, more Lutheran than Luther himself; they were the true apostles of the new sect in England.[761]

[Footnote 752: Thomas Beaufort, afterwards Duke of Exeter, who was Chancellor in 1410-12, and Richard, Earl of Salisbury, who was Chancellor in 1454-5, are exceptions.]

[Footnote 753: _L. and P._, iv., 6019.]

[Footnote 754: _Ibid._, v., 1013.]

[Footnote 755: _Ibid._, v., 805; vii., 232. Chapuys had told him that "all the Parliament could not make the Princess Mary a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, for the cognisance of cases concerning legitimacy belonged to ecclesiastical judges"; to which Henry replied that "he did not care for all the canons which might be alleged, as he preferred his laws according to which he should have illegitimacy judged by lay judges who could also take cognisance of matrimonial causes".]

[Footnote 756: _L. and P._, iv., 5925.]

[Footnote 757: _Ibid._, iv., 6325.]

[Footnote 758: _Ibid._, iv., 6385.]

[Footnote 759: The net result at the time was a royal proclamation promising an authorised version of the Scriptures in English "if the people would come to a better mind" (_L. and P._, iv., 6487).]

[Footnote 760: _L. and P._, v., App. 7.]

[Footnote 761: _Ibid._, v., 148, 850.]

But, however Lutheran Anne Boleyn may have been, Henry was still true to the orthodox faith. If he dallied with German princes, and held out hopes to his heretic subjects, it was not because he believed in the doctrines of either, but because both might be made to serve his own ends. He rescued Crome from the flames, not because he doubted or favoured Crome's heresy, but because Crome appealed from the Church to the King, and denied the papal supremacy; that, said Henry, is not heresy, but truth.[762] When he sent to Oxford for the articles on which Wycliffe had been condemned,[763] it was not to study the great Reformer's doctrine of the ma.s.s, but to discover Wycliffe's reasons for calling upon the State to purify a corrupt Church, and to digest his arguments against the temporal wealth of the clergy. When he lauded the reforms effected by the German princes he was thinking of their secularisation of ecclesiastical revenues. The spoliation (p. 275) of the Church was consistent with the most fervent devotion to its tenets. In 1531 Henry warned the Pope that the Emperor would probably allow the laity "to appropriate the possessions of the Church, which is a matter which does not touch the foundations of the faith; and what an example this will afford to others, it is easy to see".[764]

Henry managed to improve upon Charles's example in this respect. "He meant," he told Chapuys in 1533, "to repair the errors of Henry II.

and John, who, being in difficulties, had made England and Ireland tributary to the Pope; he was determined also to reunite to the Crown the goods which churchmen held of it, which his predecessors could not alienate to his prejudice; and he was bound to do this by the oath he had taken at his coronation."[765] Probably it was about this time, or a little later, that he drew up his suggestions for altering the coronation oath, and making the royal obligations binding only so far as the royal conscience thought fit. The German princes had a further claim to his consideration beyond the example they set him in dealing with the temporalties of the Church. They might be very useful if his difference with Charles over Catherine of Aragon came to an open breach; and the English envoys, who congratulated them on their zeal for reform, also endeavoured to persuade them that Henry's friendship might be no little safeguard against a despotic Emperor.

[Footnote 762: _Ibid._, v., 129, 148.]

[Footnote 763: _Ibid._, iv., 6546.]

[Footnote 764: _L. and P._, v., 326.]

[Footnote 765: _Ibid._, vi., 235.]