[Footnote 565: Ibid., iv., 3247, 3263.]

[Footnote 566: Ibid., iv., 3291.]

[Footnote 567: Sp. Cal., iii., 273.]

[Footnote 568: Sp. Cal., iii., 193, 276, 300; L. and P., iv., 3312.]

In ignorance of all this, Wolsey urged Henry to send Ghinucci, the Bishop of Worcester, and others to Rome with certain demands, among which was a request for Clement's assent to the abortive proposal for a council in France.[569] But now a divergence became apparent between the policy of Wolsey and that of his king. Both were working for a divorce, but Wolsey wanted Henry to marry as his second wife Renee, the daughter of Louis XII., and thus bind more closely the two kings, upon whose union the Cardinal's personal and political schemes were now exclusively based. Henry, however, had determined that his (p. 203) second wife was to be Anne Boleyn, and of this determination Wolsey was as yet uninformed. The Cardinal had good reason to dread that lady's ascendancy over Henry's mind; for she was the hope and the tool of the anti-clerical party, which had hitherto been kept in check by Wolsey's supremacy. The Duke of Norfolk was her uncle, and he was hostile to Wolsey for both private and public reasons; her father, Viscount Rochford, her cousins, Sir William Fitzwilliam and Sir Francis Brian, and many more distant connections, were anxious at the first opportunity to lead an attack on the Church and Cardinal. Before the divorce case began Wolsey's position had grown precarious; taxes at home and failure abroad had turned the loyalty of the people to sullen discontent, and Wolsey was mainly responsible. "Disaffection to the King," wrote Mendoza in March, 1527, "and hatred of the Legate are visible everywhere.... The King would soon be obliged to change his councillors, were only a leader to present himself and head the malcontents;" and in May he reported a general rumour to the effect that Henry intended to relieve the Legate of his share in the administration.[570] The Cardinal had incurred the dislike of nearly every section of the community; the King was his sole support and the King was beginning to waver. In May there were high words between Wolsey and Norfolk in Henry's presence;[571] in July King and Cardinal were quarrelling over ecclesiastical patronage at Calais,[572] and, long before the failure of the divorce suit, there were other (p. 204) indications that Henry and his minister had ceased to work together in harmony.

[Footnote 569: Ibid., iv., 3400.]

[Footnote 570: Sp. Cal., iii., 109, 190, 192, 193; cf. iv., 3951, Du Bellay to Montmorenci, "those who desire to catch him tripping are very glad the people cry out 'Murder'".]

[Footnote 571: L. and P., iv., 1411.]

[Footnote 572: Ibid., iv., 3304.]

It is, indeed, quite a mistake to represent Wolsey's failure to obtain a sentence in Henry's favour as the sole or main cause of his fall. Had he succeeded, he might have deferred for a time his otherwise unavoidable ruin, but it was his last and only chance. He was driven to playing a desperate game, in which the dice were loaded against him. If his plan failed, he told Clement over and over again, it would mean for him irretrievable ruin, and in his fall he would drag down the Church. If it succeeded, he would be hardly more secure, for success meant the predominance of Anne Boleyn and of her anti-ecclesiastical kin. Under the circumstances, it is possible to attach too much weight to the opinion of the French and Spanish ambassadors, and of Charles V. himself, that Wolsey suggested the divorce as the means of breaking for ever the alliance between England and the House of Burgundy, and substituting for it a union with France.[573] The divorce fitted in so well with Wolsey's French policy, that the suspicion was natural; but the same observers also recorded the impression that Wolsey was secretly opposing the divorce from fear of the ascendancy of Anne Boleyn.[574] That suspicion had been brought to Henry's mind as early as June, 1527. It was probably due to the facts that Wolsey was not blinded by passion, as Henry was, to the difficulties in the way, and that it was he who persuaded Henry to have recourse to the Pope in the first instance,[575] when the King desired to follow Suffolk's precedent, obtain a sentence (p. 205) in England, marry again, and trust to the Pope to confirm his proceedings.

[Footnote 573: L. and P., iv., 4112, 4865, 5512.]

[Footnote 574: Sp. Cal., iii., 432, 790; Ven. Cal., 1529, 212.]

[Footnote 575: "He showed me," writes Campeggio, "that in order to maintain and increase here the authority of the Holy See and the Pope he had done his utmost to persuade the King to apply for a legate... although many of these prelates declared it was possible to do without one" (iv., 4857; cf. iv., 5072, 5177).]

It is not, however, impossible to trace Wolsey's real designs behind these conflicting reports. He knew that Henry was determined to have a divorce and that this was one of those occasions upon which "he would be obeyed, whosoever spoke to the contrary". As minister he must therefore either resign—a difficult thing in the sixteenth century—or carry out the King's policy. For his own part he had no objection to the divorce in itself; he was no more touched by the pathos of Catherine's fate than was her nephew Charles V., he wished to see the succession strengthened, he thought that he might restore his tottering influence by obtaining gratification for the King, and he was straining every nerve to weaken Charles V., either because the Emperor's power was really too great, or out of revenge for his betrayal over the papal election. But he was strenuously hostile to Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn for two excellent reasons: firstly she and her kin belonged to the anti-ecclesiastical party which Wolsey had dreaded since 1515, and secondly he desired Henry to marry the French Princess Renee in order to strengthen his anti-imperial policy. Further, he was anxious that the divorce problem should be solved by means of the Papacy, because its solution by merely national action would create a breach between England and Rome, would ruin Wolsey's chances of election as Pope, would threaten his ecclesiastical supremacy in England, which was merely a legatine authority (p. 206) dependent on the Pope,[576] and would throw Clement into the arms of Charles V., whereas Wolsey desired him to be an effective member of the anti-imperial alliance. Thus Wolsey was prepared to go part of the way with Henry VIII., but he clearly saw the point at which their paths would diverge; and his efforts on Henry's behalf were hampered by his endeavours to keep the King on the track which he had marked out.

[Footnote 576: Wolsey "certainly proves himself very zealous for the preservation of the authority of the See Apostolic in this kingdom because all his grandeur is connected with it" (Campeggio to Sanga, 28th Oct., 1528, L. and P., iv., 4881).]

Henry's suspicions, and his knowledge that Wolsey would be hostile to his marriage with Anne Boleyn, induced him to act for the time independently of the Cardinal; and, while Wolsey was in France hinting at a marriage between Henry and Renee, the King himself was secretly endeavouring to remove the obstacles to his union with Anne Boleyn. Instead of adopting Wolsey's suggestion that Ghinucci should be sent to Rome as an Italian versed in the ways of the Papal Curia, he despatched his secretary, Dr. William Knight, with two extraordinary commissions, the second of which he thought would not be revealed "for any craft the Cardinal or any other can find".[577] The first was to obtain from the Pope a dispensation to marry a second wife, without being divorced from Catherine, the issue from both marriages to be legitimate. This "licence to commit bigamy" has naturally been the subject of much righteous indignation. But marriage-laws were lax (p. 207) in those days, when Popes could play fast and loose with them for political purposes; and, besides the "great reasons and precedents, especially in the Old Testament," to which Henry referred,[578] he might have produced a precedent more pertinent, more recent, and better calculated to appeal to Clement VII. In 1521 Charles V.'s Spanish council drew up a memorial on the subject of his marriage, in which they pointed out that his ancestor, Henry IV. of Castile, had, in 1437, married Dona Blanca, by whom he had no children; and that the Pope thereupon granted him a dispensation to marry a second wife on condition that, if within a fixed time he had no issue by her, he should return to his first.[579] A licence for bigamy, modelled after this precedent, would have suited Henry admirably, but apparently he was unaware of this useful example, and was induced to countermand Knight's commission before it had been communicated to Clement. The demand would not, however, have shocked the Pope so much as his modern defenders, for on 18th September, 1530, Casale writes to Henry: "A few days since the Pope secretly proposed to me that your Majesty might be allowed two wives. I told him I could not undertake to make any such proposition, because I did not know whether it would satisfy your Majesty's conscience. I made this answer because I know that the Imperialists have this in view, and are urging it; but why, I know not."[580] Ghinucci and Benet were equally cautious, and thought the Pope's suggestion was only a ruse; whether a ruse or not, it is (p. 208) a curious illustration of the moral influence Popes were then likely to exert on their flock.

[Footnote 577: Henry VIII. to Knight in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS., 318, f. 3, printed in the Academy, xv., 239, and Engl. Hist. Rev., xi., 685.]

[Footnote 578: L. and P., iv., 4977.]

[Footnote 579: Sp. Cal., ii., 379.]

[Footnote 580: L. and P., iv., 6627, 6705, App. 261.]

The second commission, with which Knight was entrusted, was hardly less strange than the first. By his illicit relations with Mary Boleyn, Henry had already contracted affinity in the first degree with her sister Anne, in fact precisely the same affinity (except that it was illicit) as that which Catherine was alleged to have contracted with him before their marriage. The inconsistency of Henry's conduct, in seeking to remove by the same method from his second marriage the disability which was held to invalidate his first, helps us to define the precise position which Henry took up and the nature of his peculiar conscience. Obviously he did not at this stage deny the Pope's dispensing power; for he was invoking its aid to enable him to marry Anne Boleyn. He asserted, and he denied, no principle whatever, though it must be remembered that his own dispensation was an almost, if not quite, unprecedented stretch of papal power. To dispense with the "divine" law against marrying the brother's wife, and to dispense with the merely canonical obstacle to his marriage with Anne arising out of his relations with Mary Boleyn, were very different matters; and in this light the breach between England and Rome might be represented as caused by a novel extension of papal claims. Henry, however, was a casuist concerned exclusively with his own case. He maintained merely that the particular dispensation, granted for his marriage with Catherine, was null and void. As a concession to others, he condescended to give a number of reasons, none of them affecting any principle, but only the legal technicalities of the case—the causes for which the dispensation was granted, such as his own (p. 209) desire, and the political necessity for the marriage were fictitious; he had himself protested against the marriage, and so forth. For himself, his own conviction was ample sanction; he knew he was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was a manifest token of the wrath of Providence. The capacity for convincing himself of his own righteousness is the most effective weapon in the egotist's armoury, and Henry's egotism touched the sublime. His conscience was clear, whatever other people might think of the maze of apparent inconsistencies in which he was involved. In 1528 he was in some fear of death from the plague; fear of death is fatal to the peace of a guilty conscience, and it might well have made Henry pause in his pursuit after the divorce and Anne Boleyn. But Henry never wavered; he went on in serene assurance, writing his love letters to Anne, as a conscientiously unmarried man might do, making his will,[581] "confessing every day and receiving his Maker at every feast,"[582] paying great attention to the morals of monasteries, and to charges of malversation against Wolsey, and severely lecturing his sister Margaret on the sinfulness of her life.[583] He hopes she will turn "to God's word, the vively doctrine of Jesu Christ, the only ground of salvation—1 COR. 3, etc."; he reminds her of "the divine ordinance of inseparable matrimony first instituted in Paradise," and urges her to avoid "the inevitable damnation threatened against (p. 210) advoutrers". Henry's conscience was convenient and skilful. He believed in the "ordinance of inseparable matrimony," so, when he wished to divorce a wife, his conscience warned him that he had never really been married to her. Hence his nullity suits with Catherine of Aragon, with Anne Boleyn and with Anne of Cleves. Moreover, if he had never been married to Catherine, his relations with Mary Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount were obviously not adultery, and he was free to denounce that sin in Margaret with a clear conscience.

[Footnote 581: L. and P., iv., 4404.]

[Footnote 582: Ibid., iv., 4542.]

[Footnote 583: Ibid., iv., 4131. Wolsey writes the letter, but he is only giving Henry's "message". The letter is undated, but it refers to the "shameless sentence sent from Rome," i.e., sentence of divorce which is dated 11th March, 1527.]

* * * * *

Dr. Knight had comparatively little difficulty in obtaining the dispensation for Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn; but it was only to be effective after sentence had been given decreeing the nullity of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon; and, as Wolsey saw, that was the real crux of the question.[584] Knight had scarcely turned his steps homeward, when he was met by a courier with fresh instructions from Wolsey to obtain a further concession from Clement; the Pope was to empower the Cardinal himself, or some other safe person, to examine the original dispensation, and, if it were found invalid, to annul Henry's marriage with Catherine. So Knight returned to the Papal Court; and then began that struggle between English and Spanish (p. 211) influence at Rome which ended in the victory of Charles V. and the repudiation by England of the Roman jurisdiction. Never did two parties enter upon a contest with a clearer perception of the issues involved, or carry it on with their eyes more open to the magnitude of the results. Wolsey himself, Gardiner, Foxe, Casale, and every English envoy employed in the case, warned and threatened Clement that, if he refused Henry's demands, he would involve Wolsey and the Papal cause in England in a common ruin. "He alleged," says Campeggio of Wolsey, "that if the King's desire were not complied with... there would follow the speedy and total ruin of the kingdom, of his Lordship and of the Church's influence in this kingdom."[585] "I cannot reflect upon it," wrote Wolsey himself, "and close my eyes, for I see ruin, infamy and subversion of the whole dignity and estimation of the See Apostolic if this course is persisted in. You see in what dangerous times we are. If the Pope will consider the gravity of this cause, and how much the safety of the nation depends upon it, he will see that the course he now pursues will drive the King to adopt remedies which are injurious to the Pope, and are frequently instilled into the King's mind."[586] On one occasion Clement confessed that, though the Pope was supposed to carry the papal laws locked up in his breast, Providence had not vouchsafed him the key wherewith to unlock them; and Gardiner roughly asked in retort whether in that case the papal laws should not be committed to the flames.[587] He told how the Lutherans were instigating Henry to do away with the temporal (p. 212) possessions of the Church.[588] But Clement could only bewail his misfortune, and protest that, if heresies and schisms arose, it was not his fault. He could not afford to offend the all-powerful Emperor; the sack of Rome and Charles's intimation conveyed in plain and set terms that it was the judgment of God[589] had cowed Clement for the rest of his life, and made him resolve never again to incur the Emperor's enmity.

[Footnote 584: For these intricate negotiations see Stephan Ehses, Roemische Dokumente zur Geschichte der Ehescheidung Heinrichs VIII. von England, 1893; these documents had all, I think, been previously printed by Laemmer or Theiner, but only from imperfect copies often incorrectly deciphered. Ehses has printed the originals with the utmost care, and thrown much new light on the subject. The story of the divorce is retold in this new light by Dr. Gairdner in the English Historical Review, vols. xi. and xii.; the documents in L. and P. must be corrected from these sources.]

[Footnote 585: L. and P., iv., 4881.]

[Footnote 586: Ibid., iv., 4897.]

[Footnote 587: Ibid., iv., 4167; cf. iv., 5156, and Ehses, Roemische Dokumente, No. 20, where Cardinal Pucci gives a somewhat different account of the interviews.]

[Footnote 588: L. and P., iv., 5038, 5417, 5476.]

[Footnote 589: Sp. Cal., iii., 309.]

From the point of view of justice, the Pope had an excellent case; even the Lutherans, who denied his dispensing power, denounced the divorce. Quod non fieri debuit, was their just and common-sense point, factum valet. But the Pope's case had been hopelessly weakened by the evil practice of his predecessors and of himself. Alexander VI. had divorced Louis XII. from his Queen for no other reasons than that Louis XII. wanted to unite Brittany with France by marrying its duchess, and that Alexander, the Borgia Pope, required Louis' assistance in promoting the interests of the iniquitous Borgia family.[590] The injustice to Catherine was no greater than that to Louis' Queen. Henry's sister Margaret, and both the husbands of his other sister, Mary, had procured divorces from Popes, and why not Henry himself? Clement was ready enough to grant Margaret's divorce;[591] he was willing to give a dispensation for a marriage between the Princess Mary and her half-brother, the Duke of (p. 213) Richmond; the more insuperable the obstacle, the more its removal enhanced his power. It was all very well to dispense with canons and divine laws, but to annul papal dispensations—was that not to cheapen his own wares? Why, wrote Henry to Clement, could he not dispense with human laws, if he was able to dispense with divine at pleasure?[592] Obviously because divine authority could take care of itself, but papal prerogatives needed a careful shepherd. Even this principle, such as it was, was not consistently followed, for he had annulled a dispensation in Suffolk's case. Clement's real anxiety was to avoid responsibility. More than once he urged Henry to settle the matter himself,[593] as Suffolk had done, obtain a sentence from the courts in England, and marry his second wife. The case could then only come before him as a suit against the validity of the second marriage, and the accomplished fact was always a powerful argument. Moreover, all this would take time, and delay was as dear to Clement as irresponsibility. But Henry was determined to have such a sentence as would preclude all doubts of the legitimacy of his children by the second marriage, and was as anxious to shift the responsibility to Clement's shoulders as the Pope was to avoid it. Clement next urged Catherine to go into a nunnery, for that would only entail injustice on herself, and would involve the Church and its head in no temporal perils.[594] When Catherine (p. 214) refused, he wished her in the grave, and lamented that he seemed doomed through her to lose the spiritualties of his Church, as he had lost its temporalties through her nephew, Charles V.[595]

[Footnote 590: L. and P., iv., 5152, where Henry's ambassadors quote this precedent to the Pope. Cf. ibid., v., 45, for other precedents.]

[Footnote 591: The sentence was actually pronounced by the Cardinal of Ancona, and the date was 11th March, 1527, just before Henry commenced proceedings against Catherine. Henry called it a "shameless sentence"; but it may nevertheless have suggested to his mind the possibility of obtaining one like it.]

[Footnote 592: L. and P., iv., 5966.]

[Footnote 593: Ibid., iv., 3802, 6290.]

[Footnote 594: Ibid., iv., 5072. "It would greatly please the Pope," writes his secretary Sanga, "if the Queen could be induced to enter some religion, because, although this course would be portentous and unusual, he could more readily entertain the idea, as it would involve the injury of only one person."]

[Footnote 595: L. and P., iv., 5518.]

It was thus with the utmost reluctance that he granted the commission brought by Knight. It was a draft, drawn up by Wolsey, apparently declaring the law on the matter and empowering Wolsey, if the facts were found to be such as were alleged, to pronounce the nullity of Catherine's marriage.[596] Wolsey desired that it should be granted in the form in which he had drawn it up. But the Pope's advisers declared that such a commission would disgrace Henry, Wolsey and Clement himself. The draft was therefore amended so as to be unobjectionable, or, in other words, useless for practical purposes; and, with this commission, Knight returned to England, rejoicing in the confidence of complete success. But, as soon as Wolsey had seen it, he pronounced the commission "as good as none at all".[597] The discovery did not improve his or Henry's opinion of the Pope's good faith; but, dissembling their resentment, they despatched, in February, 1528, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe to obtain fresh and more effective powers. Eventually, on 8th June a commission was issued to Wolsey and Campeggio to try the case and pronounce sentence;[598] even if one was unwilling, the other might act by himself; and all appeals from their jurisdiction (p. 215) were forbidden. This was not a decretal commission; it did not bind the Pope or prevent him from revoking the case. Such a commission was, however, granted on condition that it should be shown to no one but the King and Wolsey, and that it should not be used in the procedure. The Pope also gave a written promise, in spite of a protest lodged on Catherine's behalf by the Spanish ambassador, Muxetula,[599] that he would not revoke, or do anything to invalidate, the commission, but would confirm the cardinals' decision.[600] If, Clement had said in the previous December, Lautrec, the French commander in Italy, came nearer Rome, he might excuse himself to the Emperor as having acted under pressure.[601] He would send the commission as soon as Lautrec arrived. Lautrec had now arrived; he had marched down through Italy; he had captured Melfi; the Spanish commander, Moncada, had been killed; Naples was thought to be on the eve of surrender.[602] The Spanish dominion in Italy was waning, the Emperor's thunderbolts were less terrifying, and the justice of the cause of his aunt less apparent.

[Footnote 596: It was called a "decretal commission," and it was a legislative as well as an administrative act; the Pope being an absolute monarch, his decrees were the laws of the Church; the difficulties of Clement VII. and indeed the whole divorce question could never have arisen had the Church been a constitutional monarchy.]

[Footnote 597: L. and P., iv., 3913.]

[Footnote 598: Ibid., iv., 4345.]

[Footnote 599: Engl. Hist. Rev., xii., 110-14.]

[Footnote 600: Ehses, Roemische Dok., No. 23; Engl. Hist. Rev., xii., 8.]

[Footnote 601: L. and P., iv., 3682, 3750.]

[Footnote 602: Ibid., iv., 3934, 3949, 4224.]

* * * * *

On 25th July Campeggio embarked at Corneto,[603] and proceeded by slow stages through France towards England. Henry congratulated himself that his hopes were on the eve of fulfilment. But, unfortunately for him, the basis, on which they were built, was as unstable as water. The decision of his case still depended upon Clement, and Clement wavered with every fluctuation in the success or the failure of (p. 216) the Spanish arms in Italy. Campeggio had scarcely set out, when Doria, the famous Genoese admiral, deserted Francis for Charles;[604] on the 17th of August Lautrec died before Naples;[605] and, on 10th September, an English agent sent Wolsey news of a French disaster, which he thought more serious than the battle of Pavia or the sack of Rome.[606] On the following day Sanga, the Pope's secretary, wrote to Campeggio that, "as the Emperor is victorious, the Pope must not give him any pretext for a fresh rupture, lest the Church should be utterly annihilated.... Proceed on your journey to England, and there do your utmost to restore mutual affection between the King and Queen. You are not to pronounce any opinion without a new and express commission hence."[607] Sanga repeated the injunction a few days later. "Every day," he wrote, "stronger reasons are discovered;" to satisfy Henry "involves the certain ruin of the Apostolic See and the Church, owing to recent events.... If so great an injury be done to the Emperor... the Church cannot escape utter ruin, as it is entirely in the power of the Emperor's servants. You will not, therefore, be surprised at my repeating that you are not to proceed to sentence, under any pretext, without express commission; but to protract the matter as long as possible."[608] Clement himself wrote to Charles that nothing would be done to Catherine's detriment, that Campeggio had gone merely to urge Henry to do his duty, and that the whole case would eventually be referred to Rome.[609] Such were the secret instructions with which Campeggio arrived in England in October.[610] He readily promised (p. 217) not to proceed to sentence, but protested against the interpretation which he put upon the Pope's command, namely, that he was not to begin the trial. The English, he said, "would think that I had come to hoodwink them, and might resent it. You know how much that would involve."[611] He did not seem to realise that the refusal to pass sentence was equally hoodwinking the English, and that the trial would only defer the moment of their penetrating the deception; a trial was of no use without sentence.

[Footnote 603: Ibid., iv., 4605.]

[Footnote 604: L. and P., iv., 4626.]

[Footnote 605: Ibid., iv., 4663.]

[Footnote 606: Ibid., iv., 4713.]

[Footnote 607: Ibid., iv., 4721.]

[Footnote 608: Ibid., iv., 4736-37.]

[Footnote 609: Sp. Cal., iii., 779.]

[Footnote 610: L. and P., iv., 4857.]

[Footnote 611: Ibid., iv., 4736.]

In accordance with his instructions, Campeggio first sought to dissuade Henry from persisting in his suit for the divorce. Finding the King immovable, he endeavoured to induce Catherine to go into a nunnery, as the divorced wife of Louis XII. had done, "who still lived in the greatest honour and reputation with God and all that kingdom".[612] He represented to her that she had nothing to lose by such a step; she could never regain Henry's affections or obtain restitution of her conjugal rights. Her consent might have deferred the separation of the English Church from Rome; it would certainly have relieved the Supreme Pontiff from a humiliating and intolerable position. But these considerations of expediency weighed nothing with Catherine. She was as immovable as Henry, and deaf to all Campeggio's solicitations. Her conscience was, perhaps, of a rigid, Spanish type, but it was as clear as Henry's and a great deal more comprehensible. She was convinced that her marriage was valid; to admit a doubt of it would imply that she had been living in sin and imperil her immortal soul. Henry (p. 218) did not in the least mind admitting that he had lived for twenty years with a woman who was not his wife; the sin, to his mind, was continuing to live with her after he had become convinced that she was really not his wife. Catherine appears, however, to have been willing to take the monastic vows, if Henry would do the same. Henry was equally willing, if Clement would immediately dispense with the vows in his case, but not in Catherine's.[613] But there were objections to this course, and doubts of Clement's power to authorise Henry's re-marriage, even if Catherine did go into a nunnery.

[Footnote 612: Ibid., iv., 4858.]

[Footnote 613: L. and P., iv., 4977.]

Meanwhile, Campeggio found help from an unexpected quarter in his efforts to waste the time. Quite unknown to Henry, Wolsey, or Clement, there existed in Spain a brief of Julius II. fuller than the original bull of dispensation which he had granted for the marriage of Henry and Catherine, and supplying any defects that might be found in it. Indeed, so conveniently did the brief meet the criticisms urged against the bull, that Henry and Wolsey at once pronounced it an obvious forgery, concocted after the doubts about the bull had been raised. No copy of the brief could be found in the English archives, nor could any trace be discovered of its having been registered at Rome; while Ghinucci and Lee, who examined the original in Spain, professed to see in it such flagrant inaccuracies as to deprive it of all claim to be genuine.[614] Still, if it were genuine, it shattered the whole of Henry's case. That had been built up, not on the (p. 219) denial of the Pope's power to dispense, but on the technical defects of a particular dispensation. Now it appeared that the validity of the marriage did not depend upon this dispensation at all. Nor did it depend upon the brief, for Catherine was prepared to deny on oath that the marriage with Arthur had been anything more than a form;[615] in that case the affinity with Henry had not been contracted, and there was no need of either dispensation or brief. This assertion seems to have shaken Henry; certainly he began to shift his position, and, early in 1529, he was wishing for some noted divine, friar or other, who would maintain that the Pope could not dispense at all.[616] This was his first doubt as to the plenitude of papal power; his marriage with Catherine must be invalid, because his conscience told him so; if it was not invalid through defects in the dispensation, it must be invalid because the Pope could not dispense. Wolsey met the objection with a legal point, perfectly good in itself, but trivial. There were two canonical disabilities which the dispensation must meet for Henry's marriage to be valid; first, the consummation of Catherine's marriage with Arthur; secondly, the marriage, even though it was not consummated, was yet celebrated in facie ecclesiae, and generally reputed complete. There was thus an impedimentum publicae honestatis to the marriage of Henry and Catherine, and this impediment was not mentioned in, and therefore not removed by, the dispensation.[617]

[Footnote 614: Ibid., iv., 5376-77, 5470-71, 5486-87. For the arguments as to its validity see Busch, England under the Tudors, Eng. trs., i., 376-8; Friedmann, Anne Boleyn, ii., 329; and Lord Acton in the Quarterly Rev., cxliii., 1-51.]

[Footnote 615: She made this statement to Campeggio in the confessional (L. and P., iv., 4875).]

[Footnote 616: Ibid., iv., 5377, 5438; Sp. Cal., iii., 276, 327.]

[Footnote 617: L. and P., iv., 3217. See this point discussed in Taunton's Cardinal Wolsey, chap. x.]

But all this legal argument might be invalidated by the brief. (p. 220) It was useless to proceed with the trial until the promoters of the suit knew what the brief contained. According to Mendoza, Catherine's "whole right" depended upon the brief, a statement indicating a general suspicion that the bull was really insufficient.[618] So the winter of 1528-29 and the following spring were spent in efforts to get hold of the original brief, or to induce Clement to declare it a forgery. The Queen was made to write to Charles that it was absolutely essential to her case that the brief should be produced before the legatine Court in England.[619] The Emperor was not likely to be caught by so transparent an artifice. Moreover, the emissary, sent with Catherine's letter, wrote, as soon as he got to France, warning Charles that his aunt's letter was written under compulsion and expressed the reverse of her real desires.[620] In the spring of 1529 several English envoys, ending with Gardiner, were sent to Rome to obtain a papal declaration of the falsity of the brief. Clement, however, naturally refused to declare the brief a forgery, without hearing the arguments on the other side,[621] and more important developments soon supervened. Gardiner wrote from Rome, early in May, that there was imminent danger of the Pope revoking the case, and (p. 221) the news determined Henry and Wolsey to relinquish their suit about the brief, and push on the proceedings of the legatine Court, so as to get some decision before the case was called to Rome. Once the legates had pronounced in favour of the divorce, Clement was informed, the English cared little what further fortunes befel it elsewhere.

[Footnote 618: Sp. Cal., iii., 882.]

[Footnote 619: L. and P., iv., 4841.]

[Footnote 620: Ibid., iv., 5154, 5177, 5211 (ii.); Sp. Cal., iii., 877, 882.]

[Footnote 621: L. and P., iv., 5474. Yet there is a letter from Clement to Campeggio (Cotton MS., Vitellius, B, xii., 164; L. and P., iv., 5181) authorising him "to reject whatever evidence is tendered in behalf of this brief as an evident forgery". Clement was no believer in the maxim qui facit per alium facit per se; he did not mind what his legates did, so long as he was free to repudiate their action when convenient.]

So, on the 31st of May, 1529, in the great hall of the Black Friars, in London, the famous Court was formally opened, and the King and Queen were cited to appear before it on the 18th of June.[622] Henry was then represented by two proxies, but Catherine came in person to protest against the competence of the tribunal.[623] Three days later both the King and the Queen attended in person to hear the Court's decision on this point. Catherine threw herself on her knees before Henry; she begged him to consider her honour, her daughter's and his. Twice Henry raised her up; he protested that he desired nothing so much as that their marriage should be found valid, in spite of the "perpetual scruple" he had felt about it, and declared that only his love for her had kept him silent so long; her request for the removal of the cause to Rome was unreasonable, considering the Emperor's power there. Again protesting against the jurisdiction of the Court and appealing to Rome, Catherine withdrew. Touched by her appeal, Henry burst out in her praise. "She is, my Lords," he said, "as true, as obedient, and as conformable a wife, as I could, in my phantasy, wish or desire. She hath all the virtuous qualities that ought to be in a woman of her dignity, or in any other of baser estate."[624] (p. 222) But these qualities had nothing to do with the pitiless forms of law. The legate, overruled her protest, refused her appeal, and summoned her back. She took no notice, and was declared contumacious.

[Footnote 622: L. and P., iv., 5611, 5612.]

[Footnote 623: Ibid., iv., 5685, 5694, 5695, 5702.]

[Footnote 624: L. and P., iv., Introd., p. cccclxxv.]

The proceedings then went on without her; Fisher Bishop of Rochester, made a courageous defence of the validity of the marriage, to which Henry drew up a bitter reply in the form of a speech addressed to the legates.[625] The speed with which the procedure was hurried on was little to Campeggio's taste. He had not prejudged the case; he was still in doubt as to which way the sentence would go; and he entered a dignified protest against the orders he received from Rome to give sentence, if it came to that point, against Henry.[626] He would pronounce what judgment seemed to him just, but he shrank from the ordeal, and he did his best to follow out Clement's injunctions to procrastinate.[627] In this he succeeded completely. It seemed that judgment could no longer be deferred; it was to be delivered on the 23rd of July.[628] On that day the King himself, and the chief men of his Court, were present; his proctor demanded sentence. Campeggio stood up, and instead of giving sentence, adjourned the Court till October.[629] "By the mass!" burst out Suffolk, giving the table (p. 223) a great blow with his hand, "now I see that the old-said saw is true, that there was never a legate nor cardinal that did good in England." The Court never met again; and except during the transient reaction, under Mary, it was the last legatine Court ever held in England. They might assure the Pope, Wolsey had written to the English envoys at Rome a month before, that if he granted the revocation he would lose the devotion of the King and of England to the See Apostolic, and utterly destroy Wolsey for ever.[630]

[Footnote 625: Ibid., iv., Introd., p. cccclxxix.]

[Footnote 626: Ibid., iv., 5732, 5734.]

[Footnote 627: Ibid., iv., 3604.]

[Footnote 628: Ibid., iv., 5789.]

[Footnote 629: It was alleged that this adjournment was only the usual practice of the curia; but it is worth noting that in 1530 Charles V. asserted that it was usual to carry on matters so important as the divorce during vacation (ibid., iv., 6452), and that Clement had repeatedly ordered Campeggio to prolong the suit as much as possible and above all to pronounce no sentence.]

[Footnote 630: L. and P., iv., 5703, 5715, 5780.]

Long before the vacation was ended, news reached Henry that the case had been called to Rome; the revocation was, indeed, decreed a week before Campeggio adjourned his court. Charles's star, once more in the ascendant, had cast its baleful influence over Henry's fortunes. The close alliance between England and France had led to a joint declaration of war on the Emperor in January, 1528, into which the English ambassadors in Spain had been inveigled by their French colleagues, against Henry's wishes.[631] It was received with a storm of opposition in England, and Wolsey had some difficulty in justifying himself to the King. "You may be sure," wrote Du Bellay, "that he is playing a terrible game, for I believe he is the only Englishman who wishes a war with Flanders."[632] If that was his wish, he was doomed to disappointment. Popular hatred of the war was too strong; a project was mooted by the clothiers in Kent for seizing the Cardinal and turning him adrift in a boat, with holes bored in it.[633] The (p. 224) clothiers in Wiltshire were reported to be rising; in Norfolk employers dismissed their workmen.[634] War with Flanders meant ruin to the most prosperous industry in both countries, and the attempt to divert the Flanders trade to Calais had failed.[635] So Henry and Charles were soon discussing peace; no hostilities took place; an agreement, that trade should go on as usual with Flanders,[636] was followed by a truce in June,[637] and the truce by the Peace of Cambrai in the following year. That peace affords the measure of England's decline since 1521. Wolsey was carefully excluded from all share in the negotiations. England was, indeed, admitted as a participator, but only after Louise and Margaret of Savoy had practically settled the terms, and after Du Bellay had told Francis that, if England were not admitted, it would mean Wolsey's immediate ruin.[638]

[Footnote 631: Ibid., iv., 4564; Sp. Cal., iii., 729.]

[Footnote 632: L. and P., iv., 3930.]

[Footnote 633: L. and P., iv., 4310.]

[Footnote 634: Ibid., iv., 4012, 4040, 4043, 4044, 4239.]

[Footnote 635: Ibid., iv., 3262.]

[Footnote 636: Ibid., iv., 4147.]

[Footnote 637: Ibid., iv., 4376.]

[Footnote 638: Ibid., iv., 5679, 5701, 5702, 5713.]

By the Treaty of Cambrai Francis abandoned Italy to Charles. His affairs beyond the Alps had been going from bad to worse since the death of Lautrec; and the suggested guard of French and English soldiers which was to relieve the Pope from fear of Charles was never formed.[639] That failure was not the only circumstance which made Clement imperialist. Venice, the ally of England and France, seized Ravenna and Cervia, two papal towns.[640] "The conduct of the Venetians," wrote John Casale from Rome, "moves the Pope more than anything else, and he would use the assistance of any one, except (p. 225) the Devil, to avenge their injury."[641] "The King and the Cardinal," repeated Sanga to Campeggio, "must not expect him to execute his intentions, until they have used their utmost efforts to compel the Venetians to restore the Pope's territories."[642] Henry did his best, but he was not sincerely helped by Francis; his efforts proved vain, and Clement thought he could get more effective assistance from Charles. "Every one is persuaded," said one of the Emperor's agents in Italy on 10th January, 1529, "that the Pope is now sincerely attached to his Imperial Majesty."[643] "I suspect," wrote Du Bellay from London, in the same month, "that the Pope has commanded Campeggio to meddle no further, seeing things are taking quite a different turn from what he had been assured, and that the Emperor's affairs in Naples are in such a state that Clement dare not displease him."[644] The Pope had already informed Charles that his aunt's petition for the revocation of the suit would be granted.[645] The Italian League was practically dissolved. "I have quite made up my mind," said Clement to the Archbishop of Capua on 7th June, "to become an Imperialist, and to live and die as such... I am only waiting for the return of my nuncio."[646]

[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 ambassadors 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 documents 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 cockpit 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 cum religione, a mundo abvolasse videntur.[657] Ten years later, the Emperor himself declared that the sack of Rome was the just judgment of God, and one of his ambassadors 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 vassals "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 anticipated 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 title 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 reasserting 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 God 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 pronounced 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 anticipated 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 passed 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 petition 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 petition 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 assertion 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 assistance 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.]

[Footnote 670: Ibid., ii., 4074.]

[Footnote 671: Ibid., iii., 929.]

[Footnote 672: L. and P., ii., 4082.]

[Footnote 673: Ibid., ii., 4074.]

Eleven more years were to roll before the Church was subverted. They were years of Wolsey's supremacy; he alone stood between the Church and its subjection. It was owing, wrote Campeggio, in 1528, to Wolsey's vigilance and solicitude that the Holy See retained its rank and dignity.[674] His ruin would drag down the Church, and the fact was known to Anne Boleyn and her faction, to Campeggio and Clement VII., as well as to Henry VIII.[675] "These Lords intend," wrote Du Bellay, on the eve of Wolsey's fall, "after he is dead or ruined, to impeach the State of the Church, and take all its goods; which it is hardly needful for me to write in cipher, for they proclaim it openly. I expect they will do fine miracles."[676] A few days later he says, "I expect the priests will never have the great seal again; and that in this Parliament they will have terrible alarms. I think Dr. Stephen (Gardiner) will have a good deal to do with the management of affairs, especially if he will abandon his order."[677] At Easter, 1529, Lutheran books were circulating in Henry's Court, advocating the (p. 238) confiscation of ecclesiastical property and the restoration of his Church to its primitive simplicity. Campeggio warned the King against them and maintained that it had been determined by councils and theologians that the Church justly held her temporalties. Henry retorted that according to the Lutherans "those decisions were arrived at by ecclesiastics and now it was necessary for the laity to interpose".[678] In his last interview with Henry, Campeggio "alluded to this Parliament, which is about to be holden, and I earnestly pressed upon him the liberty of the Church. He certainly seemed to me very well disposed to exert his power to the utmost."[679] "Down with the Church" was going to be the Parliament cry. Whether Henry would really "exert his power" to maintain her liberties remained to be seen, but there never was a flimsier theory than that the divorce of Catherine was the sole cause of the break with Rome. The centrifugal forces were quite independent of the divorce; its historical importance lies in the fact that it alienated from Rome the only power in England which might have kept them in check. So long as Wolsey and the clerical statesmen, with whom he surrounded the King, remained supreme, the Church was comparatively safe. But Wolsey depended entirely on Henry's support; when that was withdrawn, Church and Cardinal fell together.

[Footnote 674: Ibid., iv., 4898.]

[Footnote 675: Ibid., iv., 5210, 5255, 5581, 5582.]

[Footnote 676: Ibid., iv., 6011.]

[Footnote 677: Ibid., 6019.]

[Footnote 678: L. and P., iv., 5416.]

[Footnote 679: Ibid., iv., 5995. Henry VIII. no doubt also had his eye on Gustavus in Sweden where the Vesteraes Recess of 1527 had provided that all episcopal, capitular and monastic property which was not absolutely required should be handed over to the King, and conferred upon him an ecclesiastical jurisdiction as extensive as that afterwards conferred upon Henry VIII. (Cambridge Modern Hist., ii., 626).]

Wolsey's ruin was, however, due to more causes than his failure (p. 239) to get a divorce for the King. It was at bottom the result of the natural development of Henry's character. Egotism was from the first his most prominent trait; it was inevitably fostered by the extravagant adulation paid to Tudor sovereigns, and was further encouraged by his realisation, first of his own mental powers, and then of the extent to which he could force his will upon others. He could never brook a rival in whatever sphere he wished to excel. In the days of his youth he was absorbed in physical sports, in gorgeous pageantry and ceremonial; he was content with such exhibitions as prancing before the ladies between every course in a tourney, or acting as pilot on board ship, blowing a whistle as loud as a trumpet, and arrayed in trousers of cloth of gold. Gradually, as time wore on, the athletic mania wore off, and pursuits, such as architecture, took the place of physical sports. A generation later, a writer describes Henry as "the only Phoenix of his time for fine and curious masonry".[680] From his own original designs York House was transformed into Whitehall Palace, Nonsuch Palace was built, and extensive alterations were made at Greenwich and Hampton Court.

[Footnote 680: Harrison, Description of England, in Holinshed, ed. 1577, bk. ii., chap. ix.]

But architecture was only a trifle; Henry's uncontrollable activity also broke out in political spheres, and the eruption was fatal to Wolsey's predominance. The King was still in the full vigour of manhood; he had not reached his fortieth year, and his physical graces were the marvel of those who saw him for the first time. Falier, the new Venetian ambassador, who arrived in England in 1529, is as (p. 240) rapturous over the King's personal attractions as Giustinian or Pasqualigo had been. "In this Eighth Henry," he writes, "God has combined such corporeal and intellectual beauty as not merely to surprise but astound all men.... His face is angelic (nine years before a Frenchman had called it "feminine"), rather than handsome; his head imperial and bold; and he wears a beard, contrary to the English custom. Who would not be amazed, when contemplating such singular beauty of person, coupled with such bold address, adapting itself with the greatest ease to every manly exercise?"[681] But Henry's physique was no longer proof against every ailment; frequent mention is made about this time of headaches[682] which incapacitated him from business, and it was not long before there appeared on his leg the fistula which racked him with pain till the end of his life, and eventually caused his death.

[Footnote 681: Ven. Cal., iv., 184, 185, 293.]

[Footnote 682: L. and P., iv., 4546. Henry had had small-pox in February, 1514 (ibid., i., 4831), without any serious consequences, but apart from that he had had no great illness.]

The divorce and the insuperable obstacles, which he discovered in attaining the end he thought easy at first, did more to harden Henry's temper than any bodily ills. He became a really serious man, and developed that extraordinary power of self-control which stood him in good stead in his later years. Naturally a man of violent passions, he could never have steered clear of the dangers that beset him without unusual capacity for curbing his temper, concealing his intentions, and keeping his own counsel. Ministers might flatter themselves that they could read his mind and calculate his actions, but it is quite certain that henceforth no minister read so clearly his master's (p. 241) mind as the master did his minister's. "Three may keep counsel," said the King in 1530,[683] "if two be away; and if I thought that my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire and burn it." "Never," comments a modern writer,[684] "had the King spoken a truer word, or described himself more accurately. Few would have thought that, under so careless and splendid an exterior—the very ideal of bluff, open-hearted good-humour and frankness—there lay a watchful and secret eye, that marked what was going on, without appearing to mark it; kept its own counsel until it was time to strike, and then struck, as suddenly and remorselessly as a beast of prey. It was strange to witness so much subtlety, combined with so much strength."

[Footnote 683: Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, p. 397.]

[Footnote 684: Brewer, Introd. to L. and P., iv., p. dcxxi.]

In spite of his remorseless blows and arbitrary temper, Henry was too shrewd and too great a man to despise the counsel of others, or think any worse of an adviser because his advice differed from his own. He loved to meet argument with argument, even when he might command. To the end of his days he valued a councillor who would honestly maintain the opposite of what the King desired. These councillors to whom he gave his confidence were never minions or servile flatterers. Henry had his Court favourites with whom he hunted and shot and diced; with whom he played—always for money—tennis, primero and bowls, and the more mysterious games of Pope July, Imperial and Shovelboard;[685] and to whom he threw many an acre of choice monastic land. But they never influenced his policy. No man was ever advanced to political (p. 242) power in Henry's reign, merely because he pandered to the King's vanity or to his vices. No one was a better judge of conduct in the case of others, or a sterner champion of moral probity, when it did not conflict with his own desires or conscience. In 1528 Anne Boleyn and her friends were anxious to make a relative abbess of Wilton.[686] But she had been notoriously unchaste. "Wherefore," wrote Henry to Anne herself, "I would not, for all the gold in the world, cloak your conscience nor mine to make her ruler of a house which is of so ungodly demeanour; nor I trust you would not that neither for brother nor sister I should so distain mine honour or conscience." He objected, on similar grounds, to the prioress whom Wolsey wished to nominate; the Cardinal neglected Henry's wishes, and thereby called down upon himself a rebuke remarkable for dignity and delicacy. "The great affection and love I bear you," wrote the King, "causeth me, using the doctrine of my Master, saying Quem diligo, castigo, thus plainly, as ensueth, to break to you my mind.... Methink it is not the right train of a trusty loving friend and servant, when the matter is put by the master's consent into his arbitre and judgment (specially in a matter wherein his master hath both royalty and interest), to elect and choose a person which was by him defended (forbidden). And yet another thing, which much displeaseth me more,—that is, to cloak your offence made by ignorance of my pleasure, saying that you expressly knew not my determinate mind in that behalf." Then, after showing how empty were Wolsey's excuses, he continues: "Ah! my Lord, it is a double offence, both to do ill and colour it too; but with (p. 243) men that have wit it cannot be accepted so. Wherefore, good my Lord, use no more that way with me, for there is no man living that more hateth it." He then proceeds to warn the Cardinal against sinister reports with regard to his methods of raising money for his college at Oxford. "They say the college is a cloak for all mischief. I perceive by your letter that you have received money of the exempts for having their old visitors. If your legacy (legatine authority) is a cloak apud homines, it is not apud Deum. I doubt not, therefore, you will desist." Wolsey had used his legatine authority to extort money from monasteries as the price of their immunity from his visitatorial powers. The monasteries, too, had strenuously opposed the late Amicable Loan to the King; by Wolsey's means they had been released from that obligation; and Henry strongly suspected that they had purchased their exemption from relieving his necessities by lavish contributions to the Cardinal's colleges. "I pray you, my Lord," he concludes, "think not that it is upon any displeasure that I write this unto you. For surely it is for my discharge afore God, being in the room that I am in; and secondly for the great zeal I bear unto you." Henry possessed in the highest degree not a few of the best of kingly attributes. His words are not the words of a hypocrite without conscience, devoid of the fear of God and man. For all the strange and violent things that he did, he obtained the sanction of his conscience, but his imperious egotism made conscience his humble slave, and blinded to his own sins a judgment so keen to detect and chastise the failings of others.

[Footnote 685: See various entries in Privy Purse Expenses, L. and P., v., 747-62.]

[Footnote 686: L. and P., iv., 4477, 4488, 4507, 4509.]

These incidents, of more than a year before the Cardinal's fall, (p. 244) illustrate the change in the respective positions of monarch and minister. There was no doubt now which was the master; there was no king but one. Henry was already taking, as Du Bellay said, "the management of everything".[687] Wolsey himself knew that he had lost the King's confidence. He began to talk of retirement. He told Du Bellay, in or before August, 1528, that when he had established a firm amity between France and England, extinguished the hatred between the two nations, reformed the laws and customs of England, and settled the succession, he would retire and serve God to the end of his days.[688] The Frenchman thought this was merely to represent as voluntary a loss of power which he saw would soon be inevitable; but the conversation is a striking illustration of the difference between Henry and Wolsey, and helps to explain why Wolsey accomplished so little that lasted, while Henry accomplished so much. The Cardinal seems to have been entirely devoid of that keen perception of the distinction between what was, and what was not, practicable, which was Henry's saving characteristic. In the evening of his days, after sixteen years of almost unlimited power, he was speaking of plans, which might have taxed the energies of a life-time, as preliminaries to a speedy withdrawal from the cares of State. He had enjoyed an unequalled opportunity of effecting these reforms, but what were the results of his administration? The real greatness and splendour of Henry's reign are said to have departed with Wolsey's fall.[689] The gilt and the tinsel were indeed stripped off, but the permanent results of (p. 245) Henry's reign were due to its later course. Had he died when Wolsey fell, what would have been his place in history? A brilliant figure, no doubt, who might have been thought capable of much, had he not failed to achieve anything. He had made wars from which England derived no visible profit; not an acre of territory had been acquired; the wealth, amassed by Henry VII., had been squandered, and Henry VIII., in 1529, was reduced to searching for gold mines in England.[690] The loss of his subjects' blood and treasure had been followed by the loss of their affections. The exuberant loyalty of 1509 had been turned into the wintry discontent of 1527. England had been raised to a high place in the councils of Europe by 1521, but her fall was quite as rapid, and in 1525 she counted for less than she had done in 1513. At home the results were equally barren; the English hold on Ireland was said, in 1528, to be weaker than it had been since the conquest;[691] and the English statute-book between 1509 and 1529 may be searched in vain for an act of importance, while the statute-book between 1529 and 1547 contains a list of acts which have never been equalled for their supreme importance in the subsequent history of England.

[Footnote 687: L. and P., iv., 5983; cf. iv., 3992, where Henry has an interview (March, 1528) with a Scots ambassador and tells no one about it.]

[Footnote 688: Ibid., iv., 4649.]

[Footnote 689: Brewer, Ibid., iv., Introd., p. dcxxii.]

[Footnote 690: L. and P., iv., 5209. One Hochstetter was imported from Germany in connection with "the gold mines that the King was seeking for" (Du Bellay to Montmorenci, 25th January, 1529).]

[Footnote 691: Ibid., iv., 4933.]

Wolsey's policy was, indeed, a brilliant fiasco; with a pre-eminent genius for diplomacy, he thought he could make England, by diplomacy alone, arbiter of Europe. Its position in 1521 was artificial; it had not the means to support a grandeur which was only built on the wealth left by Henry VII. and on Wolsey's skill. England owed her advance (p. 246) in repute to the fact that Wolsey made her the paymaster of Europe. "The reputation of England for wealth," said an English diplomatist in 1522, "is a great cause of the esteem in which it is held."[692] But, by 1523, that wealth had failed; Parliament refused to levy more taxes, and Wolsey's pretensions collapsed like a pack of cards. He played no part in the peace of Cambrai, which settled for the time the conditions of Europe. When rumours of the clandestine negotiations between France and Spain reached England, Wolsey staked his head to the King that they were pure invention.[693] He could not believe that peace was possible, unless it were made by him. But the rumours were true, and Henry exacted the penalty. The positive results of the Cardinal's policy were nil; the chief negative result was that he had staved off for many years the ruin of the Church, but he only did it by plunging England in the maelstrom of foreign intrigue and of futile wars.

[Footnote 692: L. and P., iii., 1978.]

[Footnote 693: Ibid., iv., 5231.]

The end was not long delayed. "I see clearly," writes Du Bellay on 4th October, 1529, "that by this Parliament Wolsey will completely lose his influence; I see no chance to the contrary."[694] Henry anticipated the temper of Parliament. A bill of indictment was preferred against him in the Court of King's Bench, and on the 22nd of October he acknowledged his liability to the penalties of praemunire.[695] The Great Seal was taken from him by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. In November the House of Lords passed a bill of attainder against him, but the Commons were persuaded by Cromwell, acting with Henry's (p. 247) connivance, to throw it out. "The King," wrote Chapuys, "is thought to bear the Cardinal no ill-will;" and Campeggio thought that he would "not go to extremes, but act considerately in this matter, as he is accustomed to do in all his actions."[696] Wolsey was allowed to retain the Archbishopric of York, a sum in money and goods equivalent to at least L70,000, and a pension of 1,000 marks from the See of Winchester.[697] In the following spring he set out to spend his last days in his northern see; six months he devoted to his archiepiscopal duties, confirming thousands of children, arranging disputes among neighbours, and winning such hold on the hearts of the people as he had never known in the days of his pride. Crowds in London had flocked to gloat over the sight of the broken man; now crowds in Yorkshire came to implore his blessing.

[Footnote 694: Ibid., iv., 5983.]

[Footnote 695: Ibid., iv., 6017.]

[Footnote 696: L. and P., iv., 6199, 6050; cf. iv., 6295, where Henry orders Dacre to treat Wolsey as became his rank; Ven. Cal., 1529, p. 237.]

[Footnote 697: Ibid., iv., 6220.]

He prepared for his installation at York on 7th November, 1530; on the 4th he was arrested for treason. His Italian physician, Agostini, had betrayed him; he was accused of having asked Francis I. to intercede with Henry on his behalf, which was true;[698] and he seems also to have sought the mediation of Charles V. But Agostini further declared that Wolsey had written to Clement, urging him to excommunicate Henry and raise an insurrection, by which the Cardinal might recover his power.[699] By Pontefract, Doncaster, Nottingham, with feeble (p. 248) steps and slow, the once-proud prelate, broken in spirit and shattered in health, returned to meet his doom. His gaol was to be the cell in the Tower, which had served for the Duke of Buckingham.[700] But a kindlier fate than a traitor's death was in store. "I am come," he said to the monks of Leicester Abbey, "I am come to leave my bones among you." He died there at eight o'clock on St. Andrew's morning, and there, on the following day, he was simply and quietly buried. "If," he exclaimed in his last hour, "I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs." That cry, wrung from Wolsey, echoed throughout the Tudor times.[701] Men paid le nouveau Messie a devotion they owed to the old; they rendered unto Caesar the things that were God's. They reaped their reward in riches and pomp and power, but they won no peace of mind. The favour of princes is fickle, and "the wrath of the King is death". So thought Wolsey and Warham and Norfolk. "Is that all?" said More, with prophetic soul, to Norfolk; "then in good faith between your grace and me is but this, that I shall die to-day and you shall die to-morrow."[702]

[Footnote 698: Ibid., iv., 6018, 6199, 6273, 6738.]

[Footnote 699: De Vaux writes on 8th November, 1530, to Montmorenci, that the King had told him "where and how" Wolsey had intrigued against him, but he does not repeat the information (ibid., iv., 6720), though Bryan's remark (ibid., iv., 6733) that "De Vaux has done well in disclosing the misdemeanour of the Cardinal" suggests that De Vaux knew more than he says.]

[Footnote 700: So Chapuys reports (iv., 6738); that Wolsey had used Agostini to sound Chapuys is obvious from the latter's remark, "were the physician to say all that passed between us, he could not do anything to impugn me".]

[Footnote 701: Cf. Buckingham's remark in L. and P., iii., 1356: "An he had not offended no more unto God than he had done to the Crown, he should die as true a man as ever was in the world".]

[Footnote 702: D.N.B., xxxviii., 437.]



CHAPTER X. (p. 249)

THE KING AND HIS PARLIAMENT.

In the closing days of July, 1529, a courier came posting from Rome with despatches announcing the alliance of Clement and Charles, and the revocation to the Papal Court of the suit between Henry VIII. and the Emperor's aunt. Henry replied with no idle threats or empty reproaches, but his retort was none the less effective. On the 9th of August[703] writs were issued from Chancery summoning that Parliament which met on the 3rd of November and did not separate till the last link in the chain which bound England to Rome was sundered, and the country was fairly launched on that sixty years' struggle which the defeat of the Spanish Armada concluded.[704] The step might well seem a desperate hazard. The last Parliament had broken up in (p. 250) discontent; it had been followed by open revolt in various shires; while from others there had since then come demands for the repayment of the loan, which Henry was in no position to grant. Francis and Charles, on whose mutual enmity England's safety largely depended, had made their peace at Cambrai; and the Emperor was free to foment disaffection in Ireland and to instigate Scotland to war. His chancellor was boasting that the imperialists could, if they would, drive Henry from his kingdom within three months,[705] and he based his hopes on revolt among Henry's own subjects. The divorce had been from the beginning, and remained to the end, a stumbling-block to the people. Catherine received ovations wherever she went, while the utmost efforts of the King could scarcely protect Anne Boleyn from popular insult. The people were moved, not only by a creditable feeling that Henry's first wife was an injured woman, but by the fear lest a breach with Charles should destroy their trade in wool, on which, said the imperial ambassador, half the realm depended for sustenance.[706]

[Footnote 703: Rymer, Foedera, xiv., 302.]

[Footnote 704: It has been alleged that the immediate object of this Parliament was to relieve the King from the necessity of repaying the loan (D.N.B., xxvi., 83); and much scorn has been poured on the notion that it had any important purpose (L. and P., iv., Introd., p. dcxlvii.). Brewer even denies its hostility to the Church on the ground that it was composed largely of lawyers, and "lawyers are not in general enemies to things established; they are not inimical to the clergy". Yet the law element was certainly stronger in the Parliaments of Charles I. than in that of 1529; were they not hostile to "things established" and "inimical to the clergy"? Contemporaries had a different opinion of the purpose of the Parliament of 1529. "It is intended," wrote Du Bellay on the 23rd of August, three months before Parliament met, "to hold a Parliament here this winter and act by their own absolute power, in default of justice being administered by the Pope in this divorce" (ibid., iv., 5862; cf. iv., 6011, 6019, 6307); "nothing else," wrote a Florentine in December, 1530, "is thought of in that island every day except of arranging affairs in such a way that they do no longer be in want of the Pope, neither for filling vacancies in the Church, nor for any other purpose" (ibid., iv., 6774).]

[Footnote 705: L. and P., iv., 4909, 4911; cf. 5177, 5501.]

[Footnote 706: Ibid., vi., 1528.]

To summon a Parliament at such a conjuncture seemed to be courting certain ruin. In reality, it was the first and most striking instance of the audacity and insight which were to enable Henry to guide the whirlwind and direct the storm of the last eighteen years of his (p. 251) reign. Clement had put in his hands the weapon with which he secured his divorce and broke the bonds of Rome. "If," wrote Wolsey a day or two before the news of the revocation arrived, "the King be cited to appear at Rome in person or by proxy, and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will tolerate it. If he appears in Italy, it will be at the head of a formidable army."[707] A sympathiser with Catherine expressed his resentment at his King being summoned to plead as a party in his own realm before the legatine Court;[708] and it has even been suggested that those proceedings were designed to irritate popular feeling against the Roman jurisdiction. Far more offensive was it to national prejudice, that England's king should be cited to appear before a court in a distant land, dominated by the arms of a foreign prince. Nothing did more to alienate men's minds from the Papacy. Henry would never have been able to obtain his divorce on its merits as they appeared to his people. But now the divorce became closely interwoven with another and a wider question, the papal jurisdiction in England; and on that question Henry carried with him the good wishes of the vast bulk of the laity. There were few Englishmen who would not resent the petition presented to the Pope in 1529 by Charles V. and Ferdinand that the English Parliament should be forbidden to discuss the question of divorce.[709] By summoning Parliament, Henry opened the floodgates of anti-papal and anti-sacerdotal feelings which Wolsey had long kept shut; and the unpopular divorce became (p. 252) merely a cross-current in the main stream which flowed in Henry's favour.

[Footnote 707: L. and P., iv., 5797.]

[Footnote 708: Cavendish, p. 210; L. and P., iv., Introd., p. dv.]

[Footnote 709: Sp. Cal., iii., 979.]

It was thus with some confidence that Henry appealed from the Pope to his people. He could do so all the more surely, if, as is alleged, there was no freedom of election, and if the House of Commons was packed with royal nominees.[710] But these assertions may be dismissed as gross exaggerations. The election of county members was marked by unmistakable signs of genuine popular liberty. There was often a riot, and sometimes a secret canvass among freeholders to promote or defeat a particular candidate.[711] In 1547 the council ventured to recommend a minister to the freeholders of Kent. The electors objected; the council reprimanded the sheriff for representing its recommendation as a command; it protested that it never dreamt of depriving the shire of its "liberty of election," but "would take it thankfully" if the electors would give their voices to the ministerial candidate. The electors were not to be soothed by soft words, and that Government candidate had to find another seat.[712] In the boroughs there was every variety of franchise. In some it was almost democratic; in others elections were in the hands of one or two voters. In the city of London the election for the Parliament of 1529 was held on (p. 253) 5th October, immensa communitate tunc presente, in the Guildhall; there is no hint of royal interference, the election being conducted in the customary way, namely, two candidates were nominated by the mayor and aldermen, and two by the citizens.[713] The general tendency had for more than a century, however, been towards close corporations in whose hands the parliamentary franchise was generally vested, and consequently towards restricting the basis of popular representation. The narrower that basis became, the greater the facilities it afforded for external influence. In many boroughs elections were largely determined by recommendations from neighbouring magnates, territorial or official.[714] At Gatton the lords of the manor nominated the members for Parliament, and the formal election was merely a matter of drawing up an indenture between Sir Roger Copley and the sheriff,[715] and the Bishop of Winchester was wont to select representatives for more than one borough within the bounds of his diocese.[716] The Duke of Norfolk claimed to be able to return ten members in Sussex and Surrey alone.[717]

[Footnote 710: "The choice of the electors," says Brewer (L. and P., iv., Introd., p. dcxlv.), "was still determined by the King or his powerful ministers with as much certainty and assurance as that of the sheriffs."]

[Footnote 711: L. and P., i., 792, vii., 1178, where mention is made of "secret labour" among the freeholders of Warwickshire for the bye-election on Sir E. Ferrers' death in 1534; and x., 1063, where there is described a hotly contested election between the candidate of the gentry of Shropshire and the candidate of the townsfolk of Shrewsbury.]

[Footnote 712: Acts of the Privy Council, 1547-50, pp. 516, 518, 519; England under Protector Somerset, pp. 71, 72.]

[Footnote 713: Narratives of the Reformation, Camden Soc., pp. 295, 296.]

[Footnote 714: Cf. Duchess of Norfolk's letter to John Paston, 8th June, 1455 (Paston Letters, ed. 1900, i., 337), and in 1586 Sir Henry Bagnal asked the Earl of Rutland if he had a seat to spare in Parliament as Bagnal was anxious "for his learning's sake to be made a Parliament man" (D.N.B., Suppl., i., 96).]

[Footnote 715: L. and P., xiv., 645; cf. Hallam, 1884, iii., 44-45.]

[Footnote 716: Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 54. There are some illustrations and general remarks on Henry's relations with Parliament in Porritt's Unreformed House of Commons, 2 vols., 1903.]

[Footnote 717: At Reigate, says the Duke, "I doubt whether any burgesses be there or not" (L. and P., x., 816); and apparently there were none at Gatton.]

But these nominations were not royal, and there is no reason (p. 254) to suppose that the nominees were any more likely to be subservient to the Crown than freely elected members unless the local magnate happened to be a royal minister. Their views depended on those of their patrons, who might be opposed to the Court; and, in 1539, Cromwell's agents were considering the advisability of setting up Crown candidates against those of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester.[718] The curious letter to Cromwell in 1529,[719] upon which is based the theory that the House of Commons consisted of royal nominees, is singularly inconclusive. Cromwell sought Henry's permission to serve in Parliament for two reasons; firstly, he was still a servant of the obnoxious and fallen Cardinal; secondly, he was seeking to transfer himself to Henry's service, and thought he might be useful to the King in the House of Commons. If Henry accepted his offer, Cromwell was to be nominated for Oxford; if he were not elected there, he was to be put up for one of the boroughs in the diocese of Winchester, then vacant through Wolsey's resignation. Even with the King's assent, his election at Oxford was not regarded as certain; and, as a matter of fact, Cromwell sat neither for Oxford, nor for any constituency (p. 255) in the diocese of Winchester, but for the borough of Taunton.[720] Crown influence could only make itself effectively felt in the limited number of royal boroughs; and the attempts to increase that influence by the creation of constituencies susceptible to royal influence were all subsequent in date to 1529. The returns of members of Parliament are not extant from 1477 to 1529, but a comparison of the respective number of constituencies in those two years reveals only six in 1529 which had not sent members to a previous Parliament; and almost if not all of these six owed their representation to their increasing population and importance, and not to any desire to pack the House of Commons. Indeed, as a method of enforcing the royal will upon Parliament, the creation of half a dozen boroughs was both futile and unnecessary. So small a number of votes was useless, except in the case of a close division of well-drilled parties, of which there is no trace in the Parliaments of Henry VIII.[721] The House of Commons acted as a whole, and not in two sections. "The sense of the House" was more apparent in its decisions then than it is to-day. Actual divisions were rare; either a proposal commended itself to the House, or it did not; and in both cases the question was usually determined without a vote.