[Footnote 718: This seems to have been the object of Southampton's tour through the constituencies of Surrey and Hampshire in March, 1539; with one of Gardiner's pocket-boroughs he did not meddle, because the lord chamberlain was the Bishop's steward there (L. and P., xiv., i., 520). There were some royal nominees in the House of Commons. In 1523 the members for Cumberland were nominated by the Crown (ibid., iii., 2931); at Calais the lord-deputy and council elected one of the two burgesses and the mayor and burgesses the other (ibid., x., 736). Calais and the Scottish Borders were of course exceptionally under Crown influence, but this curious practice may have been observed in some other cities and boroughs; in 1534, for instance, the King was to nominate to one of the two vacancies at Worcester (ibid., vii., 56).]

[Footnote 719: Ibid., iv., App. 238.]

[Footnote 720: Official Return of Members of Parliament, i., 370.]

[Footnote 721: Occasionally there were divisions, e.g., in 1523 when the court party voted a subsidy of 2s. in the pound; but this was only half the sum demanded by Wolsey (Hall, pp. 656, 657, Ellis, Orig. Letters, I., i., 220, 221).]

The creation of boroughs was also unnecessary. Parliaments packed themselves quite well enough to suit Henry's purpose, without (p. 256) any interference on his part. The limiting of the county franchise to forty-shilling (i.e., thirty pounds in modern currency) freeholders, and the dying away of democratic feeling in the towns, left parliamentary representation mainly in the hands of the landed gentry and of the prosperous commercial classes; and from them the Tudors derived their most effective support. There was discontent in abundance during Tudor times, but it was social and economic, and not as a rule political. It was directed against the enclosers of common lands; against the agricultural capitalists, who bought up farms, evicted the tenants, and converted their holdings to pasture; against the large traders in towns who monopolised commerce at the expense of their poorer competitors. It was concerned, not with the one tyrant on the throne, but with the thousand petty tyrants of the villages and towns, against whom the poorer commons looked to their King for protection. Of this discontent Parliament could not be the focus, for members of Parliament were themselves the offenders. "It is hard," wrote a contemporary radical, "to have these ills redressed by Parliament, because it pricketh them chiefly which be chosen to be burgesses.... Would to God they would leave their old accustomed choosing of burgesses! For whom do they choose but such as be rich or bear some office in the country, many times such as be boasters and braggers? Such have they ever hitherto chosen; be he never so very a fool, drunkard, extortioner, adulterer, never so covetous and crafty a person, yet, if he be rich, bear any office, if he be a jolly cracker and bragger in the country, he must be a burgess of Parliament. Alas, how can any such study, or give any godly counsel for the (p. 257) commonwealth?"[722] This passage gives no support to the theory that members of Parliament were nothing but royal nominees. If the constituencies themselves were bent on electing "such as bare office in the country," there was no call for the King's intervention; and the rich merchants and others, of whom complaint is made, were almost as much to the royal taste as were the officials themselves.

[Footnote 722: Brinkelow, Complaynt of Roderik Mors (Early English Text Society), pp. 12, 13; for other evidence of the attitude of Parliament towards social grievances, see John Hales's letter to Somerset in Lansdowne MS., 238; Crowley's Works (Early English Text Society), passim; Latimer, Sermons, p. 247.]

For the time being, in fact, the interests of the King and of the lay middle classes coincided, both in secular and ecclesiastical affairs. Commercial classes are generally averse from war, at least from war waged within their own borders, from which they can extract no profit. They had every inducement to support Henry's Government against the only alternative, anarchy. In ecclesiastical politics they, as well as the King, had their grievances against the Church. Both thought the clergy too rich, and that ecclesiastical revenues could be put to better uses in secular hands. Community of interests produced harmony of action; and a century and a half was to pass before Parliament again met so often, or sat so long, as it did during the latter half of Henry's reign. From 1509 to 1515 there had been on an average a parliamentary session once a year,[723] and in February, 1512, Warham, as Lord Chancellor, had in opening the session discoursed on the (p. 258) necessity of frequent Parliaments.[724] Then there supervened the ecclesiastical despotism of Wolsey, who tried, like Charles I., to rule without Parliament, and with the same fatal result to himself; but, from Wolsey's fall till Henry's death, there was seldom a year without a parliamentary session. Tyrants have often gone about to break Parliaments, and in the end Parliaments have generally broken them. Henry was not of the number; he never went about to break Parliament. He found it far too useful, and he used it. He would have been as reluctant to break Parliament as Ulysses the bow which he alone could bend.

[Footnote 723: The first Parliament of the reign met in January, 1510, the second in February, 1512. It had a second session, November-December of the same year (L. and P., i., 3502). A third Parliament met for its first session on 23rd January, 1514, for its second on 5th February, 1515, and for its third on 12th November, 1515 (ibid., i., 5616, 5725, ii., 1130). It was this last of which Wolsey urged "the more speedy dissolution"; then for fourteen years there was only one Parliament, that of 1523. These dates illustrate the antagonism between Wolsey and Parliament and show how natural it was that Wolsey should fall in 1529, and that his fall should coincide with the revival of Parliament.]

No monarch, in fact, was ever a more zealous champion of parliamentary privileges, a more scrupulous observer of parliamentary forms, or a more original pioneer of sound constitutional doctrine. In 1543 he first enunciated the constitutional principle that sovereignty is vested in the "King in Parliament". "We," he declared to the Commons, "at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic, so as whatsoever offence or injury during that time is offered to the meanest member of the House, is to be judged as done against our person and the whole Court of Parliament."[725] He was careful to observe himself the deference to parliamentary privilege which he exacted from others. It is no (p. 259) strange aberration from the general tenor of his rule that in 1512 by Strode's case[726] the freedom of speech of members of Parliament was established, and their freedom from arrest by Ferrers' case in 1543. In 1515 Convocation had enviously petitioned for the same liberty of speech as was enjoyed in Parliament, where members might even attack the law of the land and not be called in question therefor.[727] "I am," writes Bishop Gardiner, in 1547, apologising for the length of a letter, "like one of the Commons' house, that, when I am in my tale, think I should have liberty to make an end;"[728] and again he refers to a speech he made during Henry's reign "in the Parliament house, where was free speech without danger".[729] Wolsey had raised a storm in 1523 by trying to browbeat the House of Commons. Henry never erred in that respect. In 1532 a member moved that Henry should take back Catherine to wife.[730] Nothing could have touched the King on a tenderer spot. Charles I., for a less offence, would have gone to the House to arrest the (p. 260) offender. All Henry did was to argue the point of his marriage with the Speaker and a deputation from the Commons; no proceedings whatever were taken against the member himself. In 1529 John Petit, one of the members for London, opposed the bill releasing Henry from his obligation to repay the loan; the only result apparently was to increase Petit's repute in the eyes of the King, who "would ask in Parliament time if Petit were on his side".[731] There is, in fact, nothing to show that Henry VIII. intimidated his Commons at any time, or that he packed the Parliament of 1529. Systematic interference in elections was a later expedient devised by Thomas Cromwell. It was apparently tried during the bye-elections of 1534, and at the general elections of 1536[732] and 1539. Cromwell then endeavoured to secure a majority in favour of himself and his own particular policy (p. 261) against the reactionary party in the council. His schemes had created a division among the laity, and rendered necessary recourse to political methods of which there was no need, so long as the laity remained united against the Church. Nor is it without significance that its adoption was shortly followed by Cromwell's fall. Henry did not approve of ministers who sought to make a party for themselves. The packing of Parliaments has in fact been generally the death-bed expedient of a moribund Government. The Stuarts had their "Undertakers," and the only Parliament of Tudor times which consisted mainly of Government nominees was that gathered by Northumberland on the eve of his fall in March, 1553; and that that body was exceptionally constituted is obvious from Renard's inquiry in August, 1553, as to whether Charles V. would advise his cousin, Queen Mary, to summon a general Parliament or merely an assembly of "notables" after the manner introduced by Northumberland.

[Footnote 724: L. and P., i., 2082.]

[Footnote 725: Holinshed, Chronicles, iii., 956.]

[Footnote 726: Hallam, Const. Hist., ii., 4.]

[Footnote 727: L. and P., ii., 1314. In some respects the House of Commons appears to have exercised unconstitutional powers, e.g., in 1529 one Thomas Bradshaw, a cleric, was indicted for having conspired to poison members of Sir James Worsley's household, and on 27th February, 1531, Henry VIII. orders Lady Worsley not to trouble Bradshaw any more, "as the House of Commons has decided that he is not culpable" (ibid., iv., 6293; v., 117; cf. the case of John Wolf and his wife, ibid., vi., 742; vii., passim). The claim to criminal jurisdiction which the House of Commons asserted in Floyd's case (1621) seems in fact to have been admitted by Henry VIII.; compare the frequent use of acts of attainder.]

[Footnote 728: Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 33.]

[Footnote 729: Ibid., vi., 43.]

[Footnote 730: In the House of Lords in 1531 the Bishops of St. Asaph and of Bath with a similar immunity attacked the defence of Henry's divorce policy made by the Bishops of Lincoln and London (L. and P., v., 171).]

[Footnote 731: Narratives of the Reformation (Camden Soc.), p. 25.]

[Footnote 732: Hence the complaints of the northern rebels late in that year (L. and P., xi., 1143, 1182 [15], 1244, 1246); these are so to speak the election petitions of the defeated party; the chief complaint is that non-residents were chosen who knew little about the needs of their constituents, and they made the advanced demand that all King's servants or pensioners be excluded.

The most striking instance of interference in elections is Cromwell's letter to the citizens of Canterbury, written on 18th May, 1536, and first printed in Merriman's Cromwell, 1902, ii., 13; he there requires the electors to annul an election they had made in defiance of previous letters, and return as members Robert Derknall (a member of the royal household, L. and P., xv., pp. 563-5) and John Brydges, M.P. for Canterbury in 1529-36, instead of the two who had been unanimously chosen by eighty electors on 11th May (L. and P., x., 852). The Mayor thereupon assembled ninety-seven citizens who "freely with one voice and without any contradiction elected the aforesaid" (ibid., x., 929). These very letters show that electors did exercise a vote, and the fact that from 1534 to 1539 we find traces of pressure being put upon them, affords some presumption that before the rise of Cromwell, when we find no such traces no such pressure was exerted. The most striking exception must not be taken as the rule. See p. 317 n.]

But, while Parliament was neither packed nor terrorised to any great extent, the harmony which prevailed between it and the King has naturally led to the charge of servility. Insomuch as it was servile at all, Parliament faithfully represented its constituents; but the mere coincidence between the wishes of Henry and those of Parliament is no proof of servility.[733] That accusation can only be (p. 262) substantiated by showing that Parliament did, not what it wanted, but what it did not want, out of deference to Henry. And that has never been proved. It has never been shown that the nation resented the statutes giving Henry's proclamations the force of laws, enabling him to settle the succession by will, or any of the other acts usually adduced to prove the subservience of Parliament. When Henry was dead, Protector Somerset secured the repeal of most of these laws, but he lost his head for his pains. There is, indeed, no escape from the conclusion that the English people then approved of a dictatorship, and that Parliament was acting deliberately and voluntarily when it made Henry dictator. It made him dictator because it felt that he would do what it wanted, and better with, than without, extraordinary powers. The fact that Parliament rejected some of Henry's measures is strong presumption that it could have rejected more, had it been so minded. No projects were more dear to Henry's heart than the statutes of Wills and of Uses, yet both were rejected twice at least in the Parliament of 1529-36.[734]

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

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

The general harmony between King and Parliament was based on a fundamental similarity of interests; the harmony in detail was worked out, not by the forcible exertion of Henry's will, but by his careful and skilful manipulation of both Houses. No one was ever a greater adept in the management of the House of Commons, which is easy (p. 263) to humour but hard to drive. Parliaments are jealous bodies, but they are generally pleased with attentions; and Henry VIII. was very assiduous in the attentions he paid to his lay Lords and Commons. From 1529 he suffered no intermediary to come between Parliament and himself. Cromwell was more and more employed by the King,[735] but only in subordinate matters, and when important questions were at issue Henry managed the business himself. He constantly visited both Houses and remained within their precincts for hours at a time,[736] watching every move in the game and taking note of every symptom of parliamentary feeling. He sent no royal commands to his faithful Commons; in this respect he was less arbitrary than his daughter, Queen Elizabeth. He submitted points for their consideration, argued with them, and frankly gave his reasons. It was always done, of course, with a magnificent air of royal condescension, but with such grace (p. 264) as to carry the conviction that he was really pleased to condescend and to take counsel with his subjects, and that he did so because he trusted his Parliament, and expected his Parliament to place an equal confidence in him. Henry VIII. acted more as the leader of both Houses than as a King; and, like modern parliamentary leaders, he demanded the bulk of their time for measures which he himself proposed.

[Footnote 735: Cromwell used to report to the King on the feeling of Parliament; thus in 1534 (L. and P., vii., 51) he tells Henry how far members were willing to go in the creation of fresh treasons, "they be contented that deed and writing shall be treason," but words were to be only misprision; they refused to include an heir's rebellion or disobedience in the bill, "as rebellion is already treason and disobedience is no cause of forfeiture of inheritance," and they thought "that the King of Scots should in no wise be named" (there is in the Record Office a draft of the Treasons Bill of 1534 materially differing from the Act as passed. Therefore either the bill did not originate with the Government and was modified under Government pressure, or it did originate with the Government and was modified under parliamentary pressure). This is how Henry's legislation was evolved; there is no foundation for the assertion that Parliament merely registered the King's edicts.]

[Footnote 736: E.g., L. and P., v., 120. At other times Parliament visited him. "On Thursday last," writes one on 8th March, 1534, "the whole Parliament were with the King at York Place for three hours" (ibid., vii., 304).]

The fact that the legislation of Henry's reign was initiated almost entirely by Government is not, however, a conclusive proof of the servility of Parliament. For, though it may have been the theory that Parliament existed to pass laws of its own conception, such has never been the practice, except when there has been chronic opposition between the executive and the legislature. Parliament has generally been the instrument of Government, a condition essential to strong and successful administration; and it is still summoned mainly to discuss such measures as the executive thinks fit to lay before it. Certainly the proportion of Government bills to other measures passed in Henry's reign was less than it is to-day. A private member's bill then stood more chance of becoming law, and a Government bill ran greater risks of being rejected. That, of course, is not the whole truth. One of the reasons why Henry's House of Commons felt at liberty to reject bills proposed by the King, was that such rejection did not involve the fall of a Government which on other grounds the House wished to support. It did not even entail a dissolution. Not that general elections possessed any terrors for sixteenth-century Parliaments. A seat in the House of Commons was not considered a very great prize. The classes, from (p. 265) which its members were drawn, were much more bent on the pursuit of their own private fortunes than on participation in public affairs. Their membership was not seldom a burden,[737] and the long sessions of the Reformation Parliament constituted an especial grievance. One member complained that those sessions cost him equivalent to about five hundred pounds over and above the wages paid him by his constituents.[738] Leave to go home was often requested, and the imperial ambassador records that Henry, with characteristic craft, granted such licences to hostile members, but refused them to his own supporters.[739] That was a legitimate parliamentary stratagem. It was not Henry's fault if members preferred their private concerns to the interests of Catherine of Aragon or to the liberties of the Catholic Church.

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

[Footnote 738: L. and P., vii., 302.]

[Footnote 739: Ibid., v., 120.]

Henry's greatest advantage lay, however, in a circumstance which constitutes the chief real difference between the Parliaments of the sixteenth century and those of to-day. His members of Parliament were representatives rather than delegates. They were elected as fit and proper persons to decide upon such questions as should be submitted to them in the Parliament House, and not merely as fit and proper persons to register decisions already reached by their constituents. Although they were in the habit of rendering to their constituents an account of their proceedings at the close of each session,[740] and although the fact that they depended upon their constituencies for their wages prevented their acting in opposition to their constituents' (p. 266) wishes, they received no precise instructions. They went to Parliament unfettered by definite pledges. They were thus more susceptible, not only to pressure, but also to argument; and it is possible that in those days votes were sometimes affected by speeches. The action of members was determined, not by previous engagements or party discipline, but by their view of the merits and necessities of the case before them. Into that view extraneous circumstances, such as fear of the King, might to a certain extent intrude; but such evidence as is available points decisively to the conclusion that co-operation between the King and Parliament was secured, partly by Parliament doing what Henry wanted, and partly by Henry doing what Parliament wanted. Parliament did not always do as the King desired, nor did the King's actions always commend themselves to Parliament. Most of the measures of the Reformation Parliament were matters of give and take. It was due to Henry's skill, and to the circumstances of the time that the King's taking was always to his own profit, and his giving at the expense of the clergy. He secured the support of the Commons for his own particular ends by promising the redress of their grievances against the bishops and priests. It is said that he instituted the famous petitions urged against the clergy in 1532, and it is hinted that the abuses, of which those petitions complained, had no real existence. No doubt Henry encouraged the Commons' complaints; he had every reason to do so, but he did not invent the abuses. If the Commons did not feel the grievances, the King's promise to redress them would be no inducement to Parliament to comply with the royal demands. The hostility of the laity to the clergy, arising out (p. 267) of these grievances, was in fact the lever with which Henry overthrew the papal authority, and the basis upon which he built his own supremacy over the Church.

[Footnote 740: Cf. ibid., iv., App. 1.]

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

[Footnote 741: The phrase occurs in Cromwell's draft bill for the submission of Convocation (L. and P., v., 721).]

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

The revolution was inevitably effected through the action of the State rather than that of the Church. The Church, which, like religion itself, is in essence universal and not national, regarded with abhorrence the prospect of being narrowed and debased to serve political ends. The Church in England had moreover no means and no weapons wherewith to effect an internal reformation independent of the Papacy; as well might the Court of King's Bench endeavour to reform itself without the authority of King and Parliament. The whole jurisdiction of the Church was derived in theory from the Pope; when Wolsey wished to reform the monasteries he had to seek authority from Leo X.; the Archbishop of Canterbury held a court at Lambeth and (p. 269) exercised juridical powers, but he did so as legatus natus of the Apostolic See, and not as archbishop, and this authority could at any time be superseded by that of a legate a latere, as Warham's was by Wolsey's. It was not his own but the delegated jurisdiction of another.[743] Bishops and archbishops were only the channels of a jurisdiction flowing from a papal fountain. Henry charged Warham in 1532 with praemunire because he had consecrated the Bishop of St. Asaph before the Bishop's temporalties had been restored.[744] The Archbishop in reply stated that he merely acted as commissary of the Pope, "the act was the Pope's act," and he had no discretion of his own. He was bound to consecrate as soon as the Bishop had been declared such in consistory at Rome. Chapters might elect, the Archbishop might consecrate, and the King might restore the temporalties; but none of these things gave a bishop jurisdiction. There were in fact two and only two sources of power and jurisdiction, the temporal sovereign and the Pope; reformation must be effected by the one or the other. Wolsey had ideas of a national ecclesiastical reformation, but he could have gone no farther than the Pope, who gave him his authority, permitted. Had the Church in England transgressed that limit, it would have become dead in schism, and Wolsey's jurisdiction would have ipso facto ceased. Hence the fundamental (p. 270) impossibility of Wolsey's scheme; hence the ultimate resort to the only alternative, a reformation by the temporal sovereign, which Wycliffe had advocated and which the Anglicans of the sixteenth century justified by deriving the royal supremacy from the authority conceded by the early Fathers to the Roman Emperor—an authority prior to the Pope's.

[Footnote 743: Cf. Maitland, Roman Canon Law; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i., 90 (Bracton regards the Pope as the Englishman's "Ordinary"); and Leadam, Select Cases from the Star Chamber, Introd., pp. lxxxvi.-viii.]

[Footnote 744: L. and P., v., 1247. A curious point about this document, unnoticed by the editor, is that the Bishop of St. Asaph had been consecrated as far back as 1518, and that he was the Standish who had played so conspicuous a part in the early Church and State disputes of Henry's reign. This is an echo of the "Investiture" controversy (Luchaire, Manuel, pp. 509, 510).]

Hence, too, the agency employed was Parliament and not Convocation.[745] The representatives of the clergy met of course as frequently as those of the laity, but their activity was purely defensive. They suggested no changes themselves, and endeavoured without much success to resist the innovations forced upon them by King and by Parliament. They had every reason to fear both Henry and the Commons. They were conscious that the Church had lost its hold upon the nation. Its impotence was due in part to its own corruption, in part to the fact that thriving commercial and industrial classes, like those which elected Tudor Parliaments, are as a rule impatient of religious or at least sacerdotal dictation. God and Mammon, in spite of all efforts at compromise, do not really agree. In 1529, before the meeting of Parliament, Campeggio had appealed to Henry to prevent the ruin of the Church; he felt that without State protection the Church could hardly stand. In 1531 Warham, the successor of Becket and Langton, excused his compliance with Henry's demands by pleading (p. 271) Ira principis mors est.[746] In the draft of a speech he drew up just before his death,[747] the Archbishop referred to the case of St. Thomas, hinted that Henry VIII. was going the way of Henry II., and compared his policy with the constitutions of Clarendon. The comparison was extraordinarily apt; Henry VIII. was doing what Henry II. had failed to do, and the fate that attended the Angevin king might have befallen the Tudor had Warham been Becket and the Church of the sixteenth been the same as the Church of the twelfth century. But they were not, and Warham appealed in vain to the liberties of the Church granted by Magna Carta, and to the "ill end" of "several kings who violated them". Laymen, he complained, now "advanced" their own laws rather than those of the Church. The people, admitted so staunch a churchman as Pole, were beginning to hate the priests.[748] "There were," wrote Norfolk, "infinite clamours of the temporalty here in Parliament against the misuse of the spiritual jurisdiction.... This realm did never grudge the tenth part against the abuses of the Church at no Parliament in my days, as they do now."[749]

[Footnote 745: "It was not from Parliament," says Brewer (L. and P., iv., Introd., p. dcxlvii.), "but from Convocation that the King had to anticipate any show of independence or opposition." True, to some extent; but the fact does not prove, as Brewer alleges, that Convocation was more independent than Parliament, but that Henry was doing what Parliament liked and Convocation disliked.]

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

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

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

[Footnote 749: Ibid., v., 831; cf. v., 898, 989, App. 28.]

These infinite clamours and grudging were not the result of the (p. 272) conscientious rejection of any Catholic or papal doctrine. Englishmen are singularly free from the bondage of abstract ideas, and they began their Reformation not with the enunciation of some new truth, but with an attack on clerical fees. Reform was stimulated by a practical grievance, closely connected with money, and not by a sense of wrong done to the conscience. No dogma plays such a part in the English Reformation as Justification by Faith did in Germany, or Predestination in Switzerland. Parliament in 1530 had not been appreciably affected by Tyndale's translation of the Bible or by any of Luther's works. Tyndale was still an exile in the Netherlands, pleading in vain for the same toleration in England as Charles V. permitted across the sea. Frith was in the Tower—a man, wrote the lieutenant, Walsingham, whom it would be a great pity to lose, if only he could be reconciled[750]—and Bilney was martyred in 1531. A parliamentary inquiry was threatened in the latter case, not because Parliament sympathised with Bilney's doctrine, but because it was said that the clergy had procured his burning before obtaining the State's consent.[751] Parliament was as zealous as Convocation against heresy, but wanted the punishment of heretics left in secular hands.

[Footnote 750: L. and P., v., 1458.]

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

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

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

[Footnote 753: L. and P., iv., 6019.]

[Footnote 754: Ibid., v., 1013.]

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

[Footnote 756: L. and P., iv., 5925.]

[Footnote 757: Ibid., iv., 6325.]

[Footnote 758: Ibid., iv., 6385.]

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

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

[Footnote 761: Ibid., v., 148, 850.]

But, however Lutheran Anne Boleyn may have been, Henry was still true to the orthodox faith. If he dallied with German princes, and held out hopes to his heretic subjects, it was not because he believed in the doctrines of either, but because both might be made to serve his own ends. He rescued Crome from the flames, not because he doubted or favoured Crome's heresy, but because Crome appealed from the Church to the King, and denied the papal supremacy; that, said Henry, is not heresy, but truth.[762] When he sent to Oxford for the articles on which Wycliffe had been condemned,[763] it was not to study the great Reformer's doctrine of the mass, but to discover Wycliffe's reasons for calling upon the State to purify a corrupt Church, and to digest his arguments against the temporal wealth of the clergy. When he lauded the reforms effected by the German princes he was thinking of their secularisation of ecclesiastical revenues. The spoliation (p. 275) of the Church was consistent with the most fervent devotion to its tenets. In 1531 Henry warned the Pope that the Emperor would probably allow the laity "to appropriate the possessions of the Church, which is a matter which does not touch the foundations of the faith; and what an example this will afford to others, it is easy to see".[764] Henry managed to improve upon Charles's example in this respect. "He meant," he told Chapuys in 1533, "to repair the errors of Henry II. and John, who, being in difficulties, had made England and Ireland tributary to the Pope; he was determined also to reunite to the Crown the goods which churchmen held of it, which his predecessors could not alienate to his prejudice; and he was bound to do this by the oath he had taken at his coronation."[765] Probably it was about this time, or a little later, that he drew up his suggestions for altering the coronation oath, and making the royal obligations binding only so far as the royal conscience thought fit. The German princes had a further claim to his consideration beyond the example they set him in dealing with the temporalties of the Church. They might be very useful if his difference with Charles over Catherine of Aragon came to an open breach; and the English envoys, who congratulated them on their zeal for reform, also endeavoured to persuade them that Henry's friendship might be no little safeguard against a despotic Emperor.

[Footnote 762: Ibid., v., 129, 148.]

[Footnote 763: Ibid., iv., 6546.]

[Footnote 764: L. and P., v., 326.]

[Footnote 765: Ibid., vi., 235.]

All these phenomena, the Reformation in Germany, heresy at home, and the anti-sacerdotal prejudices of his subjects, were regarded by Henry merely as circumstances which might be made subservient to his own particular purpose; and the skill with which he used them is a (p. 276) monument of farsighted statecraft.[766] He did not act on the impulse of rash caprice. His passions were strong, but his self-control was stronger; and the breach with Rome was effected with a cold and calculated cunning, which the most adept disciple of Machiavelli could not have excelled. He did not create the factors he used; hostility to the Church had a real objective existence. Henry was a great man; but the burdens his people felt were not the product of Henry's hypnotic suggestion. He could only divert those grievances to his own use. He had no personal dislike to probate dues or annates; he did not pay them, but the threat of their abolition might compel the Pope to grant his divorce. Heresy in itself was abominable, but if heretics would maintain the royal against the papal supremacy, might not their sins be forgiven? The strength of Henry's position lay in the fact that he stood between two evenly balanced parties. It is obvious that by favouring the anti-clericals he could destroy the power of the Church. It is not so certain, but it is probable that, by supporting the Church, he could have staved off its ruin so long as he lived. Parliament might have been urgent, but there was no necessity to call it together. The Reformation Parliament, which sat for seven years, would probably have been dissolved after a few weeks had Clement granted the divorce. It met session after session, to pass one measure after another, each of which was designed to put fresh pressure on the Pope. It began with the outworks of the papal fortress; as soon (p. 277) as one was dismantled, Henry cried "Halt," to see if the citadel would surrender. When it refused, the attack recommenced. First one, then another of the Church's privileges and the Pope's prerogatives disappeared, till there remained not one stone upon another of the imposing edifice of ecclesiastical liberty and papal authority in England.

[Footnote 766: Cf. A. Zimmermann, "Zur kirchlichen Politik Heinrichs VIII., nach den Trennung vom Rom," in Roemische Quartalschrift, xiii., 263-283.]



CHAPTER XI. (p. 278)

"DOWN WITH THE CHURCH."

The Reformation Parliament met for its first session on the 3rd of November, 1529, at the Black Friars' Hall in London.[767] No careful observer was in any doubt as to what its temper would be with regard to the Church. It was opened by the King in person, and the new Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, delivered an address in which he denounced his predecessor, Wolsey, in scathing terms.[768] Parliament had been summoned, he said, to reform such things as had been used or permitted in England by inadvertence. On the following day both Houses adjourned to Westminster on account of the plague, and the Commons chose, as their Speaker, Sir Thomas Audley, the future Lord Chancellor. One of their first duties was to consider a bill of attainder against Wolsey,[769] and the fate of that measure seems to be destructive of one or the other of two favourite theories respecting Henry VIII.'s Parliaments. The bill was opposed in the Commons by Cromwell and thrown out; either it was not a mere expression of the royal will, or Parliament was something more than the tool of the Court. For it is hardly credible that Henry first caused the bill to be introduced, and then ordered its rejection. The next business was Henry's (p. 279) request for release from the obligation to repay the loan which Wolsey had raised; that, too, the Commons refused, except on conditions.[770] But no such opposition greeted the measures for reforming the clergy.[771] Bills were passed in the Commons putting a limit on the fees exacted by bishops for probate, and for the performance of other duties then regarded as spiritual functions. The clergy were prohibited from holding pluralities, except in certain cases, but the act was drawn with astonishing moderation; it did not apply to benefices acquired before 1530, unless they exceeded the number of four. Penalties against non-residents were enacted, and an attempt was made to check the addiction of spiritual persons to commercial pursuits.

[Footnote 767: L. and P., iv., 6043-44.]

[Footnote 768: Hall, Chronicle, p. 764.]

[Footnote 769: L. and P., iv., 6075.]

[Footnote 770: That it passed at all is often considered proof of parliamentary servility; it is rather an illustration of the typical Tudor policy of burdening the wealthy few in order to spare the general public. If repayment of the loan were exacted, fresh taxation would be necessary, which would fall on many more than had lent the King money. It was very irregular, but the burden was thus placed on the shoulders of those individuals who benefited most by Henry's ecclesiastical and general policy and were rapidly accumulating wealth. Taxation on the whole was remarkably light during Tudor times; the tenths, fifteenths and subsidies had become fixed sums which did not increase with the national wealth, and indeed brought in less and less to the royal exchequer (see L. and P., vii., 344, "considerations why subsidies in diverse shires were not so good in Henry's seventh year as in his fifth"; cf. vii., 1490, and xix., ii., 689, where Paget says that benevolences did not "grieve the common people").]

[Footnote 771: L. and P., iv., 6083.]

These reforms seem reasonable enough, but the idea of placing a bound to the spiritual exaction of probate seemed sacrilege to Bishop Fisher. "My lords," he cried, "you see daily what bills come hither from the Common House, and all is to the destruction of the (p. 280) Church. For God's sake, see what a realm the kingdom of Bohemia was; and when the Church went down, then fell the glory of the kingdom. Now with the Commons is nothing but 'Down with the Church!' And all this, meseemeth, is for lack of faith only."[772] The Commons thought a limitation of fees an insufficient ground for a charge of heresy, and complained of Fisher to the King through the mouth of their Speaker. The Bishop explained away the offensive phrase, but the spiritual peers succeeded in rejecting the Commons' bills. The way out of the deadlock was suggested by the King; he proposed a conference between eight members of either House. The Lords' delegates were half spiritual, half temporal, peers.[773] Henry knew well enough that the Commons would vote solidly for the measures, and that the temporal peers would support them. They did so; the bills were passed; and, on 17th December, Parliament was prorogued. We may call it a trick or skilful parliamentary strategy; the same trick, played by the Tiers Etat in 1789, ensured the success of the French Revolution, and it was equally effective in England in 1529.

[Footnote 772: Hall, Chronicle, p. 766.]

[Footnote 773: Cf. Stubbs, Lectures, 1887, p. 317.]

These mutterings of the storm fell on deaf ears at Rome. Clement was deaf, not because he had not ears to hear, but because the clash of imperial arms drowned more distant sounds. "If any one," wrote the Bishop of Auxerre in 1531, "was ever in prison or in the power of his enemies, the Pope is now."[774] He was as anxious as ever to escape responsibility. "He has told me," writes the Bishop of Tarbes to Francis I. on the 27th of March, 1530, "more than three times in (p. 281) secret that he would be glad if the marriage (with Anne Boleyn) was already made, either by a dispensation of the English legate or otherwise, provided it was not by his authority, or in diminution of his power as to dispensation and limitation of Divine law."[775] Later in the year he made his suggestion that Henry should have two wives without prejudice to the legitimacy of the children of either. Henry, however, would listen to neither suggestion.[776] He would be satisfied with nothing less than the sanction of the highest authority recognised in England. When it became imperative that his marriage with Anne should be legally sanctioned, and evident that no such sanction would be forthcoming from Rome, he arranged that the highest ecclesiastical authority recognised by law in England should be that of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[Footnote 774: L. and P., v., 562.]

[Footnote 775: L. and P., iv., 6290.]

[Footnote 776: See above p. 207.]

Meanwhile, the exigencies of the struggle drove Clement into assertions of papal prerogative which would at any time have provoked an outburst of national anger. On 7th March, 1530, he promulgated a bull to be affixed to the church doors at Bruges, Tournay and Dunkirk, inhibiting Henry, under pain of the greater excommunication, from proceeding to that second marriage, which he was telling the Bishop of Tarbes he wished Henry would complete.[777] A fortnight later he issued a second bull forbidding all ecclesiastical judges, doctors, advocates and others to speak or write against the validity of Henry's marriage with Catherine.[778] If he had merely desired to prohibit discussion of a matter under judicial consideration, he should have imposed silence also on the advocates of the marriage, and not (p. 282) left Fisher free to write books against the King and secretly send them to Spain to be printed.[779] On the 23rd of December following it was decreed in Consistory at Rome that briefs should be granted prohibiting the Archbishop of Canterbury from taking cognisance of the suit, and forbidding Henry to cohabit with any other woman than Catherine, and "all women in general to contract marriage with the King of England".[780] On the 5th of January, 1531, the Pope inhibited laity as well as clergy, universities, parliaments and courts of law from coming to any decision in the case.[781]

[Footnote 777: L. and P., iv., 6256.]

[Footnote 778: Ibid., iv., 6279.]

[Footnote 779: L. and P., iv., 6199, 6596, 6738; v., 460.]

[Footnote 780: Ibid., iv., 6772.]

[Footnote 781: Ibid., v., 27.]

To these fulminations the ancient laws of England provided Henry with sufficient means of reply. "Let not the Pope suppose," wrote Henry to Clement, "that either the King or his nobles will allow the fixed laws of his kingdom to be set aside."[782] A proclamation, based on the Statutes of Provisors, was issued on 12th September, 1530, forbidding the purchasing from the Court of Rome or the publishing of any thing prejudicial to the realm, or to the King's intended purposes;[783] and Norfolk was sent to remind the papal nuncio of the penalties attaching to the importation of bulls into England without the King's consent. But the most notorious expedient of Henry's was the appeal to the universities of Europe, first suggested by Cranmer.[784] Throughout 1530 English agents were busy abroad obtaining decisions from (p. 283) the universities on the question of the Pope's power to dispense with the law against marrying a deceased brother's wife. Their success was considerable. Paris and Orleans, Bourges and Toulouse, Bologna and Ferrara, Pavia and Padua, all decided against the Pope.[785] Similar verdicts, given by Oxford and Cambridge, may be as naturally ascribed to intimidation by Henry, as may the decisions of Spanish universities in the Pope's favour to pressure from Charles; but the theory that all the French and Italian universities were bribed is not very credible. The cajolery, the threats and the bribes were not all on one side; and in Italy at least the imperial agents would seem to have enjoyed greater facilities than Henry's. In some individual cases there was, no doubt, resort to improper inducements; but, if the majority in the most famous seats of learning in Europe could be induced by filthy lucre to vote against their conscience, it implies a greater need for drastic reformation than the believers in the theory of corruption are usually disposed to admit. Their decisions were, however, given on general grounds; the question of the consummation of Catherine's marriage with Arthur seems to have been carefully excluded. How far that consideration would have affected the votes of the universities can only be assumed; but it does not appear to have materially influenced the view taken by Catherine's advocates. They allowed that Catherine's oath would not be considered sufficient evidence in a court of law; they admitted the necessity of proving that urgent reasons existed for the grant of the dispensation, and the only (p. 284) urgent reason they put forward was an entirely imaginary imminence of war between Henry VII. and Ferdinand in 1503. Cardinal Du Bellay, in 1534, asserted that no one would be so bold as to maintain in Consistory that the dispensation ever was valid;[786] and the papalists were driven to the extreme contention, which was certainly not then admitted by Catholic Europe, that, whether the marriage with Arthur was merely a form or not, whether it was or was not against Divine law, the Pope could, of his absolute power, dispense.[787]

[Footnote 782: Ibid., iv., 6759.]

[Footnote 783: Ibid., iv., 6615; v., 45.]

[Footnote 784: See the present writer's Cranmer, pp. 39-41. Cranmer's suggestion was made early in August, 1529, and on the 23rd Du Bellay writes that Wolsey and the King "appeared to desire very much that I should go over to France to get the opinions of the learned men there about the divorce" (L. and P., iv., 5862). In October Stokesley was sent to France and Croke to Italy (ibid., p. 2684); Cranmer did not start till 1530.]

[Footnote 785: L. and P., iv., 6332, 6448, 6491, 6632, 6636.]

[Footnote 786: L. and P., vii., App. 12.]

[Footnote 787: Ibid., v., 468.]

Pending the result of Henry's appeal to the universities, little was done in the matter in England. The lords spiritual and temporal signed in June, 1530, a letter to the Pope urging him to comply with their King's request for a divorce.[788] Parliament did not meet until 16th January, 1531, and even then Chapuys reports that it was employed on nothing more important than cross-bows and hand-guns, the act against which was not, however, passed till 1534. The previous session had shown that, although the Commons might demur to fiscal exactions, they were willing enough to join Henry in any attack on the Church, and the question was how to bring the clergy to a similar state of acquiescence. It was naturally a more difficult task, but Henry's ingenuity provided a sufficient inducement. His use of the statutes of praemunire was very characteristic. It was conservative, it was legal, and it was unjust. Those statutes were no innovation designed to meet his particular case; they had been for centuries the law of the land; and there was no denying the fact that the clergy had broken the law by recognising Wolsey as legate. Henry, of course, had (p. 285) licensed Wolsey to act as legate, and to punish the clergy for an offence, at which he had connived, was scarcely consistent with justice; but no King ever showed so clearly how the soundest constitutional maxims could be used to defeat the pleas of equity; it was frequently laid down during his reign that no licence from the King could be pleaded against penalties imposed by statute, and not a few parliamentary privileges were first asserted by Henry VIII.[789] So the clergy were cunningly caught in the meshes of the law. Chapuys declares that no one could understand the mysteries of praemunire; "its interpretation lies solely in the King's head, who amplifies it and declares it at his pleasure, making it apply to any case he pleases". He at least saw how praemunire could be made to serve his purposes.[790]

[Footnote 788: Ibid., iv., 6513.]

[Footnote 789: Cf. L. and P., iv., 6199. Chapuys writes on 6th February, 1530, "I am told the King did not wish the Cardinal's case to be tried by Parliament, as, if it had been decided against him, the King could not have pardoned him".]

[Footnote 790: Ibid., iv., 6488, 6699.]

These, at the moment, were two. He wanted to extract from the clergy a recognition of his supremacy over the Church, and he wanted money. He was always in need of supplies, but especially now, in case war should arise from the Pope's refusal to grant his divorce; and Henry made it a matter of principle that the Church should pay for wars due to the Pope.[791] The penalty for praemunire was forfeiture of goods and imprisonment, and the King probably thought he was unduly lenient in granting a pardon for a hundred thousand pounds, when he might (p. 286) have taken the whole of the clergy's goods and put them in gaol as well. The clergy objected strongly; in the old days of the Church's influence they would all have preferred to go to prison, and a unanimous refusal of the King's demands would even now have baulked his purpose. But the spirit was gone out of them. Chapuys instigated the papal nuncio to go down to Convocation and stiffen the backs of the clergy.[792] They were horrified at his appearance, and besought him to depart in haste, fearing lest this fresh constitutional breach should be visited on their heads. Warham frightened them with the terrors of royal displeasure; and the clerics had to content their conscience with an Irish bull and a subterfuge. "Silence gives consent," said the Archbishop when putting the question; "Then are we all silent," cried the clergy. To their recognition of Henry as Supreme Head of the Church, they added the salvo "so far as the law of Christ allows". It was an empty phrase, thought Chapuys, for no one would venture to dispute with the King the point where his supremacy ended and that of Christ began;[793] there was in fact "a new Papacy made here".[794] The clergy repented of the concession as soon as it was granted; they were "more conscious every day," wrote Chapuys, (p. 287) "of the great error they committed in acknowledging the King as sovereign of the Church"; and they made a vain, and not very creditable, effort to get rejected by spiritual votes in the House of Lords the measures to which they had given their assent in Convocation.[795] The Church had surrendered with scarcely a show of fight; henceforth Henry might feel sure that, whatever opposition he might encounter in other quarters, the Church in England would offer no real resistance.

[Footnote 791: Cf. ibid., vi., 1381 [3], "that if the Pope attempts war, the King shall have a moiety of the temporal lands of the Church for his defence".]

[Footnote 792: L. and P., v., 62. Dr. Stubbs (Lectures, 1887, p. 318) represents the nuncio as being pressed into the King's service, and the clergy as resisting him as the Commons had done Wolsey in 1523. But this independence is imaginary; "it was agreed," writes Chapuys, "between the nuncio and me that he should go to the said ecclesiastics in their congregation and recommend them to support the immunity of the Church.... They were all utterly astonished and scandalised, and without allowing him to open his mouth they begged him to leave them in peace, for they had not the King's leave to speak with him."]

[Footnote 793: L. and P., v., 105.]

[Footnote 794: Ibid., v., 112.]

[Footnote 795: L. and P., v., 124.]

In Parliament, notwithstanding Chapuys' remark on the triviality of its business, more than a score of acts were passed, some limiting such abuses as the right of sanctuary, some dealing in the familiar way with social evils like the increase of beggars and vagabonds. The act depriving sanctuary-men, who committed felony, of any further protection from their sanctuary was recommended to Parliament by the King in person. So was a curious act making poisoning treason.[796] There had recently been an attempt to poison Fisher, which the King brought before the House of Lords. However familiar poisoning might be at Rome, it was a novel method in England, and was considered so heinous a crime that the ordinary penalties for murder were thought to be insufficient. Then the King's pardon to the clergy was embodied in a parliamentary bill. The Commons perceived that they were not included, took alarm, and refused to pass the bill. Henry at first assumed a superior tone; he pointed out that the Commons could not prevent his pardoning the clergy; he could do it as well under the Great Seal as by statute. The Commons, however, were not satisfied. "There was great murmuring among them," says Chapuys, "in the (p. 288) House of Commons, where it was publicly said in the presence of some of the Privy Council that the King had burdened and oppressed his kingdom with more imposts and exactions than any three or four of his predecessors, and that he ought to consider that the strength of the King lay in the affections of his people. And many instances were alleged of the inconveniences which had happened to princes through the ill-treatment of their subjects."[797] Henry was too shrewd to attempt to punish this very plain speaking. He knew that his faithful Commons were his one support, and he yielded at once. "On learning this," continues Chapuys, "the King granted the exemption which was published in Parliament on Wednesday last without any reservation." The two acts for the pardon of the spiritualty and temporalty were passed concurrently. But, whereas the clergy had paid for their pardon with a heavy fine and the loss of their independence, the laity paid nothing at all. The last business of the session was the reading of the sentences in Henry's favour obtained from the universities.[798] Parliament was then prorogued, and its members were enjoined to relate to their constituents that which they had seen and heard.

[Footnote 796: Ibid., v., 120.]

[Footnote 797: L. and P., v., 171. This and other incidents (see p. 289) form a singular comment on Brewer's assertion (ibid., iv., Introd., p. dcxlvii.) that "there is scarcely an instance on record, in this or any succeeding Parliament throughout the reign, of a parliamentary patriot protesting against a single act of the Crown, however unjust and tyrannical it might be".]

[Footnote 798: L. and P., v., 171.]

Primed by communion with their neighbours, members of Parliament assembled once more on 15th January, 1532, for more important (p. 289) business than they had yet transacted. Every effort was made to secure a full attendance of Peers and Commons; almost all the lords would be present, thought Chapuys, except Tunstall, who had not been summoned; Fisher came without a summons, and apparently no effort was made to exclude him.[799] The readiness of the Commons to pass measures against the Church, and their reluctance to consent to taxation, were even more marked than before. Their critical spirit was shown by their repeated rejection of the Statutes of Wills and Uses designed by Henry to protect from evasion his feudal rights, such as reliefs and primer seisins.[800] This demand, writes Chapuys,[801] "has been the occasion of strange words against the King and the Council, and in spite of all the efforts of the King's friends, it was rejected".[802] In the matter of supplies they were equally outspoken; they would only grant one-tenth and one-fifteenth, a trifling sum which Henry refused to accept.[803] It was during this debate on the question of supplies that two members moved that the King be asked to take back Catherine as his wife.[804] They would then, they urged, need no fresh armaments and their words are reported to have been well received by the House. The Commons were not more enthusiastic about the bill restraining the payment of annates to the Court at Rome.[805] They did not pay (p. 290) them; their grievance was against bishops in England, and they saw no particular reason for relieving those prelates of their financial burdens. Cromwell wrote to Gardiner that he did not know how the annates bill would succeed;[806] and the King had apparently to use all his persuasion to get the bill through the Lords and the Commons. Only temporal lords voted for it in the Upper House, and, in the Lower, recourse was had to the rare expedient of a division.[807] In both Houses the votes were taken in the King's presence. But it is almost certain that his influence was brought to bear, not so much in favour of the principle of the bill, as of the extremely ingenious clause which left the execution of the Act in Henry's discretion, and provided him with a powerful means of putting pressure on the Pope. That was Henry's statement of the matter. He told Chapuys, before the bill was passed, that the attack on annates was being made without his consent;[808] and after it had been passed he instructed his representatives at Rome to say that he had taken care to stop the mouth of Parliament and to have the question of annates referred to his decision.[809] "The King," writes the French envoy in England at the end of March, "has been very cunning, for he has caused the nobles and people to remit all to his will, so that the Pope may know that, if he does nothing for him, the King has the means of punishing him."[810] The execution of the clauses providing for the (p. 291) confirmation and consecration of bishops without recourse to Rome was also left at Henry's option.

[Footnote 799: L. and P., v., 737.]

[Footnote 800: Henry had ordered Cromwell to have a bill with this object ready for the 1531 session (L. and P., v., 394), and another for the "augmentation of treasons"; apparently neither then proved acceptable to Parliament.]

[Footnote 801: L. and P., v., 805.]

[Footnote 802: Ibid., v., 989.]

[Footnote 803: Ibid., v., 1046.]

[Footnote 804: Ibid., v., 989. This was in May during the second part of the session, after the other business had been finished; redress of grievances constitutionally preceded supply.]

[Footnote 805: Annates were attacked first, partly because they were the weakest as well as the most sensitive part in the papal armour; there was no law in the Corpus Juris Canonici requiring the payment of annates (Maitland in Engl. Hist. Rev., xvi., 43).]

[Footnote 806: L. and P., v., 723.]

[Footnote 807: Ibid., v., 898.]

[Footnote 808: Ibid., v., 832.]

[Footnote 809: Ibid., v., 886.]

[Footnote 810: L. and P., v., 150. This letter is misplaced in L. and P.; it should be under 23rd March, 1532, instead of 1531. The French envoy, Giles de la Pommeraye, did not arrive in England till late in 1531, and his letter obviously refers to the proceedings in Parliament in March, 1532; cf. v., 879.]

But no pressure was needed to induce the Commons to attack abuses, the weight of which they felt themselves. Early in the session they were discussing the famous petition against the clergy, and, on 28th February, Norfolk referred to the "infinite clamours" in Parliament against the Church.[811] The fact that four corrected drafts of this petition are extant in the Record Office, is taken as conclusive proof that it really emanated from the Court.[812] But the drafts do not appear to be in the known hand of any of the Government clerks. The corrections in Cromwell's hand doubtless represent the wishes of the King; but, even were the whole in Cromwell's hand, it would be no bar to the hypothesis that Cromwell reduced to writing, for the King's consideration, complaints which he heard from independent members in his place in Parliament. The fact that nine-tenths of our modern legislation is drawn up by Government draughtsmen, cannot be accepted as proof that that legislation represents no popular feeling. On the face of them, these petitions bear little evidence of Court dictation; the grievances are not such as were felt by Henry, whose own demands of the clergy were laid directly before Convocation, without any (p. 292) pretence that they really came from the Commons. Some are similar to those presented to the Parliament of 1515; others are directed against abuses which recent statutes had sought, but failed, to remedy. Such were the citation of laymen out of their dioceses, the excessive fees taken in spiritual courts, the delay and trouble in obtaining probates. Others complained that the clergy in Convocation made laws inconsistent with the laws of the realm; that the ordinaries delayed instituting parsons to their benefices; that benefices were given to minors; that the number of holy-days, especially in harvest-time, was excessive; and that spiritual men occupied temporal offices. The chief grievance seems to have been that the ordinaries cited poor men before the spiritual courts without any accuser being produced, and then condemned them to abjure or be burnt. Henry, reported Chapuys, was "in a most gracious manner" promising to support the Commons against the Church "and to mitigate the rigours of the inquisition which they have here, and which is said to be more severe than in Spain".[813]

[Footnote 811: Ibid., v., 831.]

[Footnote 812: Ibid., v., 1017-23. If the Court was responsible for all the documents complaining of the clergy drawn up at this time, it must have been very active. See others in L. and P., v., 49, App. 28, vi., 122.]

[Footnote 813: L. and P., v., 989.]

After debating these points in Parliament, the Commons agreed that "all the griefs, which the temporal men should be grieved with, should be put in writing and delivered to the King"; hence the drafts in the Record Office. The deputation, with the Speaker at its head, presented the complaints to Henry on 18th March. Its reception is quite unintelligible on the theory that the grievances existed only in the King's imagination. Henry was willing, he said, to consider the Commons' petition. But, if they expected him to comply with their wishes, they must make some concession to his; and he recommended (p. 293) them to forgo their opposition to the bills of Uses and Wills, to which the Lords had already agreed. After Easter he sent the Commons' petition to Convocation; the clergy appealed to the King for protection. Henry had thus manoeuvred himself into the position of mediator, in which he hoped, but in vain, to extract profit for himself from both sides.[814] From Convocation he demanded submission to three important claims; the clergy were to consent to a reform of ecclesiastical law, to abdicate their right of independent legislation, and to recognise the necessity of the King's approval for existing canons. These demands were granted. As usual, Henry was able to get what he wanted from the clergy; but from the Commons he could get no more than they were willing to give. They again rejected the bills of Uses and Wills, and would only concede the most paltry supplies. But they passed with alacrity the bills embodying the submission of the clergy. These were the Church's concessions to Henry, but it must bend the knee to the Commons as well, and other measures were passed reforming some of the points in their petition. Ordinaries were prohibited from citing men out of their proper dioceses, and benefit of clergy was denied to clerks under the order of sub-deacon who committed murder, felony, or petty treason; the latter was a slight extension of a statute passed in 1512. The bishops, however, led by Gardiner and aided by More,[815] secured in the House of Lords (p. 294) the rejection of the concessions made by the Church to the King, though they passed those made to the Commons. Parliament, which had sat for the unusual space of four months, was prorogued on the 14th of May; two days later, More resigned the chancellorship and Gardiner retired in disfavour to Winchester.

[Footnote 814: Stubbs, Lectures, 1887, pp. 320-24; Hall, pp. 784, 785; see also Lords' Journals, 1532.]

[Footnote 815: L. and P., v., 1013. More had, as Henry knew, been all along opposed to the divorce, but as More gratefully acknowledged, the King only employed those whose consciences approved of the divorce on business connected with it (vii., 289).]

* * * * *

Meanwhile the divorce case at Rome made little progress. In the highest court in Christendom the facilities afforded for the law's delays were naturally more extended than before inferior tribunals; and two years had been spent in discussing whether Henry's "excusator," sent merely to maintain that the King of England could not be cited to plead before the Papal Court, should be heard or not. Clement was in suspense between two political forces. In December, 1532, Charles was again to interview the Pope, and imperialists in Italy predicted that his presence would be as decisive in Catherine's favour as it had been three years before. But Henry and Francis had, in October, exhibited to the world the closeness of their friendship by a personal interview at Boulogne.[816] No pomp or ceremony, like that of the Field of Cloth of Gold, dazzled men's eyes; but the union between the two Kings was never more real. Neither Queen was present; Henry would not take Catherine, and he objected so strongly to Spanish dress that he could not endure the sight of Francis's Spanish Queen.[817] Anne Boleyn, recently created Marquis (so she was styled, to indicate the possession of the peerage in her own right) of (p. 295) Pembroke,[818] took Catherine's place; and plans for the promotion of the divorce formed the staple of the royal discussions. Respect for the power of the two Kings robbed the subsequent interview between Emperor and Pope of much of its effect; and before Charles and Clement parted, the Pope had secretly agreed to accord a similar favour to Francis; he was to meet him at Nice in the following summer. Long before then the divorce had been brought to a crisis. By the end of January Henry knew that Anne Boleyn was pregnant. Her issue must at any cost be made legitimate. That could only be done by Henry's divorce from Catherine, and by his marriage with Anne Boleyn.[819] There was little hope of obtaining these favours from Rome. Therefore it must be done by means of the Archbishop of Canterbury; and to remove all chance of disputing his sentence, the Court of the Archbishop of Canterbury must, before his decision was given, be recognised as the supreme tribunal for English ecclesiastical cases.

[Footnote 816: See P.A. Hamy, Entrevue de Francois I. avec Henri VIII., a Boulogne en 1532. Paris, 1898.]

[Footnote 817: L. and P., v., 1187.]

[Footnote 818: L. and P., v., 1274.]

[Footnote 819: In 1529 Du Bellay had written si le ventre croist, tout sera gaste (L. and P., iv., 5679).]

These circumstances, of which not a hint was suffered to transpire in public, dictated Henry's policy during the early months of 1533. Never was his skill more clearly displayed; he was, wrote Chapuys in December, 1532, practising more than ever with his Parliament,[820] though he received the Spanish ambassador "as courteously as ever".[821] The difficulties with which he was surrounded might have tried the nerve of any man, but they only seemed to render Henry's course more daring and steady. The date of his marriage with Anne Boleyn is even now a matter of conjecture.[822] Cranmer repudiated (p. 296) the report that he performed the ceremony.[823] He declares he did not know of it until a fortnight after the event, and says it took place about St. Paul's Day (25th January). A more important question was the individuality of the archbishop who was to pronounce the nullity of Henry's marriage with Catherine of Aragon. He must obviously be one on whom the King could rely. Fortunately for Henry, Archbishop Warham had died in August, 1532. His successor was to be Thomas Cranmer, who had first suggested to Henry the plan of seeking the opinions of the universities on the divorce, and was now on an embassy at the Emperor's Court. No time was to be lost. Henry usually gathered a rich harvest during the vacancy of great bishoprics, but now Canterbury was to be filled up without any delay, and the King even lent Cranmer 1,000 marks to meet his expenses.[824] But would the Pope be so accommodating as to expedite the bulls, suspecting, as he must have done, the object for which they were wanted?

[Footnote 820: L. and P., v., 1633.]

[Footnote 821: Ibid., v., 1579.]

[Footnote 822: Cranmer, Works, ii., 246. The antedating of the marriage to 14th November, 1532, by Hall and Holinshed was doubtless due to a desire to shield Anne's character; Stow gives the correct date.]

[Footnote 823: See the present writer's Cranmer, p. 60 n.]

[Footnote 824: L. and P., vi., 131.]

For this contingency also Henry had provided; and he was actually using the Pope as a means for securing the divorce. An appearance of friendship with Clement was the weapon he now employed with the greatest effect. The Pope was discussing with the French ambassadors a proposal to remit the divorce case to some neutral spot, such as Cambrai, and delaying that definite sentence in Catherine's favour which imperialists had hoped that his interview with Charles would (p. 297) precipitate;[825] the papal nuncio was being feasted in England, and was having suspiciously amicable conferences with members of Henry's council. Henry himself was writing to Clement in the most cordial terms; he had instructed his ambassadors in 1531 to "use all gentleness towards him,"[826] and Clement was saying that Henry was of a better nature and more wise than Francis I.[827] Henry was now willing to suspend his consent to the general council, where the Pope feared that a scheme would be mooted for restoring the papal States to the Emperor;[828] and he told the papal nuncio in England that, though he had studied the question of the Pope's authority and retracted his defence of the Holy See,[829] yet possibly Clement might give him occasion to probe the matter further still, and to reconfirm what he had originally written.[830] Was he not, moreover, withholding his assent from the Act of Annates, which would deprive the Pope of large revenues? Backed by this gentle hint, Henry's request not merely for Cranmer's bulls, but for their expedition without the payment of the usual 10,000 marks, reached Rome. The cardinals were loth to forgo their perquisites for the bulls, but the annates of all England were more precious still, and, on 22nd February, Consistory decided to do what Henry desired.

[Footnote 825: L. and P., vi., 26. The interview took place at Bologna in December, 1532.]

[Footnote 826: Ibid., v., 326.]

[Footnote 827: Ibid., v., 555.]

[Footnote 828: Ibid., vi., 89, 212.]

[Footnote 829: E.g., ibid., v., 820, where Henry tells Tunstall that to follow the Pope is to forsake Christ, that it was no schism to separate from Rome, and that "God willing, we shall never separate from the universal body of Christian men," and admits that he was misled in his youth to make war upon Louis XII. by those who sought only their own pomp, wealth and glory.]

[Footnote 830: Ibid., vi., 296.]

The same deceptive appearance of concord between King and Pope (p. 298) was employed to lull both Parliament and Convocation. The delays in the divorce suit disheartened Catherine's adherents. The Pope, wrote Chapuys, would lose his authority little by little, unless the case were decided at once;[831] every one, he said, cried out "au murdre" on Clement for his procrastination on the divorce, and for the speed with which he granted Cranmer's bulls.[832] There was a general impression that "he would betray the Emperor," and "many think that there is a secret agreement between Henry and the Pope".[833] That idea was sedulously fostered by Henry. Twice he took the Pope's nuncio down in state to Parliament to advertise the excellent terms upon which he stood with the Holy See.[834] In the face of such evidence, what motive was there for prelates and others to reject the demands which Henry was pressing upon them? The Convocations of Canterbury and York repeated the submission of 1532, and approved, by overwhelming majorities, of two propositions: firstly, that, as a matter of law, the Pope was not competent to dispense with the obstacle to a marriage between a man and his deceased brother's wife, when the previous marriage had been consummated; and secondly, that, as a matter of fact, the marriage between Catherine and Prince Arthur had been so consummated.[835] In Parliament, the Act forbidding Appeals to Rome,[836] and providing for the confirmation and consecration of (p. 299) bishops without recourse to the Papal Court, was discussed. It was, like the rest of Henry's measures, based on a specious conservative plea. General councils had, the King said, decreed that suits should be determined in the place in which they originated;[837] so there was no need for appeals to go out of England. Such opposition as it encountered was based on no religious principle. Commercial interests were the most powerful impulse of the age, and the Commons were afraid that the Act of Appeals might be followed by a papal interdict. They did not mind the interdict as depriving them of religious consolations, but they dreaded lest it might ruin their trade with the Netherlands.[838] Henry, however, persuaded them that the wool trade was as necessary to Flemings as it was to Englishmen, and that an interdict would prove no more than an empty threat. He was careful to make no other demands upon the Commons. No subsidies were required; no extension of royal prerogative was sought; and eventually the Act of Appeals was passed with a facility that seems to have created general surprise.[839]

[Footnote 831: L. and P., vi., 142.]

[Footnote 832: Ibid., vi., 296.]

[Footnote 833: Ibid., vi., 89.]

[Footnote 834: Ibid., vi., 142, 160. The nuncio sat on Henry's right and the French ambassador on his left, this trinity illustrating the league existing between Pope, Henry and Francis.]

[Footnote 835: Ibid., vi., 276, 311, 317, 491.]

[Footnote 836: The germ of this Act may be found in a despatch from Henry dated 7th October, 1530; that the system of appeals had been subject to gross abuse is obvious from the fact that the Council of Trent prohibited it (Cambridge Modern Hist., ii., 671).]

[Footnote 837: L. and P., vi., 1489.]

[Footnote 838: Ibid., vi., 296.]

[Footnote 839: Ibid., XII., ii., 952.]

Henry's path was now clear. Cranmer was archbishop and legatus natus with a title which none could dispute. By Act of Parliament his court was the final resort for all ecclesiastical cases. No appeals from his decision could be lawfully made. So, on 11th April, before he was yet consecrated, he besought the King's gracious permission to determine his "great cause of matrimony, because much bruit exists among the common people on the subject".[840] No doubt there did; but that (p. 300) was not the cause for the haste. Henry was pleased to accede to this request of the "principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction"; and, on the 10th of May, the Archbishop opened his Court at Dunstable. Catherine, of course, could recognise no authority in Cranmer to try a cause that was before the papal curia. She was declared contumacious, and, on the 23rd, the Archbishop gave his sentence. Following the line of Convocation, he pronounced that the Pope had no power to license marriages such as Henry's, and that the King and Catherine had never been husband and wife.[841] Five days later, after a secret investigation, he declared that Henry and Anne Boleyn were lawfully married, and on Whitsunday, the 1st of June, he crowned Anne as Queen in Westminster Abbey.[842] Three months later, on Sunday, the 7th of September, between three and four in the afternoon, Queen Anne gave birth to a daughter at Greenwich.[843] The child was christened on the following Wednesday by Stokesley, Bishop of London, and Cranmer stood godfather. Chapuys scarcely considered the matter worth mention. The King's amie had given birth to a bastard, a detail of little importance to any one, and least of all to a monarch like Charles V.[844] (p. 301) Yet the "bastard" was Queen Elizabeth, and the child, thus ushered into a contemptuous world, lived to humble the pride of Spain, and to bear to a final triumph the banner which Henry had raised.

[Footnote 840: Cranmer, Works, ii., 237.]

[Footnote 841: Ibid., ii., 241, 244; L. and P., vi., 332, 469, 470, 525. This sentence did not bastardise the Princess Mary according to Chapuys, for "even if the marriage were null, the Princess was legitimate owing to the lawful ignorance of her parents. The Archbishop of Canterbury had foreseen this and had not dared to be so shameless as to declare her a bastard" (ibid., vii., 94).]

[Footnote 842: See Tudor Tracts edited by the present writer, 1903, pp. 10-28, and L. and P., vi., 561, 563, 584, 601.]

[Footnote 843: L. and P., vi., 1089, 1111.]

[Footnote 844: L. and P., vi., 1112.]



CHAPTER XII. (p. 302)

"THE PREVAILING OF THE GATES OF HELL."

That victorious issue of the Tudor struggle with the power, against which Popes proclaimed that the gates of hell should not prevail, was distant enough in 1533. Then the Tudor monarch seemed rushing headlong to irretrievable ruin. Sure of himself and his people, and feeling no longer the need of Clement's favour, Henry threw off the mask of friendship, and, on the 9th of July, confirmed, by letters patent, the Act of Annates.[845] Cranmer's proceedings at Dunstable, Henry's marriage, and Anne's coronation, constituted a still more flagrant defiance of Catholic Europe. The Pope's authority was challenged with every parade of contempt. He could do no less than gather round him the relics of his dignity and prepare to launch against Henry the final ban of the Church.[846] So, on the 11th of July, the sentence of the greater excommunication was drawn up. Clement did not yet, (p. 303) nor did he ever, venture to assert his claims to temporal supremacy in Christendom, by depriving the English King of his kingdom; he thought it prudent to rely on his own undisputed prerogative. His spiritual powers seemed ample; and he applied to himself the words addressed to the Prophet Jeremiah, "Behold, I have set thee above nations and kingdoms that thou mayest root up and destroy, build and plant, a lord over all kings of the whole earth and over all peoples bearing rule".[847] In virtue of this prerogative Henry was cut off from the Church while he lived, removed from the pale of Christian society, and deprived of the solace of the rites of religion; when he died, he must lie without burial, and in hell suffer torment for ever.[848]

[Footnote 845: L. and P., vi., 793.]

[Footnote 846: Ibid., vi., 807, App. 3; vii., 185. The declaration of it was at the same time suspended until September, and the delicate question of entrusting the executoriales to princes who repudiated the honour caused further delays. The bull of excommunication was eventually dated 30th August, 1535 (ix., 207); and a bull depriving Henry of his kingdom was sanctioned, printed and prepared for publication (x., Introd., p. xv., Nos. 82, 107), but first Francis and then Charles put difficulties in the way. In December, 1538, Paul III., now that he, Charles and Francis were united in the bond of friendship, published with additions the bull of August, 1535 (XIII., ii., 1087, Introd., p. xli.). Even then no bull of deprivation was published. Apparently that was an honour reserved for Henry's daughter.]

[Footnote 847: Jeremiah i. 10. The Vulgate text adopted in Papal bulls differs materially from that in the English Authorised Version.]

[Footnote 848: See the text in Burnet, ed. Pocock, iv., 318-31.]

What would be the effect of this terrific anathema? The omens looked ill for the English King. If he had flouted the Holy See, he had also offended the temporal head of Christendom. The Emperor's aunt had been divorced, his cousin's legitimacy had been impugned, and the despatches of his envoy, Chapuys, were filled with indignant lamentations over the treatment meted out to Catherine and to her daughter. Both proud and stubborn women, they resolutely refused to admit in any way the validity of Henry's acts and recent legislation. Catherine would rather starve as Queen, than be sumptuously clothed and fed as Princess Dowager. Henry would give her anything she asked, if she would acknowledge that she was not the Queen, nor her daughter the Princess; but her bold resistance to his commands and wishes (p. 304) brought out all the worst features of his character.[849] His anger was not the worst the Queen and her daughter had to fear; he still preserved a feeling of respect for Catherine and of affection for Mary. "The King himself," writes Chapuys, "is not ill-natured; it is this Anne who has put him in this perverse and wicked temper, and alienates him from his former humanity."[850] The new Queen's jealous malignity passed all bounds. She caused her aunt to be made governess to Mary, and urged her to box her charge's ears; and she used every effort to force the Princess to serve as a maid upon her little half-sister, Elizabeth.[851]

[Footnote 849: L. and P., vi., 805, 1186.]

[Footnote 850: Ibid., vi., 351; vii., 171, 871; cf. v., 216, where Chapuys says Anne hated the Princess Mary more than she did Queen Catherine because she saw that Henry had some affection for Mary, and praised her in Anne's presence. At the worst Henry's manners were generally polite; on one occasion, writes Chapuys, "when the King was going to mount his horse, the Princess went on to a terrace at the top of the house to see him. The King, either being told of it or by chance, turned round, and seeing her on her knees with her hands joined, bowed to her and put his hand to his hat. Then all those present who had not dared to raise their heads to look at her [surely they may not have seen her] rejoiced at what the King had done, and saluted her reverently with signs of good-will and compassion" (ibid., vii., 83).]

[Footnote 851: Ibid., vii., 171.]

This humiliation was deeply resented by the people, who, says Chapuys, though forbidden, on pain of their lives, to call Catherine Queen, shouted it at the top of their voices.[852] "You cannot imagine," he writes a few weeks later to Charles, "the great desire of all this people that your Majesty should send men. Every day I have been applied to about it by Englishmen of rank, wit and learning, (p. 305) who give me to understand that the last King Richard was never so much hated by his people as this King."[853] The Emperor, he went on, had a better chance of success than Henry VII., and Ortiz at Rome was cherishing the belief that England would rise against the King for his contumacy and schismatic disobedience.[854] Fisher was urgent that Charles should prepare an invasion of England; the young Marquis of Exeter, a possible claimant to the throne, was giving the same advice.[855] Abergavenny, Darcy and other peers brooded in sullen discontent. They were all listening to the hysterical ravings of Elizabeth Barton,[856] the Nun of Kent, who prophesied that Henry had not a year to live. Charles's emissaries were busy in Ireland, where Kildare was about to revolt. James V. of Scotland was hinting at his claims to the English crown, should Henry be deprived by the Pope;[857] and Chapuys was divided in mind whether it would be better to make James the executor of the papal sentence, or marry Mary to some great English noble, and raise an internal rebellion.[858] At Catherine's suggestion he recommended to the Emperor Reginald Pole, a grandson of George, Duke of Clarence, as a suitor for Mary's hand; and he urged, on his own account, Pole's claims to the English throne.[859] Catherine's scruples, not about deposing her husband, or passing over the claims of Henry's sisters, but on the score of Edward IV.'s grandson, the Marquis of Exeter, might, thought Chapuys, (p. 306) be removed by appealing to the notorious sentence of Bishop Stillington, who, on the demand of Richard III., had pronounced Edward IV.'s marriage void and his children illegitimate.[860] Those who had been the King's firm supporters when the divorce first came up were some of them wavering, and others turning back.[861] Archbishop Lee, Bishops Tunstall and Gardiner, and Bennet,[862] were now all in secret or open opposition, and even Longland was expressing to Chapuys regrets that he had ever been Henry's confessor;[863] like other half-hearted revolutionists, they would never have started at all, had they known how far they would have to go, and now they were setting their sails for an adverse breeze. It was the King, and the King alone, who kept England on the course which he had mapped out. Pope and Emperor were defied; Europe was shocked; Francis himself disapproved of the breach with the Church; Ireland was in revolt; Scotland, as ever, was hostile; legislation had been thrust down the throats of a recalcitrant Church, and, we are asked to believe, of a no less unwilling House of Commons, while the people at large were seething with indignation at the insults heaped upon the injured Queen and her daughter. By all the laws of nature, of morals, and of politics, it would seem, Henry was doomed to the fate of the monarch in the Book of Daniel the Prophet,[864] who did according to his will and exalted and magnified himself above every god; who divided the land for gain, and had power over the treasures of gold and silver; who was troubled by tidings from the east and from the north; who went forth with (p. 307) great fury to destroy and utterly make away many, and yet came to his end, and none helped him.