[Footnote 852: Ibid., vi., 918.]

[Footnote 853: L. and P., vi., 508; vii., 121.]

[Footnote 854: Ibid., v., 1324.]

[Footnote 855: Ibid., v., 416.]

[Footnote 856: See Transactions of the Royal Hist. Soc., N.S., xviii.; L. and P., vi., 1419, 1445, 1464, 1467, 1468.]

[Footnote 857: L. and P., v., 609, 807; vi., 815, 821.]

[Footnote 858: Ibid., vi., 446, 541; vii., 114.]

[Footnote 859: Ibid., vi., 1164.]

[Footnote 860: L. and P., vii., 1368.]

[Footnote 861: Even Norfolk, and Suffolk and his wife wanted to dissuade Henry in 1531 from persisting in the divorce (ibid., v., 287).]

[Footnote 862: Ibid., v., 696.]

[Footnote 863: Ibid., vii., 14.]

[Footnote 864: Daniel xi., 36-45.]

All these circumstances, real and alleged, would be quite convincing as reasons for Henry's failure; but they are singularly inconclusive as explanations of his success, of the facts that his people did not rise and depose him, that no Spanish Armada disgorged its host on English shores, and that, for all the papal thunderbolts, Henry died quietly in his bed fourteen years later, and was buried with a pomp and respect to which Popes themselves were little accustomed. He may have stood alone in his confidence of success, and in his penetration through these appearances into the real truth of the situation behind. That, from a purely political or non-moral point of view, is his chief title to greatness. He knew from the beginning what he could do; he had counted the cost and calculated the risks; and, writes Russell in August, 1533, "I never saw the King merrier than he is now".[865] As early as March, 1531, he told Chapuys that if the Pope issued 10,000 excommunications he would not care a straw for them.[866] When the papal nuncio first hinted at excommunication and a papal appeal to the secular arm, Henry declared that he cared nothing for either.[867] He would open the eyes of princes, he said, and show them how small was really the power of the Pope;[868] and "when the Pope had done what he liked on his side, Henry would do what he liked here".[869] That threat, at least, he fulfilled with a vengeance. He did not fear the Spaniards; they might come, he said (as they did in 1588), but (p. 308) perhaps they might not return.[870] England, he told his subjects, was not conquerable, so long as she remained united;[871] and the patriotic outburst with which Shakespeare closes "King John" is but an echo and an expansion of the words of Henry VIII.

This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself.... Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.

[Footnote 865: L. and P., vi., 948.]

[Footnote 866: Ibid., v., 148.]

[Footnote 867: Ibid., v., 738.]

[Footnote 868: Ibid., v., 1292.]

[Footnote 869: Ibid., v., 287.]

[Footnote 870: L. and P., vi., 1479.]

[Footnote 871: Ibid., vi., 324.]

The great fear of Englishmen was lest Charles should ruin them by prohibiting the trade with Flanders. "Their only comfort," wrote Chapuys, "is that the King persuades the people that it is not in your Majesty's power to do so."[872] Henry had put the matter to a practical test, in the autumn of 1533, by closing the Staple at Calais.[873] It is possible that the dispute between him and the merchants, alleged as the cause for this step, was real; but the King could have provided his subjects with no more forcible object-lesson. Distress was felt at once in Flanders; complaints grew so clamorous that the Regent sent an embassy post-haste to Henry to remonstrate, and to represent the closing of the Staple as an infraction of commercial treaties. Henry coldly replied that he had broken no treaties at all; it was merely a private dispute between his merchants and himself, in which foreign powers had no ground for intervention. The envoys had to return, convinced against their will. The Staple at Calais was soon reopened, but the English King was able to (p. 309) demonstrate to his people that the Flemings "could not do without England's trade, considering the outcry they made when the Staple of Calais was closed for only three months".

[Footnote 872: Ibid., vi., 1460.]

[Footnote 873: Ibid., vi., 1510, 1523, 1571.]

Henry, indeed, might almost be credited with second-sight into the Emperor's mind. On 31st May, 1533, Charles's council discussed the situation.[874] After considering Henry's enormities, the councillors proceeded to deliberate on the possible remedies. There were three: justice, force and a combination of both. The objections to relying on methods of justice, that is, on the papal sentence, were, firstly, that Henry would not obey, and secondly, that the Pope was not to be trusted. The objections to the employment of force were, that war would imperil the whole of Europe, and especially the Emperor's dominions, and that Henry had neither used violence towards Catherine nor given Charles any excuse for breaking the Treaty of Cambrai. Eventually, it was decided to leave the matter to Clement. He was to be urged to give sentence against Henry, but on no account to lay England under an interdict, as that "would disturb her intercourse with Spain and Flanders. If, therefore, an interdict be resorted to, it should be limited to one diocese, or to the place where Henry dwells."[875] Such an interdict might put a premium on assassination, but otherwise neither Henry nor his people were likely to care much about it. The Pope should, however, be exhorted to depose the English King; that might pave the way for Mary's accession and for the predominance in England of the Emperor's influence; but the execution of the sentence must not be entrusted to Charles.[876] It would (p. 310) be excellent if James V. or the Irish would undertake to beard the lion in his den, but the Emperor did not see his way clear to accepting the risk himself.

[Footnote 874: L. and P., vi., 568.]

[Footnote 875: Ibid., vi., 570.]

[Footnote 876: In January, 1534, Charles's ambassador at Rome repudiated the Pope's statement that the Emperor had ever offered to assist in the execution of the Pope's sentence (L. and P., vii., 96).]

Charles was, indeed, afraid, not merely of Henry, but of Francis, who was meditating fresh Italian schemes; and various expedients were suggested to divert his attention in other directions. He might be assisted in an attack upon Calais. "Calais," was Charles's cautious comment, "is better as it is, for the security of Flanders."[877] The Pope hinted that the grant of Milan would win over Francis. It probably would; but Charles would have abandoned half a dozen aunts rather than see Milan in French possession. His real concern in the matter was not the injustice to Catherine, but the destruction of the prospect of Mary's succession. That was a tangible political interest, and Charles was much less anxious to have Henry censured than to have Mary's legitimate claim to the throne established.[878] He was a great politician, absolutely impervious to personal wrong when its remedy conflicted with political interests. "Though the Emperor," he said, "is bound to the Queen, this is a private matter, and public considerations must be taken into account." And public considerations, as he admitted a year later, "compelled him to conciliate (p. 311) Henry".[879] So he refused Chapuys' request to be recalled lest his presence in England should lead people to believe that Charles had condoned Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn,[880] and dissuaded Catherine from leaving England.[881] The least hint to Francis of any hostile intent towards Henry would, thought Charles, be at once revealed to the English King, and the two would join in making war on himself. War he was determined to avoid, for, apart from the ruin of Flanders, which it would involve, Henry and Francis had long been intriguing with the Lutherans in Germany. A breach might easily precipitate civil strife in the Empire; and, indeed, in June, 1534, Wuertemberg was wrested from the Habsburgs by Philip of Hesse with the connivance of France. Francis, too, was always believed to have a working agreement with the Turk; Barbarossa was giving no little cause for alarm in the Mediterranean; while Henry on his part had established close relations with Luebeck and Hamburg, and was fomenting dissensions in Denmark, the crown of which he was offered but cautiously (p. 312) declined.[882]

[Footnote 877: Ibid., vi., 774. The sense of this passage is spoilt in L. and P. by the comma being placed after "better" instead of after "is".]

[Footnote 878: Control over England was the great objective of Habsburg policy. In 1513 Margaret of Savoy was pressing Henry to have the succession settled on his sister Mary, then betrothed to Charles himself (ibid., i., 4833).]

[Footnote 879: L. and P., vii., 229. All that Charles thought practicable was to "embarrass Henry in his own kingdom, and to execute what the Emperor wrote to the Irish chiefs" (cf. vii., 342, 353).]

[Footnote 880: Ibid., vi., 351. Charles's conduct is a striking vindication of Wolsey's foresight in 1528, when he told Campeggio that the Emperor would not wage war over the divorce of Catherine, and said there would be a thousand ways of keeping on good terms with him (Ehses, Roemische Dokumente, p. 69; L. and P., iv., 4881). Dr. Gairdner thinks Wolsey was insincere in this remark (English Hist. Rev., xii., 242), but he seems to have gauged Charles V.'s character and embarrassments accurately.]

[Footnote 881: L. and P., vi., 863. Her departure would have prejudiced Mary's claim to the throne, but Charles's advice was particularly callous in view of the reports which Chapuys was sending Charles of her treatment.]

[Footnote 882: L. and P., vii., 737, 871, 957-58, and vol. viii., passim; cf. C.F. Wurm, Die politischen Beziehungen Heinrichs VIII. zu Mercus Meyer und Juergen Wullenwever, Hamburg, 1852.]

This incurable jealousy between Francis and Charles made the French King loth to weaken his friendship with Henry. The English King was careful to impress upon the French ambassador that he could, in the last resort, make his peace with Charles by taking back Catherine and by restoring Mary to her place in the line of succession.[883] Francis had too poignant a recollection of the results of the union between Henry and Charles from 1521 to 1525 ever to risk its renewal. The age of the crusades and chivalry was gone; commercial and national rivalries were as potent in the sixteenth century as they are to-day. Then, as in subsequent times, mutual suspicions made impossible an effective concert of Europe against the Turk. The fall of Rhodes and the death of one of Charles's brothers-in-law at Mohacz and the expulsion of another from the throne of Denmark had never been avenged, and, in 1534, the Emperor was compelled to evacuate Coron.[884] If Europe could not combine against the common enemy of the Faith, was it likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons (p. 313) from Charles on behalf of the Spanish Queen. "Henry," wrote Chapuys, "has always fortified himself by the consent of Parliament."[885] It would be well, he thought, if Charles would follow suit, and induce the Cortes of Aragon and Castile, "or at least the grandees," to offer their persons and goods in Catherine's cause. Such an offer, if published in England, "will be of inestimable service". But here comes the proof of Charles's pitiful impotence; in order to obtain this public offer, the Emperor was "to give them privately an exemption from such offer and promise of persons and goods". It was to be one more pretence like the others, and unfortunately for the Pope and for the Emperor, Henry had an inconvenient habit of piercing disguises.

[Footnote 883: L. and P., vi., 1572.]

[Footnote 884: Ibid., vii., 670.]

[Footnote 885: L. and P., vi., 720.]

The strength of Henry's position at home was due to a similar lack of unity among his domestic enemies. If the English people had wished to depose him, they could have effected their object without much difficulty. In estimating the chances of a possible invasion, it was pointed out how entirely dependent Henry was upon his people: he had only one castle in London, and only a hundred yeomen of the guard to defend him.[886] He would, in fact, have been powerless against a united people or even against a partial revolt, if well organised and really popular. There was chronic discontent throughout the Tudor period, but it was sectional. The remnants of the old nobility always hated Tudor methods of government, and the poorer commons were sullen at their ill-treatment by the lords of the land; but there was no concerted basis of action between the two. The dominant class (p. 314) was commercial, and it had no grievance against Henry, while it feared alike the lords and the lower orders. In the spoliation of the Church temporal lords and commercial men, both of whom could profit thereby, were agreed; and nowhere was there much sympathy with the Church as an institution apart from its doctrine. Chapuys himself admits that the act, depriving the clergy of their profits from leases, was passed "to please the people";[887] and another conservative declared that, if the Church were deprived of all its temporal goods, many would be glad and few would bemoan.[888] Sympathy with Catherine and hatred of Anne were general, but people thought, like Charles, that these were private griefs, and that public considerations must be taken into account. Englishmen are at all times reluctant to turn out one Government until they see at least the possibility of another to take its place, and the only alternative to Henry VIII. was anarchy. The opposition could not agree on a policy, and they could not agree on a leader. There were various grandchildren of Edward IV. and of Clarence, who might put forward distant claims to the throne; and there were other candidates in whose multitude lay Henry's safety. It was quite certain that the pushing of any one of these claimants would throw the rest on Henry's side. James V., whom at one time Chapuys favoured, knew that a Scots invasion would unite the whole of England against him; and Charles was probably wise in rebuking his ambassador's zeal, and in thinking that any attempt on his own part would be more disastrous to himself than to Henry.[889] For all (p. 315) this, the English King was, as Chapuys remarks, keeping a very watchful eye on the countenance of his people,[890] seeing how far he could go and where he must stop, and neglecting no precaution for the peace and security of himself and his kingdom. Acts were passed to strengthen the navy, improvements in arms and armament were being continually tested, and the fortifications at Calais, on the Scots Borders and elsewhere were strengthened. Wales was reduced to law and order, and, through the intermediation of Francis, a satisfactory peace was made with Scotland.[891]

[Footnote 886: Ibid., vi., App. 7.]

[Footnote 887: L. and P., vii., 114.]

[Footnote 888: Ibid., vii., 24.]

[Footnote 889: Chapuys is quite plaintive when he hints at the advantages which might follow if only "your Majesty were ever so little angry" with Henry VIII. (L. and P., vii., 114). A few days later he "apologises for his previous letters advocating severity" (ibid., vii., 171).]

[Footnote 890: Ibid., vi., 351.]

[Footnote 891: Ibid., vi., 729, 1161. One of Henry's baits to James V. was a suggestion that he would get Parliament to entail the succession on James if his issue by Anne Boleyn failed (ibid., vii., 114).]

* * * * *

Convinced of his security from attack at home and abroad, Henry proceeded to accomplish what remained for the subjugation of the Church in England and the final breach with Rome. Clement had no sooner excommunicated Henry than he began to repent; he was much more alarmed than the English King at the probable effects of his sentence. Henry at once recalled his ambassadors from Rome, and drew up an appeal to a General Council.[892] The Pope feared he would lose England for ever. Even the Imperialists proved but Job's comforters, and told him that, after all, it was only "an unprofitable (p. 316) island,"[893] the loss of which was not to be compared with the renewed devotion of Spain and the Emperor's other dominions; possibly they assured him that there would never again be a sack of Rome. Clement delayed for a time the publication of the sentence against Henry, and in November he went to his interview with Francis I. at Marseilles.[894] While he was there, Bonner intimated to him Henry's appeal to a General Council. Clement angrily rejected the appeal as frivolous, and Francis regarded this defiance of the Pope as an affront to himself in the person of his guest, and as the ruin of his attempts to reconcile the two parties. "Ye have clearly marred all," he said to Gardiner; "as fast as I study to win the Pope, you study to lose him,"[895] and he declared that, had he known of the intimation beforehand, it should never have been made. Henry, however, had no desire that the Pope should be won.[896] He was, he told the French ambassador, determined to separate from Rome; "he will not, in consequence of this, be less Christian, but more so, for in everything and in every place he desires to cause Jesus Christ to be recognised, who alone is the patron of Christians; and he will cause the Word to be preached, and not the canons and decrees of the Pope."[897]

[Footnote 892: Ibid., vi., 721, 979, 980, 998.]

[Footnote 893: L. and P., vi., 997.]

[Footnote 894: He is said, while there, to have privately admitted to Francis that the dispensation of Julius II. was invalid (ibid., vii., 1348, App. 8).]

[Footnote 895: Ibid., vi., 1425, 1426, 1427.]

[Footnote 896: On his side he was angry with Francis for telling the Pope that Henry would side against the Lutherans; he was afraid it might spoil his practices with them (ibid., vi., 614, 707); the Luebeckers had already suggested to Henry VIII. that he should seize the disputed throne of Denmark (ibid., vi., 428; cf. the present writer in Cambridge Modern History, ii., 229).]

[Footnote 897: L. and P., vi., 1435, 1479.]

Parliament was to meet to effect this purpose in January, 1534, (p. 317) and during the previous autumn there are the first indications, traceable to Cromwell's hand, of an attempt to pack it. He drew up a memorandum of such seats as were vacant from death or from other causes; most of the new members appear to have been freely elected, but four vacancies were filled by "the King's pleasure."[898] More extensive and less doubtful was the royal interference in the election of abbots. Many abbeys fell vacant in 1533, and in every case commissioners were sent down to secure the election of the King's nominee; in many others, abbots were induced to resign, and fresh (p. 318) ones put in their place.[899] It is not clear that the main object was to pack the clerical representation in the House of Lords, because only a few of these abbots had seats there, the abbots gave much less trouble than the bishops in Parliament, and Convocation, where they largely outnumbered the bishops, was much more amenable than the House of Peers, where the bishops' votes preponderated. It is more probable that the end in view was already the dissolution of the monasteries by means of surrender. Cromwell, who was now said to "rule everything,"[900] was boasting that he would make his King the richest monarch in Christendom, and his methods may be guessed from his praise of the Sultan as a model to other princes for the authority he wielded over his subjects.[901] Henry, however, was fortunate in 1533, even in the matter of episcopal representation. He had, since the fall of Wolsey, had occasion to fill up the Sees of York, Winchester, London, Durham and Canterbury; and in this year five more became vacant: Bangor, Ely, Coventry and Lichfield by death, and Salisbury and Worcester through the deprivation by Act of Parliament of their foreign and absentee pastors, Campeggio and Ghinucci.[902] Of the other bishops, Clerk of Bath and Wells, and Longland of Lincoln, had been active in the divorce, which, indeed, Longland, the King's confessor, was said to have originally suggested about the year 1523; the Bishops of Norwich and of Chichester were both over ninety years of age.[903] (p. 319) Llandaff was Catherine's confessor, a Spaniard who could not speak a word of English. On the whole bench there was no one but Fisher of Rochester who had the will or the courage to make any effective stand on behalf of the Church's liberty.

[Footnote 898: L. and P., vi., 1382; vii., 56. A whole essay might be written on this latter brief document; it is not, what it purports to be, a list of knights of the shires who had died since the beginning of Parliament, for the names are those of living men. Against most of the constituencies two or three names are placed; Dr. Gairdner suggests that these are the possible candidates suggested by Cromwell and to be nominated by the King. But why is "the King's pleasure" placed opposite only three vacancies, if the whole twenty-eight were to be filled on his nomination? The names are probably those of influential magnates in the neighbourhood who would naturally have the chief voice in the election; and thus they would correspond with the vacancies, e.g., Hastings, opposite which is placed "Not for the Warden of the Cinque Ports," and Southwark, for which there is a similar note for the Duke of Suffolk. It is obvious that the King could not fill up all the vacancies by nomination; for opposite Worcester town, where both members, Dee and Brenning, had died, is noted, "the King to name one". It is curious to find "the King's pleasure" after Winchester city, as that was one of the constituencies for which Gardiner as bishop afterwards said he was wont to nominate burgesses (Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 54). It must also be remembered that these were bye-elections and possibly a novelty. In 1536 the rebels demand that "if a knight or burgess died during Parliament his room should continue void to the end of the same" (L. and P., xi., 1182 [17]). In the seventeenth century supplementary members were chosen for the Long Parliament to fill possible vacancies; there were no bye-elections.]

[Footnote 899: L. and P., vi., 716, 816, 847, 1007, 1056, 1057, 1109 (where by the Bishopric of "Chester" is meant Coventry and Lichfield, and not Chichester, as suggested by the editor; the See of Coventry and Lichfield was often called Chester before the creation of the latter see), 1239, 1304, 1376, 1408, 1513; vii., 108, 257, 297, 344, 376.]

[Footnote 900: Ibid., vi., 1445.]

[Footnote 901: Ibid., vii., 1554.]

[Footnote 902: Ibid., vii., 48, 54, 634.]

[Footnote 903: L. and P., vii., 171.]

Before Parliament met Francis sent Du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, to London to make one last effort to keep the peace between England and Rome. Du Bellay could get no concessions of any value from Henry. All the King would promise was that, if Clement would before Easter declare his marriage with Catherine null and that with Anne valid, he would not complete the extirpation of the papal authority.[904] Little enough of that remained, and Henry himself had probably no expectation and no wish that his terms should be accepted. Long before Du Bellay had reached Rome, Parliament was discussing measures designed to effect the final severance. Opposition was of the feeblest character alike in Convocation and in both Houses of Parliament. Chapuys himself gloomily prophesied that there would be no difficulty in getting the principal measures, abolishing the Pope's authority and arranging for the election of bishops, through the House of Lords.[905] The second Act of Appeals embodied the concessions made by Convocation in 1532 and rejected that year in the House of Lords. Convocation was neither to meet nor to legislate without the King's assent; Henry might appoint a royal commission to reform the canon law;[906] appeals were to be permitted to Chancery from the Archbishop's Court;[907] (p. 320) abbeys and other religious houses, which had been exempt from episcopal authority, were placed immediately under the jurisdiction of Chancery. A fresh Act of Annates defined more precisely the new method of electing bishops, and provided that, if the Chapter did not elect the royal nominee within twelve days, the King might appoint him by letters patent. A third act forbade the payment of Peter-pence and other impositions to the Court of Rome, and handed over the business of dispensations and licences to the Archbishop of Canterbury; at the same time it declared that neither King nor realm meant to vary from the articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom.

[Footnote 904: Ibid., vii., App. 13.]

[Footnote 905: Ibid., vii., 171; cf. XII., ii., 952.]

[Footnote 906: This commission was not appointed till 1551: see the present writer's Cranmer, pp. 280-4.]

[Footnote 907: 25 Henry VIII., c. 19. The first suggestion appears to have been "to give the Archbishop of Canterbury the seal of Chancery, and pass bulls, dispensations and other provisions under it" (L. and P., vii., 14; cf. vii., 57); his title was changed from Apostolicae Sedis legatus to Metropolitanus (ibid., vii., 1555).]

Another act provided that charges of heresy must be supported by two lay witnesses, and that indictments for that offence could only be made by lay authorities. This, like the rest of Henry's anti-ecclesiastical legislation, was based on popular clamour. On the 5th of March the whole House of Commons, with the Speaker at their head, had waited on the King at York Place and expatiated for three hours on the oppressiveness of clerical jurisdiction. At length it was agreed that eight temporal peers, eight representatives of the Lower House and sixteen bishops "should discuss the matter and the King be umpire"[908]—a repetition of the plan of 1529 and a very exact reflection of Henry's methods and of the Church-and-State situation during the Reformation Parliament.

[Footnote 908: L. and P., vii., 304, 393, 399; the provision about two witnesses was in 1547 extended to treason.]

The final act of the session, which ended on 30th March, was a (p. 321) constitutional innovation of the utmost importance. From the earliest ages the succession to the crown had in theory been determined, first by election, and then by hereditary right. In practice it had often been decided by the barbarous arbitrament of war. For right is vague, it may be disputed, and there was endless variety of opinion as to the proper claimant to the throne if Henry should die. So vague right was to be replaced by definite law, which could not be disputed, but which, unlike right, could easily be changed. The succession was no longer to be regulated by an unalterable principle, but by the popular (or royal) will expressed in Acts of Parliament.[909] The first of a long series of Acts of Succession was now passed to vest the succession to the crown in the heirs of the King by Anne Boleyn; clauses were added declaring that persons who impugned that marriage by writing, printing, or other deed were guilty of treason, and those who impugned it by words, of misprision. The Government proposal that both classes of offenders should be held guilty of treason was modified by the House of Commons.[910]

[Footnote 909: The succession to the crown was one of the last matters affected by the process of substituting written law for unwritten right which began with the laws of Ethelbert of Kent. There had of course been ex post facto acts recognising that the crown was vested in the successful competitor.]

[Footnote 910: L. and P., vii., 51.]

On 23rd March, a week before the prorogation of Parliament, and seven years after the divorce case had first begun, Clement gave sentence at Rome pronouncing valid the marriage between Catherine and Henry.[911] The decision produced not a ripple on the surface of English affairs; Henry, writes Chapuys, took no account of it and was making as (p. 322) good cheer as ever.[912] There was no reason why he should not. While the imperialist mob at Rome after its kind paraded the streets in crowds, shouting "Imperio et Espagne," and firing feux-de-joie over the news, the imperialist agent was writing to Charles that the judgment would not be of much profit, except for the Emperor's honour and the Queen's justification, and was congratulating his master that he was not bound to execute the sentence.[913] Flemings were tearing down the papal censures from the doors of their churches,[914] and Charles was as convinced as ever of the necessity of Henry's friendship. He proposed to the Pope that some one should be sent from Rome to join Chapuys in "trying to move the King from his error"; and Clement could only reply that "he thought the embassy would have no effect on the King, but that nothing would be lost by it, and it would be a good compliment!"[915] Henry, however was less likely to be influenced by compliments, good or bad, than by the circumstance that neither Pope nor Emperor was in a position to employ any ruder persuasive. There was none so poor as to reverence a Pope, and, when Clement died six months later, the Roman populace broke into the chamber where he lay and stabbed his corpse; they were with difficulty prevented from dragging it in degradation through the streets.[916] Such was the respect paid to the Supreme Pontiff in the Holy City, and deference to his sentence was not to be expected in more distant parts.

[Footnote 911: Ibid., vii., 362.]

[Footnote 912: L. and P., vii., 469.]

[Footnote 913: Ibid., vii., 368.]

[Footnote 914: Ibid., vii., 184.]

[Footnote 915: Ibid., vii., 804.]

[Footnote 916: Ibid., vii., 1262.]

Henry's political education was now complete; the events of the last five years had proved to him the truth of the assertion, with (p. 323) which he had started, that the Pope might do what he liked at Rome, but that he also could do what he liked in England, so long as he avoided the active hostility of the majority of his lay subjects. The Church had, by its actions, shown him that it was powerless; the Pope had proved the impotence of his spiritual weapons; and the Emperor had admitted that he was both unable and unwilling to interfere. Henry had realised the extent of his power, and the opening of his eyes had an evil effect upon his character. Nothing makes men or Governments so careless or so arbitrary as the knowledge that there will be no effective opposition to their desires. Henry, at least, never grew careless; his watchful eye was always wide open. His ear was always strained to catch the faintest rumbling of a coming storm, and his subtle intellect was ever on the alert to take advantage of every turn in the diplomatic game. He was always efficient, and he took good care that his ministers should be so as well. But he grew very arbitrary; the knowledge that he could do so much became with him an irresistible reason for doing it. Despotic power is twice cursed; it debases the ruler and degrades the subject; and Henry's progress to despotism may be connected with the rise of Thomas Cromwell, who looked to the Great Turk as a model for Christian princes.[917] Cromwell became secretary in May, 1534; in that month Henry's security was enhanced by the (p. 324) definitive peace with Scotland,[918] and he set to work to enforce his authority with the weapons which Parliament had placed in his hands. Elizabeth Barton, and her accomplices, two Friars Observants, two monks, and one secular priest, all attainted of treason by Act of Parliament, were sent to the block.[919] Commissioners were sent round, as Parliament had ordained, to enforce the oath of succession throughout the land.[920] A general refusal would have stopped Henry's career, but the general consent left Henry free to deal as he liked with the exceptions. Fisher and More were sent to the Tower. They were willing to swear to the succession, regarding that as a matter within the competence of Parliament, but they refused to take the oath required by the commissioners;[921] it contained, they alleged, a repudiation of the Pope not justified by the terms of the statute. Two cartloads of friars followed them to the Tower in June, and the Order of Observants, in whose church at Greenwich Henry had been baptised and married, and of whom in his earlier years he had written in terms of warm admiration, was suppressed altogether.[922]

[Footnote 917: "The Lord Cromwell," says Bishop Gardiner, "had once put in the King our late sovereign lord's head, to take upon him to have his will and pleasure regarded for a law; for that, he said, was to be a very King," and he quoted the quod principi placuit of Roman civil law. Gardiner replied to the King that "to make the laws his will was more sure and quiet" and "agreeable with the nature of your people". Henry preferred Gardiner's advice (Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 46).]

[Footnote 918: L. and P., vii., 483, 647.]

[Footnote 919: Ibid., vii., 522.]

[Footnote 920: Ibid., vii., 665.]

[Footnote 921: Ibid., vii., 499.]

[Footnote 922: Ibid., vii., 841, 856. The order had been particularly active in opposition to the divorce (ibid., iv., 6156; v., 266.)]

In November Parliament[923] reinforced the Act of Succession by laying down the precise terms of the oath, and providing that a certificate of refusal signed by two commissioners was as effective as the indictment of twelve jurors. Other acts empowered the King to repeal by royal proclamation certain statutes regulating imports and exports. The first-fruits and tenths, of which the Pope had been already (p. 325) deprived, were now conferred on the King as a fitting ecclesiastical endowment for the Supreme Head of the Church. That title, granted him four years before by both Convocations, was confirmed by Act of Parliament; its object was to enable the King as Supreme Head to effect the "increase of virtue in Christ's Religion within this Realm of England, and to repress and extirp all Errors, Heresies and other Enormities, and Abuses heretofore used in the same". The Defender of the Faith was to be armed with more than a delegate power; he was to be supreme in himself, the champion not of the Faith of any one else, but of his own; and the qualifying clause, "as far as the law of Christ allows," was omitted. His orthodoxy must be above suspicion, or at least beyond the reach of open cavil in England. So new treasons were enacted, and any one who called the King a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper, was rendered liable to the heaviest penalty which the law could inflict. As an earnest of the royal and parliamentary desire for an increase of virtue in religion, an act was concurrently passed providing for the creation of a number of suffragan bishops.[924]

[Footnote 923: Ibid., vii., 1377.]

[Footnote 924: These were not actually created till 1540; the way in which Henry VIII. sought statutory authority for every conceivable thing is very extraordinary. There seems no reason why he could not have created these bishoprics without parliamentary authority.]

Henry was now Pope in England with powers no Pope had possessed.[925] The Reformation is variously regarded as the liberation of the (p. 326) English Church from the Roman yoke it had long impatiently borne, as its subjection to an Erastian yoke which it was henceforth, with more or less patience, long to bear, or as a comparatively unimportant assertion of a supremacy which Kings of England had always enjoyed. The Church is the same Church, we are told, before and after the change; if anything, it was Protestant before the Reformation, and Catholic after. It is, of course, the same Church. A man may be described as the same man before and after death, and the business of a coroner's jury is to establish the identity; but it does not ignore the vital difference. Even Saul and Paul were the same man. And the identity of the Church before and after the legislation of Henry VIII. covers a considerable number of not unimportant changes. It does not, however, seem strictly accurate to say that Henry either liberated or enslaved the Church. Rather, he substituted one form of despotism for another, a sole for a dual control; the change, complained a reformer, was merely a translatio imperii.[926] The democratic movement within the Church had died away, like the democratic movements in national and municipal politics, before the end of the fifteenth century. It was never merry with the Church,[927] complained a Catholic in 1533, since the time when bishops were wont to be chosen by the Holy Ghost and by their Chapters.

[Footnote 925: With limitations, of course. Henry's was only a potestas jurisdictionis not a potestas ordinis (see Makower, Const. Hist. of the Church of England, and the present writer's Cranmer, pp. 83, 84, 95, 232, 233). Cranmer acknowledged in the King also a potestatem ordinis, just as Cromwell would have made him the sole legislator in temporal affairs; Henry's unrivalled capacity for judging what he could and could not do saved him from adopting either suggestion.]

[Footnote 926: L. and P., XIV., ii., p. 141.]

[Footnote 927: Ibid., vi., 797 [2]; a Venetian declared that Huguenotism was "due to the abolition of the election of the clergy" (Armstrong, Wars of Religion, p. 11).]

Since then the Church had been governed by a partnership between King and Pope, without much regard for the votes of the shareholders. It was not Henry who first deprived them of influence; neither did (p. 327) he restore it. What he did was to eject his foreign partner, appropriate his share of the profits, and put his part of the business into the hands of a manager. First-fruits and tenths were described as an intolerable burden; but they were not abolished; they were merely transferred from the Pope to the King. Bishops became royal nominees, pure and simple, instead of the joint nominees of King and Pope. The supreme appellate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical causes was taken away from Rome, but it was not granted the English Church to which in truth it had never belonged.[928] Chancery, and not the Archbishop's Court, was made the final resort for ecclesiastical appeals. The authority, divided erstwhile between two, was concentrated in the hands of one; and that one was thus placed in a far different position from that which either had held before.

[Footnote 928: For one year, indeed, Cranmer remained legatus natus, and by a strange anomaly exercised a jurisdiction the source of which had been cut off. Stokesley objected to Cranmer's use of that style in order to escape a visitation of his see, and Gardiner thought it an infringement of the royal prerogative. It was abolished in the following year.]

The change was analogous to that in Republican Rome from two consuls to one dictator. In both cases the dictatorship was due to exceptional circumstances. There had long been a demand for reform in the Church in England as well as elsewhere, but the Church was powerless to reform itself. The dual control was in effect, as dual controls often are, a practical anarchy. The condition of the Church before the Reformation may be compared with that of France before the Revolution. In purely spiritual matters the Pope was supreme: the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century had failed. The Pope had (p. 328) gathered all powers to himself, in much the same way as the French monarch in the eighteenth century had done; and the result was the same, a formal despotism and a real anarchy. Pope and Monarch were crushed by the weight of their own authority; they could not reform, even when they wanted to. From 1500 to 1530 almost every scheme, peaceful or bellicose, started in Europe was based on the plea that its ultimate aim was the reform of the Church; and so it would have continued, vox et praeterea nihil, had not the Church been galvanised into action by the loss of half its inheritance.

In England the change from a dual to a sole control at once made that control effective, and reform became possible. But it was a reform imposed on the Church from without and by means of the exceptional powers bestowed on the Supreme Head. Hence the burden of modern clerical criticism of the Reformation. Objection is raised not so much to the things that were done, as to the means by which they were brought to pass, to the fact that the Church was forcibly reformed by the State, and not freed from the trammels of Rome, and then left to work out its own salvation. But such a solution occurred to few at that time; the best and the worst of Henry's opponents opposed him on the ground that he was divorcing the Church in England from the Church universal. Their objection was to what was done more than to the way in which it was done; and Sir Thomas More would have fought the Reformation quite as strenuously had it been effected by the Convocations of Canterbury and York. On the other side there was equally little thought of a Reformation by clerical hands. Henry (p. 329) and Cromwell carried on and developed the tradition of the Emperor Frederick II. and Peter de Vinea,[929] of Philippe le Bel and Pierre Dubois, of Lewis the Bavarian and Marsiglio of Padua[930] who maintained the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual power and asserted that the clergy wielded no jurisdiction and only bore the keys of heaven in the capacity of turnkeys.[931] It was a question of the national State against the universal Church. The idea of a National Church was a later development, the result and not the cause of the Reformation.

[Footnote 929: The comparison has been drawn by Huillard-Breholles in his Vie et Correspondence de Pierre de la Vigne, Paris, 1865.]

[Footnote 930: Marsiglio's Defensor Pacis was a favourite book with Cromwell who lent a printer L20 to bring out an English edition of it in 1535 (see the present writer in D.N.B., s.v. Marshall, William). Marshall distributed twenty-four copies among the monks of Charterhouse to show them how the Christian commonwealth had been "unjustly molested, vexed and troubled by the spiritual and ecclesiastical tyrant". See also Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, pp. 14, 60, 61.]

[Footnote 931: Defensor Pacis, ii., 6.]

Henry's dictatorship was also temporary in character. His supremacy over the Church was royal, and not parliamentary. It was he, and not Parliament, who had been invested with a semi-ecclesiastical nature. In one capacity he was head of the State, in another, head of the Church. Parliament and Convocation were co-ordinate one with another, and subordinate both to the King. The Tudors, and especially Elizabeth, vehemently denied to their Parliaments any share in their ecclesiastical powers. Their supremacy over the Church was their own, and, as a really effective control, it died with them. As the authority of the Crown declined, its secular powers were seized by Parliament; (p. 330) its ecclesiastical powers fell into abeyance between Parliament and Convocation. Neither has been able to vindicate an exclusive claim to the inheritance; and the result of this dual claim to control has been a state of helplessness, similar in some respects to that from which the Church was rescued by the violent methods of Henry VIII.[932]

[Footnote 932: A much neglected but very important constitutional question is whether the King qua Supreme Head of the Church was limited by the same statute and common law restrictions as he was qua temporal sovereign. Gardiner raised the question in a most interesting letter to Protector Somerset in 1547 (Foxe, vi., 42). It had been provided, as Lord Chancellor Audley told Gardiner, that no spiritual law and no exercise of the royal supremacy should abate the common law or Acts of Parliament; but within the ecclesiastical sphere there were no limits on the King's authority. The Popes had not been fettered, habent omnia jura in suo scrinio; and their jurisdiction in England had been transferred whole and entire to the King. Henry was in fact an absolute monarch in the Church, a constitutional monarch in the State; he could reform the Church by injunction when he could not reform the State by proclamation. There was naturally a tendency to confuse the two capacities not merely in the King's mind but in his opponents'; and some of the objections to the Stuarts' dispensing practice, which was exercised chiefly in the ecclesiastical sphere, seem due to this confusion. Parliament in fact, as soon as the Tudors were gone, began to apply common law and statute law limitations to the Crown's ecclesiastical prerogative.]



CHAPTER XIII. (p. 331)

THE CRISIS.

Henry's title as Supreme Head of the Church was incorporated in the royal style by letters patent of 15th January, 1535,[933] and that year was mainly employed in compelling its recognition by all sorts and conditions of men. In April, Houghton, the Prior of the Charterhouse, a monk of Sion, and the Vicar of Isleworth, were the first victims offered to the Supreme Head. But the machinery supplied by Parliament was barely sufficient to bring the penalties of the statute to bear on the two most illustrious of Henry's opponents, Fisher and More. Both had been attainted of misprision of treason by Acts of Parliament in the previous autumn; but those penalties extended no further than to lifelong imprisonment and forfeiture of goods. Their lives could only be exacted by proving that they had maliciously attempted to deprive Henry of his title of Supreme Head;[934] their opportunities in the Tower for compassing that end were limited; and it is possible (p. 332) that they would not have been further molested, but for the thoughtlessness of Clement's successor, Paul III. Impotent to effect anything against the King, the Pope did his best to sting Henry to fury by creating Fisher a cardinal on 20th May. He afterwards explained that he meant no harm, but the harm was done, and it involved Fisher's friend and ally, Sir Thomas More. Henry declared that he would send the new cardinal's head to Rome for the hat; and he immediately despatched commissioners to the Tower to inform Fisher and More that, unless they acknowledged the royal supremacy, they would be put to death as traitors.[935] Fisher apparently denied the King's supremacy, More refused to answer; he was, however, entrapped during a conversation with the Solicitor-General, Rich, into an admission that Englishmen could not be bound to acknowledge a supremacy over the Church in which other countries did not concur. In neither case was it clear that they came within the clutches of the law. Fisher, indeed, had really been guilty of treason. More than once he had urged Chapuys to press upon Charles the invasion of England, a fact unknown, perhaps, to the English Government.[936] The evidence it had (p. 333) collected was, however, considered sufficient by the juries which tried the prisoners; Fisher went to the scaffold on 22nd June, and More on 6th July. Condemned justly or not by the law, both sought their death in a quarrel which is as old as the hills and will last till the crack of doom. Where shall we place the limits of conscience, and where those of the national will? Is conscience a luxury which only a king may enjoy in peace? Fisher and More refused to accommodate theirs to Acts of Parliament, but neither believed conscience to be the supreme tribunal.[937] More admitted that in temporal matters his conscience was bound by the laws of England; in spiritual matters the conscience of all was bound by the will of Christendom; and on that ground both Fisher and he rejected the plea of conscience when urged by heretics condemned to the flames. The dispute, indeed, passes the wit of man to decide. If conscience must reign supreme, all government is a pis aller, and in anarchy the true millennium must be found. If conscience is deposed, man sinks to the level of the lower creation. Human society can only be based on compromise, and compromise itself is a matter of conscience. Fisher and More protested by their death against a principle which they had practised in life; both they and the heretics whom they persecuted proclaimed, as Antigone had done thousands of years before,[938] that they could not obey laws (p. 334) which they could not believe God had made.

[Footnote 933: L. and P., viii., 52; Rymer, xiv., 549.]

[Footnote 934: The general idea that Fisher and More were executed for refusing to take an oath prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical officers. The Act under which they were executed was 26 Henry VIII., c. 13, and the common mistake arises from a confusion between the oath to the succession and the oath of supremacy.]

[Footnote 935: L. and P., viii., 876.]

[Footnote 936: L. and P., iv., 6199; vi., 1164, 1249. He told Chapuys that if Charles invaded England he would be doing "a work as agreeable to God as going against the Turk," and suggested that the Emperor should make use of Reginald Pole "to whom, according to many, the kingdom would belong" (Chapuys to Charles, 27th September, 1533). Again, says Chapuys, "the holy Bishop of Rochester would like you to take active measures immediately, as I wrote in my last; which advice he has sent to me again lately to repeat" (10th October, 1533). Canon Whitney, in criticising Froude (Engl. Hist. Rev., xii., 353), asserts that "nothing Chapuys says justifies the charge against Fisher!"]

[Footnote 937: This statement has been denounced as "astounding" in a Roman Catholic periodical; yet if More believed individual conscience (i.e., private judgment) to be superior to the voice of the Church, how did he differ from a Protestant? The statement in the text is merely a paraphrase of More's own, where he says that men are "not bound on pain of God's displeasure to change their conscience for any particular law made anywhere except by a general council or a general faith growing by the working of God universally through all Christian nations" (More's English Works, p. 1434; L. and P., vii., 432).]

[Footnote 938: [Greek: Ou gar ti moi Zeus en ho keruxas tade oud he xunoikos ton kato theon Dike.] Sophocles, Antigone, 450.]

It was the personal eminence of the victims rather than the merits of their case that made Europe thrill with horror at the news of their death; for thousands of others were sacrificing their lives in a similar cause in most of the countries of Christendom. For the first and last time in English history a cardinal's head had rolled from an English scaffold; and Paul III. made an effort to bring into play the artillery of his temporal powers. As supreme lord over all the princes of the earth, he arrogated to himself the right to deprive Henry VIII. of his kingdom; and he sent couriers to the various courts to seek their co-operation in executing his judgment. But the weapons of Innocent III. were rusty with age. Francis denounced the Pope's claim as a most impudent attack on monarchical dignity; and Charles was engaged in the conquest of Tunis. Thus Henry was able to take a high tone in reply to the remonstrances addressed to him, and to proceed undisturbed with the work of enforcing his royal supremacy. The autumn was occupied mainly by a visitation of the monasteries and of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others were deposed from the seat of authority they had held for so many centuries, and efforts were made to substitute studies like that of the civil law, more in harmony with the King's doctrine and with his views of royal authority.

The more boldly Henry defied the Fates, the more he was favoured by Fortune. "Besides his trust in his subjects," wrote Chapuys in (p. 335) 1534, "he has great hope in the Queen's death;"[939] and the year 1536 was but eight days old when the unhappy Catherine was released from her trials, resolutely refusing to the last to acknowledge in any way the invalidity of her marriage with Henry. She had derived some comfort from the papal sentence in her favour, but that was not calculated to soften the harshness with which she was treated. Her pious soul, too, was troubled with the thought that she had been the occasion, innocent though she was, of the heresies that had arisen in England, and of the enormities which had been practised against the Church. Her last days were cheered by a visit from Chapuys,[940] who went down to Kimbolton on New Year's Day and stayed until the 5th of January, when the Queen seemed well on the road to recovery. Three days later she passed away, and on the 29th she was buried with the state of a princess dowager in the church of the Benedictine abbey at Peterborough. Her physician told Chapuys that he suspected poison, but the symptoms are now declared, on high medical authority, to have been those of cancer of the heart.[941] The suspicion was the natural result of the circumstance that her death relieved the King of a pressing anxiety. "God be praised!" he exclaimed, "we are free from all suspicion of war;"[942] and on the following day he proclaimed his joy by appearing at a ball, clad in yellow from head to foot.[943] Every inch a King, Henry VIII. never attained to the stature of a gentleman, but even Bishop Gardiner wrote that by Queen Catherine's death (p. 336) "God had given sentence" in the divorce suit between her and the King.[944]

[Footnote 939: L. and P., vii., 83.]

[Footnote 940: Ibid., x., 28, 59, 60, 141.]

[Footnote 941: Dr. Norman Moore in Athenaeum, 1885, i., 152, 215, 281.]

[Footnote 942: L. and P., x., 51.]

[Footnote 943: Ibid. Hall only tells his readers that Anne Boleyn wore yellow for the mourning (Chronicle, p. 818).]

[Footnote 944: L. and P., x., 256.]

A week later, the Reformation Parliament met for its seventh and last session. It sat from 4th February to 14th April, and in those ten weeks succeeded in passing no fewer than sixty-two Acts. Some were local and some were private, but the residue contained not a few of public importance. The fact that the King obtained at last his Statute of Uses[945] may indicate that Henry's skill and success had so impressed Parliament, that it was more willing to acquiesce in his demands than it had been in its earlier sessions. But, if the drafts in the Record Office are to be taken as indicating the proposals of Government, and the Acts themselves are those proposals as modified in one or other House, Parliament must have been able to enforce views of its own to a certain extent; for those drafts differ materially from the Acts as finally passed.[946] Not a few of the bills were welcome, if unusual, concessions to the clergy. They were relieved from paying tenths in the year they paid their first-fruits. The payment of tithes, possibly rendered doubtful in the wreck of canon law, was enjoined by Act of Parliament. An attempt was made to deal with the poor, and another, if not to check enclosures, at least to extract some profit for the King from the process. It was made high treason to counterfeit the King's sign-manual, privy signet, or privy seal; and Henry was empowered by Parliament, as he had before been by (p. 337) Convocation, to appoint a commission to reform the canon law. But the chief acts of the session were for the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and for the erection of a Court of Augmentations in order to deal with the revenues which were thus to accrue to the King.

[Footnote 945: This Act has generally been considered a failure, but recent research does not confirm this view (see Joshua Williams, Principles of the Law of Real Property, 18th ed., 1896).]

[Footnote 946: L. and P., x., 246.]

The way for this great revolution had been carefully prepared during the previous autumn and winter. In virtue of his new and effective supremacy, Henry had ordered a general visitation of the monasteries throughout the greater part of the kingdom; and the reports of these visitors were made the basis of parliamentary action. On the face of them they represent a condition of human depravity which has rarely been equalled;[947] and the extent to which those reports are worthy of credit will always remain a point of contention. The visitors themselves were men of doubtful character; indeed, respectable men could hardly have been persuaded to do the work. Their methods were certainly harsh; the object of their mission was to get up a case for the Crown, and they probably used every means in their power to induce the monks and the nuns to incriminate themselves. Perhaps, too, an entirely false impression may be created by the fact that in most cases only the guilty are mentioned; the innocent are often passed over in silence, and the proportion between the two is not recorded. Some of the terms employed in the reports are also open to dispute; it is possible that in many instances the stigma of unchastity (p. 338) attached to a nun merely meant that she had been unchaste before entering religion,[948] and it is known that nunneries were considered the proper resort for ladies who had not been careful enough of their honour.

[Footnote 947: See the documents in L. and P., vols. ix., x. The most elaborate criticism of the Dissolution is contained in Gasquet's Henry VIII. and the Monasteries, 2 vols., 4th ed. 1893; some additional details and an excellent monastic map will be found in Gairdner's Church History, 1902.]

[Footnote 948: "Religion" of course in the middle ages and sixteenth century was a term almost exclusively applied to the monastic system, and the most ludicrous mistakes are often made from ignorance of this fact; "religiosi" are sharply distinguished from "clerici".]

On the other hand, the lax state of monastic morality does not depend only upon the visitors' reports; apart from satires like those of Skelton, from ballads and from other mirrors of popular opinion or prejudice, the correspondence of Henry VIII.'s reign is, from its commencement, full of references, by bishops and other unimpeachable witnesses, to the necessity of drastic reform. In 1516, for instance, Bishop West of Ely visited that house, and found such disorder that he declared its continuance would have been impossible but for his visitation.[949] In 1518 the Italian Bishop of Worcester writes from Rome that he had often been struck by the necessity of reforming the monasteries.[950] In 1521 Henry VIII., then at the height of his zeal for the Church, thanks the Bishop of Salisbury for dissolving the nunnery of Bromehall because of the "enormities" practised there.[951] Wolsey felt that the time for reform had passed, and began the process of suppression, with a view to increasing the number of cathedrals and devoting other proceeds to educational endowments. Friar Peto, afterwards a cardinal, who had fled abroad to escape Henry's anger for his bold denunciation of the divorce, and who had no possible (p. 339) motive for cloaking his conscientious opinion, admitted that there were grave abuses, and approved of the dissolution of monasteries, if their endowments were used for proper ends.[952] There is no need to multiply instances, because a commission of cardinals, appointed by Paul III. himself, reported in 1537 that scandals were frequent in religious houses.[953] The reports of the visitors, too, can hardly be entirely false, though they may not be entirely true. The charges they make are not vague, but very precise. They specify names of the offenders, and the nature of their offences; and an air of verisimilitude, if nothing more, is imparted to the condemnations they pronounce against the many, by the commendations they bestow on the few.[954]

[Footnote 949: L. and P., ii., 1733.]

[Footnote 950: Ibid., ii., 4399.]

[Footnote 951: Ibid., iii., 1863; see also iii., 77, 533, 567, 569, 600, 693, 1690; iv. 4900.]

[Footnote 952: D.N.B., xlv., 89. Chapuys had stated in 1532 that the Cistercian monasteries were greatly in need of dissolution (L. and P., iii., 361).]

[Footnote 953: Cambridge Modern History, ii., 643.]

[Footnote 954: Nor, of course, were the symptoms peculiar to England; it is absurd to attribute the dissolution of the monasteries solely to Henry VIII. and Cromwell, because monasteries were dissolved in many countries of Europe, Catholic as well as Protestant. So, too, the charges are not naturally incredible, because the kind of vice alleged against the monks has unfortunately been far from unknown wherever and whenever numbers of men, young or middle-aged, have lived together in enforced celibacy.]

Probably the staunchest champion of monasticism would acknowledge that in the reign of Henry VIII. there was at least a plausible case for mending monastic morals. But that was not then the desire of the Government of Henry VIII.; and the case for mending their morals was tacitly assumed to be the same as a case for ending the monasteries. It would be unjust to Henry to deny that he had always shown himself careful of the appearance, at least, of morality in the Church; but it requires a robust faith in the King's disinterestedness to (p. 340) believe that dissolution was not the real object of the visitation, and that it was merely forced upon him by the reports of the visitors. The moral question afforded a good excuse, but the monasteries fell, not so much because their morals were lax, as because their position was weak. Moral laxity contributed no doubt to the general result, but there were other causes at work. The monasteries themselves had long been conscious that their possession of wealth was not, in the eyes of the middle-class laity, justified by the use to which it was put; and, for some generations at least, they had been seeking to make friends with Mammon by giving up part of their revenues, in the form of pensions and corrodies to courtiers, in the hope of being allowed to retain the remainder.[955] It had also become the custom to entrust the stewardship of their possessions to secular hands; and, possibly as a result, the monasteries were soon so deeply in debt to the neighbouring gentry that their lay creditors saw no hope of recovering their claims except by extensive foreclosures.[956] There had certainly been a good deal of private spoliation before the King gave the practice a national character. The very privileges of the monasteries were now turned to their ruin. Their immunity from episcopal jurisdiction deprived them of episcopal aid; their exemption from all authority, save that of the Pope, left them without support when the papal jurisdiction was abolished. Monastic orders knew no distinction (p. 341) of nationality. The national character claimed for the mediaeval Church in England could scarcely cover the monasteries, and no place was found for them in the Church when it was given a really national garb.

[Footnote 955: See Fortescue, Governance of England, ed. Plummer, cap. xviii., and notes, pp. 337-40.]

[Footnote 956: E.g., Christ Church, London, which surrendered to Henry in 1532, was deeply in debt to him (L. and P., v., 823).]

Their dissolution is probably to be connected with Cromwell's boast that he would make his king the richest prince in Christendom. That was not its effect, because Henry was compelled to distribute the greater part of the spoils among his nobles and gentry. One rash reformer suggested that monastic lands should be devoted to educational purposes;[957] had that plan been followed, education in England would have been more magnificently endowed than in any other country of the world, and England might have become a democracy in the seventeenth century. From this point of view Henry spoilt one of the greatest opportunities in English history; from another, he saved England from a most serious danger. Had the Crown retained the wealth of the monasteries, the Stuarts might have made themselves independent of Parliament. But this service to liberty was not voluntary on Henry's part. The dissolution of the monasteries was in effect, and probably in intention, a gigantic bribe to the laity to induce them to acquiesce in the revolution effected by Henry VIII. When he was gone, his successors might desire, or fail to prevent, a reaction; something more permanent than Henry's iron hand was required to support the (p. 342) fabric he had raised. That support was sought in the wealth of the Church. The prospect had, from the very opening of the Reformation Parliament, been dangled before the eyes of the new nobles, the members of Parliament, the justices of the peace, the rich merchants who thirsted for lands wherewith to make themselves gentlemen. Chapuys again and again mentions a scheme for distributing the lands of the Church among the laity as a project for the ensuing session; but their time was not yet; not until their work was done were the labourers to reap their reward.[958] The dissolution of the monasteries harmonised well with the secular principles of these predominant classes. The monastic ideal of going out of the world to seek something, which cannot be valued in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, is abhorrent to a busy, industrial age; and every principle is hated most at the time when it most is needed.

[Footnote 957: The Complaynt of Roderick Mors (Early Eng. Text Soc.), pp. 47-52. The author, Henry Brinkelow (see D.N.B., vi., 346), also suggested that both Houses of Parliament should sit together as one assembly "for it is not rytches or autoryte that bringeth wisdome" (Complaynt, p. 8). Some of the political literature of the later part of Henry's reign is curiously modern in its ideas.]

* * * * *

Intimately associated as they were in their lives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn were not long divided by death; and, piteous as is the story of the last years of Catherine, it pales before the hideous tragedy of the ruin of Anne Boleyn. "If I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will become of her," wrote Anne of the Princess Mary.[959] On 29th January, 1536, the day of her rival's funeral, Anne Boleyn was prematurely delivered of a dead child, and the result was fatal to Anne herself. This was not her first miscarriage,[960] and Henry's (p. 343) old conscience began to work again. In Catherine's case the path of his conscience was that of a slow and laborious pioneer; now it moved easily on its royal road to divorce. On 29th January, Chapuys, ignorant of Anne's miscarriage, was retailing to his master a court rumour that Henry intended to marry again. The King was reported to have said that he had been seduced by witchcraft when he married his second queen, and that the marriage was null for this reason, and because God would not permit them to have male issue.[961] There was no peace for her who supplanted her mistress. Within six months of her marriage Henry's roving fancy had given her cause for jealousy, and, when she complained, he is said to have brutally told her she must put up with it as her betters had done before.[962] These disagreements, however, were described by Chapuys as mere lovers' quarrels, and they were generally followed by reconciliations, after which Anne's influence seemed (p. 344) as secure as ever. But by January, 1536, the imperial ambassador and others were counting on a fresh divorce. The rumour grew as spring advanced, when suddenly, on 2nd May, Anne was arrested and sent to the Tower. She was accused of incest with her brother, Lord Rochford, and of less criminal intercourse with Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris, William Brereton, and Mark Smeaton. All were condemned by juries to death for high treason on 12th May. Three days later Anne herself was put on her trial by a panel of twenty-six peers, over which her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, presided.[963] They returned a unanimous verdict of guilty, and, on the 19th, the Queen's head was struck off with the sword of an executioner brought for the purpose from St. Omer.[964]

[Footnote 958: "The King," says Chapuys in September, 1534, "will distribute among the gentlemen of the kingdom the greater part of the ecclesiastical revenues to gain their good-will" (L. and P., vii., 1141).]

[Footnote 959: Ibid., x., 307.]

[Footnote 960: Anne was pregnant in Feb., 1534, when Henry told Chapuys he thought he should have a son soon (L. and P., vii., 232; cf., vii., 958).]

[Footnote 961: Ibid., x., 199.]

[Footnote 962: Ibid., vi., 1054, 1069. As early as April, 1531, Chapuys reports that Anne "was becoming more arrogant every day, using words and authority towards the King of which he has several times complained to the Duke of Norfolk, saying that she was not like the Queen [Catherine] who never in her life used ill words to him" (ibid., v., 216). In Sept., 1534, Henry was reported to be in love with another lady (ibid., vii., 1193, 1257). Probably this was Jane Seymour, as the lady's kindness to the Princess Mary—a marked characteristic of Queen Jane—is noted by Chapuys. This intrigue, we are told, was furthered by many lords with the object of separating the King from Anne Boleyn, who was disliked by the lords on account of her pride and that of her kinsmen and brothers (ibid., vii., 1279). Henry's behaviour to the Princess was becoming quite benevolent, and Chapuys begins to speak of his "amiable and cordial nature" (ibid., vii., 1297).]

[Footnote 963: In 1533 Anne had accused her uncle of having too much intercourse with Chapuys and of maintaining the Princess Mary's title to the throne (L. and P., vi., 1125).]

[Footnote 964: Ibid., x., 902, 910, 919. The Regent Mary of the Netherlands writes: "That the vengeance might be executed by the Emperor's subjects, he sent for the executioner of St. Omer, as there were none in England good enough" (ibid., x., 965). It is perhaps well to be reminded that even at this date there were more practised executioners in the Netherlands than in England.]

Two days before Anne's death her marriage with Henry had been declared invalid by a court of ecclesiastical lawyers with Cranmer at its head. The grounds of the sentence are not stated, but there may have been two—the alleged precontract with the Earl of Northumberland, which the Earl denied on oath and on the sacrament, and the previous affinity between Anne and Henry arising from the King's relations with Mary Boleyn. The latter seems the more probable. Henry had obtained of Clement VII. a dispensation from this disability; but the Pope's power to dispense had since been repudiated, while the canonical (p. 345) objection remained and was given statutory authority in this very year.[965] The effects of this piece of wanton injustice were among the troubles which Henry bequeathed to Queen Elizabeth; the sole advantage to Henry was that his infidelities to Anne ceased to be breaches of the seventh commandment. The justice of her sentence to death is also open to doubt. Anne herself went to the block boldly proclaiming her innocence.[966] Death she regarded as a relief from an intolerable situation, and she "laughed heartily," writes the Lieutenant of the Tower as she put her hands round her "little neck," and thought how easy the executioner's task would be.[967] She complained when the day of her release from this world was deferred, and regretted that so many innocent persons should suffer through her. Of her accomplices, none confessed but Smeaton, though Henry is said, before Anne's arrest, to have offered Norris a pardon if he would admit his crime. On the other hand, her conduct must have made the charges plausible. Even in those days, when justice to individuals was regarded as dust if weighed in the balance against the real or supposed interests of the State, it is not credible that the juries should have found her accomplices guilty, that twenty-six peers, including her uncle, (p. 346) should have condemned Anne herself, without some colourable justification. If the charges were merely invented to ruin the Queen, one culprit besides herself would have been enough. To assume that Henry sent four needless victims to the block is to accuse him of a lust for superfluous butchery, of which even he, in his most bloodthirsty moments, was not capable.[968]

[Footnote 965: This Act indirectly made Elizabeth a bastard and Henry's marriage with Anne invalid, (cf. Chapuys to Granvelle L. and P., x., 909). The Antinomian theory of marital relations, which Chapuys ascribes to Anne, was an Anabaptist doctrine of the time. Chapuys calls Anne a Messalina, but he of course was not an impartial witness.]

[Footnote 966: According to some accounts, but a Spaniard who writes as an eye-witness says she cried "mercy to God and the King for the offence she had done" (L. and P., x., 911).]

[Footnote 967: Ibid., x., 910.]

[Footnote 968: The execution of Anne was welcomed by the Imperialists and Catholics, and it is possible that it was hastened on by rumours of disquiet in the North. A few days later the nobles and gentry who were in London were ordered to return home to put the country in a state of defence (L. and P., x., 1016).]

On the day that his second queen was beheaded, Henry obtained from Cranmer a special licence to marry a third.[969] He was betrothed on the morrow and privately married "in the Queen's closet at York Place" on the 30th of May. The lady of his choice was Jane, daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall in Wiltshire.[970] She was descended on her mother's side from Edward III., and Cranmer had to dispense with a canonical bar to the marriage arising from her consanguinity to the King in the third and fourth degrees. She had been lady-in-waiting to the two previous queens, and her brother, Sir Edward Seymour, the future Protector, had for years been steadily rising in Henry's favour. In October, 1535, the King had paid a visit to Wolf Hall, and from that time his attentions to Jane became marked. She seems to have received them with real reluctance; she refused a purse of gold and returned the King's letters unopened.[971] She even obtained a (p. 347) promise from Henry that he would not speak with her except in the presence of others, and the King ejected Cromwell from his rooms in the Palace in order to bestow them on Sir Edward Seymour, and thus to provide a place where he and Jane could converse without scandal. All this modesty has, of course, been attributed to prudential and ambitious motives, which were as wise as they were successful. But Jane seems to have had no enemies, except Alexander Aless, who denounced her to Luther as an enemy to the Gospel, probably because she extinguished the shining light of Anne Boleyn.[972] Cardinal Pole described her as "full of goodness,"[973] and she certainly did her best to reconcile Henry with his daughter the Princess Mary, whose treatment began to improve from the fall of Anne Boleyn. "She is," writes Chapuys, "of middle stature, and no great beauty; so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise."[974] But all agreed in praising her intelligence. She had neither Catherine's force of character nor the temper of Anne Boleyn; she was a woman of gentle spirit, striving always to mitigate the rigour of others; her brief married life was probably happier than that of any other of Henry's Queens; and her importance is mainly due to the fact that she bore to Henry his only legitimate son.

[Footnote 969: Ibid. x., 915, 926, 993, 1000. There is a persistent fable that they were married on the day or the day after Anne's execution; Dr. Gairdner says it is repeated "in all histories".]

[Footnote 970: See Wilts Archaeol. Mag., vols xv., xvi., documents printed from the Longleat MSS.]

[Footnote 971: L. and P., x., 245.]

[Footnote 972: Luther, Briefe, v., 22; L. and P., xi., 475.]

[Footnote 973: Strype, Eccl. Memorials, I., ii., 304.]

[Footnote 974: L. and P., x., 901.]

The disgrace of Anne Boleyn necessitated the summons of a fresh Parliament to put the succession to the crown on yet another basis. The Long Parliament had been dissolved on 14th April; another was called to meet on the 8th of June. The eighteen acts passed during its six weeks' session illustrate the parallel development of the (p. 348) Reformation and of the royal autocracy. The Act of Succession made Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, a bastard, without declaring Catherine's daughter, Mary, legitimate, and settled the crown on Henry's prospective issue by Jane. A unique clause empowered the King to dispose of the crown at will, should he have no issue by his present Queen.[975] Probably he intended it, in that case, for the Duke of Richmond; but the Duke's days were numbered, and four days after the dissolution of Parliament he breathed his last. The royal prerogative was extended by a statute enabling a king, when he reached the age of twenty-four, to repeal by proclamation any act passed during his minority; and the royal caste was further exalted by a statute making it high treason for any one to marry a king's daughter, legitimate or not, his sister, his niece, or his aunt on the father's side, without royal licence. The reform of clerical abuses was advanced by an act to prevent non-residence, and by another to obviate the delay in instituting to benefices practised by bishops with a view to (p. 349) keeping the tithes of the vacant benefice in their own hands. The breach with Rome was widened still further by a statute, declaring all who extolled the Pope's authority to be guilty of praemunire, imposing an oath of renunciation on all lay and clerical officers, and making the refusal of that oath high treason. Thus the hopes of a reaction built on the fall of those "apostles of the new sect," Anne Boleyn and her relatives, were promptly and roughly destroyed.

[Footnote 975: Parliament prefered to risk the results of Henry's nomination to the risk of civil war, which would inevitably have broken out had Henry died in 1536. Hobbes, it may be noted, made this power of nomination an indispensable attribute of the sovereign, and if the sovereign be interpreted as the "King in Parliament" the theory is sound constitutionalism and was put in practice in 1701 as well as in 1536. But the limitations on Henry's power of bequeathing the crown have generally been forgotten; he never had power to leave the crown away from Edward VI., that is, away from the only heir whose legitimacy was undisputed. The later acts went further, and entailed the succession upon Mary and Elizabeth unless Henry wished otherwise—which he did not. The preference of the Suffolk to the Stuart line may have been due to (1) the common law forbidding aliens to inherit English land (cf. L. and P., vii., 337); (2) the national dislike of the Scots; (3) a desire to intimate to the Scots that if they would not unite the two realms by the marriage of Edward and Mary, they should not obtain the English crown by inheritance.]

Henry's position had been immensely strengthened alike by the death of Catherine of Aragon and by the fall of Anne Boleyn; and on both occasions he had expressed his appreciation of the fact in the most indecent and heartless manner. He was now free to marry whom he liked, and no objection based on canon or on any other law could be raised to the legitimacy of his future issue; whether the Pope could dispense or not, it made no difference to Edward VI.'s claim to the throne. The fall of Anne Boleyn, in spite of some few rumours that she might have been condemned on insufficient evidence, was generally popular; for her arrogance and that of her family made them hated, and they were regarded as the cause of the King's persecution of Catherine, of Mary, and of those who maintained their cause. Abroad the effect was still more striking. The moment Henry heard of Catherine's death, he added a postscript to Cromwell's despatch to the English ambassadors in France, bidding them to take a higher tone with Francis, for all cause of difference had been removed between him and Charles V.[976] The Emperor secretly believed that his aunt had been poisoned,[977] but that private grief was not to affect his public policy; and Charles, Francis, and even the Pope, became more or less eager competitors (p. 350) for Henry's favour. The bull of deprivation, which had been drawn up and signed, became a dead letter, and every one was anxious to disavow his share in its promotion. Charles obtained the suspension of its publication, made a merit of that service to Henry, and tried to represent that it was Francis who, with his eyes on the English crown, had extorted the bull from the Pope.[978] Paul III. himself used words to the English envoy at Rome, which might be interpreted as an apology for having made Fisher a cardinal and having denounced his and More's execution.[979]

[Footnote 976: L. and P., x., 54.]

[Footnote 977: Ibid., x., 230.]

[Footnote 978: L. and P., x., 887.]

[Footnote 979: Ibid., x., 977.]

Henry had been driven by fear of Charles in the previous year to make further advances than he relished towards union with the German princes; but the Lutherans could not be persuaded to adopt Henry's views of the mass and of his marriage with Catherine; and now he was glad to substitute an understanding with the Emperor for intrigues with the Emperor's subjects.[980] Cromwell and the council were, indeed, a little too eager to welcome Chapuys' professions of friendship and to entertain his demands for help against Francis. Henry allowed them to go on for a time; but Cromwell was never in Wolsey's position, and the King was not inclined to repeat his own and the Cardinal's errors of 1521. He had suffered enough from the prostration of France and the predominance of Charles; and he was anxious now that neither should be supreme. So, when the imperial ambassador came expecting Henry's assent, he, Cromwell and the rest of the council were (p. 351) amazed to hear the King break out into an uncompromising defence of the French King's conduct in invading Savoy and Piedmont.[981] That invasion was the third stroke of good fortune which befel Henry in 1536. As Henry and Ferdinand had, in 1512, diverted their arms from the Moors in order to make war on the Most Christian King, so, in 1536, the Most Christian King and the sovereign, who was at once King Catholic and the temporal head of Christendom, instead of turning their arms against the monarch who had outraged and defied the Church, turned them against one another. Francis had never lost sight of Milan; he had now recovered from the effects of Pavia; and in the spring of 1536 he overran Savoy and Piedmont. In April the Emperor once more visited Rome, and on the 17th he delivered a famous oration in the papal Consistory.[982] In that speech he denounced neither Luther nor Henry VIII.; he reserved his invectives for Francis I. Unconsciously he demonstrated once and for all that unity of faith was impotent against diversity of national interests, and that, whatever deference princes might profess to the counsels of the Vicar of Christ, the counsels they would follow would be those of secular impulse.

[Footnote 980: Cf. Stern, Heinrich VIII. und der Schmalkaldische Bund, and P. Singer, Beziehung des Schmalkald. Bundes zu England. Greifswald, 1901.]

[Footnote 981: L. and P., x., 699.]

[Footnote 982: Ibid., x., 678, 684, 968.]

* * * * *

Henry was thus left to deal with the great domestic crisis of his reign without intervention from abroad. The dissolution of the monasteries inevitably inflicted considerable hardship on a numerous body of men. It had been arranged that the inmates of the dissolved religious houses should either be pensioned or transferred to other monasteries; but, although the pensions were adequate and (p. 352) sometimes even generous in scale,[983] and although the commissioners themselves showed a desire to prevent unnecessary trouble by obtaining licences for many houses to continue for a time,[984] the monks found some difficulty in obtaining their pensions, and Chapuys draws a moving picture of their sufferings as they wandered about the country, seeking employment in a market that was already overstocked with labour, and endeavouring to earn a livelihood by means to which they had never been accustomed.[985] They met with no little sympathy from the commons, who were oppressed with a like scarcity of work, and who had looked to the monasteries for such relief as charity could afford. Nowhere were these feelings so strong as in the north of England, and there the commissioners for dissolving the monasteries were often met with open resistance. Religious discontent was one of the motives for revolt, but probably the rebels were drawn mainly[986] from evicted tenants, deprived of their holdings by enclosures or by the conversion of land from tillage to pasture, men who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by a general turmoil. In these men the wandering monks found ready listeners to their complaints, and there were (p. 353) others, besides the monks, who eagerly turned to account the prevailing dissatisfaction. The northern lords, Darcy and Hussey, had for years been representing to Chapuys the certainty of success if the Emperor invaded England, and promising to do their part when he came. Darcy had, at Christmas 1534, sent the imperial ambassador a sword as an intimation that the time had come for an appeal to its arbitrament; and he was seeking Henry's licence to return to his house in Yorkshire in order to raise "the crucifix" as the standard of revolt.[987] The King, however, was doubtful of Darcy's loyalty, and kept him in London till early in 1536. It would have been well had he kept him longer.

[Footnote 983: E.g., the Prioress of Tarent received L100 a year, the Abbot of Evesham, L240 (Gasquet, ii., 230, 310); these sums must be multiplied by ten to bring them to their present value. Most of these lavish pensions were doubtless given as bribes or rewards for the surrender of monasteries.]

[Footnote 984: L. and P., xi., 385, 519.]

[Footnote 985: Ibid., xi., 42.]

[Footnote 986: The exact proportion is of course difficult to determine; Mr. E.F. Gay in an admirable paper (Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., N.S., xviii., 208, 209) thinks that I have exaggerated the part played by the propertyless class in the rebellion. They were undoubtedly present in large numbers; but my remark is intended to guard against the theory that the grievances were entirely religious, not to exclude those grievances; and the northern lords were of course notable examples of the discontent of the propertied class.]

[Footnote 987: L. and P., vii., 1206; viii., 48.]

Towards the end of the summer rumours[988] were spread among the commons of the North that heavy taxes would be levied on every burial, wedding and christening, that all cattle would be marked and pay a fine to the King, and that all unmarked beasts would be forfeit; churches within five miles of each other were to be taken down as superfluous, jewels and church plate confiscated; taxes were to be paid for eating white bread, goose, or capon; there was to be a rigid inquisition into every man's property; and a score of other absurdities gained currency, obviously invented by malicious and lying tongues. The outbreak began at Caistor, in Lincolnshire, on the 3rd of October, with resistance, not to the commissioners for dissolving the monasteries, but to those appointed to collect the subsidy granted by Parliament. The rebels entered Lincoln on the 6th; they could, they said, pay no more money; they demanded the repeal of religious changes, the restoration of the monasteries, the banishment of (p. 354) heretics like Cranmer and Latimer, and the removal of low-born advisers such as Cromwell and Rich from the council.[989] The mustering of an army under Suffolk and the denial by heralds and others that the King had any such intentions as were imputed to him, induced the commons to go home; the reserves which Henry was collecting at Ampthill were disbanded; and the commotion was over in less than a fortnight.

[Footnote 988: Ibid., xi., 768, 826[2].]

[Footnote 989: L. and P., xi., 786, 1182, 1244, 1246.]

The Lincolnshire rebels, however, had not dispersed when news arrived of a much more serious rising which affected nearly the whole of Yorkshire. It was here that Darcy and his friends were most powerful; but, though there is little doubt that they were the movers, the ostensible leader was Robert Aske, a lawyer. Even here the rebellion was little more than a magnified riot, which a few regiments of soldiers could soon have suppressed. The rebels professed complete loyalty to Henry's person; they suggested no rival candidate for the throne; they merely demanded a change of policy, which they could not enforce without a change of government. They had no means of effecting that change without deposing Henry, which they never proposed to do, and which, had they done it, could only have resulted in anarchy. The rebellion was formidable mainly because Henry had no standing army; he had to rely almost entirely on the goodwill or at least acquiescence of his people. Outside Yorkshire the gentry were willing enough; possibly they had their eyes on monastic rewards; and they sent to Cambridge double[990] or treble the forces Henry demanded, which (p. 355) they could hardly have done had their tenants shown any great sympathy with the rebellion. But transport in those days was more difficult even than now; and before the musters could reach the Trent, Darcy, after a show of reluctance, yielded Pomfret Castle to the rebels and swore to maintain their cause. Henry was forced, much against his will, to temporise. To pardon or parley with rebels he thought would distain his honour.[991] If Norfolk was driven to offer a pardon, he must on no account involve the King in his promise.

[Footnote 990: Surrey to Norfolk, 15th Oct., xi., 727, 738.]

[Footnote 991: L. and P., xi., 864.]

Norfolk apparently had no option. An armistice was accordingly arranged on the 27th of October, and a deputation came up to lay the rebels' grievances before the King. It was received graciously, and Henry's reply was a masterly piece of statecraft.[992] He drew it up "with his own hand, and made no creature privy thereto until it was finished". Their complaints about the Faith were, he said, "so general that hard they be to be answered," but he intended always to live and to die in the faith of Christ. They must specify what they meant by the liberties of the Church, whether they were lawful or unlawful liberties; but he had done nothing inconsistent with the laws of God and man. With regard to the Commonwealth, what King had kept his subjects so long in wealth and peace, ministering indifferent justice, and defending them from outward enemies? There were more low-born councillors when he came to the throne than now; then there were "but two worth calling noble.[993] Others, as the Lords Marny and Darcy, were scant well-born gentlemen, and yet of no great lands till (p. 356) they were promoted by us. The rest were lawyers and priests.... How came you to think that there were more noble men in our Privy Council then than now?" It did not become them to dictate to their sovereign whom he should call to his Council; yet, if they could prove, as they alleged, that certain of the Council were subverters of God's law and the laws of the realm, he would proceed against them. Then, after denouncing their rebellion and referring to their request for pardon, he says: "To show our pity, we are content, if we find you penitent, to grant you all letters of pardon on your delivering to us ten such ringleaders of this rebellion as we shall assign to you. Now note the benignity of your Prince, and how easily bloodshed may be eschewed. Thus I, as your head, pray for you, my members, that God may enlighten you for your benefit."