The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon

The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon
James Froude

James Anthony Froude

The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon / The Story as Told by the Imperial Ambassadors Resident at the Court of Henry VIII

INTRODUCTION

The mythic element cannot be eliminated out of history. Men who play leading parts on the world’s stage gather about them the admiration of friends and the animosity of disappointed rivals or political enemies. The atmosphere becomes charged with legends of what they have said or done – some inventions, some distortions of facts, but rarely or never accurate. Their outward acts, being public, cannot be absolutely misstated; their motives, being known only to themselves, are an open field for imagination; and as the disposition is to believe evil rather than good, the portraits drawn may vary indefinitely, according to the sympathies of the describer, but are seldom too favourable. The more distinguished a man is the more he is talked about. Stories are current about him in his own lifetime, guaranteed apparently by the highest authorities; related, insisted upon; time, place, and circumstance accurately given – most of them mere malicious lies; yet, if written down, to reappear in memoirs a hundred years hence, they are likely to pass for authentic, or at least probable. Even where there is no malice, imagination will still be active. People believe or disbelieve, repeat or suppress, according to their own inclinations; and death, which ends the feuds of unimportant persons, lets loose the tongues over the characters of the great. Kings are especially sufferers; when alive they hear only flattery; when they are gone men revenge themselves by drawing hideous portraits of them, and the more distinguished they may have been the more minutely their weaknesses are dwelt upon. “C’est un plaisir indicible,” says Voltaire, “de donner des décrets contre des souverains morts quand on ne peut en lancer contre eux de leur vivant de peur de perdre ses oreilles.” The dead sovereigns go their way. Their real work for good or evil lives after them; but they themselves are where the opinions expressed about their character affect them no more. To Cæsar or Napoleon it matters nothing what judgment the world passes upon their conduct. It is of more importance for the ethical value of history that acts which as they are related appear wicked should be duly condemned, that acts which are represented as having advanced the welfare of mankind should be duly honoured, than that the real character of individuals should be correctly appreciated. To appreciate any single man with complete accuracy is impossible. To appreciate him even proximately is extremely difficult. Rulers of kingdoms may have public reasons for what they do, which at the time may be understood or allowed for. Times change, and new interests rise. The circumstances no longer exist which would explain their conduct. The student looks therefore for an explanation in elements which he thinks he understands – in pride, ambition, fear, avarice, jealousy, or sensuality; and, settling the question thus to his own satisfaction, resents or ridicules attempts to look for other motives. So long as his moral judgment is generally correct, he inflicts no injury, and he suffers none. Cruelty and lust are proper objects of abhorrence; he learns to detest them in studying the Tiberius of Tacitus, though the character described by the great Roman historian may have been a mere creation of the hatred of the old Roman aristocracy. The manifesto of the Prince of Orange was a libel against Philip the Second; but the Philip of Protestant tradition is an embodiment of the persecuting spirit of Catholic Europe which it would be now useless to disturb. The tendency of history is to fall into wholesome moral lines whether they be accurate or not, and to interfere with harmless illusions may cause greater errors than it aspires to cure. Crowned offenders are arraigned at the tribunal of history for the crimes which they are alleged to have committed. It may be sometimes shown that the crimes were not crimes at all, that the sufferers had deserved their fate, that the severities were useful and essential for some great and valuable purpose. But the reader sees in the apology for acts which he had regarded as tyrannical a defence of tyranny itself. Preoccupied with the received interpretation, he finds deeds excused which he had learnt to execrate; and in learning something which, even if true, is of no real moment to him, he suffers in the maiming of his perceptions of the difference between right and wrong. The whitewashing of the villains of tradition is, therefore, justly regarded as waste of labour. If successful, it is of imperfect value; if unsuccessful, it is a misuse of industry which deserves to be censured. Time is too precious to be squandered over paradoxes. The dead are gone; the censure of mankind has written their epitaphs, and so they may be left. Their true award will be decided elsewhere.

This is the common sense verdict. When the work of a man is done and ended; when, except indirectly and invisibly, he affects the living world no more, the book is closed, the sentence is passed, and there he may be allowed to rest. The case is altered, however, when the dead still live in their actions, when their principles and the effects of their conduct are still vigorous and operative, and the movements which they initiated continue to be fought over. It sometimes happens that mighty revolutions can be traced to the will and resolution of a single man, and that the conflict continues when he is gone. The personal character of such a man becomes then of intrinsic importance as an argument for attack or defence. The changes introduced by Henry VIII. are still denounced or defended with renewed violence; the ashes of a conflict which seemed to have been decided are again blown into a flame; and what manner of man Henry was, and what the statesmen and churchmen were who stood by him and assisted him in reshaping the English constitution, becomes a practical question of our own time. By their fruits ye shall know them. A good tree cannot bear evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Roman Catholics argue from the act to the man, and from the man back to the act. The Reformation, they say, was a rebellion against an authority appointed by God for the rule of the world; it was a wicked act in itself; the author or the authors of it were presumably, therefore, themselves wicked; and the worst interpretation of their conduct is antecedently probable, because a revolt against the Church of Christ could only have originated in depraved hearts. Or again, inverting the argument, they say with sufficient plausibility that the sins and crimes of the King are acknowledged facts of history; that from so bad a man no good thing could ever rise; that Henry was a visible servant of the devil, and therefore the Reformation, of which he was the instrument, was the devil’s work. If the picture drawn of him by his Catholic contemporaries is correct, the inference is irresistible. That picture, however, was drawn by those whose faith he wounded and whose interests he touched, and therefore might be regarded with suspicion. Religious animosity is fertile in calumny, because it assumes beforehand that every charge is likely to be true in proportion to its enormity, and Catholic writers were credulous of evil when laid to the charge of so dangerous an adversary. But the Catholics have not been Henry’s only accusers; all sorts and sects have combined in the general condemnation. The Anglican High Churchman is as bitter against him as Reginald Pole himself. He admits and maintains the separation from Rome which Henry accomplished for him; but he abhors as heartily as Pole or Lingard the internal principles of the Reformation. He resents the control of the clergy by the civil power. He demands the restoration of the spiritual privileges which Henry and his parliaments took away from them. He aspires to the recovery of ecclesiastical independence. He therefore with equal triumph points to the blots in Henry’s character, and deepens their shade with every accusation, proved or unproved, which he can find in contemporary records. With him, too, that a charge was alleged at the time is evidence sufficient to entitle him to accept it as a fact.

Again, Protestant writers have been no less unsparing from an imprudent eagerness to detach their cause from a disreputable ally. In Elizabeth’s time it was a point of honour and loyalty to believe in the innocence of her mother. If Anne Boleyn was condemned on forged or false evidence to make way for Jane Seymour, what appears so clearly to us must have been far clearer to Henry and his Council; of all abominable crimes committed by tyrannical princes there was never one more base or cowardly than Anne’s execution; and in insisting on Anne’s guiltlessness they have condemned the King, his ministers, and his parliaments. Having discovered him to have murdered his wife, they have found him also to have been a persecutor of the truth. The Reformation in England was at its outset political rather than doctrinal. The avarice and tyranny of the Church officials had galled the limbs of the laity. Their first steps were to break the chains which fretted them, and to put a final end to the temporal power of the clergy. Spiritual liberty came later, and came slowly from the constitution of the English mind. Superstition had been familiarised by custom, protected by natural reverence, and shielded from inquiry by the peculiar horror attaching to unbelief. The nation had been taught from immemorial time that to doubt on the mysteries of faith was the worst crime which man could commit; and while they were willing to discover that on their human side the clergy were but brother mortals of questionable character, they drew a distinction between the Church as a national institution and the doctrines which it taught. An old creed could not yield at once. The King did much; he protected individual Lutherans to the edge of rashness. He gave the nation the English Bible. He made Latimer a bishop. He took away completely and for ever the power of the prelates to punish what they called heresy ex officio and on their own authority; but the zeal of the ultra-Protestants broke loose when the restraint was taken off; the sense of the country was offended by the irreverence with which objects and opinions were treated which they regarded as holy, and Parliament, which had put a bit in the mouth of the ecclesiastical courts, was driven to a substitute in the Bill of the Six Articles. The advanced section in popular movements is usually unwise. The characteristic excellence of the English Reformation is, that throughout its course it was restrained by the law, and the Six Articles Bill, tempered as it was in the execution, was a permissible, and perhaps useful, measure in restraint of intemperance. It was the same in Germany. Anabaptists continued to be burnt in Saxony and Hesse long after Luther’s revolt; Calvin thought the stake a fitting penalty for doubts upon the Trinity. John Knox, in Scotland, approved of witch-burning and sending mass-priests to the gallows. Henry could not disregard the pronounced feeling of the majority of the English people. He was himself but one of them, and changed slowly as they changed. Yet Protestant tradition has assumed that the bloody whip with six strings was an act of arbitrary ferocity. It considers that the King could, and ought to, have advanced at once into an understanding of the principle of toleration – toleration of the new opinions, and a more severe repression of the old. The Puritans and Evangelicals forgot that he had given them the English Testament. They forgot that by setting his foot upon the bishops he had opened the pulpits to themselves, and they classed him among the persecutors, or else joined in the shallow laughs of the ultramontane Catholics at what they pleased to call his inconsistency.

Thus from all sides a catena of invective has been wrapped about Henry’s character. The sensible part of the country held its tongue. The speakers and writers were the passionate and fanatical of both persuasions, and by them the materials were supplied for the Henry VIII. who has been brought down to us by history, while the candid and philosophic thinkers of the last and present centuries have accepted the traditional figure. In their desire to be impartial they have held the balance equal between Catholics and Protestants, inclining slightly to the Catholic side, from a wish to conciliate a respectable body who had been unjustly maligned and oppressed; while they have lavished invectives upon the early Reformers violent enough to have satisfied even Pole himself, whose rhetoric has formed the base of their declamation.

Liberal philosophy would have had a bad time of it in England, perhaps in all Europe, if there had been no Henry VIII. to take the Pope by the throat. But one service writers like Macaulay have undoubtedly accomplished. They have shown that it is entirely impossible to separate the King from his ministers – to condemn Henry and to spare Cranmer. Protestant writers, from Burnet to Southey, have tried to save the reforming bishops and statesmen at Henry’s expense. Cranmer, and Latimer, and Ridley have been described as saints, though their master was a villain. But the cold impartiality of Macaulay has pointed out unanswerably that in all Henry’s most questionable acts his own ministers and his prelates were active participants – that his Privy Council, his parliaments, his judges on the bench, the juries empanelled to try the victims of his tyranny, were equally his accomplices; some actively assisting; the rest, if these acts were really criminal, permitting themselves to be bribed or terrified into acquiescence. The leading men of all descriptions, the nation itself, through the guilt of its representatives, were all stained in the same detestable colours. It may be said, indeed, that they were worse than the King himself. For the King at least may be pleaded the coarse temptations of a brutal nature; but what palliation can be urged for the peers and judges who sacrificed Anne Boleyn, or More, or Fisher, according to the received hypothesis? Not even the excuse of personal fear of an all-powerful despot. For Henry had no Janissaries or Prætorians to defend his person or execute his orders. He had but his hundred yeomen of the guard, not more numerous than the ordinary followers of a second-rate noble. The Catholic leaders, who were infuriated at his attacks upon the Church, and would if they could have introduced foreign armies to dethrone him, insisted on his weakness as an encouragement to an easy enterprise. Beyond those few yeomen they urged that he had no protection save in the attachment of the subjects whom he was alienating. What strange influence was such a king able to exercise that he could overawe the lords and gentry of England, the learned professions, the municipal authorities? How was it that he was able to compel them to be the voluntary instruments of his cruelty? Strangest of all, he seems to have needed no protection, but rather to have been personally popular, even among those who disapproved his public policy. The air was charged with threats of insurrection, but no conspiracy was ever formed to kill him, like those which so often menaced the life of his daughter. When the North was in arms in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and a question rose among the leaders whether in the event of victory the King was to be deposed, it was found that anyone who proposed to remove him would be torn in pieces by the people.

Granting that Henry VIII. was, as Dickens said of him, “a spot of blood and grease” on the page of English history, the contemporary generation of Englishmen must have been fit subjects of such a sovereign. Every country, says Carlyle, gets as good a government as it deserves. The England of the Cromwells and the Cranmers, the Howards and the Fitzwilliams, the Wriothesleys and the Pagets, seems to have been made of baser materials than any land of which mankind has preserved a record. Roman Catholics may fairly plead that out of such a race no spiritual reform is likely to have arisen which could benefit any human soul. Of all the arguments which can be alleged for the return of England to the ancient fold, this is surely the most powerful.

Yet England shows no intention of returning. History may say what it pleases, yet England remains tenacious of the liberties which were then won for us, and unconscious of the disgrace attaching to them; unconscious, also, that the version of the story which it accepts contains anything which requires explanation. The legislation of Henry VIII., his Privy Council, and his parliaments is the Magna Charta of the modern world. The Act of Appeals and the Act of Supremacy asserted the national independence, and repudiated the interference of foreign bishop, prince, or potentate within the limits of the English empire. The clergy had held for many centuries an imperium in imperio. Subject themselves to no law but their own, they had asserted an irresponsible jurisdiction over the souls and bodies of the people. The Act for the submission of these persons reduced them to the common condition of subjects under the control of the law. Popes were no longer allowed to dispense with ordinary obligations. Clerical privileges were abolished. The spiritual courts, with their intolerable varieties of iniquity, were swept away, or coerced within rational limits. The religious houses were suppressed, their enormous wealth was applied for the defence of the realm, and the worse than Augean dunghill of abuses was cleared out with resolute hand. These great results were accomplished in the face of papal curses, in defiance of superstitious terrors, so despicable when bravely confronted, so terrible while the spectre of supernatural power was still unexorcised; in the face, too, of earthly perils which might make stout hearts shake, of an infuriated priesthood stirring the people into rebellion, of an exasperated Catholic Europe threatening fire and sword in the name of the Pope. These were distinguished achievements, not likely to have been done at all by an infamous prince and infamous ministers; yet done so well that their work is incorporated in the constitution almost in the form in which they left it; and this mighty revolution, the greatest and most far-reaching in modern times, was accomplished without a civil war, by firmness of hand, by the action of Parliament, and a resolute enforcement of the law. Nor has the effect of Henry’s legislation been confined to England. Every great country, Catholic or Protestant, has practically adopted its chief provisions. Popes no longer pretend a power of deposing princes, absolving subjects from their allegiance, or selling dispensations for offences against the law of the land. Appeals are no longer carried from the national courts to the court of the Rota. The papal treasury is no longer supplied by the plunder of the national clergy, collected by resident papal officials. Bishops and convocations have ceased to legislate above and independent of the secular authority, and clerks who commit crimes bear the same penalties as the profane. The high quality of the Reformation statutes is guaranteed by their endurance; and it is hard to suppose that the politicians who conceived and carried them out were men of base conditions. The question is not of the character of the King. If nothing was at issue but the merits or demerits of a single sovereign, he might be left where he lies. The question is of the characters of the reforming leaders, who, jointly with the King, were the authors of this tremendous and beneficent revolution. Henry in all that he did acted with these men and through them. Is it possible to believe that qualities so opposite as the popular theory requires existed in the same persons? Is it possible, for instance, that Cranmer, who composed or translated the prayers in the English Liturgy, was the miserable wretch which Macaulay or Lingard describes? The era of Elizabeth was the outspring of the movement which Henry VIII. commenced, and it was the grandest period in English history. Is it credible that so invigorating a stream flowed from a polluted fountain?

Before accepting a conclusion so disgraceful – before consigning the men who achieved so great a victory, and risked and lost their lives in the battle, to final execration – it is at least permissible to pause. The difficulty can only be made light of by impatience, by prejudice, or by want of thought. To me at any rate, who wished to discover what the real history of the Reformation had been, it seemed so considerable, that, dismissing the polemical invectives of later writers, I turned to the accounts of their conduct, which had been left behind by the authors of it themselves. Among the fortunate anomalies of the situation, Henry departed from previous custom in holding annual parliaments. At every step which he took, either in the rearrangement of the realm or in his own domestic confusions, he took the Lords and Commons into his council, and ventured nothing without their consent. The preambles of the principal statutes contain a narrative clear and precise of the motives of everything that he did – a narrative which at least may have been a true one, which was not put forward as a defence, but was a mere explanation of acts which on the surface seemed violent and arbitrary. If the explanation is correct, it shows us a time of complications and difficulties, which, on the whole, were successfully encountered. It shows us severe measures severely executed, but directed to public and necessary purpose, involving no sycophancy or baseness, no mean subservience to capricious tyranny, but such as were the natural safeguards during a dangerous convulsion, or remedies of accidents incidental to hereditary monarchy. The story told is clear and distinct; pitiless, but not dishonourable. Between the lines can be read the storm of popular passions, the beating of the national heart when it was stirred to its inmost depths. We see established institutions rooted out, idols overthrown, and injured worshippers exasperated to fury; the air, as was inevitable at such a crisis, full of flying rumours, some lies, some half lies with fragments of truth attaching to them, bred of malice or dizzy brains, the materials out of which the popular tradition has been built. It was no insular revolution. The stake played for was the liberty of mankind. All Europe was watching England, for England was the hinge on which the fate of the Reformation turned. Could it be crushed in England, the Catholics were assured of universal victory, and therefore tongues and pens were busy everywhere throughout Christendom, Catholic imagination representing Henry as an incarnate Satan, for which, it must be admitted, his domestic misadventures gave them tempting opportunities. So thick fell the showers of calumny, that, bold as he was, he at times himself winced under it. He complained to Charles V. of the libels circulated about him in France and Flanders. Charles, too, had suffered in the same way. He answered, humorously, that “if kings gave occasion to be spoken about they would be spoken about; kings were not kings of tongues.” Henry VIII. was an easy mark for slander; but if all slanders are to pass as true which are flung at public men whose policy provides them with an army of calumniators, the reputation of the best of them is but a spotted rag. The clergy were the vocal part of Europe. They had the pulpits; they had the writing of the books and pamphlets. They had cause to hate Henry, and they hated him with an intensity of passion which could not have been more savage had he been the devil himself. But there are men whose enmity is a compliment. They libelled Luther almost as freely as they libelled the English king. I myself, after reading and weighing all that I could find forty years ago in prints or manuscripts, concluded that the real facts of Henry’s conduct were to be found in the Statute Book and nowhere else; that the preambles of the Acts of Parliament did actually represent the sincere opinion about him of the educated laymen of England, who had better opportunities of knowing the truth than we can have, and that a modern Englishman may be allowed to follow their authority without the imputation of paradox or folly.

With this impression, and with the Statute Book for a guide, I wrote the opening portion of my “History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada.” The published criticisms upon my work were generally unfavourable. Catholic writers inherited the traditions and the temper of their forefathers, and believed the catena of their own historians. Protestants could not believe in a defence of the author of the Six Articles Bill. Secular reviewers were easily witty at the “model husband” whom they supposed me to be imposing upon them, and resented the interference with a version of the story authenticated by great names among my predecessors. The public, however, took an interest in what I had to say. The book was read, and continues to be read; at the close of my life, therefore, I have to go once more over the ground; and as I am still substantially alone in maintaining an opinion considered heretical by orthodox historians, I have to decide in what condition I am to leave my work behind me. In the thirty-five years which have elapsed since those early volumes appeared large additions have been made to the materials for the history of the period. The vast collection of manuscripts in the English Record Office, which then were only partially accessible, have been sorted, catalogued, and calendared by the industry of my friends Mr. Brewer and Mr. Gairdner. Private collections in great English houses have been examined and reported on by the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Foreign archives at Paris, Simancas, Rome, Venice, Vienna, and Brussels have been searched to some extent by myself, but in a far larger degree by able scholars specially appointed for the purpose. In the despatches, thus made accessible, of the foreign ambassadors resident at Henry’s court we have the invaluable, if not impartial, comments of trained and responsible politicians who related from day to day the events which were passing under their eyes. Being Catholics, and representatives of Catholic powers, they were bitterly hostile to the Reformation – hostile alike on political grounds and religious – and therefore inclined to believe and report the worst that could be said both of it and of its authors. But they wrote before the traditions had become stereotyped; their accounts are fresh and original; and, being men of the world, and writing in confidence to their own masters, they were as veracious as their prejudices would allow them to be. Unconsciously, too, they render another service of infinite importance. Being in close communication with the disaffected English peers and clergy, and engaged with them secretly in promoting rebellion, the ministers of Charles V. reveal with extraordinary clearness the dangers with which the Government had to deal. They make it perfectly plain that the Act of Supremacy, with its stern and peremptory demands, was no more than a legitimate and necessary defence against organised treason.

It was thus inevitable that much would have to be added to what I had already published. When a microscope is applied to the petal of a flower or the wing of an insect, simple outlines and simple surfaces are resolved into complex organisms with curious and beautiful details. The effect of these despatches is precisely the same – we see with the eyes, we hear with the ears, of men who were living parts of the scenes which they describe. Stories afterwards elaborated into established facts we trace to their origin in rumours of the hour; we read innumerable anecdotes, some with the clear stamp of truth on them, many mere creations of passing wit or malice, no more authentic than the thousands like them which circulate in modern society, guaranteed by the positive assertions of personal witnesses, yet visibly recognisable as lies. Through all this the reader must pick his way and use his own judgment. He knows that many things are false which are reported about his own eminent contemporaries. He may be equally certain that lies were told as freely then as now. He will probably allow his sympathies to guide him. He will accept as fact what fits in with his creed or his theory. He will share the general disposition to believe evil, especially about kings and great men. The exaggerated homage paid to princes, when they are alive, has to be compensated by suspecting the worst of them as soon as they are gone. But the perusal of all these documents leaves the broad aspect of the story, in my opinion, precisely where it was. It is made more interesting by the greater fulness of particulars; it is made more vivid by the clear view which they afford of individual persons who before were no more than names. But I think now, as I thought forty years ago, that through the confusions and contradictions of a stormy and angry time, the statute-book remains the safest guide to follow. If there be any difference, it is that actions which till explained appeared gratuitously cruel, like the execution of Bishop Fisher, are seen beyond dispute to have been reasonable and just. Bishop Fisher is proved by the words of the Spanish Ambassador himself to have invited and pressed the introduction of a foreign Catholic army into England in the Pope’s interest.

Thus I find nothing to withdraw in what I then wrote, and little to alter save in correcting some small errors of trivial moment; but, on the other hand, I find much to add; and the question rises in what way I had better do it, with fair consideration for those who have bought the book as it stands. To take the work to pieces and introduce the new material into the text or the notes will impose a necessity of buying a new copy, or of being left with an inferior one, on the many friends who least deserve to be so treated. I have concluded, therefore, on writing an additional volume, where such parts of the story as have had important light thrown upon them can be told over again in ampler form. The body of the history I leave as it stands. It contains what I believe to be a true account of the time, of the immediate causes which brought about the changes of the sixteenth century, and of the characters and principles of the actors in them. I have only to fill up certain deficiencies and throw light into places hitherto left dark. For the rest, I do not pretend to impartiality. I believe the Reformation to have been the greatest incident in English history; the root and source of the expansive force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe, and imprinted the English genius and character on the constitution of mankind. I am unwilling to believe more evil than I can help of my countrymen who accomplished so beneficent a work, and in a book written with such convictions the mythical element cannot be wholly wanting. Even things which immediately surround us, things which we see and touch, we do not perceive as they are; we perceive only our own sensations, and our sensations are a combined result of certain objects and of the faculties which apprehend them. Something of ourselves must always be intermixed before knowledge can reach us; in every conclusion which we form, in every conviction which is forced upon us, there is still a subjective element. It is so in physical science. It is so in art. It is so in our speculations on our own nature. It is so in religion. It is so even in pure mathematics. The curved and rectilineal figures on which we reason are our own creation, and have no existence exterior to the reasoning mind. Most of all is it so in history, where we have no direct perceptions to help us, but are dependent on the narratives of others whose beliefs were necessarily influenced by their personal dispositions. The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence. In judging of the truth of particular statements, the conclusion which he will form must be based partly upon evidence and partly upon what he conceives to be likely or unlikely. In a court of justice, where witnesses can be cross-examined, uncertain elements can in some degree be eliminated; yet, after all care is taken, judges and juries have been often blinded by passion and prejudice. When we have nothing before us but rumours set in circulation, we know not by whom or on what authority, and we are driven to consider probabilities, the Protestant, who believes the Reformation to have been a victory of truth over falsehood, cannot come to the same conclusion as the Catholic, who believes it to have been a curse, or perhaps to the same conclusion as the indifferent philosopher, who regards Protestant and Catholic alike with benevolent contempt. For myself, I can but say that I have discriminated with such faculty as I possess. I have kept back nothing. I have consciously distorted nothing which conflicts with my own views. I have accepted what seems sufficiently proved. I have rejected what I can find no support for save in hearsay or prejudice. But whether accepting or rejecting, I have endeavoured to follow the rule that incidents must not be lightly accepted as authentic which are inconsistent with the universal laws of human nature, and that to disprove a calumny it is sufficient to show that there is no valid witness for it.

Finally, I do not allow myself to be tempted into controversy with particular writers whose views disagree with my own. To contradict in detail every hostile version of Henry VIII.’s or his ministers’ conduct would be as tedious as it would be irritating and unprofitable. My censors have been so many that a reply to them all is impossible, and so distinguished that a selection would be invidious. Those who wish for invectives against the King, or Cranmer, or Cromwell, can find them everywhere, from school manuals to the grave works of elaborate historians. For me, it is enough to tell the story as it presents itself to my own mind, and to leave what appears to me to be the truth to speak for itself.

The English nation throughout their long history have borne an honourable reputation. Luther quotes a saying of Maximilian that there were three real sovereigns in Europe – the Emperor, the King of France, and the King of England. The Emperor was a king of kings. If he gave an order to the princes of the Reich, they obeyed or disobeyed as they pleased. The King of France was a king of asses. He ordered about his people at his will, and they obeyed like asses. The King of England was king of a loyal nation who obeyed him with heart and mind as loyal and faithful subjects. This was the character borne in the world by the fathers of the generation whom popular historians represent as having dishonoured themselves by subserviency to a bloodthirsty tyrant. It is at least possible that popular historians have been mistaken, and that the subjects of Henry VIII. were neither much better nor much worse than those who preceded or came after them.

CHAPTER I

Prospects of a disputed succession to the crown – Various claimants – Catherine incapable of having further children – Irregularity of her marriage with the King – Papal dispensations – First mention of the divorce – Situation of the Papacy – Charles V. – Policy of Wolsey – Anglo-French alliance – Imperial troops in Italy – Appeal of the Pope – Mission of Inigo de Mendoza – The Bishop of Tarbes – Legitimacy of the Princess Mary called in question – Secret meeting of the Legates’ court – Alarms of Catherine – Sack of Rome by the Duke of Bourbon – Proposed reform of the Papacy – The divorce promoted by Wolsey – Unpopular in England – Attempts of the Emperor to gain Wolsey.

In the year 1526 the political prospects of England became seriously clouded. A disputed succession had led in the previous century to a desperate civil war. In that year it became known in private circles that if Henry VIII. was to die the realm would again be left without a certain heir, and that the strife of the Roses might be renewed on an even more distracting scale. The sons who had been born to Queen Catherine had died in childbirth or had died immediately after it. The passionate hope of the country that she might still produce a male child who would survive had been constantly disappointed, and now could be entertained no longer. She was eight years older than her husband. She had “certain diseases” which made it impossible that she should be again pregnant, and Henry had for two years ceased to cohabit with her. He had two children still living – the Princess Mary, Catherine’s daughter, then a girl of eleven, and an illegitimate son born in 1519, the mother being a daughter of Sir John Blount, and married afterwards to Sir Gilbert Talboys. By presumptive law the Princess was the next heir; but no woman had ever sat on the throne of England alone and in her own right, and it was doubtful whether the nation would submit to a female sovereign. The boy, though excluded by his birth from the prospect of the crown, was yet brought up with exceptional care, called a prince by his tutors, and probably regarded by his father as a possible successor should his sister go the way of her brothers. In 1525, after the King had deliberately withdrawn from Catherine, he was created Duke of Richmond – a title of peculiar significance, since it had been borne by his grandfather, Henry VII. – and he was granted precedence over the rest of the peerage. Illegitimacy was a serious, but, it might be thought, was not an absolute, bar. The Conqueror had been himself a bastard. The Church, by its habits of granting dispensations for irregular marriages or of dissolving them on pleas of affinity or consanguinity or other pretext, had confused the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. A Church Court had illegitimatised the children of Edward IV. and Elizabeth Grey, on the ground of one of Edward’s previous connections; yet no one regarded the princes murdered in the Tower as having been illegitimate in reality; and to prevent disputes and for an adequate object, the Duke of Richmond, had he grown to manhood, might, in the absence of other claims, have been recognised by Parliament. But the Duke was still a child, and might die as Henry’s other sons had died; and other claims there were which, in the face of the bar sinister, could not fail to be asserted. James V. of Scotland was next in blood, being the son of Henry’s eldest sister, Margaret. There were the Greys, inheriting from the second sister, Mary. Outside the royal house there were the still popular representatives of the White Rose, the Marquis of Exeter, who was Edward IV.’s grandson; the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence, and sister of the murdered Earl of Warwick; and Henry’s life was the only obstacle between the collision of these opposing pretensions. James, it was quite certain, would not be allowed to succeed without a struggle. National rivalry forbade it. Yet it was no less certain that he would try, and would probably be backed by France. There was but one escape from convulsions which might easily be the ruin of the realm. The King was in the flower of his age, and might naturally look for a Prince of Wales to come after him if he was married to a woman capable of bearing one. It is neither unnatural nor, under the circumstances, a matter to be censured if he and others began to reflect upon the peculiar character of his connection with Catherine of Aragon. It is not sufficiently remembered that the marriage of a widow with her husband’s brother was then, as it is now, forbidden by the laws of all civilised countries. Such a marriage at the present day would be held ipso facto invalid and not a marriage at all. An irregular power was then held to rest with the successors of St. Peter to dispense, under certain conditions, with the inhibitory rules. The popes are now understood to have never rightly possessed such an authority, and therefore, according to modern law and sentiment, Henry and Catherine never were husband and wife at all. At the time it was uncertain whether the dispensing power extended so far as to sanction such a union, and when the discussion rose upon it the Roman canonists were themselves divided. Those who maintained the widest view of the papal faculty yet agreed that such a dispensation could only be granted for urgent cause, such as to prevent foreign wars or internal seditions, and no such cause was alleged to have existed when Ferdinand and Henry VII. arranged the marriage between their children. The dispensation had been granted by Pope Julius with reluctance, had been acted upon after considerable hesitation, and was of doubtful validity, since the necessary conditions were absent. The marriages of kings were determined with little reference to the personal affection of the parties. Between Henry and Catherine there was probably as much and as little personal attachment as there usually is in such cases. He respected and perhaps admired her character; but she was not beautiful, she was not attractive, while she was as proud and intractable as her mother Isabella. Their union had been settled by the two fathers to cement the alliance between England and Spain. Such connections rest on a different foundation from those which are voluntarily entered into between private persons. What is made up for political reasons may pardonably be dissolved when other reasons of a similar kind require it; and when it became clear that Catherine could never bear another child, that the penalty threatened in the Levitical law against marriages of this precise kind had been literally enforced in the death of the male offspring, and that civil war was imminent in consequence upon the King’s death, Henry may have doubted in good faith whether she had ever been his wife at all – whether, in fact, the marriage was not of the character which everyone would now allow to attach to similar unions. Had there been a Prince of Wales, the question would never have arisen, and Henry, like other kings, would have borne his fate. But there was no prince, and the question had risen, and there was no reason why it should not. There was no trace at the outset of an attachment to another woman. If there had been, there would be little to condemn; but Anne Boleyn, when it was first mooted, was no more to the King than any other lady of the court. He required a wife who could produce a son to secure the succession. The powers which had allowed an irregular marriage could equally dissolve it, and the King felt that he had a right to demand a familiar concession which other sovereigns had often applied for in one form or another, and rarely in vain.

Thus as early as 1526 certainly, and probably as much as a year before, Cardinal Wolsey had been feeling his way at Rome for a separation between Henry and Catherine. On September 7 in that year the Bishop of Bath, who was English Ambassador at Paris, informed the Cardinal of the arrival there of a confidential agent of Pope Clement VII. The agent had spoken to the Bishop on this especial subject, and had informed him that there would be difficulties about it.[1 - Calendar of State Papers, Hen. VIII., Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. Introduction, p. 223.] The “blessed divorce” —benedictum divorcium the Bishop calls it – had been already under consideration at Rome. The difficulties were not specified, but the political features of the time obliged Clement to be circumspect, and it was these that were probably referred to. Francis I. had been defeated and taken prisoner by the Imperialists at Pavia. He had been carried to Spain, and had been released at Henry’s intercession, under severe conditions, to which he had reluctantly consented, and his sons had been left at Madrid as hostages for the due fulfilment of them. The victorious army, half Spanish, half German, remained under the Duke of Bourbon to complete the conquest of Italy; and Charles V., with his already vast dominions and a treasury which the world believed to be inexhaustibly supplied from the gold mines of the New World, seemed advancing to universal empire.

France in the preceding centuries had been the hereditary enemy of England; Spain and Burgundy her hereditary friends. The marriage of Catherine of Aragon had been a special feature of the established alliance. She was given first to Prince Arthur, and then to Henry, as a link in the confederacy which was to hold in check French ambition. Times were changing. Charles V. had been elected emperor, largely through English influence; but Charles was threatening to be a more serious danger to Europe than France had been. The Italian princes were too weak to resist the conqueror of Pavia. Italy once conquered, the Papacy would become a dependency of the empire, and, with Charles’s German subjects in open revolt against it, the Church would lose its authority, and the organisation of the Catholic world would fall into hopeless decrepitude. So thought Wolsey, the most sharp-sighted of English ministers. He believed that the maintenance of the Papacy was the best defence of order and liberty. The only remedy which he could see was a change of partners. England held the balance between the great rival powers. If the English alliance could be transferred from the Empire to France, the Emperor could be held in check, and his supposed ambition neutralised. Wolsey was utterly mistaken; but the mistake was not an unnatural one. Charles, busy with his Italian wars, had treated the Lutheran schism with suspicious forbearance. Notwithstanding his Indian ingots his finances were disordered. Bourbon’s lansquenets had been left to pay themselves by plunder. They had sacked monasteries, pillaged cathedral plate, and ravished nuns with irreverent ferocity. The estates of the Church had been as little spared by them as Lombardy; and to Clement VII. the invasion was another inroad of barbarians, and Bourbon a second Attila. What Bourbon’s master meant by it, and what he might intend to do, was as uncertain to Clement as perhaps it was to Charles himself. In the prostrate, degraded, and desperate condition into which the Church was falling, any resolution was possible. To the clearest eyes in Europe the Papacy seemed tottering to its fall, and Charles’s hand, if he chose to raise it, might precipitate the catastrophe. To ask a pope at such a time to give mortal offence to the Spanish nation by agreeing to the divorce of Catherine of Aragon was to ask him to sign his death-warrant. No wonder, therefore, that he found difficulties. Yet it was to France and England that Clement had to look for help in his extremities. The divorce perhaps had as yet been no more than a suggestion, a part of a policy which was still in its infancy. It could wait at any rate for a more convenient season. Meantime he sent his secretary, Sanga, to Paris to beg aid; and to Henry personally he made a passionate appeal, imploring him not to desert the Apostolic See in its hour of extreme need. He apologised for his importunacy, but he said he hoped that history would not have to record that Italy had been devastated in the time of Clement VII. to the dishonour of the King and of Wolsey. If France and England failed him, he would himself be ruined. The Emperor would be universal monarch. They would open their eyes at last, but they would open them too late. So piteous was the entreaty that Henry when he read the Pope’s letter burst into tears.[2 - Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, Hen. VIII., vol. iv. p. 1112. – Hen. VIII. to Clement VII., Oct. 23, 1526. —Ib. p. 1145. Giberto to Gambara, Dec. 20, 1526. —Ib. p. 1207.] Clement had not been idle. He had brought his own small army into the field to oppose Bourbon; he joined the Italian League, and prepared to defend himself. He was called the father of Christendom, yet he was at open war with the most Catholic king. But Wolsey reasonably considered that unless the Western powers interfered the end would come.

If England was to act, she could act only in alliance with France. The change of policy was ill understood, and was not popular among Henry’s subjects. The divorce as yet had not been spoken of. No breath of such a purpose had gone abroad. But English sentiment was imperial, and could endure with equanimity even the afflictions of a pope. The King was more papal than his people; he allowed Wolsey to guide him, and negotiations were set on foot at once for a special treaty with France, one of the conditions of which was to be the marriage of the Princess Mary – allotted like a card in a game – either to Francis or to one of his sons; another condition being that the English crown should be settled upon her should Henry die without a legitimate son. Sir John Russell was simultaneously despatched to Rome with money to help the Pope in paying his troops and garrisoning the city. The ducats and the “kind words” which accompanied them “created incredible joy,” encouraged his Holiness to reject unjust conditions which had been offered, and restored him, if for the moment only, “from death to life.”[3 - Giberto, Bishop of Verona, to Wolsey, Feb. 10, 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. pp. 1282-3.] If Russell described correctly what he saw in passing through Italy, Clement had good cause for anxiety. “The Swabians and Spaniards,” he wrote, “had committed horrible atrocities. They had burnt houses to the value of two hundred million ducats, with all the churches, images, and priests that fell into their hands. They had compelled the priests and monks to violate the nuns. Even where they were received without opposition they had burned the place; they had not spared the boys, and they had carried off the girls; and whenever they found the Sacrament of the Church they had thrown it into a river or into the vilest place they could find. If God did not punish such cruelty and wickedness, men would infer that He did not trouble Himself about the affairs of this world.”[4 - Giberto, Bishop of Verona, to Wolsey, Feb. 10, 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, April 26, 1527, vol. iv. p. 1386.]

The news from Italy gave a fresh impulse to Wolsey’s policy and the Anglo-French Alliance, which was pushed forward in spite of popular disapproval. The Emperor, unable to pay, and therefore unable to control, his troops, became himself alarmed. He found himself pressed into a course which was stimulating the German revolt against the Papacy, and he professed himself anxious to end the war. Inigo de Mendoza, the Bishop of Burgos, was despatched to Paris to negotiate for a general pacification. From Paris he was to proceed to London to assure Henry of the Emperor’s inalienable friendship, and above all things to gain over Wolsey by the means which experience had shown to be the nearest way to Wolsey’s heart. The great Cardinal was already Charles’s pensionary, but the pension was several years in arrear. Mendoza was to tell him not only that the arrears should be immediately paid up, but that a second pension should be secured to him on the revenues of Milan, and that the Emperor would make him a further grant of 6,000 ducats annually out of the income of Spanish bishoprics. No means was to be spared to divert the hostility of so dangerous an enemy.[5 - Inigo de Mendoza to the Emperor, Jan. 19, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. pt. 2, p. 24.]

Wolsey was not to be so easily gained. He had formed large schemes which he did not mean to part with, and in the matter of pensions Francis I. was as liberal in promises as Charles. The Pope’s prospects were brightening. Besides the English money, he had improved his finances by creating six new cardinals, and making 240,000 crowns out of the disposition of these sacred offices.[6 - Alonzo Sanchez to Charles V., May 7, 1527. —Ib. p. 176.] A French embassy, with the Bishop of Tarbes at its head, came to England to complete the treaty with Henry in the Pope’s defence. Demands were to be made upon the Emperor; if those demands were refused, war was to follow, and the cement of the alliance was to be the marriage of Mary with a French prince. It is likely that other secret projects were in view also of a similar kind. The marriage of Henry with Catherine had been intended to secure the continuance of the alliance with Spain. Royal ladies were the counters with which politicians played; and probably enough there were thoughts of placing a French princess in Catherine’s place. However this may be, the legality of the King’s marriage with his nominal queen was suddenly and indirectly raised in the discussion of the terms of the treaty, when the Bishop of Tarbes inquired whether it was certain that Catherine’s daughter was legitimate.

Mr. Brewer, the careful and admirable editor of the “Foreign and Domestic Calendar of State Papers,” doubts whether the Bishop did anything of the kind. I cannot agree with Mr. Brewer. The Bishop of Tarbes was among the best-known diplomatists in Europe. He was actively concerned during subsequent years in the process of the divorce case in London, in Paris, and at Rome. The expressions which he used on this occasion were publicly appealed to by Henry in his addresses to the peers and to the country, in the public pleas which he laid before the English prelates, in the various repeated defences which he made for his conduct. It is impossible that the Bishop should have been ignorant of the use which was made of his name, and impossible equally to suppose that he would have allowed his name to be used unfairly. The Bishop of Tarbes was unquestionably the first person to bring the question publicly forward. It is likely enough, however, that his introduction of so startling a topic had been privately arranged between himself and Wolsey as a prelude to the further steps which were immediately to follow. For the divorce had by this time been finally resolved on as part of a general scheme for the alteration of the balance of power. The domestic reasons for it were as weighty as ever were alleged for similar separations. The Pope’s hesitation, it might be assumed, would now be overcome, since he had flung himself for support upon England and France, and his relations with the Emperor could hardly be worse than they were.

The outer world, and even the persons principally concerned, were taken entirely by surprise. For the two years during which it had been under consideration the secret had been successfully preserved. Not a hint had reached Catherine herself, and even when the match had been lighted by the Bishop of Tarbes the full meaning of it does not seem to have occurred to her. Mendoza, on his arrival in England, had found her disturbed; she was irritated at the position which had been given to the Duke of Richmond; she was angry, of course, at the French alliance; she complained that she was kept in the dark about public affairs; she was exerting herself to the utmost among the friends of the imperial connection to arrest Wolsey’s policy and maintain the ancient traditions; but of the divorce she had not heard a word. It was to come upon her like a thunderstroke.[7 - Mendoza to Charles V., March 18, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 110.]

Before the drama opens a brief description will not be out of place of the two persons who were to play the principal parts on the stage, as they were seen a year later by Ludovico Falieri, the Venetian ambassador in England. Of Catherine his account is brief.

“The Queen is of low stature and rather stout; very good and very religious; speaks Spanish, French, Flemish, and English; more beloved by the Islanders than any queen that has ever reigned; about forty-five years old, and has been in England thirty years. She has had two sons and one daughter. Both the sons died in infancy. One daughter survives.”

On the King, Falieri is more elaborate.

“In the 8th Henry such beauty of mind and body is combined as to surprise and astonish. Grand stature, suited to his exalted position, showing the superiority of mind and character; a face like an angel’s, so fair it is; his head bald like Cæsar’s, and he wears a beard, which is not the English custom. He is accomplished in every manly exercise, sits his horse well, tilts with his lance, throws the quoit, shoots with his bow excellent well; he is a fine tennis player, and he practises all these gifts with the greatest industry. Such a prince could not fail to have cultivated also his character and his intellect. He has been a student from his childhood; he knows literature, philosophy, and theology; speaks and writes Spanish, French, and Italian, besides Latin and English. He is kind, gracious, courteous, liberal, especially to men of learning, whom he is always ready to help. He appears religious also, generally hears two masses a day, and on holy days High Mass besides. He is very charitable, giving away ten thousand gold ducats annually among orphans, widows, and cripples.”[8 - Report from England, Nov. 10, 1531. —Venetian Calendar. Falieri arrived in England in 1528, and the general parts of the Report cover the intervening period.]

Such was the King, such the Queen, whom fate and the preposterous pretensions of the Papacy to dispense with the established marriage laws had irregularly mated, and whose separation was to shake the European world. Pope Clement complained in subsequent years that the burden of decision should have been thrown in the first instance upon himself. If the King had proceeded at the outset to try the question in the English courts; if a judgment had been given unfavourable to the marriage, and had he immediately acted upon it, Queen Catherine might have appealed to the Holy See; but accomplished facts were solid things. Her case might have been indefinitely protracted by legal technicalities till it died of itself. It would have been a characteristic method of escape out of the difficulty, and it was a view which Wolsey himself perhaps at first entertained. He knew that the Pope was unwilling to take the first step.

On the 17th of May, 1527, after a discussion of the Treaty with France, he called a meeting of his Legatine court at York Place. Archbishop Warham sate with him as assessor. The King attended, and the Cardinal, having stated that a question had arisen on the lawfulness of his marriage, enquired whether the King, for the sake of public morals and the good of his own soul, would allow the objections to be examined into. The King assented, and named a proctor. The Bull of Julius II. was introduced and considered. Wolsey declared that in a case so intricate the canon lawyers must be consulted, and he asked for the opinions of the assembled bishops. The bishops, one only excepted, gave dubious answers. The aged Bishop of Rochester, reputed the holiest and wisest of them, said decidedly that the marriage was good, and the Bull which legalised it sufficient.

These proceedings were not followed up, but the secrecy which had hitherto been observed was no longer possible, and Catherine and her friends learnt now for the first time the measure which was in contemplation. Mendoza, writing on the day following the York Place meeting to the Emperor, informed him, as a fact which he had learnt on reliable authority, that Wolsey, for a final stroke of wickedness, was scheming to divorce the Queen. She was so much alarmed that she did not venture herself to speak of it, but it was certain that the lawyers and bishops had been invited to sign a declaration that, being his brother’s widow, she could not be the wife of the King. The Pope, she was afraid, might be tempted to take part against her, or the Cardinal himself might deliver judgment as Papal Legate. Her one hope was in the Emperor. The cause of the action taken against her was her fidelity to the Imperial interests. Nothing as yet had been made formally public, and she begged that the whole matter might be kept as private as possible.[9 - Inigo de Mendoza to Charles V., May 18, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 193.]

That the Pope would be willing, if he dared, to gratify Henry at Charles’s expense was only too likely. The German Lutherans and the German Emperor were at the moment his most dangerous enemies. France and England were the only Powers who seemed willing to assist him, and a week before the meeting of Wolsey’s court he had experienced in the most terrible form what the imperial hostility might bring upon him. On the 7th of that same month of May the army of the Duke of Bourbon had taken Rome by storm. The city was given up to pillage. Reverend cardinals were dragged through the streets on mules’ backs, dishonoured and mutilated. Convents of nuns were abandoned to the licentious soldiery. The horrors of the capture may have been exaggerated, but it is quite certain that to holy things or holy persons no respect was paid, and that the atrocities which in those days were usually perpetrated in stormed towns were on this occasion eminently conspicuous. The unfortunate Pope, shut up in the Castle of St. Angelo, looked down from its battlements upon scenes so dreadful that it must have appeared as if the Papacy and the Church itself had been overtaken by the final judgment. We regard the Spaniards as a nation of bigots, we consider it impossible that the countrymen of Charles and Philip could have been animated by any such bitterness against the centre of Catholic Christendom. Charles himself is not likely to have intended the humiliation of the Holy See. But Clement had reason for his misgivings, and Wolsey’s policy was not without excuse. Lope de Soria was Charles’s Minister at Genoa, and Lope de Soria’s opinions, freely uttered, may have been shared by many a Catholic besides himself. On the 25th of May, a fortnight after the storm, he wrote to his master the following noticeable letter: —

“The sack of Rome must be regarded as a visitation from God, who permits his servant the Emperor to teach his Vicar on earth and other Christian princes that their wicked purposes shall be defeated, the unjust wars which they have raised shall cease, peace be restored to Christendom, the faith be exalted, and heresy extirpated… Should the Emperor think that the Church of God is not what it ought to be, and that the Pope’s temporal power emboldens him to promote war among Christian princes, I cannot but remind your Majesty that it will not be a sin, but a meritorious action, to reform the Church; so that the Pope’s authority be confined exclusively to his own spiritual affairs, and temporal affairs to be left to Cæsar, since by right what is God’s belongs to God, and what is Cæsar’s to Cæsar. I have been twenty-eight years in Italy, and I have observed that the Popes have been the sole cause of all the wars and miseries during that time. Your Imperial Majesty, as Supreme Lord on earth, is bound to apply a remedy to that evil.”[10 - Lope de Soria to Charles V., May 25, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 209.]

Heretical English and Germans were not the only persons who could recognise the fitness of the secular supremacy of princes over popes and Churches. Such thoughts must have passed through the mind of Charles himself, and of many more besides him. De Soria’s words might have been dictated by Luther or Thomas Cromwell. Had the Emperor at that moment placed himself at the head of the Reformation, all later history would have been different. One statesman at any rate had cause to fear that this might be what was about to happen. Wolsey was the embodiment of everything most objectionable and odious to the laity in the ecclesiastical administration of Europe. To defend the Papacy and to embarrass Charles was the surest method of protecting himself and his order. The divorce was an incident in the situation, but not the least important. Catherine represented the Imperialist interest in England. To put her away was to make the breach with her countrymen and kindred irreparable. He took upon himself to assure the King that after the last outrage the Pope would agree to anything that France and England demanded of him, and would trust to his allies to bear him harmless. That the divorce was a thing reasonable in itself to ask for, and certain to be conceded by any pope who was free to act on his own judgment, was assumed as a matter of course. Sir Gregory Casalis, the English agent at Rome, was instructed to obtain access to Clement in St. Angelo, to convey to him the indignation felt in England at his treatment, and then to insist on the illegality of the King’s relations with Catherine, on the King’s own scruples of conscience, and on the anxiety of his subjects that there should be a male heir to the crown. The “urgent cause” such as was necessary to be produced when exceptional actions were required of the popes was the imminence or even certainty of civil war if no such heir was born.

Catherine meanwhile had again communicated with Mendoza. She had spoken to her husband, and Henry, since further reticence was impossible, had told her that they had been living in mortal sin, and that a separation was necessary. A violent scene had followed, with natural tears and reproaches.[11 - Mendoza to Charles V., July 13, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. ii. part 2, p. 276.] The King endeavoured to console her, but it was not a matter where consolation could avail. Wolsey advised him to deal with her gently, till it was seen what the Pope and the King of France would do in the matter. Wolsey himself was to go immediately to Paris to see Francis, and consult with him on the measures necessary to be taken in consequence of the Pope’s imprisonment. It was possible that Clement, finding himself helpless, might become a puppet in the Emperor’s hands. Under such circumstances he could not be trusted by other countries with the spiritual authority attaching to his office, and schemes were being formed for some interim arrangement by which France and England were to constitute themselves into a separate patriarchate, with Wolsey at its head as Archbishop of Rouen. Mendoza says that this proposal had been actually made to Wolsey by the French Ambassador.[12 - Ib. vol. iii. part 2, p. 273.] In Spain it was even believed to be contemplated as a permanent modification of the ecclesiastical system. The Imperial Councillors at Valladolid told the Venetian Minister that the Cardinal intended to separate the Churches of England and France from that of Rome, saying that as the Pope was a prisoner he was not to be obeyed, and that even if the Emperor released him, he still would not be free unless his fortresses and territory now in the Emperor’s hands were restored to him.[13 - Andrea Navagero to the Signory, July 17, 1527. —Venetian Calendar.] Wolsey had reason for anxiety, for Catherine and Mendoza were writing to the Emperor insisting that he should make the Pope revoke Wolsey’s Legatine powers.

In spite of efforts to keep secret the intended divorce, it soon became known throughout England. The Queen was personally popular. The nation generally detested France, and looked on the Emperor as their hereditary friend. The reasons for the divorce might influence statesmen, but did not touch the body of the people. They naturally took the side of an injured wife, and if Mendoza can be believed (and there is no reason why he should not be believed), the first impression was decidedly unfavourable to a project which was regarded as part of the new policy. Mendoza made the most of the opposition. He told the Emperor that if six or seven thousand men were landed in Cornwall, forty thousand Englishmen would rise and join them.[14 - Mendoza to Charles V., July 17, 1527. —Spanish Calendar.] He saw Wolsey – he reasoned with him, and when he found reason ineffectual, he named the bribe which the Emperor was willing to give. Knowing what Francis was bidding, he baited his hook more liberally. He spoke of the Papacy: “how the chair was now in the Emperor’s hands, and the Emperor, if Wolsey deserved it, would no doubt promote his elevation.” The glittering temptation was unavailing. The papal chair had been Wolsey’s highest ambition, but he remained unmoved. He said that he had served the Emperor in the past out of disinterested regard. He still trusted that the Emperor would replace the Pope and restore the Church. Mendoza’s answer was not reassuring to an English statesman. He said that both the spiritual and temporal powers were now centred in his master, and he advised Wolsey, if he desired an arrangement, to extend his journey from France, go on to Spain, and see the Emperor in person. It was precisely this centering which those who had charge of English liberties had a right to resent. Divorce or no divorce, they could not allow a power possessed of so much authority in the rest of Christendom to be the servant of a single prince. The divorce was but an illustration of the situation, and such a Papacy as Mendoza contemplated would reduce England and all Catholic Europe into fiefs of the Empire.

CHAPTER II

Mission of Wolsey to Paris – Visits Bishop Fisher on the way – Anxieties of the Emperor – Letter of the Emperor to Henry VIII. – Large offers to Wolsey – Address of the French Cardinals to the Pope – Anne Boleyn chosen by Henry to succeed Catherine – Surprise and displeasure of Wolsey – Fresh attempts of the Emperor to bribe him – Wolsey forced to continue to advocate the divorce – Mission of Dr. Knight to Rome – The Pope at Orvieto – The King applies for a dispensation to make a second marriage – Language of the dispensation demanded – Inferences drawn from it – Alleged intrigue between the King and Mary Boleyn.

It was believed at the time – and it was the tradition afterwards – that Wolsey, in his mission to Paris, intended to replace Catherine by a French princess, the more surely to commit Francis to the support of Henry in the divorce, and to strengthen the new alliance. Nothing can be inherently more likely. The ostensible reason, however, was to do away with any difficulties which might have been suggested by the objection of the Bishop of Tarbes to the legitimacy of the Princess Mary. If illegitimate, she would be no fitting bride for the Duke of Orleans. But she had been born bonâ fide parentum. There was no intention of infringing her prospective rights or of altering her present position. Her rank and title were to be secured to her in amplest measure.

The Cardinal went upon his journey with the splendour attaching to his office and befitting a churchman who was aspiring to be the spiritual president of the two kingdoms. On his way to the coast he visited two prelates whose support to his policy was important. Archbishop Warham had been cold about the divorce, if not openly hostile. Wolsey found him “not much changed from his first fashion,” but admitting that, although it might be unpleasant to the Queen, truth and justice must prevail. Bishop Fisher was a more difficult subject. He had spoken in the Legate’s court in Catherine’s favour. It was from him, as the King supposed, that Catherine herself had learnt what was impending over her. Wolsey called at his palace as he passed through Rochester. He asked the Bishop plainly if he had been in communication with the Queen. The Bishop, after some hesitation, confessed that the Queen had sought his advice, and said that he had declined to give an opinion without the King’s command. Before Wolsey left London, at a last interview at York Place, the King had directed him to explain “the whole matter” to the Bishop. He went through the entire history, mentioned the words of the Bishop of Tarbes, and discussed the question which had risen upon it, on account of which he had been sent into France. Finally, he described the extreme violence with which Catherine had received the intelligence.

The Bishop greatly blamed the conduct of the Queen, and said he thought that if he might speak to her he might bring her to submission. He agreed, or seemed to agree, that the marriage had been irregular, though he did not himself think that it could now be broken. Others of the bishops, he thought, agreed with him; but he was satisfied that the King meant nothing against the laws of God, and would be fully justified in submitting his misgivings to the Pope.[15 - Wolsey to Henry VIII., July 5. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2. Bishop Fisher to Paul, ibid., p. 1471.]

Mendoza’s and the Queen’s letters had meanwhile been despatched to Spain, to add to the anxieties which were overwhelming the Emperor. Nothing could have been less welcome at such a juncture than a family quarrel with his uncle of England, whose friendship he was still hoping to retain. The bird that he had caged at Rome was no convenient prisoner. The capture of Rome had not been ordered by himself, though politically he was obliged to maintain it. The time did not suit for the ambitious Church reforms of Lope de Soria. Peace would have to be made with the Pope on some moderate conditions. His own Spain was hardly quieted after the revolt of the Comunidades. Half Germany was in avowed apostasy from the Church of Rome. The Turks were overrunning Hungary, and sweeping the Mediterranean with their pirate fleets, and the passionate and restless Francis was watching his opportunity to revenge Pavia and attack his captor in the Low Countries and in Italy. The great Emperor was moderate, cautious, prudent to a fault. In a calmer season he might have been tempted to take the Church in hand; and none understood better the condition into which it had fallen. But he was wise enough to know that if a reform of the Papacy was undertaken at all it must be undertaken with the joint consent of the other Christian princes, and all his present efforts were directed to peace. He was Catherine’s natural guardian. Her position in England had been hitherto a political security for Henry’s friendship. It was his duty and his interest to defend her, and he meant to do it; not, however, by sending roving expeditions to land in Cornwall and raise a civil war; all means were to be tried before that; to attempt such a thing, he well knew, would throw Europe into a blaze. The letters found him at Valladolid. He replied, of course, that he was shocked at a proceeding so unlooked for and so scandalous, but he charged Mendoza to be moderate and to confine himself to remonstrance.[16 - Charles V. to Inigo de Mendoza, July 29. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1500.] He wrote himself to Henry – confidentially, as from friend to friend, and ciphering his letter with his own hand. He was unable to believe, he said, that Henry could contemplate seriously bringing his domestic discomforts before the world. Even supposing the marriage illegitimate – even supposing that the Pope had no power to dispense in such cases – “it would be better and more honourable to keep the matter secret, and to work out a remedy.” He bade Mendoza remind the King that to question the dispensing power affected the position of other princes besides his own; that to touch the legitimacy of his daughter would increase the difficulties with the succession, and not remove them. He implored the King “to keep the matter secret, as he would do himself.” Meanwhile, he told Mendoza, for Catherine’s comfort, that he had written to demand a mild brief from the Pope to stop the scandal. He had requested him, as Catherine had suggested, to revoke Wolsey’s powers, or at least to command that neither he nor any English Court should try the case. If heard at all it must be heard before his Holiness and the Sacred College.[17 - Ibid.] But he could not part with the hope that he might still bring Wolsey to his own and the Queen’s side. A council of Cardinals was to meet at Avignon to consider the Pope’s captivity. The Cardinal of England was expected to attend. Charles himself might go to Perpignan. Wolsey might meet him there, discuss the state of Europe, and settle the King’s secret affair at the same time. Should this be impossible, he charged Mendoza once more to leave no stone unturned to recover Wolsey’s friendship. “In our name,” he said, “you will make him the following offers: —

“1. The payment of all arrears on his several pensions, amounting to 9,000 ducats annually.

“2. Six thousand additional ducats annually until such a time as a bishoprick or other ecclesiastical endowment of the same revenue becomes vacant in our kingdom.

“3. The Duke, who is to have Milan, to give him a Marquisate in that Duchy, with an annual rent of 12,000 ducats, or 15,000 if the smaller sum be not enough; the said Marquisate to be held by the Cardinal during his life, and to pass after him to any heir whom he shall appoint.”[18 - Charles V. to Mendoza, Sept. 30, 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. p. 1569.]

As if this was not sufficient, the Emperor paid a yet further tribute to the supposed all-powerful Cardinal. He wrote himself to him as to his “good friend.” He said that if there was anything in his dominions which the Cardinal wished to possess he had only to name it, as he considered Wolsey the best friend that he had in the world.[19 - The Emperor to the Cardinal of York, Aug. 31, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 357.]

For the ministers of great countries deliberately to sell themselves to foreign princes was the custom of the age. The measure of public virtue which such a custom indicates was not exalted; and among the changes introduced by the Reformation the abolition or suspension of it was not the least beneficial. Thomas Cromwell, when he came to power, set the example of refusal, and corruption of public men on a scale so scandalously enormous was no more heard of. Gold, however, had flowed in upon Wolsey in such enormous streams and from so many sources that the Emperor’s munificence and attention failed to tempt him. On reaching Paris he found Francis bent upon war, and willing to promise anything for Henry’s assistance. The belief at the French Court was that the Emperor, hearing that the Churches of England and France meant to decline from their obedience to the Roman Communion, would carry the Pope to Spain; that Clement would probably be poisoned there, and the Apostolic See would be established permanently in the Peninsula.[20 - Wolsey to Henry VIII., Aug. – , 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2.] Wolsey himself wrote this, and believed it, or desired Henry to believe it, proving the extreme uncertainty among the best-informed of contemporary politicians as to the probable issue of the capture of Rome. The French Cardinals drew and sent an address to the Pope, intimating that as long as he was in confinement they could accept no act of his as lawful, and would not obey it. Wolsey signed at the head of them. The Cardinals Salviati, Bourbon, Lorraine, and the Chancellor Cardinal of Sens, signed after him.[21 - The Cardinals of France to Clement VII., Sept. 16, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 383.] The first stroke in the game had been won by Wolsey. Had the Pope recalled his powers as legate, an immediate schism might have followed. But a more fatal blow had been prepared for him by his master in England. Trusting to the Cardinal’s promises that the Pope would make no difficulty about the divorce, Henry had considered himself at liberty to choose a successor to Catherine. He had suffered once in having allowed politics to select a wife for him. This time he intended to be guided by his own inclination. When Elizabeth afterwards wished to marry Leicester, Lord Sussex said she had better fix after her own liking; there would be the better chance of the heir that her realm was looking for. Her father fixed also after his liking in selecting Elizabeth’s mother.