VOLUME IX SLICE V "English History" (continued 6)

In nothing is the general stagnation of the church in the later 15th century shown better than by the gradual cessation of the monastic chronicles. The stream of narrative was still flowing strongly in 1400; by 1485 it has run dry, The monasteries. even St Albans, the mother of historians, produced no annalist after Whethamstede, whose story ceases early in the Wars of the Roses. The only monastic chronicler who went on writing for a few years after the extinction of the house of York was the “Croyland continuator.” For the last two-thirds of the century the various “London chronicles,” the work of laymen, are much more important than anything which was produced in the religious houses. The regular clergy indeed seem to have been sunk in intellectual torpor. Their numbers were falling off, their zeal was gone; there is little good to be said of them save that they were still in some cases endowing England with splendid architectural decorations. But even in the wealthier abbeys we find traces of thriftless administration, idleness, self-indulgence and occasionally grave moral scandals. The parochial clergy were probably in a healthier condition; but the old abuses of pluralism and non-residence were as rampant as ever, and though their work may have been in many cases honourably carried out, it is certain that energy and intelligence were at a low ebb.

The moral faults of the church only reflected those of the nation. It was a hard and selfish generation which witnessed the Wars of the Roses and the dictatorship of Edward IV. The iniquitous French war, thirty years Moral decay of the nation. of plunder and demoralization, had corrupted the minds of the governing classes before the civil strife began. Afterwards the constant and easy changes of allegiance, as one faction or the other was in the ascendant, the wholesale confiscations and attainders, the never-ending executions, the sudden prosperity of adventurers, the premium on time-serving and intrigue, sufficed to make the whole nation cynical and sordid. The claim of the Yorkists to represent constitutional opposition to misgovernment became a mere hypocrisy. The claim of the Lancastrians to represent loyalty soon grew almost as hollow. Edward IV. with his combination of vicious self-indulgence and spasmodic cruelty was no unfit representative The “Paston Letters.” of his age. The Paston Letters, that unique collection of the private correspondence of a typical family of nouveaux riches, thriftless, pushing, unscrupulous, give us the true picture of the time. All that can be said in favour of the Yorkists is that they restored a certain measure of national prosperity, and that their leaders had one redeeming virtue in their addiction to literature. The learning which had died out in monasteries began to flourish again in the corrupt soil of the court. Most of Edward’s favourites had literary tastes. His constable Tiptoft, the “butcher earl” of Worcester, was a figure who might have stepped out of the Italian Renaissance. Influence of the Italian Renaissance. A graduate of Pavia, a learned lawyer, who translated Caesar and Cicero, composed works both in Latin and English, and habitually impaled his victims, he was a man of a type hitherto unknown in England. Antony, Lord Rivers, the queen’s brother, was a mere adventurer, but a poet of some merit, and a great patron of Caxton. Hastings, the Bourchiers, and other of the king’s friends were minor patrons of literature. It is curious to find that Caxton, an honest man, and an enthusiast as to the future of the art of printing, which he had introduced into England, waxes enthusiastic as to the merits of the intelligent but unscrupulous peers who took an interest in his endeavours. Of the detestable Tiptoft he writes that “there flowered in virtue and cunning none like him among the lords of the temporalty in science and moral virtue”! And this is no time-serving praise of a patron, but disinterested tribute to a man who had perished long before on the scaffold.

The uneventful latter half of the reign of Edward IV. ended with his death at the age of forty-one on the 9th of April 1483. He had ruined a splendid constitution by the combination of sloth and evil living, and during his last Death of Edward IV. years had been sinking slowly into his grave, unable to take the field or to discharge the more laborious duties of royalty. Since Clarence’s death he had been gradually falling into the habit of transferring the conduct of great matters of state to his active and hard-working youngest brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who had served him well and faithfully ever since he first took the field at Barnet. Richard, duke of Gloucester. Gloucester passed as a staid and religious prince, and if there was blood on his hands, the same could be said of every statesman of his time. His sudden plunge into crime and usurpation after his brother’s death was wholly unexpected by the nation. Indeed it was his previous reputation for loyalty and moderation which made his scandalous coup d’état of 1483 possible. No prince with a sinister reputation would have had the chance of executing the series of crimes which placed him on the throne. But when Richard declared that he was the victim of plots and intrigues, and was striking down his enemies only to defend his own life and honour, he was for some time believed.

At the moment of King Edward’s death his elder son by Elizabeth Woodville, Edward, prince of Wales, was twelve; his younger son Richard, duke of York, was nine. It was clear that there would be a long minority, and Gloucester proclaims himself protector. that the only possible claimants for the regency were the queen and Richard of Gloucester. Elizabeth was personally unpopular, and the rapacity and insolence of her family was well known. Hence when Richard of Gloucester seized on the person of the young king, and imprisoned Lord Rivers and Sir Richard Grey, the queen’s brother and son, on the pretence that they were conspiring against him, his action was regarded with equanimity by the people. Nor did the fact that the duke took the title of “protector and defender of the realm” cause any surprise. Suspicions only became rife after Richard had seized and beheaded without any trial, Lord Hastings, the late king’s most familiar friend, and had arrested at the same moment the archbishop of York, Morton, bishop of Ely, and Lord Stanley, all persons of unimpeachable loyalty to the house of Edward IV. It was not plausible to accuse such persons of plotting with the queen to overthrow the protector, and public opinion began to turn against Gloucester. Nevertheless he went on recklessly with his design, having already enlisted the support of a party of the greater peers, who were ready to follow him to any length of treason. These confidants, the duke of Buckingham, the lords Howard and Lovel, and a few more, must have known from an early date that he was aiming at the crown, though it is improbable that they suspected that his plan involved the murder of the rightful heirs as well as mere usurpation.

On the 16th of June, Richard, using the aged archbishop Bourchier as his tool, got the little duke of York out of his mother’s hands, and sent him to join his brother in the Tower. A few days later, having packed London with his own armed retainers and those of Buckingham and his other confidants, he openly put forward his pretensions to the throne. Edward IV., as he asserted, had been privately contracted to Lady Eleanor Talbot before he ever met Queen Elizabeth. His children therefore were bastards, the offspring of a bigamous union. As to the son and daughter of the duke of Clarence, their blood had been corrupted by their father’s attainder, and they could not be reckoned as heirs to the crown. He himself, therefore, was the legitimate successor of Edward IV. This preposterous theory was set forth by Buckingham, first to the mayor and corporation of London, and next day to an assembly of the estates of the realm held in St Paul’s. Cowed by the show of armed force, and remembering the fate of Hastings, the two assemblies received the claim with silence which gave consent. Richard, after a Richard III. crowned. hypocritical show of reluctance, allowed himself to be saluted as king, and was crowned on the 6th of July 1483. Before the coronation ceremony he had issued orders for the execution of the queen’s relatives, who had been in prison since the beginning of May. He paid his adherents lavishly for their support, making Lord Howard duke of Norfolk, and giving Buckingham enormous grants of estates and offices.

Having accomplished his coup d’état Richard started for a royal progress through the Midlands, and a few days after his departure sent back secret orders to London for the murder of his two nephews in the Tower. There is Murder of the princes. no reason to doubt that they were secretly smothered on or about the 15th of July by his agent Sir James Tyrrell, or that the bones found buried under a staircase in the fortress two hundred years after belonged to the two unhappy lads. But the business was kept dark at the time, and it was long before any one could assert with certainty that they were dead or alive. Richard never published any statement as to their end, though some easy tale of a fever, a conflagration, or an accident might have served him better than the mere silence that he employed. For while many persons believed that the princes still existed there was room for all manner of impostures and false rumours.

The usurper’s reign was from the first a troubled one. Less than three months after his coronation the first insurrection broke out; it was headed—strangely enough—by the duke of Buckingham, who seems to have been shocked Buckingham’s rebellion. by the murder of the princes; he must have been one of the few who had certain information of the crime. He did not take arms in his own cause, though after the house of York the house of Buckingham had the best claim to the throne, as representing Thomas of Woodstock, the youngest son of Edward III. His plan was to unite the causes of York and Lancaster by wedding the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest sister of the murdered princes, to Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, a young exile who represented the very doubtful claim of the Beauforts to the Lancastrian heritage. Henry was the son of Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John, first duke of Somerset, and the niece of Edmund, second duke, who fell at St Albans. All her male kinsmen had been exterminated in the Wars of the Roses.

This promising scheme was to be supported by a rising of those Yorkists who rejected the usurpation of Richard III., and by the landing on the south coast of Henry of Richmond with a body of Lancastrian exiles and Execution of Buckingham. foreign mercenaries. But good organization was wanting, and chance fought for the king. A number of scattered risings in the south were put down by Richard’s troops, while Buckingham, who had raised his banner in Wales, was prevented from bringing aid by a week of extraordinary rains which made the Severn impassable. Finding that the rest of the plan had miscarried, Buckingham’s retainers melted away from him, and he was forced to fly. A few days later he was betrayed, handed over to the king, and beheaded (Nov. 2, 1483). Meanwhile Richmond’s little fleet was dispersed by the same storms that scattered Buckingham’s army, and he was forced to return to Brittany without having landed in England.

Here King Richard’s luck ended. Though he called a parliament early in 1484, and made all manner of gracious promises of good governance, he felt that his position was insecure. The nation was profoundly disgusted with his unscrupulous policy, and the greater part of the leaders of the late insurrection had escaped abroad and were weaving new plots. Early in the spring he lost his only son and heir, Edward, prince of Wales, and the question of the succession to the crown was opened from a new point of view. After some hesitation Richard named his nephew John de la Pole, earl of Lincoln, a son of his sister, as his heir. But he also bethought him of another and a most repulsive plan for strengthening his position. His queen, Anne Neville, the daughter of the kingmaker, was on her death-bed. With indecent haste he began to devise a scheme for marrying his niece Elizabeth, whose brothers he had murdered but a year before. Knowledge of this scheme is said to have shortened the life of the unfortunate Anne, and many did not scruple to say that her husband had made away with her.

When the queen was dead, and some rumours of the king’s intentions got abroad, the public indignation was so great that Richard’s councillors had to warn him to disavow the projected marriage, if he wished to retain a single Henry of Richmond lands at Milford. adherent. He yielded, and made public complaint that he had been slandered—which few believed. Meanwhile the conspirators of 1483 were busy in organizing another plan of invasion. This time it was successfully carried out, and the earl of Richmond landed at Milford Haven with many exiles, both Yorkists and Lancastrians, and 1000 mercenaries lent him by the princess regent of France. The Welsh joined him in great numbers, not forgetting that by his Tudor descent he was their own kinsman, and when he reached Shrewsbury English adherents also began to flock in to his banner, for Battle of Bosworth. the whole country was seething with discontent, and Richard III. had but few loyal adherents. When the rivals met at Bosworth Field (Aug. 22, 1485) the king’s army was far the larger, but the greater part of it was determined not to fight. When battle was joined some left the field and many joined the pretender. Richard, however, refused to fly, and was slain, fighting to the last, along with the duke of Norfolk and a few other of his more desperate partisans. The slaughter was small, for treason, not the sword, had settled the day. The battered crown which had fallen from Richard’s helmet was set on the victor’s head by Lord Stanley, the chief of the Yorkist peers who had joined his standard, and his army hailed him by the new title of Henry VII.

No monarch of England since William the Conqueror, not excluding Stephen and Henry IV., could show such a poor title to the throne as the first of the Tudor kings. His claim to represent the house of Lancaster was of the Henry VII. weakest—when Henry IV. had assented to the legitimating of his brothers the Beauforts, he had attached a clause to the act, to provide that they were given every right save that of counting in the line of succession to the throne. The true heir to the house of John of Gaunt should have been sought among the descendants of his eldest legitimate daughter, not among those of his base-born sons. The earl of Richmond had been selected by the conspirators as their figure-head mainly because he was known as a young man of ability, and because he was unmarried and could therefore take to wife the princess Elizabeth, and so absorb the Yorkist claim in his own. This had been the essential part of the bargain, and Henry was ready to carry it out, but he insisted that he should first be recognized as king in his own right, lest it might be held that he ruled merely as his destined wife’s consort. He was careful to hold his first parliament and get his title acknowledged before he married the princess. When he had done so, he had the triple claim by conquest, by election and by inheritance, safely united. Yet his position was even then insecure; the vicissitudes of the last thirty years had shaken the old prestige of the name of king, and a weaker and less capable man than Henry Tudor might have failed to retain the crown that he had won. There were plenty of possible pretenders in existence; the earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had recognized as his heir, was still alive; the two children of the duke of Clarence might be made the tools of conspirators; and there was a widespread doubt as to whether the sons of Edward IV. had actually died in the Tower. The secrecy with which their uncle had carried out their murder was destined to be a sore hindrance to his successor.

Bosworth Field is often treated as the last act of the Wars of the Roses. This is an error; they were protracted for twelve years after the accession of Henry VII., and did not really end till the time of Blackheath Field and the Early years of the reign. siege of Exeter (1497). The position of the first Tudor king is misconceived if his early years are regarded as a time of strong governance and well-established order. On the contrary he was in continual danger, and was striving with all the resources of a ready and untiring mind to rebuild foundations that were absolutely rotten. Phenomena like the Cornish revolt (which recalls Cade’s insurrection) and the Yorkshire rising of 1489, which began with the Insurrections and plots. death of the earl of Northumberland, show that at any moment whole counties might take arms in sheer lawlessness, or for some local grievance. Loyalty was such an uncertain thing that the king might call out great levies yet be forced to doubt whether they would fight for him—at Stoke Field it seems that a large part of Henry’s army misbehaved, much as that of Richard III. had done at Bosworth. The demoralization brought about by the evil years between 1453 and 1483 could not be lived down in a day—any sort of treason was possible to the generation that had seen the career of Warwick and the usurpation of Gloucester. The survivors of that time were capable of taking arms for any cause that offered a chance of unreasonable profit, and no one’s loyalty could be trusted. Did not Sir William Stanley, the best paid of those who betrayed Richard III., afterwards lose his head for a deliberate plot to betray Henry VII.? The various attempts that were made to overturn the new dynasty seem contemptible to the historian of the 20th century. They were not so contemptible at the time, because England and Ireland were full of adventurers who were ready to back any cause, and who looked on the king of the moment as no more than a successful member of their own class—a base-born Welshman who had been lucky enough to become the figurehead of the movement that had overturned an unpopular usurper. The organizing spirits of the early troubles of the reign of Henry VII. were irreconcilable Yorkists who had suffered by the change of dynasty; but their hopes of success rested less on their own strength than on the not ill-founded notion that England would tire of any ruler who had to raise taxes and reward his partisans. The position bore a curious resemblance to that of the early years of Henry IV., a king who, like Henry VII., had to vindicate a doubtful elective title to the throne by miracles of cunning and activity. The later representative of the house of Lancaster was fortunate, however, in having less formidable enemies than the earlier; the power of the baronage had been shaken by the Wars of the Roses no less than the power of the crown; so many old estates had passed rapidly from hand to hand, so many old titles were represented by upstarts destitute of local influence, that the feudal danger had become far less. Risings like that of the Percies in 1403 were not the things which the seventh Henry had to fear. He was lucky too in having no adversary of genius of the type of Owen Glendower. Welsh national spirit indeed was enlisted on his own side. Yet leaderless seditions and the plots of obvious impostors sufficed to make his throne tremble, and a ruler less resolute, less wary, and less unscrupulous might have been overthrown.

The first of the king’s troubles was an abortive rising in the north riding of Yorkshire, the only district where Richard III. seems to have enjoyed personal popularity. It was led by Lord Lovel, Richard’s chamberlain and admiral; but the insurgents dispersed when Henry marched against them with a large force (1486), and Lovel took refuge in Flanders with Margaret of York, the widow of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, whose dower towns were the refuge of all English exiles, and whose coffers were always open to subsidize plots against her niece’s husband. Under the auspices of this rancorous princess the second conspiracy was hatched in the following year (1487). Its leaders were Lovel and John, earl of Lincoln, whom Richard III. had designated as his heir. But the Yorkist banner was to be raised, not in the name of Lincoln, but in that of the boy Edward of Clarence, then a prisoner in the Tower. His absence and captivity might seem a fatal hindrance, but the conspirators had Lambert Simnel. prepared a “double” who was to take his name till he could be released. This was a lad named Lambert Simnel, the son of an Oxford organ-maker, who bore a personal resemblance to the young captive. The conspirators seem to have argued that Henry VII. would not proceed to murder the real Edward, but would rather exhibit him to prove the imposition; if he took the more drastic alternative Lincoln could fall back on his own claim to the crown.

In May 1487 Lincoln and Lovel landed in Ireland accompanied by other exiles and 2000 German mercenaries. The cause of York was popular in the Pale, and the Anglo-Irish barons seem to have conceived the notion that Henry VII. was likely to prove too strong and capable a king to suit their convenience. The invading army was welcomed by almost all the lords, and the spurious Clarence was crowned at Dublin by the name of Edward VI. A few weeks later Lincoln had recruited his army with 4000 or 5000 Irish adventurers under Thomas Fitzgerald, son of the earl of Kildare, and had taken ship for England. He landed in Lancashire, and pushed forward, hoping to gather the English Yorkists to his aid. But few had joined him when Battle of Stoke. King Henry brought him to action at Stoke, near Newark, on the 17th of July. Despite the doubtful conduct of part of the royal army, and the fierce resistance of the Germans and Irish, the rebel army was routed. Lincoln and Fitzgerald were slain; Lovel disappeared in the rout; the young impostor Simnel was taken prisoner. Henry treated him with politic contempt, and made him a cook boy in his kitchen. He lived for many years after in the royal household. The Irish lords were pardoned on renewing their oaths of fealty; the king did not wish to entangle himself in costly campaigns beyond St George’s Channel till he had made his position in England more stable.

The Yorkist cause was crushed for four years, till it was raised again by Margaret of Burgundy, with an imposture even more preposterous than that of Lambert Simnel. In the intervening space, however, while Henry VII. was Foreign alliances. comparatively undisturbed by domestic rebellion, he found opportunity for a first tentative experiment at interfering in European politics. He allied himself with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and with Maximilian of Austria, who was ruling the Netherlands in behalf of his young son, Philip, the heir of the Burgundian inheritance, for the purpose of preventing France from annexing Brittany, the last great fief of the crown which had not yet been absorbed into the Valois royal domain. This struggle, the only continental war in which the first of the Tudors risked his fortunes, was not prosecuted with any great energy, and came to a necessary end when Anne, duchess of Brittany, in whose behalf it was being waged, disappointed her allies by marrying Charles VIII. of her own free will (Dec. 1491). Henry very wisely proceeded to get out of the war on the best terms possible, and, to the disgust of Maximilian, sold peace to the French king for 600,000 crowns, as well as an additional sum representing arrears of the pension which Louis XI. had Treaty of Étaples. been bound to pay to Edward IV. This treaty of Étaples was, in short, a repetition of Edward’s treaty of Picquigny, equally profitable and less disgraceful, for Maximilian of Austria, whom Henry thus abandoned, had given more cause of offence than had Charles of Burgundy in 1475. Domestic malcontents did not scruple to hint that the king, like his father-in-law before him, had made war on France, not with any hope of renewing the glories of Creçy or Agincourt, still less with any design of helping his allies, but purely to get first grants from his parliament, and then a war indemnity from his enemies. In any case he was wise to make peace. France was now too strong for England, and both Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain were selfish and shifty allies. Moreover, it was known that the one dominating desire of Charles VIII. was to conquer Italy, and it was clear that his ambitions in that direction were not likely to prove dangerous to England.

In the year of the treaty of Étaples the Yorkist conspiracies began once more to thicken, and Henry was fortunate to escape with profit from the French war before his domestic troubles recommenced. Ever since 1483 it had been Yorkist plots. Perkin Warbeck. rumoured that one or both of the sons of Edward IV. had escaped, not having been murdered in the Tower. Of this widespread belief the plotters now took advantage; they held that much more could be accomplished with such a claim than by using that of the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, whose chances were so severely handicapped by his being still the prisoner of Henry VII. The scheme for producing a false Plantagenet was first renewed in Ireland, where Simnel’s imposture had been so easily taken up a few years before. The tool selected was one Perkin Warbeck, a handsome youth of seventeen or eighteen, the son of a citizen of Tournai, who had lived for some time in London, where Perkin had actually been born. There is a bare possibility that the young adventurer may have been an illegitimate son of Edward IV.; his likeness to the late king was much noticed. When he declared himself to be Richard of York, he obtained some support in Ireland from the earl of Desmond and other lords; but he did not risk open rebellion till he had visited Flanders, and had been acknowledged as her undoubted nephew by Duchess Margaret. Maximilian of Austria also took up his cause, as a happy means of revenging himself on Henry VII. for the treaty of Étaples. There can be small doubt that both the duchess and the German King (Maximilian had succeeded to his father’s crown in 1493) were perfectly well aware that they were aiding a manifest fraud. But they made much of Perkin, who followed the imperial court for two years, while his patron was intriguing with English malcontents. The emissaries from Flanders got many promises of assistance, and a formidable rising might have taken place had not Henry VII. been well served by his spies. But in the winter of 1494-1495 the traitors were themselves betrayed, and a large number of arrests were made, including not only Lord Fitzwalter and a number of well-known knights of Yorkist families, but Sir William Stanley, the king’s chamberlain, who had been rewarded with enormous gifts for his good service at Bosworth, and was reckoned one of the chief supports of the throne. Stanley and several others were beheaded, the rest hanged or imprisoned. This vigorous action on the part of the king seems to have cowed all Warbeck’s supporters on English soil. But the pretender nevertheless sailed from Flanders in July 1495 with a following of 2000 exiles and German mercenaries. He attempted to land at Deal, but his vanguard was destroyed by Kentish levies, and he drew off and made for Ireland. Suspecting that this would be his goal, King Henry had been doing his best to strengthen his hold on the Pale, whither he had sent his capable servant Sir Edward Poynings as lord deputy. Already before Warbeck’s arrival Poynings had arrested the earl of Kildare, Simnel’s old supporter, cowed some of the Irish by military force, and bought over others by promises of subsidies and pensions. But his best-remembered achievement was that he had induced the Irish parliament to pass the ordinances known as “Poynings’ Law,” by which it acknowledged that it could pass no legislation which had not been approved by the king and his council, and agreed that all statutes passed by the English parliament should be in force in Ireland. That such terms could be imposed shows the strength of Poynings’ arm, and his vigour was equally evident when Warbeck came ashore in Munster in July 1495. Few joined the impostor save the earl of Desmond, and he was repulsed from Waterford, and dared not face the army which the lord deputy put into the field against him. Thereupon, abandoning his Irish schemes, Warbeck sailed to Scotland, whose young king James IV. had just been seduced by the emperor Maximilian into declaring war on England. He promised the Scottish king Berwick and 50,000 crowns in return for the aid of an army. James took the offer, gave him the hand of his kinswoman Catherine Gordon, daughter of the earl of Huntly, and took him forth for a raid into Northumberland (1496). But a pretender backed by Scottish spears did not appeal to the sympathies of the English borderers. The expedition fell flat; not a man joined the banner of the white rose, and James became aware that he had set forth on a fool’s errand. But Warbeck soon found other allies of a most unexpected sort. The heavy taxation granted by the English parliament for the Scottish war had provoked discontent and rioting in the south-western counties. In Cornwall especially Cornish rebellion. the disorders grew to such a pitch that local demagogues called out several thousand men to resist the tax-collectors, and finally raised open rebellion, proposing to march on London and compel the king to dismiss his ministers. These spiritual heirs of Jack Cade were Flammock, a lawyer of Bodmin, and a farrier named Michael Joseph. Whether they had any communication with Warbeck it is impossible to say; there is no proof of such a connexion, but their acts served him well. A Cornish army marched straight on London, picking up some supporters in Devon and Somerset on their way, including a discontented baron, Lord Audley, whom they made their captain.

So precarious was the hold of Henry VII. on the throne that he was in great danger from this outbreak of mere local turbulence. The rebels swept over five counties unopposed, and were only stopped and beaten in a hard fight on Battle of Blackheath. Blackheath, when they had reached the gates of London. Audley, the farrier and the lawyer were all captured and executed (June 18, 1497). But the crisis was not yet at an end. Warbeck, hearing of the rising, but not of its suppression, had left Scotland, and appeared in Devonshire in August. He rallied the wrecks of the west country rebels, and presently appeared before the gates of Exeter with nearly 8000 men. But the citizens held out against him, and presently the approach of the royal army was reported. The pretender led off his horde to meet the relieving force, but when he reached Taunton he found that his followers were so dispirited that disaster was certain. Thereupon he absconded by night, and took sanctuary in the abbey of Beaulieu. He offered to confess his imposture if he were promised his life, and the king accepted the terms. First at Taunton and again at Westminster, Perkin publicly recited a long narrative of his real parentage, his frauds and his adventures. He was then consigned to not over strict confinement in the Tower, and might have fared no worse than Lambert Simnel if he had possessed his soul in patience. But in the next year he corrupted his warders, broke out from his prison, and tried to escape beyond seas. He was captured, but the king again spared his life, though he was placed for the future in a dungeon “where he could see neither moon nor sun.” Even this did not tame the impostor’s mercurial temperament. In 1499 he again planned an escape, which was to be shared by another prisoner, the unfortunate Edward of Clarence, earl of Warwick, whose cell was in the storey above his own. But there were traitors among the Tower officials whom they suborned to help them, and the king was warned of the plot. He allowed it to proceed to the verge of execution, and then arrested both the false and the true Plantagenet. Execution of Warbeck and Edward of Clarence. Evidence of a suspicious character was produced to show that they had planned rebellion as well as mere escape, and both were put to death with some of their accomplices. Warbeck deserved all that he reaped, but the unlucky Clarence’s fate estranged many hearts from the king. The simple and weakly young man, who had spent fifteen of his twenty-five years in confinement, had, in all probability, done no more than scheme for an escape from his dungeon. But as the true male heir of the house of Plantagenet he was too dangerous to be allowed to survive.

The turbulent portion of the reign of Henry VII. came to an end with Blackheath Field and the siege of Exeter. From that time forward the Tudor dynasty was no longer in serious danger; there were still some abortive plots, Establishment of the Tudor dynasty. but none that had any prospect of winning popular support. The chances of Warbeck and Clarence had vanished long before they went to the scaffold. The Yorkist claim, after Clarence’s death, might be supposed to have passed to his cousin Edmund, earl of Suffolk, the younger brother of that John, earl of Lincoln, who had been declared heir to the crown by Richard III., and had fallen at Stoke field. Fully conscious of the danger of his position, Suffolk fled to the continent, and lived for many years as a pensioner of the emperor Maximilian. Apparently he dabbled in treason; it is at any rate certain that in 1501 King Henry executed some, and imprisoned others, of his relatives and retainers. But his plots, such as they were, seem to have been futile. There was no substratum of popular discontent left in England on which a dangerous insurrection might be built up. It was to be forty years before another outbreak of turbulence against the crown was to break forth.

VI. The Tudor Despotism and the Beginnings of the Reformation (1497-1528)

The last twelve years of the reign of Henry VII. present in most respects a complete contrast to the earlier period, 1485-1497. There were no more rebellions, and—as we have already seen—no more plots that caused any serious danger. Nor did the king indulge his unruly subjects in foreign wars, though he was constantly engaged in negotiations with France, Scotland, Spain and the emperor, which from time to time took awkward turns. But Henry was determined to win all that he could by diplomacy, and not by force of arms. His cautious, but often unscrupulous, dealings with the rival continental powers had two main ends: the first was to keep his own position safe by playing off France against the Empire and Spain; the second was to get commercial advantages by dangling his alliance before each power in turn. Flanders was still the greatest customer of England, and it was therefore necessary above all things to keep on good terms with the archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian, who on coming of age had taken over the rule of the Netherlands from his father. The king’s great triumphs were the conclusion of the Intercursus Magnus of 1496 and the Intercursus Malus (so called by the Commercial treaties. Flemings, not by the English) of 1506. The former provided for a renewal of the old commercial alliance with the house of Burgundy, on the same terms under which it had existed in the time of Edward IV.; the rupture which had taken place during the years when Maximilian was backing Perkin Warbeck had been equally injurious to both parties. The Malus Intercursus on the other hand gave England some privileges which she had not before enjoyed—exemption from local tolls in Antwerp and Holland, and a licence for English merchants to sell cloth retail as well as wholesale—a concession which hit the Netherland small traders and middlemen very hard. Another great commercial advantage secured by Henry VII. for his subjects was an increased share of the trade to the Scandinavian countries. The old treaties of Edward IV. with the Hanseatic League had left the Germans still in control of the northern seas. Nearly all the Baltic goods, and most of those from Denmark and Norway, had been reaching London or Hull in foreign bottoms. Henry allied himself with John of Denmark, who was chafing under the monopoly of the Hansa, and obtained the most ample grants of free trade in his realms. The Germans murmured, but the English shipping in eastern and northern waters continued to multiply. Much the same policy was pursued in the Mediterranean. Southern goods hitherto had come to Southampton or Sandwich invariably in Venetian carracks, which took back in return English wool and metals. Henry concluded a treaty with Florence, by which that republic undertook to receive his ships in its harbours and to allow them to purchase all eastern goods that they might require. From this time forward the Venetian monopoly ceased, and the visits of English merchant vessels to the Mediterranean became frequent and regular.

Nor was it in dealing with old lines of trade alone that Henry Tudor showed himself the watchful guardian of the interests of his subjects. He must take his share of credit for the encouragement of the exploration of the seas of the English navigators. Far West. The British traders had already pushed far into the Atlantic before Columbus discovered America; fired by the success of the great navigator they continued their adventures, hoping like him to discover a short “north-west passage” to Cathay and Japan. With a charter from the king giving him leave to set up the English banner on all the lands he might discover, the Bristol Genoese trader John Cabot successfully passed the great sea in 1497, and discovered Newfoundland and its rich fishing stations. Henry rewarded him with a pension of £20 a year, and encouraged him to further exploration, in which he discovered all the American coastline from Labrador to the mouth of the Delaware—a great heritage for England, but one not destined to be taken up for colonization till more than a century had passed.

Henry’s services to English commerce were undoubtedly of far more importance to the nation than all the tortuous details of his foreign policy. His chicanery need not, however, be censured over much, for the princes with whom Foreign policy of Henry VII. he had to deal, and notably Ferdinand and Maximilian, were as insincere and selfish as himself. Few diplomatic hagglings have been so long and so sordid as that between England and Spain over the marriage treaty which gave the hand of Catherine of Aragon first to Henry’s eldest son Arthur, and then, on his premature death in 1502, to his second son Henry. The English king no doubt imagined that he had secured a good bargain, as he had kept the princess’s dowry, and yet never gave Ferdinand any practical assistance in war or peace. It is interesting to find that he had for some time at the end of his reign a second Spanish marriage in view; his wife Elizabeth of York having died in 1503, he seriously proposed himself as a suitor for Joanna of Castile, the elder sister of Catherine, and the widow of the archduke Philip, though she was known to be insane. Apparently he hoped thereby to gain vantage ground for an interference in Spanish politics, which would have been most offensive to Ferdinand. Nothing came of the project, which contrasts strangely with the greater part of Henry’s sober and cautious schemes.

On the other hand a third project of marriage alliance which Henry carried out in 1503 was destined to be consummated, and to have momentous, though long-deferred, results. Marriage of James IV. of Scotland and Margaret Tudor. This was the giving of the hand of his daughter Margaret to James IV. of Scotland. Thereby he bought quiet on the Border and alliance with Scotland for no more than some ten years. But—as it chanced—the issue of this alliance was destined to unite the English and the Scottish crowns, when the male line of the Tudors died out, and Henry, quite unintentionally, had his share in bringing about the consummation, by peaceful means, of that end which Edward I. had sought for so long to win by the strong hand.

All the foreign politics of the reign of Henry VII. have small importance compared with his work within the realm. The true monument of his ability was that he left England tamed and orderly, with an obedient people and a full Character of Henry’s internal rule. exchequer, though he had taken it over wellnigh in a state of anarchy. The mere suppression of insurrections like those of Simnel and Warbeck was a small part of his task. The harder part was to recreate a spirit of order and subordination among a nation accustomed to long civil strife. His instruments were ministers of ability chosen from the clergy and the gentry—he seems to have been equally averse to trusting the baronage at the one end of the social scale, or mere upstarts at the other, and it is notable that no one during his reign can be called a court favourite. The best-known names among his servants were his great chancellor, Archbishop Morton, Foxe, bishop of Winchester, Sir Reginald Bray, and the lawyers Empson and Dudley. These two last bore the brunt of the unpopularity of the financial policy of the king during the latter half of his reign, when the vice of avarice seems to have grown upon him beyond all reason. But Henry was such a hard-working monarch, and so familiar with all the details of administration, that his ministers cannot be said to have had any independent authority, or to have directed their master’s course of action.

The machinery employed by the first of the Tudors for the suppression of domestic disorder is well known. The most important item added by him to the administrative machinery of the realm was the famous Star Chamber, The Star Chamber. which was licensed by the parliament of 1487. It consisted of a small committee of ministers, privy councillors and judges, which sat to deal with offences that seemed to lie outside the scope of the common law, or more frequently with the misdoings of men who were so powerful that the local courts could not be trusted to execute justice upon them, such as great landowners, sheriffs and other royal officials, or turbulent individuals who were the terror of their native districts. The need for a strong central court directly inspired by the king, which could administer justice without respect of persons, was so great, that the constitutional danger of establishing an autocratic judicial committee, untrammelled by the ordinary rules of law, escaped notice at the time. It was not till much later that the nation came to look upon the Star Chamber as the special engine of royal tyranny and to loathe its name. In 1500 it was for the common profit of the realm that there should exist such a court, which could reduce even the most powerful offender to order.

One of the most notable parts of the king’s policy was his long-continued and successful assault on the abuse of “livery and maintenance,” which had been at its height during the Wars of the Roses. We have seen the part which Suppression of livery and maintenance. it had taken in strengthening the influence of those who were already too powerful, and weakening the ordinary operation of the law. Henry put it down with a strong hand, forbidding all liveries entirely, save for the mere domestic retainers of each magnate. His determination to end the system was well shown by the fact that he heavily fined even the earl of Oxford, the companion of his exile, the victor of Bosworth, and the most notoriously loyal peer in the realm, for an ostentatious violation of the statute. Where Oxford was punished, no less favoured person could hope to escape. By the end of the reign the little hosts of badged adherents which had formed the nucleus for the armies of the Wars of the Roses had ceased to exist.

Edward IV., as has been already remarked, had many of the opportunities of the autocrat, if only he had cared to use them; but his sloth and self-indulgence stood in the way. Henry VII., the most laborious and systematic of men, Personal rule. turned them to account. He formed his personal opinion on every problem of administration and intervened himself in every detail. In many respects he was his own prime minister, and nothing was done without his knowledge and consent. A consistent policy may be detected in all his acts—that of gathering all the machinery of government into his own hands. Under the later Plantagenets and the Lancastrian kings the great check on the power of the crown had been that financial difficulties were continually compelling the sovereign to summon parliaments. The estates had interfered perpetually in all the details of governance, by means of the power of the purse. Edward IV., first among English sovereigns, had been able to dispense with parliaments for periods of many years, because he did not need their grants save at long intervals. Henry was in the same position; by strict economy, by the use of foreign subsidies, by the automatic growth of his revenues during a time of peace and returning prosperity, by confiscation and forfeitures, he built himself up a financial position which rendered it unnecessary for him to make frequent appeals to parliament. Not the least fertile of his expedients was that regular exploitation of the law as a source of revenue, which had already been seen in the time of his father-in-law. This part of Henry’s policy is connected with the name of his two extortionate “fiscal judges” Empson and Dudley, who “turned law and justice into rapine” by their minute inquisition into all technical breaches of legality, and the nice fashion in which they adapted the fine to the wealth of the misdemeanant, without any reference to his moral guilt or any regard for extenuating circumstances. The king must take the responsibility for their unjust doings; it was his coffers which mainly profited by their chicane. In his later years he fell into the vice of hoarding money for its own sake; so necessary was it to his policy that he should be free, as far as possible, from the need for applying to parliament for money, that he became morbidly anxious to have great hoards in readiness for any possible day of financial stress. At his death he is said to have had £1,800,000 in hard cash laid by. Hence it is not strange to find that he was able to dispense with parliaments in a fashion that would have seemed incredible to a 14th-century king. In his whole reign he only asked them five times for grants of taxation, and three of the five requests were made during the first seven years of his reign. In the eyes of many men parliament lost the main reason for its existence when it ceased to be the habitual provider of funds for the ordinary expenses of the realm. Those who had a better conception of its proper functions could see that it had at any rate been stripped of its chief power when the king no longer required its subsidies. There are traces of a want of public interest in its proceedings, very different from the anxiety with which they used to be followed in Plantagenet and Lancastrian times. Legislation, which only incidentally affects him, is very much less exciting to the ordinary citizen than taxation, which aims directly at his pocket. It is at any rate clear that during the latter years of his reign, when the time of impostures and rebellions had ended, Henry was able to dispense with parliaments to a great extent, and incurred no unpopularity by doing so. Indeed he was accepted by the English people as the benefactor who had delivered them from anarchy; and if they murmured at his love of hoarding, and cursed his inquisitors Empson and Dudley, they had no wish to change the Tudor rule, and were far from regarding the times of the “Lancastrian experiment” as a lost golden age. The present king might be unscrupulous and avaricious, but he was cautious, intelligent and economical; no one would have wished to recall the régime of that “crowned saint” Henry VI.

Nevertheless when the first of the Tudors died, on the 21st of April 1509, there were few who regretted him. He was not a monarch to rouse enthusiasm, while much was expected from his brilliant, clever and handsome son Henry VIII. Henry VIII., whose magnificent presence and manly vigour recalled the early prime of Edward IV. Some years later England realized that its new king had inherited not only the physical beauty and strength of his grandfather, but also every one of his faults, with the sole exception of his tendency to sloth. Henry VIII. indeed may be said, to sum up his character in brief, to have combined his father’s brains with his grandfather’s passions. Edward IV. was selfish and cruel, but failed to become a tyrant because he lacked the energy for continuous work. Henry VII. was unscrupulous and untiring, but so cautious and wary that he avoided violent action and dangerous risks. Their descendant had neither Edward’s sloth nor Henry’s moderation; he was capable of going to almost any lengths in pursuit of the gratification of his ambition, his passions, his resentment or his simple love of self-assertion. Yet, however far he might go on the road to tyranny, Henry had sufficient cunning, versatility and power of cool reflection, to know precisely when he had reached the edge of the impossible. He had his father’s faculty for gauging public opinion, and estimating dangers, and though his more venturous temperament led him to press on far beyond the point at which the seventh Henry would have halted, he always stopped short on the hither side of the gulf. It was the most marvellous proof of his ability that he died on his throne after nearly forty years of autocratic rule, during which he had roused more enmities and done more to change the face of the realm than any of the kings that were before him.

But it was long before the nation could estimate all the features of the magnificent but sinister figure which was to dominate England from 1509 to 1547. At his accession Henry VIII. was only eighteen years of age, and, if his character was already formed, it was only the attractive side of it that was yet visible. His personal beauty, his keen intelligence, his scholarship, his love of music and the arts, his kingly ambition, were all obvious enough. His selfishness, his cruelty, his ingratitude, his fierce hatred of criticism and opposition, his sensuality, had yet to be discovered by his subjects. A suspicious observer might have detected something ominous in the first act of his reign—the arrest and attainder of his father’s unpopular ministers, Empson and Dudley, whose heads he flung to the people in order to win a moment’s applause. Whatever their faults, they had served the house of Tudor well, and it was a grotesque perversion of justice to send them to the scaffold on a charge of high treason. A similar piece of cruelty was the execution, some time later, of the earl of Suffolk, who had been languishing long years in the Tower; he was destroyed not for any new plots, but simply for his Yorkist descent. But in Henry’s earlier years such acts were still unusual; it was not till he had grown older, and had learnt how much the nation would endure, that judicial murder became part of his established policy.

Henry’s first outburst of self-assertion took the form of reversing his father’s thrifty and peaceful policy, by plunging into the midst of the continental wars from which England had been held back by his cautious parent. Continental projects of Henry VIII. The adventure was wholly unnecessary, and also unprofitable. But while France was engaged in the “Holy War” against the pope, Venice, the emperor, and Ferdinand of Spain, Henry renewed the old claims of the Plantagenets, and hoped, if not to win back the position of Edward III., at least to recover the duchy of Aquitaine, or some parts of it. He lent an army to Ferdinand for the invasion of Gascony, and landed himself at Calais with 25,000 men, to beat up the northern border of France. Little good came of his efforts. The Spanish king gave no assistance, and the northern campaign, though it included the brilliant battle of the Spurs (August 16th, 1513), accomplished nothing more than the capture of Tournai and Thérouanne. It was soon borne in upon King Henry that France, even when engaged with other enemies, was too strong to be overrun in the old style. Moreover, his allies were giving him no aid, though they had eagerly accepted his great subsidies. With a sudden revulsion of feeling Henry offered peace to France, which King Louis XII. gladly bought, Treaty of Étaples. agreeing to renew the old pension or tribute that Henry VII. had received by the treaty of Étaples. Their reconciliation and alliance were sealed by the marriage of the French king to Henry’s favourite sister Mary, who was the bridegroom’s junior by more than thirty years. Their wedlock and the Anglo-French alliance lasted only till the next year, when Louis died, and Mary secretly espoused an old admirer, Charles Brandon, afterwards duke of Suffolk, King Henry’s greatest friend and confidant.

While the French war was still in progress there had been heavy fighting on the Scottish border. James IV., reverting to the traditionary policy of his ancestors, had taken the opportunity of attacking England while her king War with Scotland. Battle of Flodden. and his army were overseas. He suffered a disaster which recalls that of David II. at Neville’s Cross—a fight which had taken place under precisely similar political conditions. After taking a few Northumbrian castles, James was brought to action at Flodden Field by the earl of Surrey (September 9th, 1513). After a desperate fight lasting the greater part of a day, the Scots were outmanœuvred and surrounded. James IV.—who had refused to quit the field—was slain in the forefront of the battle, with the greater part of his nobles; with him fell also some 10,000 or 12,000 of his men. Scotland, with her military power brought low, and an infant king on the throne, was a negligible quantity in international politics for some years. The queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, aided by a party that favoured peace and alliance with England, was strong enough to balance the faction under the duke of Albany which wished for perpetual war and asked for aid from France.

With the peace of 1514 ended the first period of King Henry’s reign. He was now no longer a boy, but a man of twenty-three, with his character fully developed; he had gradually got rid of his father’s old councillors, and had chosen Thomas Wolsey. for himself a minister as ambitious and energetic as himself, the celebrated Thomas Wolsey, whom he had just made archbishop of York, and who obtained the rank of cardinal from the pope in the succeeding year. Wolsey was the last of the great clerical ministers of the middle ages, and by no means the worst. Like so many of his predecessors he had risen from the lower middle classes, through the royal road of the church; he had served Henry VII.’s old councillor Foxe, bishop of Winchester, as secretary, and from his household had passed into that of his master. He had been an admirable servant to both, full of zeal, intelligence and energy, and not too much burdened with scruples. The young king found in him an instrument well fitted to his hand, a man fearless, ingenious, and devoted to the furtherance of the power of the crown, by which alone he had reached his present position of authority. For fourteen years he was his master’s chief minister—the person responsible in the nation’s eyes for all the more unpopular assertions of the royal prerogative, and for all the heavy taxation and despotic acts which Henry’s policy required. It mattered little to Henry that the cardinal was arrogant, tactless and ostentatious; indeed it suited his purpose that Wolsey should be saddled by public opinion with all the blame that ought to have been laid on his own shoulders. It was convenient that the old nobility should detest the upstart, and that the commons should imagine him to be the person responsible for the demands for money required for the royal wars. As long as his minister served his purposes and could execute his behests Henry gave him a free hand, and supported him against all his enemies. It was believed at the time, and is still sometimes maintained by historians, that Wolsey laid down schemes of policy and persuaded his master to adopt them; but the truth would appear to be that Henry was in no wise dominated by the cardinal, but imposed on him his own wishes, merely leaving matters of detail to be settled by his minister. Things indifferent might be trusted to him, but the main lines of English diplomacy and foreign policy show rather the influence of the king’s personal desires of the moment than that of a statesman seeking national ends.

It has often been alleged that Henry, under the guidance of Wolsey, followed a consistent scheme for aggrandizing England, by making her the state which kept the balance of power of Europe in her hands. And it is pointed out that during the years of the cardinal’s ascendancy the alliance of England was sought in turn by the great princes of the continent, and proved the make-weight in the scales. This is but a superficial view of the situation. Henry, if much courted, was much deceived by his contemporaries. They borrowed his money and his armies, but fed him with vain promises and illusory treaties. He and his minister were alternately gulled by France and by the emperor, and the net result of all their activity was bankruptcy and discontent at home and ever-frustrated hopes abroad. It is hard to build up a reputation for statecraft for either Henry or Wolsey on the sum total of English political achievement during their collaboration.

During the first few years of the cardinal’s ascendancy the elder race of European sovereigns, the kings with whom Henry VII. had been wont to haggle, disappeared one after the other. Louis of France died in 1515, Ferdinand Henry VIII. and the rivalry of Francis I. and Charles V. of Aragon in 1516, the emperor Maximilian—the last survivor of his generation—in 1519. Louis was succeeded by the active, warlike and shifty Francis I.; the heritage of both Ferdinand and Maximilian—his maternal and paternal grandfathers—fell to Charles of Habsburg, who already possessed the Netherlands in his father’s right and Castile in that of his mother. The enmity of the house of Valois and the house of Habsburg, which had first appeared in the wars of Charles VIII. and Maximilian, took a far more bitter shape under Francis I. and Charles V., two young princes who were rivals from their youth. Their wars were almost perpetual, their peaces never honestly carried out. Their powers were very equally balanced; if Charles owned broader lands than Francis, they were more scattered and in some cases less loyal. The solid and wealthy realm of France proved able to make head against Spain and the Netherlands, even when they were backed by the emperor’s German vassals. Charles was also distracted by many stabs in the back from the Ottoman Turks, who were just beginning their attack on Christendom along the line of the Danube. To each of the combatants it seemed that the English alliance would turn the scale in his own favour. Henry was much courted, and wooed with promises of lands to be won from the other side by his ally of the moment. But neither Charles nor Francis wished him to be a real gainer, and he himself was a most untrustworthy friend, for he was quite ready to turn against his ally if he seemed to be growing too powerful, and threatened to dominate all Europe; the complete success of either party would mean that England would sink once more into a second-rate power. How faithless and insincere was Henry’s policy may be gauged from the fact that in 1520, after all the pageantry of the “Field of the Cloth of Gold” and his vows of undying friendship for Francis, he met Charles a few weeks later at Gravelines, and concluded with him a treaty which pledged England to a defensive alliance against the king’s “good brother” of France. Such things happened not once nor twice during the years of Wolsey’s ministry. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, if Henry’s allies regularly endeavoured Failure of Henry’s diplomacy. to cheat him out of his share of their joint profits. What use was there in rewarding a friend who might become an enemy to-morrow? The greatest deception of all was in 1522, when Charles V., who had made the extraordinary promise that he would get Wolsey made pope, and lend Henry an army to conquer northern France, failed to redeem his word in both respects. He caused his own old tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, to be crowned with the papal tiara, and left the English to invade Picardy entirely unassisted. But this was only one of many such disappointments.

The result of some twelve years of abortive alliances and ill-kept treaties was that Henry had obtained no single one of the advantages which he had coveted, and that he had lavished untold wealth and many English lives Beginnings of parliamentary resistance. upon phantom schemes which crumbled between his fingers. His subjects had already begun to murmur; the early parliaments of his reign had been passive and complaisant; but by 1523 the Commons had been goaded into resistance. They granted only half the subsidies asked from them, pleading that three summers more of such taxation as the cardinal demanded for his master would leave the realm drained of its last penny, and reduced to fall back on primitive forms of barter, “clothes for victuals and bread for cheese,” out of mere want of coin. Fortunately for the king his subjects laid all the blame upon his mouthpiece the cardinal, instead of placing it where it was due. On Wolsey’s back also was saddled the most iniquitous of Henry’s acts of tyranny against individuals—the judicial murder of the duke of Buckingham, the highest head among the English nobility. For some hasty words, amplified by the doubtful evidence of treacherous retainers, Execution of the duke of Buckingham. together with a foolish charge of dabbling with astrologers, the heir of the royal line of Thomas of Woodstock had been tried and executed with scandalous haste. His only real crime was that, commenting on the lack of male heirs to the crown—for after many years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon Henry’s sole issue was one sickly daughter—he had been foolish enough to remark that if anything should happen to the king he himself was close in succession to the crown. The cardinal bore the blame, because he and Buckingham had notoriously disliked each other; but the deed had really been of the king’s own contriving. He was roused to implacable wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the succession question.

In the later years of Wolsey’s ascendancy, nevertheless, that same question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry’s own mind it was never long absent; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing tired of Question of the king’s divorce. his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid. Somewhere about the end of 1526 those who were in the king’s intimate confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce—a thing not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But Henry’s doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had become enamoured of another lady—the beautiful, ambitious and cunning Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of becoming merely the king’s mistress, but aspired to be his consort.

The question of the king’s divorce soon became inextricably confused with another problem, whose first beginnings go back to a slightly earlier date. What was to be the attitude of England towards the Reformation? It was now England and the Reformation. nearly ten years since Martin Luther had posted up his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and since he had testified to his faith before the diet of Worms. All Germany was now convulsed with the first throes of the revolt against the papacy, and the echoes of the new theological disputes were being heard in England. King Henry himself in 1521 had deigned to write an abusive pamphlet against Luther, for which he had been awarded the magnificent title of Fidei Defensor by that cultured sceptic Pope Leo X. About the same time we begin to read of orders issued by the bishops for the discovery and burning of all Lutheran books—a clear sign that they were reaching England in appreciable quantities. Hitherto it had been only the works of Wycliffe that had merited this attention on the part of inquisitors. In the Wycliffite remnant, often persecuted but never exterminated, there already existed in England the nucleus of a Protestant party. All through the reign of Henry VII. and the early years of Henry VIII. the intermittent burning of “heretics,” and their far more frequent recantations, had borne witness to the fact that the sect still lingered on. The Wycliffites were a feeble folk, compelled to subterraneous ways, and destitute of learned leaders or powerful supporters. But they survived to see Luther’s day, and to merge themselves in one body with the first English travelling scholars and merchants who brought back from the continent the doctrines of the German Reformation. The origins of a Protestant party, who were not mere Wycliffites, but had been first interested in dogmatic controversy by coming upon the works of Luther, can be traced back to the year 1521 and to the university of Cambridge. There a knot of scholars, some of whom were to perish early at the stake, while others were destined to become the leaders of the English Reformation, came together and encouraged each other to test the received doctrines of contemporary orthodoxy by searching the Scriptures and the works of the Fathers. The sect spread in a few years to London, Oxford and other centres of intellectual life, but for many years its followers were not numerous; like the old Lollardy, Protestantism took root only in certain places and among certain classes—notably the lesser clergy and the merchants of the great towns.

King Henry and those who wished to please him professed as great a hatred and contempt for the new purveyors of German doctrines as for the belated disciples of Wycliffe. But there was another movement, whose origins went back for many centuries, which they were far from discouraging, and were prepared to utilize when it suited their convenience. This was the purely political feeling against the tyranny of the papacy, and the abuses of the national church, which in early ages had given supporters to William the Conqueror and Henry II., which had dictated the statutes of Mortmain and of Praemunire. Little had been heard of the old anti-clerical party in England since the time of Henry IV.; it had apparently been identified in the eyes of the orthodox with that Lollardy with which it had for a time allied itself, and had shared in its discredit. But it had always continued to exist, and in the early years of Henry VIII. had been showing unmistakable signs of vitality. The papacy of the Renaissance was a fair mark for criticism. It was not hard to attack the system under which Rodrigo Borgia wore the tiara, while Girolamo Savonarola went to the stake; or in which Julius II. exploited the name of Christianity to serve his territorial policy in Italy, and Leo X. hawked his indulgences round Europe to raise funds which would enable him to gratify his artistic tastes. At no period had the official hierarchy of the Western Church been more out of touch with common righteousness and piety. Moreover, they were sinning under the eyes of a laity which was far more intelligent and educated, more able to think and judge for itself, less the slave of immemorial tradition, than the old public of the middle ages. In Italy the Renaissance might be purely concerned with things intellectual or artistic, and seem to have little or no touch with things moral. Beyond the Alps it was otherwise; among the Teutonic nations at least the revolt against the scholastic philosophy, the rout of the obscurantists, the eager pursuit of Hellenic culture, had a religious aspect. The same generation which refused to take thrice-translated and thrice-garbled screeds from Aristotle as the sum of human knowledge, and went back to the original Greek, was also studying the Old and New Testaments in their original tongues, and drawing from them conclusions as unfavourable to the intelligence as to the scholarship of the orthodox medieval divines. Such a discovery as that which showed that the “False Decretals,” on which so much of the power of the papacy rested, were mere 9th-century forgeries struck deep at the roots of the whole traditional relation between church and state.

The first English scholars of the Renaissance, like Erasmus on the continent, did not see the logical outcome of their own discoveries, nor realize that the campaign against obscurantism would develop into a campaign against Roman orthodoxy. Sir Thomas More, the greatest of them, was actually driven into reaction by the violence of Protestant controversialists, and the fear that the new doctrines would rend the church in twain. He became himself a persecutor, and a writer of abusive pamphlets unworthy of the author of the Utopia. But to the younger generation the irreconcilability of modern scholarship and medieval formulae of faith became more and more evident. One after another all the cardinal doctrines were challenged by writers who were generally acute, and almost invariably vituperative. For the controversies of the Reformation were conducted by both sides, from kings and prelates down to gutter pamphleteers, in language of the most unseemly violence.

But, as has been already said, the scholars and theologians had less influence in the beginning of the English Reformation than the mere lay politicians, whose anti-clerical tendencies chanced to fit in with King Henry’s convenience when he quarrelled with the papacy. It is well to note that the first attacks of parliament on the church date back to two years before Luther published his famous theses. The contention began in 1515 with the fierce assault by the Commons on the old abuse of benefit of clergy, and the immunity of clerical criminals from due punishment for secular crimes—a question as old as the times of Henry II. and Becket. But the discussion spread in later years from this particular point into a general criticism of the church and its relations to the state, embracing local grievances as well as the questions which turned on the dealings of the papacy with the crown. The old complaints which had been raised against the Church of England in the days of Edward I. or Richard II. had lost none of their force in 1526. The higher clergy were more than ever immersed in affairs of state, “Caesarean” as Wycliffe would have called them. It was only necessary to point to the great cardinal himself, and to ask how far his spiritual duties at York were properly discharged while he was acting as the king’s prime minister. The cases of Foxe and Morton were much the same; the former passed for a well-meaning man, yet had been practically absent from his diocese for twenty years. Pluralism, nepotism, simony and all the other ancient abuses were more rampant than ever. The monasteries had ceased to be even the nurseries of literature; their chronicles had run dry, and secular priests or laymen had taken up the pens that the monks had dropped. They were wealthier than ever, yet did little to justify their existence; indeed the spirit of the age was so much set against them that they found it hard to keep up the numbers of their inmates. Truculent pamphleteers like Simon Fish, who wrote Beggars’ Supplication, were already demanding “that these sturdy boobies should be set abroad into the world, to get wives of their own, and earn their living by the sweat of their brows, according to the commandment of God; so might the king be better obeyed, matrimony be better kept, the gospel better preached, and none should rob the poor of his alms.” It must be added that monastic scandals were not rare; though the majority of the houses were decently ordered, yet the unexceptionable testimony of archiepiscopal and episcopal visitations shows that in the years just before the Reformation there was a certain number of them where chastity of life and honesty of administration were equally unknown. But above all things the church was being criticized as an imperium in imperio, a privileged body not amenable to ordinary jurisdiction, and subservient to a foreign lord—the pope. And it was true that, much as English churchmen might grumble at papal exactions, they were generally ready as a body to support the pope against the crown; the traditions of the medieval church made it impossible for them to do otherwise. That there would in any case have been a new outbreak of anti-clerical and anti-papal agitation in England, under the influence of the Protestant impulse started by Luther in Germany, is certain. But two special causes gave its particular colour to the opening of the English Reformation; the one was that the king fell out with the papacy on the question of his divorce. The other was that the nation at this moment was chafing bitterly against a clerical minister, whom it (very unjustly) made responsible for the exorbitant taxation which it was enduring, in consequence of the king’s useless and unsuccessful foreign wars. The irony of the situation lay in the facts that Henry was, so far as dogmatic views were concerned, a perfectly orthodox prince; he had a considerable knowledge of the old theological literature, as he had shown in his pamphlet against Luther, and though he was ready to repress clerical immunities and privileges that were inconvenient to the crown, he had no sympathy whatever with the doctrinal side of the new revolt against the system of the medieval church. Moreover, Wolsey, whose fall was to synchronize with the commencement of the reforming movement, was if anything more in sympathy with change than was his master. He was an enlightened patron of the new learning, and was inclined to take vigorous measures in hand for the pruning away of the abuses of the church. It is significant that his great college at Oxford—“Cardinal’s College” as he designed to call it, “Christ Church” as it is named to-day—was endowed with the revenues of some score of small monasteries which he had suppressed on the ground that they were useless or ill-conducted. His master turned the lesson to account a few years later; but Henry’s wholesale destruction of religious houses was carried out not in the interests of learning, but mainly in those of the royal exchequer.

(C. W. C. O.)

VII. The Reformation and the Age of Elizabeth (1528-1603)

Wolsey did not fall through any opposition to reform; nor was he opposed to the idea of a divorce. Indeed, both in France and Spain he was credited with the authorship of the project. But he differed from Henry on the question Fall of Wolsey. of Catherine’s successor. Wolsey desired a French marriage to consummate the breach upon which he was now bent with the emperor; and war, in fact, was precipitated with Spain in 1528. This is said to have been done without Henry’s consent; he certainly wished to avoid war with Charles V., and peace was made after six months of passive hostility. Nor did Henry want a French princess; his affections were fixed for the time on Anne Boleyn, and she was the hope of the anti-clerical party. The crisis was brought to a head by the failure of Wolsey’s plan to obtain a divorce. Originally it had been suggested that the ecclesiastical courts in England were competent without recourse to Rome. Wolsey deprecated this procedure, and application was made to Clement VII. Wolsey relied upon his French and Italian allies to exert the necessary powers of persuasion; and in 1528 a French army crossed the Alps, marched through Italy and threatened to drive Charles V. out of Naples. Clement was in a position to listen to Henry’s prayer; and Campeggio was commissioned with Wolsey to hear the suit and grant the divorce.

No sooner had Campeggio started than the fortunes of war changed. The French were driven out of Naples, and the Imperialists again dominated Rome; the Church, wrote Clement to Campeggio, was completely in the Question of the divorce. power of Charles V. The cardinal, therefore, must on no account pronounce against Charles’s aunt; if he could not persuade Henry and Catherine to agree on a mutual separation, he must simply pass the time and come to no conclusion. Hence it was June 1529 before the court got to work at all, and then its proceedings were only preparatory to an adjournment and revocation of the suit to Rome in August. Clement VII. had, in his own words, made up his mind to live and die an imperialist; the last remnants of the French army in Italy had been routed, and the pope had perforce concluded the treaty of Barcelona, a sort of family compact between himself and Charles, whereby he undertook to protect Charles’s aunt, and the emperor to support the Medici dynasty in Florence. This peace was amplified at the treaty of Cambrai (August 1529) into a general European pacification in which England had no voice. So far had it fallen since 1521.

In every direction Wolsey had failed, and his failure involved the triumph of the forces which he had opposed. The fate of the papal system in England was bound up with his personal fortunes. It was he and he alone who had kept parliament at arm’s length and the enemies of the church at bay. He had interested the king, and to some extent the nation, in a spirited foreign policy, had diverted their attention from domestic questions, and had staved off that parliamentary attack on the church which had been threatened fifteen years before. Now he was doomed, and both Campeggio and Cardinal du Bellay were able to send their governments accurate outlines of the future policy of Henry VIII. The church was to be robbed of its wealth, its power and its privileges, and the papal jurisdiction was to be abolished. In October Wolsey was deprived of the great seal, and surrendered many of his ecclesiastical preferments, though he was allowed to retain his archbishopric of York which he now visited for the first time. The first lay ministry since Edward the Confessor’s time came into office; Sir Thomas More became lord chancellor, and Anne Boleyn’s father lord privy seal; the only prominent cleric who remained in office was Stephen Gardiner, who succeeded Wolsey as bishop of Winchester.

Parliament met in November 1529 and passed many acts against clerical exactions, mortuaries, probate dues and pluralities, which evoked a passionate protest from Bishop Fisher: “Now, with the Commons,” he cried Attack on the church in parliament. in the House of Lords, “is nothing but ‘Down with the Church.’” During 1530 Henry’s agents were busy abroad making that appeal on the divorce to the universities which Cranmer had suggested. In 1531 the clergy in convocation, terrified by the charge of praemunire brought against them for recognizing Wolsey’s legatine authority, paid Henry a hundred and eighteen thousand pounds and recognized him as supreme head of the church so far as the law of Christ would allow. The details of this surrender were worked out by king and Commons in 1532; but Gardiner and More secured the rejection by the Lords of the bill in which they were embodied, and it was not till 1533, when More had ceased to be chancellor and Gardiner to be secretary, that a parliamentary statute annihilated the independent legislative authority of the church. An act was, however, passed in 1532 empowering the king, if he thought fit, to stop the payment of annates to Rome. Henry suspended his consent in order to induce the pope to grant Cranmer his bulls as archbishop of Canterbury where he succeeded Warham late in 1532. The stratagem was successful, and Henry cast off all disguise. The act of annates was confirmed; another prohibiting appeals to Rome and providing for the appointment of bishops without recourse to the papacy was passed; and Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage with Catherine Henry VIII. marries Anne Boleyn. null and void and that with Anne Boleyn, which had taken place about January 25, 1533, valid. Anne was crowned in June, and on the 7th of September the future Queen Elizabeth was born. At length in 1534 Clement VII. concluded the case at Rome, pronouncing in favour of Catherine’s marriage, and drawing up a bull of excommunication against Henry and his abettors. But he did not venture to publish it; public opinion in England, while hostile to the divorce, was not in favour of the clergy or the pope, and the rivalry between Charles V. and Francis I. was too bitter to permit of joint, or even isolated, action against Henry. Charles was only too anxious to avoid the duty of carrying out the pope’s commands, and a year later he was once more involved in war with France. Henry was able to deal roughly with such manifestations as Elizabeth Barton’s visions, and in the autumn The Act of Supremacy. of 1534 to obtain from parliament the Act of Supremacy which transferred to him the juridical, though not the spiritual, powers of the pope. No penalties were attached to this act, but another passed in the same session made it treason to attempt to deprive the king of any of his titles, of which supreme head of the church was one, being incorporated in the royal style by letters patent of January 1535. Fisher and More were executed on this charge; they had been imprisoned in the previous year for objecting to take the form of oath to the succession as vested in Anne Boleyn’s children which the commissioners prescribed. But their lives could only be forfeit on the supposition that they sought to deprive the king of his royal supremacy. Many of the friars observant of Greenwich and monks of the Charterhouse were involved in a similar fate, but there was no general resistance, and Henry, now inspired or helped by Thomas Cromwell, was able to proceed with the next step in the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries.

It was Cecil’s opinion twenty-five years later that, but for the dissolution, the cause of the Reformation could not have succeeded. Such a reason could hardly be avowed, and justification had to be sought in the condition of Dissolution of the monasteries. the monasteries themselves. The action of Wolsey and other bishops before 1529, the report of a commission of cardinals appointed by Paul III. in 1535, the subsequent experience of other, even Catholic, countries give collateral support to the conclusions of the visitors appointed by Cromwell, although they were dictated by a desire not to deal out impartial justice, but to find reasons for a policy already adopted in principle. That they exaggerated the evils of monastic life hardly admits of doubt; but even a Henry VIII. and a Thomas Cromwell would not have dared to attack, or succeeded in destroying, the monasteries had they retained their original purity and influence. As it was their doubtful reputation and financial embarrassments enabled Henry to offer them as a gigantic bribe to the upper classes of the laity, and the Reformation parliament met for its last session early in 1536 to give effect to the reports of the visitors and to the king’s and their own desires.

But it had barely been dissolved in April when it became necessary to call another. In January the death of Catherine had rejoiced the hearts of Henry and Anne Boleyn, but Anne’s happiness was short-lived. Two miscarriages and the failure to produce the requisite male heir linked her in Henry’s mind and in misfortune to Catherine; unlike Catherine she was unpopular and not above suspicion. The story of her tragedy is still one of the most horrible and mysterious pages in English history. It is certain that Henry was tired and wanted to get rid of her; but if she were innocent, why were charges brought against her which were not brought against Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves? and why were four other victims sacrificed when one would have been enough? The peers a year before could acquit Lord Dacre; would they have condemned the queen without some show of evidence? and unless there was suspicious evidence, her daughter was inhuman in making no effort subsequently to clear her mother’s character. However that may be, Execution of Queen Anne Boleyn. Anne was not only condemned and executed, but her marriage was declared invalid and her daughter a bastard. Parliament was required to establish the succession on the new basis of Henry’s new queen, Jane Seymour. It also empowered the king to leave the crown by will if he had no legitimate issue; but the illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, in whose favour this provision is said to have been conceived, died shortly afterwards.

Fortunately for Henry, Queen Jane roused no domestic or foreign animosities; Charles V. and Francis I. were at war; and the pope’s and Pole’s attempt to profit by the Pilgrimage of Grace came too late to produce any effect The Pilgrimage of Grace. except the ruin of Pole’s family. The two risings of 1536 in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were provoked partly by the dissolution of the monasteries, partly by the collection of a subsidy and fears of fresh taxation on births, marriages and burials, and partly by the protestantizing Ten Articles of 1536 and Cromwell’s Injunctions. They were conservative demonstrations in favour of a restoration of the old order by means of a change of ministry, but not a change of dynasty. The Lincolnshire rising was over before the middle of October, the more serious revolt in Yorkshire under Aske lasted through the winter. Henry’s lieutenants were compelled to temporize and make concessions. Aske was invited to come to London and hoodwinked by Henry into believing that the king was really bent on restoration and reform. But an impatient outburst of the insurgents and a foolish attempt to seize Hull and Scarborough gave Henry an excuse for repudiating the concessions made in his name. He could afford to do so because England south of the Trent remained stauncher to him than England north of it did to the Pilgrimage. Aske and other leaders were tried and executed, and summary vengeance was wreaked on the northern counties, especially on the monasteries. The one satisfactory outcome was the establishment of the Council of the North, which gave the shires between the Border and the Trent a stronger and more efficient government than they had ever had before.

Probably the Pilgrimage had some effect in moderating Henry’s progress. The monasteries did not benefit and in 1538-1539 the greater were involved in the fate which had already overtaken the less. But no further advances The “Six Articles.” were made towards Protestantism after the publication and authorization of the “Great” Bible in English. The Lutheran divines who came to England in 1538 with a project for a theological union were rebuffed; the parliament elected in 1539 was Catholic, and only the reforming bishops in the House of Lords offered any resistance to the Six Articles which reaffirmed the chief points in Catholic doctrine and practice. The alliance between pope, emperor and French king induced Henry to acquiesce in Cromwell’s scheme for a political understanding with Cleves and the Schmalkaldic League, which might threaten Charles V.’s position in Germany and the Netherlands, but could not be of much direct advantage to England. Cromwell rashly sought to wed Henry to this policy, proposed Anne of Cleves as a bride for Henry, now once more a widower, and represented the marriage as England’s sole protection against a Catholic league. Henry put his neck under the yoke, but soon discovered that there was no necessity; for Charles and Francis were already beginning to quarrel and had Fall of Thomas Cromwell. no thought of a joint attack on England. The discovery was fatal to Cromwell; after a severe struggle in the council he was abandoned to his enemies, attainted of treason and executed. Anne’s marriage was declared null, and Henry found a fifth queen in Catherine Howard, a niece of Norfolk, a protégée of Gardiner, and a friend of the Catholic church.

Nevertheless there was no reversal of what had been done, only a check to the rate of progress. Cranmer remained archbishop and compiled an English Litany, while Catherine Howard soon ceased to be queen; charges of loose conduct, which in her case at any rate were not instigated by the king, were made against her and she was brought to the block; she was succeeded by Catherine Parr, a mild patron of the new learning. The Six Articles were only fitfully put in execution, especially in 1543 and 1546: all the plots against Cranmer failed; and before he died Henry was even considering the advisability of further steps in the religious reformation, apart from mere spoliation like the confiscation of the chantry lands.

But Scotland, Ireland and foreign affairs concerned him most. Something substantial was achieved in Ireland; the papal sovereignty was abolished and Henry received from the Irish parliament the title of king instead of lord of Policy in Ireland and Scotland. Ireland. The process was begun of converting Irish chieftains into English peers which eventually divorced the Irish people from their natural leaders; and principles of English law and government were spread beyond the Pale. In Scotland Henry was less fortunate. He failed to win over James V. to his anti-papal policy, revived the feudal claim to suzerainty, won the battle of Solway Moss (1542), and then after James’s death bribed and threatened the Scots estates into concluding a treaty of marriage between their infant queen and Henry’s son. The church in Scotland led by Beaton, and the French party led by James V.’s widow, Mary of Guise, soon reversed this decision, and Hertford’s heavy hand was (1544) laid on Edinburgh in revenge. France was at the root of the evil, and Henry was thus induced once more to join Charles V. in war (1543). The joint invasion of 1544 led to the capture of Boulogne, but the emperor made peace in order to deal with the Lutherans and left Henry at war with France. The French attempted to retaliate in 1545, and burnt some villages in the Isle of Wight and on the coast of Sussex. But their expedition was a failure, and peace was made in 1546, by which Henry undertook to restore Boulogne in eight years’ time on payment of eight hundred thousand crowns. Scotland was not included in the pacification, and when Henry died (January 28, 1547) he was busy preparing to renew his attempt on Scotland’s independence.

He left a council of sixteen to rule during his son’s minority. The balance of parties which had existed since Cromwell’s fall had been destroyed in the last months of the reign by the attainder of Norfolk and his son Surrey, and Edward VI. the exclusion of Gardiner and Thirlby from the council of regency. Men of the new learning prevailed, and Hertford (later duke of Somerset), as uncle to Edward VI., was made protector of the realm and governor of the king’s person. He soon succeeded in removing the trammels imposed upon his authority, and made himself king in everything but name. He used his arbitrary power to modify the despotic system of the Tudors; all treason laws since Edward III., all heresy laws, all restrictions upon the publication of the Scriptures were removed in the first parliament of the reign, and various securities for liberty were Progress of the Reformation. enacted. The administration of the sacrament of the altar in both elements was permitted, the Catholic interpretation of the mass was rendered optional, images were removed, and English was introduced into nearly the whole of the church service. In the following session (1548-1549) the first Act of Uniformity authorized the first Book of Common Prayer. It met with strenuous resistance in Devon and in Cornwall, where rebellions added to the thickening troubles of the protector.

His administration was singularly unsuccessful. In 1547 he won the great but barren victory of Pinkie Cleugh over the Scots, and attempted to push on the marriage and union by a mixture of conciliation and coercion. He Administration of the protector Somerset. made genuine and considerable concessions to Scottish feeling, guaranteeing autonomy and freedom of trade, and suggesting that the two realms should adopt the indifferent style of the empire of Great Britain. But he also seized Haddington in 1548, held by force the greater part of the Lowlands, and, when Mary was transported to France, revived the old feudal claims which he had dropped in 1547. France was, as ever, the backbone of the Scots resistance; men and money poured into Edinburgh to assist Mary of Guise and the French faction. The protector’s offer to restore Boulogne could not purchase French acquiescence in the union of England and Scotland; and the bickerings on the borders in France and open fighting in Scotland led the French to declare war on England in August 1549. They were encouraged by dissensions in England. Somerset’s own brother, Thomas Seymour, jealous of the protector, intrigued against the government; he sought to secure the hand of Elizabeth, the favour of Edward VI. and the support of the Suffolk line, secretly married Catherine Parr, and abused his office as lord high admiral to make friends with pirates and other enemies of order. Foes of the family, such as Warwick and Southampton, saw in his factious conduct the means of ruining both the brothers. Seymour was brought to the block, and the weak consent of the protector seriously damaged him in the public eye. His notorious sympathy with the peasantry further alienated the official classes and landed gentry, and his campaign against enclosures brought him into conflict with the strongest forces of the time. The remedial measures which he favoured failed; and the rising of Ket in Norfolk and others less important in nearly all the counties of England, made Somerset’s position impossible. Bedford and Herbert suppressed the rebellion in the west, Warwick that in Norfolk (July-August 1549). They then combined with the majority of the council and the discontented Catholics to remove the protector from office and imprison him in the Tower (October).