Of both More and Cromwell it has been observed that historians do not greatly vary in their estimates, when a reasonable allowance is made for Protestant and anti-Protestant bias. That remark does not hold good of King Henry. The popular idea of him is more intimately associated with that of Bluebeard than of any other hero of fiction or history. Mr. Froude has created a legend of his own, wherein the only doubt seems to be whether Henry quite passed the dividing line between the mere hero and the demi-god. Most commonly, he appears as a brutal tyrant. Among the best informed living authorities in England on the sixteenth century, one distinguishes him as the most remarkable man who ever sat on the English throne, and another has characterised him as a weak-willed bully, always depending for support on some stronger will than his own; yet neither the one nor the other shows signs of having been led to his conclusion by any marked bias. The data for his reign, in the form of documents calendared with exceptional skill, are peculiarly ample; but the opportunities for drawing divergent inferences therefrom are extensive. It would be too much to call them unique, in a century which gave birth also to Elizabeth and to Mary Queen of Scots.

About the fourth year of Henry’s reign, Thomas Wolsey came to the front and remained there for sixteen years. For another ten years, Thomas Cromwell was in the king’s service. During this period of something exceeding a quarter of a century, did Henry or his ministers control policy? Great events happened. Did he, in dealing with them, show himself a great statesman? Or did he merely play the part of a selfish and greedy libertine? One can only express a personal opinion. The view which seems most consonant with the facts may be broadly stated thus. Like his daughter Elizabeth, he had a keen eye for character and ability; he could appreciate statesmanship in a servant, and he knew how to get the utmost value out of the men he chose to trust. In the main, he let them carry out their designs in their own way; but he remained watchful, and saw to it that if he happened to want anything not included in their programme, the programme should be altered. He did not initiate, but he did adopt and make his own, the principles of Wolsey’s foreign and Cromwell’s domestic policy. A time came when he wanted from Wolsey something which his minister’s genius was not adapted to provide; and Wolsey vanished. By slow degrees Cromwell emerged. A time came when Cromwell had given him all that he could give, and was seeking to draw his master into paths he did not choose to tread. Cromwell went to the scaffold. In his remaining years, the king showed no power of striking out for himself a strong policy for good or for evil; he had no minister whom he trusted to pilot the ship; his own pilotage proved crude, and left to the succeeding government a crop of difficulties with which it was quite incompetent to cope. His father’s policy had been his own creation; his ministers had never been much more than clerks. The eighth Henry chose ministers to create and carry out a policy for him, but always under his own control. The peculiarity of the Tudor genius, which he shared with his father and his daughter, lay in the unfailing skill with which they judged men, and their intuitive appreciation of popular feeling, which kept them from passing the bounds of acquiescence. Hence, whatever we may think of their policy itself or of particular acts, whether our moral judgment condemns or applauds, whether we account their measures far-sighted or short-sighted, they stand out as great rulers, accomplishing what they meant to accomplish, and displaying their activities on a great scale.

II
THE CARDINAL RULES

Henry was his father’s second son. Tradition says that his sire, ever thoughtful of economy, destined him for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and had him educated accordingly. As the boy, however, became, through his elder brother’s death, heir apparent to the throne at the age of eleven, the remarkable theological erudition which he displayed in later years can hardly be attributed to his early school-room studies—even if the tradition had any more basis of fact than that it was at least ben trovato. Whatever career was anticipated for him, the utmost pains were bestowed on his education, and he learnt to take a keen interest in intellectual pursuits. Erasmus gives an agreeable picture of him at the age of nine, and remarks on the extraordinary intelligence of his letters a little later—an intelligence which made the learned man believe that the boy’s tutor wrote or revised them, till ocular demonstration convinced him of the contrary. Intellectual pursuits, however, did not absorb the Prince of Wales. His father was not endowed with any very striking physique, but the boy rather took after his grandfather Edward IV., being decidedly handsome, of very athletic frame, and excelling in the sports of vigorous and healthy youth.

Two months before Henry completed his eighteenth year, his father’s death placed him on the throne of England—successor to a king whose later years had been conspicuously sordid and gloomy. Spring with its pulsing, generous life, followed the sapless dreariness of winter. So men dreamed, and so probably Henry reckoned, himself. Ugly things like Empson and Dudley were to vanish into limbo; the king would celebrate his marriage royally—and follow that up by some splendid martial achievement. It was still permitted to dream mediÆval dreams; might not the Crescent be once more rolled back before the advancing Cross? Still, at eighteen there was no great hurry about that, and meanwhile life might be very much enjoyed. Kings have servants about them to take the dull drudgery of politics off their hands.

A most excellent state of things, in the eyes of the veterans Ferdinand and Maximilian. The old king’s martial ardour had resolved itself into occasional campaigns on which no money was wasted, and in which no blood was shed, but which somehow had a trick of resulting in the transfer of hard cash from somebody’s pocket to that of the English monarch. But surely this open-hearted boy could be persuaded that Henry V. set a more attractive precedent than Henry VII., and that France was a good deal nearer than Constantinople. To simplify matters he had beside him a comely and capable wife, devoted to the Spanish interest, and all the more likely to influence him, at his age, for being a few years the elder: and no young prince could have an adviser half so shrewd as his quite disinterested father-in-law of Aragon. So the unsophisticated Henry was carefully manoeuvred into war with France. From which he learned two lessons: one that there was frequently a very marked difference between the words of kings and their deeds; the other, that military glory or political success cannot be achieved without close attention to detail. Incidentally, the young king made another discovery; namely that the comparatively insignificant ecclesiastic whom old Bishop Fox had introduced into the Council was as sharp-witted as Ferdinand himself, could do the work of ten ordinary men, and always knew what he was about.

Before the end of 1514, Ferdinand and Maximilian were made painfully aware that Henry was not going to be anybody’s tool, by the unexpected alliance of England and France. The diplomatist who had beaten them with their own weapons had won the English king’s entire confidence, and there was only one possible rival to him, in the person of Henry’s brother-in-arms, Charles Brandon, newly created Duke of Suffolk; nor was it long before it became patent that the brother-in-arms, having made himself brother-in-law into the bargain by marrying the princess Mary, might remain the favourite companion in the hunting field, and the favourite antagonist in the tournament, but would have very little to say to the king’s politics. Wolsey had not only thoroughly impressed his master by his immense administrative ability, his capacity for hard work, and his astuteness; he had also succeeded in giving a new turn to the king’s ambitions, making them political rather than martial. The campaigns of 1513 had restored the prestige of English soldiers at least in a respectable degree; the outwitting of the craftiest prince in Europe next year showed that there was a worthy successor to Henry VII.; that monarch was reputed to have left in the royal coffers wealth so enormous as to be almost inexhaustible; Scotland had suffered such a blow at Flodden that she could not, for the time at least, hamper English action. Henry therefore could now hold the balance between the potentates of Europe, and become the controlling factor in international affairs. Such a position was much better worth working for than reconquests of French soil, or even the recovery of the French crown, which Henry V. had won but had not lived long enough to wear. As for crusades, Henry was old enough now to know that in the eyes of a practical politician they were out of date.

Schemes for dominating Europe were much affected by the fact that in 1514 many important changes in the personality of the rulers were obviously impending. Henry, twenty-three years old, was the only young man among them. But on the next New Year’s Day, France was to pass from Louis XII. to young Francis of AngoulÊme, aged twenty. In 1516, Ferdinand was to be succeeded by his grandson Charles, aged sixteen. In 1519, Maximilian was to disappear; and, inasmuch as the Empire was not technically hereditary, much would depend on the Imperial election, in which, however, the chances were that Ferdinand’s heir would prove to be Maximilian’s heir also.

From 1514, the figure of Wolsey—very shortly to become a Cardinal—completely dominated English politics. The king resigned himself wholly to his guidance, and for many years there was no more talk of Henry leading victorious armies over the Continent. The rival ambitions of Francis, Maximilian, and others, chiefly concerned with the annexation of Italian States by one potentate or another, the playing off of rivals, the paying and withholding of subsidies, were the main business in hand till the demise of the emperor, early in 1519, opened the great question, who was to wear the Imperial crown?

Young Charles was already king of all Spain, and lord of the Burgundian heritage. He was also heir to the Austrian and other German possessions of Maximilian, who, like Ferdinand, had been his grandfather. For some time, Habsburg had followed Habsburg as emperor. There was no other of the princes of Germany strong enough territorially to bear the weight of empire, and Frederic of Saxony, capax imperii, had no mind for the undertaking. If Charles were elected he would wield enormous powers. The French king, ambitious, and dreading the further aggrandisement of a rival whose dominions were already so great, came forward as a candidate: his success would mean an accession of power to France even more dangerous to the European balance than that of Charles. Under these circumstances, it is not incredible that Henry really meant business in taking steps with a view to obtaining the Imperial crown for himself. At twenty-eight, he was quite young enough to believe that the thing was really practicable: and if practicable, it would be a magnificent fulfilment of his ambitions along the very lines on which Wolsey had directed them. It is not, however, credible that the Cardinal should have taken that view; whether the king was or was not merely playing with the idea, his minister must have known that it was chimerical. The agent, Richard Pace, very soon made it quite clear that it would be sheer waste of energy and money for Henry to enter seriously for the stakes, and Cuthbert Tunstal was careful to point out that in burdening himself with the responsibilities of the Empire, he would be losing for the sake of a shadow the solid substance of his power as King of England. Henry’s candidature was withdrawn, and no one was any the worse.

The episode, however, suggests certain conclusions. It is almost impossible to doubt that the idea of the candidature was Henry’s own; it is difficult to doubt that he did contemplate it seriously. It was consistent—in intention—with the conception of political predominance as a more substantial object of ambition than military laurels. It was of a grandiosity which appealed to the imagination, but not to the practical judgment of a far-sighted statesman. That Henry should have taken it up is entirely consistent with his character as we have conceived it. On the other hand, if he had been merely a monarch who allowed himself to be habitually managed, but broke out in occasional fits of obstinacy—as weak men do—he would have struggled to the last for that election. In fact, he did interfere with Wolsey the moment he thought he could better the minister’s plans, but when he saw he had made a mistake, but could retire without loss of dignity, he did so without losing his temper. Later in life he might have made himself unpleasant to somebody, under like conditions. That would have depended very much on how far he had set his heart on the particular object he found himself called upon to surrender. In the present case, Wolsey had ostensibly done everything possible to make the scheme succeed. He may never have attempted dissuasion, relying on the inherent impracticability of the whole thing to prevent any really awkward consequences. At any rate, Henry’s confidence was in no way diminished.

There was indeed little enough reason to be dissatisfied. Western Europe was in the hands of three young men, of whom the eldest, Henry, was twenty-eight, and the youngest, Charles, was not twenty. If Charles had the widest dominion, his task was also the most complicated. He could only pass to his Teutonic from his Spanish territories by sea; French territory was continuous. If Charles and Francis quarrelled, each would want the friendship of England: for her enmity to Charles would mean immense injury to the trade of Flanders, and her enmity to France would mean serious military embarrassments in the direction of Picardy. So for some time to come both were eagerly seeking an English alliance, while Wolsey’s skill was sufficiently tasked, but not over-tasked, to keep the pair of them in play; and to keep them at peace, since if they once went to war it might prove exceedingly difficult to avoid embroiling England.

In 1520 the competition between emperor and king for English favour—which both took to mean the Cardinal’s favour—was particularly lively, with the result that the great meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold took place, designed to signalise the enthusiastic amity of Henry and Francis. Wolsey, however, had manoeuvred a less magnificent meeting in England, only just before, between Henry and the emperor; and no one could say that either of the rivals had really won a lead over the other. But it became increasingly difficult to prevent a collision between them, and a year later, when Wolsey was ostensibly making a great effort at the Conference of Calais to effect a reconciliation, he was in reality coming privately to terms with Charles. If England was to be dragged into a war, she would be on the Imperial side.

III
WAR

Why did England go to war with France, instead of resolutely holding aloof? The Cardinal cannot have seriously thought of the war as a means to the recovery of the French crown: nor can he have held it good for England that France should be crippled, and the Emperor magnified. If he went into the war of his own free will, if he urged it on Henry, it can only have been with the purely personal object of so binding Charles to him as to ensure his own election to the Papacy at the next vacancy. Yet at the time of the Calais Conference there was no immediate likelihood of the reigning Pope’s death; Wolsey was surely the last man to count on the gratitude of princes for past favours as an effective motive, and Charles had already shown a thorough appreciation of the doctrine that promises are made to be evaded. Moreover, so shrewd a man as the Cardinal would presumably have felt extremely doubtful whether the Papacy—with Charles master of Europe—would be much worth having. The only remaining suggestion is, that Wolsey foresaw great domestic troubles, and took the time-honoured course of trying to divert attention by plunging the country in war. The obvious objection to that is that there were no pressing signs of disturbance at all.

The mere fact that the war was a regular reversal of the methods Wolsey had hitherto followed, points to its having been undertaken against his judgment. But is it unreasonable to suppose that it was not against the king’s judgment? That Henry for the second time indicated the course which his minister was to follow, and the minister obeyed rather than resign? In those days, ministers did not resign, unless they were exceptional people with consciences, like Thomas More: and for Wolsey—whose political existence, if not his life, depended entirely on the king’s favour—to resign would have meant virtual suicide. On the other hand, there were influences which would affect Henry in favour of the war, intelligibly enough. To him, the conquest of France with the help of Charles may not have seemed absurd, and he was not ashamed to avow it as his object to Parliament, when asking for money. Apart from that, there was always a military party headed by men who felt themselves much more likely to achieve honour and fame on the battlefield than in the Cardinal’s ante-room: and if there was to be war at all, there was a sort of standing sentiment in favour of fighting the French. Lastly, the king was still on good terms with his wife, and his wife was a most determined advocate of her nephew’s interests. Henry was even now only just thirty, and the glamour of military achievement might still tempt him. It certainly seems the most reasonable conclusion that it was not Wolsey who dragged the king into war, but the king who forced war on Wolsey.

As a matter of fact, events proved that there was very little to be made out of the war. After eight years, Wolsey found himself compelled to call a Parliament again, in order to get money—whereas it had been his consistent policy to dispense with Parliament altogether. The war was at any rate not sufficiently unpopular to prevent the voting of a substantial subsidy; but as time passed, such favour as it had found with the public faded; the Cardinal did not venture, when more money was needed, to ask Parliament for it again, and when he tried to raise what was called an Amicable loan, the response was cold. The disaster of Francis at Pavia, though it suggested more talk about recovering the Crown of France, offered no opportunity for material advantage to Henry, and it very soon became evident that Charles was so much the master of Europe that his career would only be held in check by an Anglo-French alliance, which it became the Cardinal’s business to contract in 1527.

IV
THE “DIVORCE”

This was precisely the time at which there is no doubt that the question of divorcing Katharine of Aragon was very much on the minds both of king and Cardinal. In discussing that subject in the preceding study of Wolsey, nothing was said of the theory most adverse to Wolsey—that the idea originated with him, and that he suggested it with the specific intention of breaking the alliance with Charles and substituting a French marriage, a French alliance being now his object. On this theory it is argued that the king’s intention of using the divorce to marry Anne Boleyn was sprung on the Cardinal as something quite new, on his return from the French embassy; his absence having been turned to account by his enemies, with the simple object of wrecking his policy and ruining him. The fact that Henry afterwards publicly acquitted Wolsey of having instigated the divorce may not count for much as evidence of his innocence; but there is another grave objection to the theory. If Henry told him that the divorce must be managed somehow, he would doubtless have considered that the least injurious result would be a French marriage; but it is not easy to imagine that he would himself have sought to bring about a step which would have made so permanent a breach between Henry and Charles. His own policy was to keep it always in the power of England to shift from one side to the other—to trim the balance between Charles and Francis. The theory is put forward to square with a particular view of Henry’s character—that he was managed by any one who could get at him. But it makes the Cardinal himself somewhat unintelligible—or unintelligent.

The view advanced in these pages is, that for the third time the king laid down a policy of his own for the Cardinal to carry out. In the first place he had two personal reasons for wanting the divorce—a superstitious impression that the failure of Katharine to supply him with a male heir was Heaven’s punishment for a marriage which the Pope ought never to have sanctioned; and a passion for Anne Boleyn. In the second place, the policy of alliance with Charles against Francis had worked out badly, and a rupture with Charles must come in any case. Wolsey should manage it, or should help: and if he began with a belief that a French marriage might be the outcome, there would be no harm done. The policy, as before, was a deviation from Wolsey’s, but did not seem superficially to run counter to the broad principle on which it was based, that England was to prove her effective predominance by throwing her weight into the French or the Imperial scale as circumstances might demand. But, as before, the method was short-sighted. On the other hand, we find Wolsey behaving also precisely as he did before. If the king did elect to lay down a policy, he must be the instrument through which it should be carried out. He could not prevent it; he must make the best of it, and as far as possible neutralise the bad effects by skilful handling. He made his attempt, failed, and fell. It would have been better for his credit if he had fallen in open instead of in covert opposition.

It remains in any case impossible to dogmatise; the whole thing is a tangle, and there are difficulties in the way of accepting each solution. To the theory that the divorce was primarily a plan of Wolsey’s in order to facilitate a French alliance, there is a further objection that a negotiation was already on foot for marrying the Princess Mary to Henry of Orleans, the French king’s second son, who afterwards became Henry II. The substitution of the marriage of the king himself to a French princess would have hardly been in itself a closer bond; yet we should be compelled to believe that Wolsey deliberately, with no greater advantage in view, sought to make this change at the cost of a probably irreparable breach with the emperor. The political motive is inadequate. Whereas, for the king, who had a powerful non-political motive thrown in, the plan becomes intelligible enough. The divorce should be so managed that Mary’s legitimacy should still be secured, the marriage with Orleans could go forward, and he himself would get the wife he wanted. That in 1527 his passion for Anne was a very powerful motive is not to be disputed—the love-letters, uncertain as their dates are, cannot be attributed to a still later time.

It is also tolerably clear that the king meant to have the divorce in any case, whether it upset foreign relations or not. Moreover, if the plan was Wolsey’s, he would have been satisfied to leave the Cardinal to work it out, which he was not. From the beginning he appears to have suspected—if there was not more than a suspicion—that his minister disliked the whole idea, and would be only too pleased if it were shelved; and he employed other agents to get the thing done, behind Wolsey’s back. Wolsey was very much in the position of a lawyer whose client, with whom he cannot afford to quarrel, insists on his adopting a certain course in defiance of his own judgment. He devised ingenious expedients; he tried to make his case as safe as possible; he gave nothing away to the other side; but he was reluctant throughout, while the king was invincibly obstinate.

Assuming then that it was Henry, not Wolsey, who from the commencement sought the divorce, the Cardinal’s consistency is restored. So far also the consistency of Henry’s character is maintained. He never laid out a great political scheme, calculating for the future; but when Wolsey formulated a large design, he readily recognised its merits, and recognised Wolsey himself as the man to carry it through. But three times he was moved with a desire to obtain a particular end, without realising that to do so would overturn the main scheme; on each occasion the minister formally and officially obeyed his master’s behest. Over the divorce, however, Henry’s behaviour presents an interesting psychological study.

There have been many statesmen, successful in varying degree, who have quite deliberately ignored moral considerations in their policy. They have not admitted that unrighteous action as such carries any penalty attached to it. Crime which shocks public sentiment violently they may avoid; not because it is criminal, but because public sentiment cannot be ignored. The mere fact that a particular course of action involves injustice or cruelty, or otherwise over-rides the moral law, is not permitted to weigh at all in judging of its expediency. Such a one was Thomas Cromwell. There have been others who would never allow any claim of mere expediency to countervail against the dictates of conscience. Such a one was Thomas More.

The average man is content to compromise: not drawing the line very high, but still drawing it somewhere. Henry belonged to the class who would never violate conscience; but, when any particular course presented itself to his mind as expedient or desirable, he had a quite unique power of convincing himself not only that the thing would not be wrong, but that conscience positively clamoured that it must be done: nothing was so monstrous that he could not solemnly persuade himself that it was a sad duty. There are men who are made that way. They will rob the widow and swindle the orphan, but they must and do first trick themselves into an amazing belief that in so doing they are serving heaven or society. Henry was much more dangerous than a commonplace hypocrite who assumes a mask to deceive the world, since he had to begin by making the deception convincing to himself.

Thus it was in the matter of the divorce. It was of real urgent importance that he should have a male heir, and there was no hope of his wife giving him one; he wanted very much to marry Anne, and he could not do so while his wife was living; but with what conscience could he get rid of that wife? Henry’s conscience gave him the answer he wanted, pat: it always did. Conscience pointed out that the children of the marriage, except one girl, all came to grief—were still-born, or died in a few weeks. Surely, here was Heaven’s judgment on a sinful union. True, the contracting parties had sinned with a Pope’s benediction, and thinking there was nothing wrong. But clearly the Pope must have erred. Conscience therefore did not merely excuse, it demanded, the dissolution of the unholy bond. Conscience permitted Henry to declare fervently that nothing would please him so much as to find that his scruples were groundless; but nothing would ever have persuaded him that they were so except perhaps the death of Anne Boleyn. Having once thoroughly satisfied himself that the divorce was a duty, whatever any one might say to the contrary, it followed that some legal method of accomplishing it must exist. If the Pope did not see the thing in the same light, there must be something defective in the Papal authority after all. The scruple of conscience gradually assumed an axiomatic character to Henry; and the repudiation of Clement, who regarded it as an extremely questionable postulate, followed logically.

Until Clement revoked the cause to Rome—a practical demonstration that he would not sanction a verdict objectionable to the emperor—nothing demanding revolutionary measures had occurred. That event, however, changed the situation. There would have to be a fight with the Papacy, which could not be conducted under the Cardinal’s captaincy. The Cardinal had failed badly; his behaviour had been suspicious. It did not take the conscientious monarch long to discover that advantage had been taken of his own generous trustfulness, that he had been warming a viper in his bosom. Wolsey was thrown to the wolves. It is curiously characteristic of Henry that the instrument by which he shattered Wolsey was the charge of a breach of PrÆmunire in accepting and exercising the legatine authority. The mere fact that this had been done with the king’s own licence, almost at his instigation, would have checked any other monarch. Henry found in it an additional cause of offence. The Cardinal had not only broken the law—he, whose business it was to see that the king did not accidentally transgress, had actually inveigled the king into transgression. A just man, tricked by his own familiar friend into committing an act of injustice, feels righteous indignation against the friend. Such was the indignation of the king against the Cardinal, as of Adam against Eve.

V
THE NEW POLICY

The fall of Wolsey marks, as the beginning of the divorce proceedings really commences, the second stage of Henry’s career. Had he died before 1529, the Bluebeard legend would never have been applied to him, and his connexion with the Reformation would have been in effect limited to a controversial pamphlet in favour of the extreme Papal claims, directed against Luther. This was all that the uprising of the great Reformer had evoked from the prince who was expected to be the royal champion of the Intellectuals. No one would have called him a tyrant. It is true that Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, had been put to death at the beginning of the reign—as tradition says, in fulfilment of the advice of Henry VII. It is true also that Buckingham had been executed, not so much because he had committed any treason as because he was thought dangerous; but the world would have been content to leave that as one of the charges against Wolsey. Henry would have passed with posterity as a pleasure-loving monarch with a great taste for extravagance, who cheerfully left the government of the country to an able and unscrupulous minister, and did absolutely nothing personally in the twenty years of his reign to justify the high hopes with which his accession was hailed. The reign would have been recorded as the reign of the Cardinal, and our ideas of the king himself would have been conveyed mainly in the anecdotes of his personal vanity and love of pageantry and popularity. It is the forcefulness, energy, and resolution—or the violence, fickleness, and obstinacy—displayed in the second period which make us revise our judgment of the first, and set us seeking therein for some appearance of these same characteristics, and discovering in them the explanation of some puzzles in the Cardinal’s policy.

The new stage of Henry’s career presents us with a problem at the outset. Hitherto, he had followed Wolsey’s counsels; very shortly, the Machiavellian maxims of Cromwell guided his course; but there is no one to bridge the gap between Wolsey and Cromwell. Sir Thomas More succeeded the Cardinal as Chancellor, but not as first minister—he never made any secret, to the king, of his conviction that the marriage with Katharine could not and should not be invalidated. Nothing points to Norfolk or Suffolk as guiding policy. The newly discovered Cranmer had suggested a principle for dealing with the divorce, but his appearance is merely in the character of a University doctor, not of a statesman. Precisely at this moment, before he knew anything of Cromwell, with Wolsey, so to speak, hanging on the very verge of the precipice, a Parliament is called suddenly, which remains undissolved until its seventh year. Since 1515 there had been only one Parliament, that of 1523–1524. Between 1500 and 1515 Parliaments had been rare. Henry VII., when he no longer felt the need of constant Parliamentary sanction, and Wolsey after him, had gone steadily on the rule of accustoming the country to have the government carried on almost without Parliaments, and of establishing absolutism on those lines. From this moment that attitude towards Parliament disappears. For the rest of the reign, there is no prolonged interval without one; Parliament itself is converted into the instrument and the buttress of despotism.

In the preceding study of Thomas Cromwell the view was adopted that he was the real author of what was one comprehensive design for establishing the royal power high over everything else, including therein the repudiation of Papal rivalry, and the subordination of the clerical organisation; while the method, of deliberately choosing to make Parliament share the responsibility, was his also. Yet the calling of this Parliament in 1529, and its initial measures of ecclesiastical reform, cannot be attributed to him. Henry did it out of his own head. It will be found, however, that the apparent contradictions are easily reconcilable.

Henry found, in 1529, that his determination to have a divorce would involve either a fight with the Papacy or a struggle to secure Papal support in despite of the emperor. Also he felt that the Cardinal was not to be depended on as the manager of that struggle. He had no one ready to take the Cardinal’s place, though Stephen Gardiner might have done so had he been a layman. He had formulated no plan of campaign beyond that of sending the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn’s father, with Cranmer in his train, on an embassy to Bologna. But he might find himself impelled to do more or less questionable things; the precedent of his father’s first years suggested that in that case it would be useful to be able to say that he had acted with the sanction of Parliament; and he had the Tudor instinct of appreciating the value of conciliating popular sentiment. Nothing would conciliate popular sentiment so much as inducing his subjects to believe that it was their interests and their opinions he was consulting. So he summoned Parliament.

Thus, Henry called the Parliament: Henry authorised clerical reform: Henry meditated a possible quarrel with the Pope. But it was Cromwell who co-ordinated Henry’s ideas—clever enough as far as they went, but not going far—into a single far-reaching scheme, wherein the things his master had thought of were nicely adjusted, gaps were filled in, consequences calculated, and a systematic evolution arranged in which every step should seem the corollary of what had already been accomplished. How far individual steps were invented by Henry, and how far by Cromwell, it is not possible to gauge. Cromwell never assumed the pose of Wolsey—the pose which the Cardinal did indubitably adopt, although it was erroneously inferred from the famous if legendary phrase, Ego et rex meus. He was always ostensibly the king’s instrument. In Wolsey’s time a question had once arisen whether in sending certain official despatches the full information should be sent to him, and only general remarks to the king, or vice versa. That would not have happened with Thomas Cromwell. The full official despatch would have gone to the king as a matter of course—but Cromwell might have had a private unofficial commentary. Henry, during the Cromwell rÉgime, was in constant evidence as the ruler of the country. During Wolsey’s rÉgime, he ostentatiously left the management in Wolsey’s hands. But during both periods we can at any rate form a shrewd guess at the points on which king and minister were in harmony, and those where the minister had to yield to the king.

Beyond minor reforms of abuses, and the movement for taking the opinion of the Universities on the divorce, there was no immediate sign, after the Cardinal’s fall, of a definitely anti-clerical or anti-Papal policy. The first blow—the demand for a ransom from the clergy under the PrÆmunire—would have been entirely characteristic of either the king or Cromwell: the idea was after all merely a very much more audacious application of the method adopted towards Wolsey. Whoever hit upon the notion, it was made the first step in the systematic grinding down of the clergy between the upper and the nether millstones of financial spoliation and political subjection. The Supplication against the Ordinaries in Parliament, the Submission of the Clergy, forced upon Convocation as the clause of the “Supreme Head” had been, appear to be more decisively Cromwell’s handiwork. There is no adequate reason to suppose that Parliament had these measures thrust down its throat: anti-clericalism was not a new idea, and was usually popular; and if the Supplication included matters about which the general public cared very little, such as the right of ecclesiastical legislation exercised by Convocation, it also carefully embodied popular grievances, though they may not have been as flagrant as was represented. But on the other hand, if the Supplication emanated from any one but Cromwell, it implies an elaboration of organised action among private members which there is nothing to corroborate. It must have been what may be called a Government measure, which on the whole had the support—possibly the enthusiastic support—of the House. The Annates Act, opposed by the bishops, was not enthusiastically adopted by the Commons—not so much because they objected to depriving the Pope of the impost as because they saw no reason why the clergy should be relieved of it. They did not realise that the king and Cromwell had no intention of allowing it to become an effective measure of relief at all.

VI
DIVERGENCES BETWEEN HENRY AND CROMWELL

In short, down to the pronouncement of the divorce, Henry and Cromwell are clearly working in perfect accord—whether minister or king devised the programme: Convocation is being steadily compelled, very much against its will, to endorse the propositions of the Crown, and Parliament is at any rate acquiescent. We may, however, suspect that Henry, up to this point at least if not for nearly a year more, inclined to hope that the Pope might yet give way; whereas in the overtures to the Lutheran Princes in 1533 we may see Cromwell working to make doubly sure the assurance of complete severance from Rome. The Lutheran alliance was unquestionably a favourite scheme of Cromwell’s, but the king never did more than dally with it. In his pet character of theologian he could never bring himself to accept the Augsburg Confession, or any compromise which would have satisfied the Protestants.

Cromwell was always possessed with the belief that a combination of Powers favourable to the Papacy would be formed sooner or later for the destruction of England and the Protestants on the Continent: the coalition of Charles and Francis was his bugbear. On the other hand, he saw no hope of an effective union between England and France; while he fancied that, if the bar between Henry and Charles, irremovable while Katharine lived, were once annulled by her death, the emperor—whose troops had sacked Rome in 1527, and who had in many respects evinced very little real regard for the Pope’s authority—might be brought over to the anti-Papal side. Therefore, whenever he thought there was a prospect of effecting an Imperial alliance, he let the idea of the Protestant alliance go; whenever the Imperial alliance seemed hopeless, the Protestant alliance re-appeared on his programme.

Henry, however, was not at one with Cromwell. He looked askance at the idea of a Protestant alliance because he did not consider himself a Protestant; on the contrary, he accounted Lutheranism as heresy, and himself as a pattern of orthodoxy. From his point of view, the only quarrel with Rome lay in the Pope’s assertion of usurped claims to jurisdiction, which either Charles or Francis might find themselves ready to repudiate in their own dominion at any convenient moment. He remembered Wolsey’s doctrine. Francis and Charles had so many antagonistic interests that they could never co-operate for long. The business of England was to make each desire her alliance; to avoid the mistake of committing herself too deeply to either. For a short time—in 1539—he began to think that Cromwell might be right about the danger of a coalition, and accepted the plan of the Cleves marriage as a defensive measure. The marriage was hardly accomplished when a fresh breach between the rival princes showed that his own view of the danger had been right. There never was, either in his own time or later, a Catholic coalition against England. At the same time it is at least a tenable view that a Protestant union, steadily maintained, might have had great results; on which it is not uninteresting to speculate, but the speculation is too much guesswork to be profitable.

Henry’s views, then, on foreign policy, differed from his minister’s, and it was Henry’s views that prevailed, except in the episode of the Cleves marriage; and in that particular case, there was so startling an appearance of a real rapprochement between Francis and Charles that the king’s deviation along Cromwell’s lines can hardly be attributed to weakness. And even so he took careful precautions, as long as the thing was possible, to preserve a loop-hole for his own withdrawal, however deeply his minister might be committed.

In the ecclesiastical policy also, as it emerges after the definite breach with Rome, Cromwell was evidently more inclined to encourage the advanced school than his master. Henry made Cranmer Archbishop, wanting in that post a man who accepted whole-heartedly the theory of Royal Supremacy. As long as the reforms proposed were restricted to dealing with notorious abuses of the kind which Colet had freely denounced, and to the introduction of an English Bible—which the Conservatives might regard as dangerous, but could not denounce as in itself heretical—Henry was prepared to give his sanction; but whenever doctrines were in question as to which the followers of the “Old Learning” were in solid agreement, Henry consistently held with them. Cromwell, on the other hand—not from religious sentiment, but on purely political grounds—had Lutheran proclivities, owing to his desire to conciliate Continental Protestantism. He did not, as Cranmer did, urge the acceptance of views to which Henry objected; but his influence was always in favour of “advanced” appointments, and of a lax application of the laws which pressed hardly upon that school. Henry’s personal affection for Cranmer, a liking for Latimer, and an absence of any such feeling towards Gardiner and Gardiner’s colleagues, kept him from active interference in this respect. But he saw to it that what the law laid down should be unimpeachably orthodox, and every attempt of Cromwell’s to draw nearer to the Lutherans was countered by affirmations of a rigid adherence to the Old Faith and denunciation of innovations: culminating in the Act of the Six Articles. The differences in the formularies of faith issued from 1536 to 1540 are all in the direction of increasing definiteness, of leaving fewer questions open; and the definiteness is always in favour of the old school. Although the minister officially supported the Six Articles, while the Archbishop made all the fight possible against it, the Act was the king’s deliberate work, and the forcing of it through was without any possible doubt a direct set-back for Cromwell. At the same time, however, Henry took occasion to impress on his Court, with his usual vigour, that it would be extremely injudicious for any one to act on the hypothesis that it involved any diminution of the personal favour in which Cranmer was held.

In the rest of the domestic policy—Treason Acts, Supremacy Acts, Acts of Succession, Dissolution of Monasteries, Attainders—there is no opposition between king and minister. The edifice of absolutism with the sanction of Parliament is steadily reared, on the ruins of the ecclesiastical fabric and of the last families round whom any sort of Yorkist tradition can centre. When at last it had culminated in the Royal Proclamations Act, Cromwell ceased to be necessary; being no longer necessary, he offended his master; and, offending him, fell as Wolsey fell before him.

VII
HENRY’S CLOSING YEARS

Down to this point, then, from 1513 to 1540, we may believe that Henry was the puppet first of Wolsey and then of Cromwell; or that both were no more than the instruments of his supreme genius; or that, having with a light heart delegated all his duties and cares to the Cardinal, he resolved to rule himself, upset the Cardinal, and used Cromwell as a tool and scapegoat. Or we may judge that the creative, designing brains were his ministers’; but that he deliberately made their policy his own, except when he had a fancy for diverging from it, trusting to their pilotage just so long as it suited him—that they, not he, were the pilots, but he was emphatically the captain. We may even believe that the ministers were responsible only for the mistakes in execution, the king for the great designs. But when Cromwell is gone no one takes the vacant place. Gardiner and Norfolk are at the head of the Council, which becomes a hotbed of intrigues; but it is quite impossible to attribute the royal policy either to any individual or to any clique. Hence, in the king’s conduct of affairs during the remaining six and a half years of his life, we ought to find clues to the nature and extent of the control he really exercised during the thirty years preceding.

The view here put forward has been, that Wolsey diverted him from his first merely boyish dreams of martial achievements, to take hold of the conception of making England stand as the secure arbiter between the great Powers of the Continent, wooed by all—or both, when only two were left—and able always to turn the scale if one or other threatened to preponderate. His brain, however, being somewhat more liable to inflation than the Cardinal’s, he compelled the latter, in pursuit of this policy, to diverge from the right path and commit the country to the French war—possibly, though not on the whole probably, with the notion that the old grandiose idea of conquering France might become practicable. Then, just as the blunder was in course of being remedied, he became obsessed with the determination to divorce Katharine; a proceeding which could hardly fail to make friendly relations with the emperor so impossible as to destroy the basis of the balancing scheme, which demanded that the two European rivals should both be anxious to court English support. Then Cromwell showed him how to use the divorce as a piece of the machinery by which the power of the Crown might be made at least as absolute as any known in European history. He adopted Cromwell’s plan, but not what Cromwell regarded as its corollary, the acceptance of the position, and the alliance of the continental Protestants: endeavouring to hold himself aloof from alliances, and, after Katharine’s death, to regain the position of balance-holder.

Now it has been argued that the policy of 1522 was Wolsey’s own, not the king’s policy forced on him, because it was only when Wolsey was minister that a “spirited foreign policy” was acted upon. It is therefore to be noted that when Henry was left to himself with neither Wolsey nor Cromwell to give counsel, he did quite evidently take up the almost defunct Plantagenet notion of imposing the sovereignty of England on Scotland—which experience had shown to be no more feasible than the conquest of France: and he did again find himself drawn into an Imperial alliance, and actually at war with the French. These facts do not amount to a proof, but they do afford a presumption that the talk about recovering the French crown had not been altogether wind, and that the first fighting alliance with Charles was, like the second, the doing of the king. Probably Henry’s main motive in going into this later French war was to compel Francis to withdraw his support from the Scots. He ought, however, to have known by this time, first, that France could not afford to stand by while Scotland was robbed of the independence which was always a practical and valuable asset for France when she was at war with England: and, secondly, that Charles would play for his own hand, and would find some excuse for leaving his ally isolated the moment his own needs were satisfied.

The Scots affair, by the way, supplies another interesting example of the peculiarities of Henry’s conscience. The head and front of the party in Scotland who were most bitterly hostile to England was Cardinal Beton: who was in close alliance with Mary of Guise, the queen-mother. Henry was ingenious enough to discover that Beton was a rebel, who had secured himself above the reach of the law, and that consequently his assassination would be rather commendable. It is not surprising that the Cardinal was murdered in due course, and that the murderers looked to England for support.

The history of these later years, in short, lends colour to the view that the political errors—in foreign affairs—committed in Wolsey’s days were forced on him by the king: and also that the king himself did not formulate large political conceptions on his own account. More than that, it shows him capable of such serious blunders as the proposal to re-assert the old fable of English suzerainty in Scotland, and—what was in its own way hardly less short-sighted—the wholesale debasement of the coinage. It was not till he was left to manage things with no strong counsellor to aid him that he gave way completely to this most evil propensity of his last years. The thing did incalculable mischief, ruining credit, driving up prices, robbing creditors for the benefit of debtors, and, of course, driving all the sound coins out of circulation. It is to the credit of Somerset in the next reign that, in spite of the depleted treasury, he did not carry that disastrous experiment further: it was left for Northumberland to degrade the currency even more than Henry had done. And it was Henry who had done it, not Wolsey or Cromwell or Gardiner. These things would seem to mean that, left to himself, it was his tendency to resort to paltry and short-sighted tricks and devices of a kind incompatible with the higher statesmanship; tricks which seem at the moment to effect their purpose, but are a mere evasion of the difficulties with which they pretend to deal. In these years, Henry’s statesmanship makes a poor display. We may plead on his behalf that physical disease weakened his intellectual powers, that practically unchecked despotism produced moral degeneration, that we cannot judge the qualities of a man whose rule had been—for whatever reason—undeniably powerful for a quarter of a century, by the mismanagement of the years when he was wearing into his grave. There is truth in the plea. Yet from the degeneration we can infer the inherent defects. The man who muddled his Scottish policy, and left the arrangements for carrying on the government at his death in a state of chaos, was not he who planned, organised, and carried out the defiance of the Papal power and the subjection of the Church; but he may have been perfectly capable of appreciating that vast scheme, and of playing a formidable part in the execution of it. On the other hand, had he been merely a vain tyrannical bully, there was more than one man in his entourage after Cromwell’s fall, who would have had the wit to make a puppet of him—which no one certainly succeeded in doing.

VIII
HENRY’S MARRIAGES

A study of Henry’s character, however brief, would be incomplete if it omitted to touch on his widely varied marital relations. The Blue Beard legend may by this time be fairly looked upon as exploded. He did not marry one wife after another to gratify capricious passions, and, when he was weary of the new toy, cut her head off and get himself another. Except in the case of Anne Boleyn, and possibly Jane Seymour, passion can have had very little to say to his various ventures. His Court was licentious; but the king himself does not appear to have been worse than his neighbours, even if he was no better. Political intriguers tried to obtain influence through mistresses; there was certainly an attempt to supplant Anne Boleyn by this means, and the Earl of Surrey—who was probably innocent enough of real treason but otherwise deserves very little of the pity that has been wasted on him—tried to persuade his own sister to establish herself at the king’s ear in the same way. There is hardly a shadow of doubt that Anne Boleyn’s elder sister Mary was Henry’s mistress before he turned his eyes upon Anne. Rumour declared, though the statement is not substantiated, that Sir John Perrot, who did good work in Ireland in Elizabeth’s day, was really Henry’s son. It is probable, however, that there were no children of his born out of wedlock except the son of Elizabeth Blount, whom he made Duke of Richmond and was credited with intending to get legitimised, when there was no likelihood of a legitimate male heir appearing. The state of the Court was such that Chapuys declined to believe in the otherwise unimpeached virtue of Jane Seymour, merely on the general principle that no woman could be supposed virtuous under the conditions there prevalent—but Chapuys was writing at a moment when he was feeling particularly hot against the whole Court. An item in the royal accounts has been supposed to indicate that Henry kept a sort of harem, but that is based on what is almost certainly a misinterpretation of the term “mistress.” Henry was licentious enough, but there is no reason to imagine him as a satyr, or as on the same plane with Francis I. The kings of the sixteenth century, bad or good, were not often clean livers. The way to Henry’s favour was never through the good graces of the favourite of the hour; and except in the case of Anne Boleyn it never appears that he allowed any passion to interfere with his politics.

At eighteen, as soon as he ascended the throne, Henry married the wife secured for him by the diplomacy of Henry VII. and Ferdinand and the complaisance of the Pope. Katharine was four years the elder, sufficiently good-looking, capable, and fit to be a queen. She had already been the bride of the young king’s elder brother, who had died very shortly after the nuptials: but the Pope had duly provided a dispensation to permit the second marriage. She and her husband got on satisfactorily enough for a time. In 1513, when he was displaying his martial prowess in Picardy, she was occupied in organising the Flodden campaign and wrote to him in a tone implying that they were excellent friends: yet it is possible to recognise a certain want of tact, in the absence of that adroit flattery which Henry’s vain soul loved, when she dwells on her own achievements instead of praising those of her lord. Henry soon grew cool—there is no reason to suppose that he was ever her ardent lover—and already, when babies died or were still-born, he seems to have turned his mind to a divorce, though he dropped the idea again. When the princess Mary was born and did not die, the big jovial monarch made a great pet of the child; and though he was unfaithful to his wife, and had no compunction about it, the conventional friendliness was maintained. There is no doubt that the queen exercised active influence to secure England’s favour for her nephew Charles V.; and critics have found, in the desire of Henry and Wolsey, a few years later, to break with Charles and form an alliance with France, one of the leading motives which recommended the divorce to them.

About 1522, Anne Boleyn came to Court; and from this time, favours began to flow in the direction of the Boleyn family. The probabilities are, however, that as yet they were due rather to the complaisance of the elder sister Mary than to the attractions of the younger. Four years later, it is clear that Anne had become the object of the king’s pursuit; but, whether because she was more virtuous or more ambitious than Mary, Anne would not surrender herself. The king became the victim of an absorbing passion, which made him determined to procure the divorce from Katharine at any cost—whether or no it was primarily responsible for reviving the idea. Once embarked on it, Henry was far too obstinate to allow anything to divert him. Towards the end of 1532—as soon as Warham was dead—he saw his way. Before the year was out, Anne had become his mistress or his wife; a marriage ceremony was performed in January—possibly in November. It is not easy to believe—though the evidence points that way—that Anne, after holding out till the prize was actually in reach, would have risked everything by yielding without insisting on the ceremony first taking place.

The marriage was extremely unpopular; the new queen was spiteful, flighty, undignified, if nothing worse. In a very short time, Cranmer was the only friend she had left; she lost her charm for her husband, and she annoyed him by the same failure to fulfil his expectations as Katharine. The old idea cropped up again, that on this as on the previous union the blessing of heaven did not rest. The king found himself attracted by the somewhat inconspicuous charms and persistent virtue of Jane Seymour. Charges were brought against Anne, which may or may not have been true; admissions were made to Cranmer, the nature of which we can only guess at; on the strength of the former, she was condemned to death for treason, and on the strength of the latter the marriage was declared void ab initio. The unhappy woman was beheaded; next day, according to Chapuys, the king married Jane Seymour privately. The official marriage was ten days later.

Jane appears to have been a pleasing, colourless, irreproachable person; who, when she had given birth to the much-desired son, departed to another world without having suffered any estrangement from her husband. He, however, was wife-hunting again before long—not because he was attracted by any one, but for purely political ends. Unfortunately he was not satisfied by the possession of purely political qualifications on the part of the ladies, but offended their susceptibilities by wishing to inspect them. At last Cromwell beguiled him into approving the Cleves marriage; but when Anne came over, and retreat seemed impossible, he first found that she was not at all to his taste, and then that the political reasons for wedding her had been quite inadequate. So the ecclesiastical lawyers set to work again to discover an excuse for annulling that marriage; and in the meantime the Duke of Norfolk produced a young niece of his own, Katharine Howard, who took the king’s more than middle-aged fancy. Being quit of Anne, he married the girl, who successfully cajoled him for about a year: after which, the faction opposed to Norfolk discovered and laid before the unfortunate husband evidence of undoubted immorality before and probable immorality after her marriage. So Katharine Howard followed Anne Boleyn to the block. The affair seems to have been a really complete and very painful surprise to Henry.

By this time, the jibe attributed to the Duchess of Milan when Henry was thinking of marrying her—“Had I two heads, one should be at his majesty’s disposal”—would have been quite excusable. Even the ladies of his own Court were not covetous of the queenly throne. Chapuys, ever cynical, hinted that an Act passed at this time would quite account for reluctance on their part: if the king should propose to marry a subject, she must confess any improprieties of which she had been guilty; otherwise, if they were subsequently discovered, she would be held guilty of treason. Still Henry discovered one more lady who was willing to take the risks—a lady of much conjugal experience, now a widow for the second time. This was Katharine Parr, whose last husband had been Lord Latimer. Her virtue, however, was as much above suspicion as Jane Seymour’s had been; she was sensible, careful, and extremely tactful; and when an attempt was made to set her husband against her as a heretic, she satisfied him very easily, and her accuser had to submit to one of Henry’s ratings. She survived him, and married Admiral Thomas Seymour.

The marriages with Katharine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves were both avowedly and professedly political. That with Anne Boleyn was one of passion; that with Katharine Parr one of inclination. It is extremely doubtful whether either was effectively promoted by political intrigue. It is hardly at all doubtful that in the two remaining cases it was political intrigue which brought both Jane Seymour and Katharine Howard under the king’s notice; nevertheless, it is not likely that either of these marriages affected the king’s policy, though the disastrous termination of the second did so.

IX
HENRY’S CHARACTER

The end of Henry’s life was quite characteristic. For some time beforehand every one knew that he could not last long; and intrigues were rife to secure power when he was gone. The Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour’s brother, was at the head of that one of the two main factions whose leading ecclesiastic was Cranmer; they were balanced by Gardiner, with the old Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Earl of Surrey. A false move on Surrey’s part gave a handle to the enemy; Surrey was executed; Norfolk was attainted and his life saved only by Henry’s own death; Gardiner’s name was excluded from the council of “executors,” which is supposed to have been intended by the king to balance the two parties. Henry, left to himself, did not display wisdom in his government, but he always at the worst held the reins in a fast grip and sat firm in the saddle. His arrangements for carrying on the government after him were short-sighted, and his successor in the saddle, Hertford, was as much his inferior in practical mastery as he was superior in his ethical aims. The results are discussed in another chapter. Henry was almost in articulo mortis before any one ventured to tell him that his hours were numbered. At last he allowed Cranmer to be summoned. When he arrived, the king was speechless; but being besought to give some sign that he put his trust in Christ, wrung the Archbishop’s hand. An hour afterwards, he was dead.

Henry’s career leaves a pretty wide option for forming a judgment of his character. After making every possible allowance for flattery, we know that he was exceptionally accomplished, cultured, athletic; he could hold his own with any one, in an argument or in the tilt-yard. His physical courage has been impugned, principally because in respect of infectious diseases he was notoriously a coward. As a young man, if he was unfaithful to his wife he at any rate observed the expected courtesies; it is not surprising to find that as the divorce proceedings went on his manner deteriorated, till his treatment of Katharine, of his daughter Mary, of Anne Boleyn when she lost her hold on him, can only be described as blackguardly. No one, perhaps, would venture to ascribe to him a fervent zeal for religion; but he was intensely satisfied with the rigidity of his own orthodoxy. It is one of the many ironies of his career that his religiousness has been praised exclusively by people whom he would have sent to the stake as heretics without a moment’s hesitation. If he let Cranmer have his way about an English Bible, it was not from an enthusiastic admiration of the Scriptures, but because he knew that some of the clergy thought it would weaken their influence. The nature of his own creed is conveyed in the Act of the Six Articles. Of his “morality,” in the restricted sense of that term, enough has already been said; it was that of his age and his rank. For his conception of honour, his applications of the Statute of PrÆmunire, and the return he rendered to Wolsey and Cromwell and More for their services, are sufficient witness. In the case of More, by the way, it was characteristic of him that when the report of the ex-Chancellor’s execution was brought to him, he turned on Anne Boleyn and told her it was all her doing. For a high-minded man, his approval of the schemes for getting James Beton kidnapped when under a safe-conduct, and for the murder of David Beton, seems a little peculiar; yet in those times, it cannot be denied that similar schemes found sanction in most unexpected quarters. As far as politics were concerned, he kept his promises, on the whole, a shade more loyally than Charles and Francis and their successors. Ferdinand and Maximilian, of course, had never begun to think that promises could be looked upon as binding.

As a statesman: we must reject the theory that he was merely a Roi FainÉant who liked to fancy that he was running the machine while he was merely dancing to the tune called by cleverer men than himself: we reject also the theory that the policy followed throughout was his own creation, and that Wolsey and Cromwell stood in the same relation to him as Morton and Fox to his father. He was not a far-seeing man himself, but he knew a far-seeing man when he found one, having an unfailing instinct for judging other men’s capacities and limitations, intellectual and moral. He was ready to recognise their insight and foresight, their organising and administrative powers, to lay the burden—and the reproach—on their shoulders; but if they did not convince his judgment, they had to obey his behests, not he theirs. And yet there is one field wherein credit, and very high credit, attaches to Henry—credit, moreover, which appears to be entirely his own. As Wolsey had his hobby, education, so Henry had his hobby, the navy. A Royal Navy, a fleet whose business was fighting, was practically his creation. It may very well be that he was much wiser than he knew himself in this matter—that his ships were to him something of a toy. But what he did went far to making the glories of his daughter’s reign possible, as the army of Frederick I. of Prussia made the army of Frederick II. possible.

Finally; although we have denied him personally the greatest qualities of statesmanship displayed by his ministers, he did possess in a very high degree certain essential qualities of a successful ruler. No mere blustering tyrant would have held England in his grip for thirty-seven years; the annals of princes of that type may be terrible, but they are brief. The masses may be held in subjection by a powerful upper class for an indefinite period; the continued power of an individual tyrant—of an active and resolutely aggressive autocratic ruler—depends on his preserving the loyalty of the active part of his subjects. That loyalty Henry retained; he never had the smallest difficulty in stamping out every attempt at resistance. Mere ruthlessness will not account for it; ruthlessness by itself rouses new enemies: a reign of sheer terror is brief. To the instinct for gauging men he added the instinct of gauging popular sentiment—a perception of the line which must not be over-stepped; a knack of gracious and timely withdrawal if ever he seemed to have passed the danger-point. Withal, he recognised that the surest method of getting his own way was to make his subjects believe that it was their way too. His figure is very, very far from being god-like; it is quite remote from the heroic; it might, however, have fairly been called Titanic, if that term did not imply ultimate failure—for he did not fail. Neither his intellectual nor his moral qualities permit us to love him, to praise him, or to honour him; and yet, if we have read him aright, it is impossible not to admire.