Corruption wins not more than honesty. Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not : Thy God's, and truth's; then if thou fall'st, O Cromwell, And,-Prithee, lead me in: There take an inventory of all I have, To the last penny; 'tis the king's my robe, I dare now call mine own. O Cromwell, Cromwell, Crom. Good sir, have patience. So I have. Farewell [Exeunt. The hopes of court! my hopes in heaven do dwell. 153. THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII. [It may be convenient, before we proceed further in selection of scenes in this period, to give a general summary of the events of the reign, from 'The PENNY CYCLOPÆDIA.'] Henry VIII., the second son of Henry VII., by his queen Elizabeth of York, was born at Greenwich, 28th June, 1491. On the 1st of November following he was created duke of York, and in 1494 his father conferred upon him the honorary title of lord-lieutenant of Ireland, Sir Edward Poynings being appointed his deputy The government of Sir Edward is famous for the enactment of the statute, or rather series of statutes, declaring the dependence of the Irish parliament upon that oɩ England, which passes under his name. Henry's nominal lord-lieutenancy appears to have lasted only till the next year, when he exchanged that dignity for the office of president of the Northern Marches. The king's design in these appointments seems to have been to oppose his son's name to the pretensions of Perkin Warbeck, and the efforts of the supporters of that adventurer, first in Ireland and afterwards from the side of Scotland. Although thus early distinguished by these and other civil titles and appointments, it is stated by Paolo Sarpi, in his 'History of the Council of Trent,' that Henry was from the first destined to the archbishopric of Canterbury; 'that prudent king his father,' observes Lord Herbert (in the 'History of his Life and Reign') 'choosing this as the most cheap and glorious way for disposing of a younger son.' He received accordingly a learned education; SO that,' continues this writer, besides his being an able Latinist, philosopher, and divine, he was (which one might wonder at in a king) a curious musician, as two entire masses composed by him, and often sung in his chapel, did abundantly witness.' As the death of his elder brother Arthur, however, 2nd April, 1502, made him heir to the crown before he had completed his eleventh year, it is evident that his clerical education could not have proceeded very far, and that what he knew either of divinity or of the learned tongues must have been for the most part acquired without any view to the church. There is a contradiction in the statements as to the time when he was created prince of Wales. 6 Very soon after Arthur's death the singular project was started of marrying Henry to his brother's widow. The proposition appears to have originally come from Ferdinand and Isabella, the parents of the princess, who were anxious to re tain the connexion with England; and to have been assented to by king Henry in great part from his wish to avoid the repayment of the dower of the princess. The final agreement between the two kings was signed 23rd June, 1503, and, according to the chroniclers, the parties were affianced on Sunday the 25th of the same month, at the bishop of Salisbury's house in Fleet Street, although the dispensation was certainly not obtained from Pope Julius II. till the 26th of December following. Henry became king 22nd April, 1509, being then in his 19th year. On a memorial being presented by the Spanish ambassador, it was, notwithstanding the opposition of Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, resolved in the council that the marriage with Catherine should be completed. The marriage was accordingly solemnized in the beginning of June. Henry was indebted for the warm and general gratulation with which his accession was hailed by his subjects, partly to his distinguished personal advantages and accomplishments, and to some points of manner and character adapted to take the popular taste; partly to the sense of relief produced by the termination of the austere and oppressive rule of his predecessor. One of the earliest proceedings of the new reign was the trial and punishment of his father's ministers, Dudley and Empson. They were indicted for a conspiracy to take possession of London with an armed force during the last illness of the late king, and being convicted on this charge, and afterwards attainted by parliament, were, after lying in gaol for about a year, beheaded together on Tower Hill, 17th August, 1510. Henry had not been long upon the throne when he was induced to join what was called the Holy League, formed against France by the pope, the emperor, and the king of Spain. A force of 10,000 men was sent to Biscay under the earl of Dorset in the spring of 1512, to co-operate with an army promised by Ferdinand for the conquest of Guienne; but the Spanish king, after dexterously availing himself of the presence of the English troops to enable him to overrun and take possession of Navarre, showed plainly that he had no intention of assisting his ally in his object; and after having had his ranks thinned, not by the sword, but by disease, Dorset was compelled by discontents in his camp, which rose at last to actual mutiny, to return to England before the end of the year, without having done anything. The next year Henry passed over in person to France with a new army, and having been joined by the emperor Maximilian, defeated the French, 4th August, at Guinegaste, in what was called the Battle of the Spurs, from the unusual energy the beaten party are said to have shown in riding off the ground, and took the two towns of Terouenne and Tournay. On the 9th of September also the Scottish king James IV., who as the ally of France had invaded England, was defeated by the earl of Surrey in the great battle of Flodden, he himself with many of his principal nobility being left dead on the field. This war with France however was ended the following year by a treaty, the principal condition of which was that Louis XII., who had just lost his queen, Ann of Bretagne, the same who had been in the first instance married to his predecessor Charles VIII., should wed Henry's sister, the Princess Mary. The marriage between Louis, who was in his fifty-third, and the English princess, as yet only in her sixteenth year, was solemnized 9th October, 1514; but Louis died within three months, and scarcely was she again her own mistress, when his young widow gave her hand to Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, an alliance out of which afterwards sprung a claim to the crown. The members of Henry's council, when he came to the throne, had been selected, according to lord Herbert, 'out of those his father most trusted,' by his grandmother the countess of Richmond, 'noted to be a virtuous and prudent lady.' A rivalry however and contest for the chief power soon broke out between Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, secretary and lord privy seal, and Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey (afterwards duke of Norfolk), who held the office of lord treasurer. This led to the introduction at court of the famous Thomas Wolsey, who, being then dean of Lincoln, was brought forward by Fox to counteract the growing ascendancy of Surrey, and who speedily made good for himself a place in the royal favour that reduced all the rest of the king's ministers to insignificance, and left in his hands for a long course of years nearly the whole power of the state. The reign of Wolsey may be considered as having begun after the return of Henry from his expedition to France, towards the close of the year 1513; and henceforth the affairs of the kingdom for fourteen or fifteen years were directed principally by the interests of his ambition, which governed and made subservient to its purposes even the vanity and other passions of his master. The history of the greater part of this period consists of Henry's transactions with his two celebrated contemporaries, Francis I. of France, the successor of Louis XII., and Charles, originally archduke of Austria, but who became king of Spain as Charles I. by the death of his mother's father, Ferdinand, in 1516, and three years after was elected to succeed his paternal grandfather Maximilian I. as emperor of Germany. His position might have enabled the English king in some degree to hold the balance between these two irreconcileable rivals, who both accordingly made it a principal point of policy to endeavour to secure his friendship and alliance; but his influence on their long contention was in reality very inconsiderable, directed as it was for the most part either by mere caprice, or by nothing higher than the private resentments, ambitions, and vanities of himself or his minister. The foreign policy of this reign had nothing national about it, either in reality or even in semblance; it was neither regulated by a view to the true interests of the country, nor even by any real, however mistaken, popular sentiment. Henry had himself been a candidate for the imperial dignity when the prize was obtained by Charles; but he never had for a moment the least chance of success. For a short time he remained at peace, both with Charles and Francis; the former of whom paid him a visit at Dover in the end of May, 1520; and with the latter of whom he had a few days after a seemingly most amicable interview, celebrated under the name of the Field of the Cloth of Gold,' in the neighbourhood of Calais. Wolsey's object at this time however was to detach his master from the interests of the French king; and a visit which Henry paid to the emperor at Gravelines, on his way home, showed Francis how little he was to count upon any lasting effect of their recent cordialities. Before the close of the following year Henry was formally joined in a league with the emperor and the pope; and in March, 1522, he declared war against France. In the summer of the same year the emperor flattered him by paying him a visit at London; his vanity having also been a short time before gratified in another way by the title of 'Defender of the Faith' bestowed upon him by pope Leo X. (recently succeeded by Adrian VI.) for a Latin treatise which he had published 'On the Seven Sacraments,' in confutation of Luther. Henry continued to attach himself to the interest of the emperor,- -even sending an army to France, in August, 1523, under the duke of Suffolk, which succeeded in taking several towns, though only to give them up again in a few months, until the disappointment, for the second time, of Wolsey's hope of being made pope through the influence of Charles, on the death of Adrian in September of the last-mentioned year, is supposed to have determined that minister upon a change of politics. Before the memorable defeat and capture of Francis at the battle of Pavia, 24th February, 1525, the English king had made every preparation to break with the emperor; having actually commenced negotiations for a peace with Francis's ally, James V., the young king of Scotland, on condition of giving James in marriage his daughter the princess Mary (afterwards queen), who had been already promised to the emperor. In August he concluded a treaty of peace and alliance with France; and after the release of Francis, in March, 1526, Henry was declared protector of the league styled 'Most Clement and Most Holy,' which was formed under the auspices of the pope for the renewal of the war against Charles. Before this date two domestic occurrences took place that especially deserve to be noted. The first of these was the execution, in 1513, immediately before Henry proceeded on his expedition to France, of Edmund de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, whose mother was Elizabeth Plantagenet, sister of Edward IV.; he had lain a prisoner in the Tower ever since a short time before the death of the late king, who had contrived to obtain possession of his person after he had fled to the Continent, and, it is said, had in his last hours recommended that he should not be suffered to live. He was now put to death without any form of trial or other legal proceeding, his crime, there can be no doubt, being merely his connexion with the House of York. Lord Herbert tells us that Henry's going to the Continent at this time was deemed dangerous and inexpedient, on the ground 'that if the king should die without issue, however the succession were undoubted in his sister Margaret, yet the people were so affected to the House of York, as they might take Edmund de la Pole out of the Tower and set him up.' Wolsey was perhaps as yet too new in office to be fairly made answerable for this act of bloodshed; in the next case the unfortunate victim is generally believed to have been sacrificed to his resentment and thirst of vengeance. In 1521 Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, son of the duke beheaded by Richard III., was apprehended on some information furnished to Wolsey by a discarded servant, and being brought to trial was found guilty and executed as a traitor. The acts with which he was charged did not according to law amount to treason, even if they had been proved; but the duke is said by certain indiscretions of speech and demeanor to have wounded the pride of the all-powerful minister; and, besides, he was also of dangerous pedigree, being not only maternally of the stock of John of Gaunt, but likewise a Plantagenet by his descent from Anne, the daughter of Edward the Third's youngest son Thomas, duke of Gloucester. With this nobleman came to an end the great office of hereditary lord high constable. What may be called the second part of Henry's reign begins in the year 1527, from which date our attention is called to a busy scene of domestic transactions beside which the foreign politics of the kingdom become of little interest or importance. It is no longer the ambition and intrigue of the minister, but the wilfulness and furious passions of the king himself, that move all things. In 1527 Henry cast his eyes upon Anne Boleyn, and appears to have very soon formed the design of ridding himself of Catherine, and making the object of this new attachment his queen. Anne was understood to be favourably disposed towards those new views on the subject of religion and ecclesiastical affairs which had been agitating all Europe ever since Luther had begun his intrepid career by publicly opposing indulgences at Wittemberg ten years before. Queen Catherine on the other hand was a good Catholic; and, besides, the circumstances in which she was placed made it her interest to take her stand by the church, as on the other hand her adversaries were driven in like manner by their interests and the course of events into dissent and opposition. This one consideration sufficiently explains all that followed. The friends of the old religion generally considered Catherine's cause as their own; the reformers as naturally arrayed themselves on the side of her rival. Henry himself again, though he had been till now resolutely opposed to the new opinions, was carried over by his passion towards the same side; the consequence of which was the loss of the royal favour by those who had hitherto monopolized it, and its transference in great part to other men, to be employed by them in the promotion of entirely opposite purposes and politics. The proceedings for the divorce were commenced by an application to the court of Rome, in August, 1527. For two years the affair lingered on through a succession of legal proceedings, but without any decisive result. From the autumn of 1529 are to be dated both the fall of Wolsey and the rise of Cranmer. The death of the great cardinal took place 29th November, 1530. In January following the first blow was struck at the church by an indictment being brought into the King's Bench against all the clergy of the kingdom for supporting Wolsey in the exercise of his legatine powers without the royal licence, as required by the old statutes of provisors and premunire; and it was in an act passed immediately after by the Convocation of the province of Canterbury, for granting to the king a sum of money to exempt them from the penalties of their conviction on this indictment, that the first movement was made towards a revolt against the see of Rome, by the titles given to Henry of 'the one protector of the English church, its only and supreme lord, and, as far as might be by the law of Christ, its supreme head.' Shortly after, the convocation declared the king's marriage with Catherine to be contrary to the law of God. The same year Henry went the length of openly countenancing Protestantism abroad by remitting a subsidy to the confederacy of the Elector of Brandenburg and other German princes, called the League of Smalcald. In August, 1532, Cranmer was appointed to the archbishopric of Canterbury. In the beginning of the year 1533 Henry was privately married to Anne Boleyn; and on the 23rd of May following archbishop Cranmer pronounced the former marriage with Catherine void. In the meantime the parliament had passed an act forbidding all appeals to the see of Rome. Pope Clement VII. met this by annulling the sentence of Cranmer in the matter of the marriage; on which the separation from Rome became complete. Acts were passed by the parliament the next year declaring that the clergy should in future be assembled in convocation only by the king's writ, that no constitutions enacted by them should be of force without the king's assent, and that no first fruits or Peter's pence, or money for dispensations, should be any longer paid to the pope. The clergy of the province of York themselves in convocation declared that the pope had no more power in England than any other bishop. A new and most efficient supporter of the Reformation now also becomes conspicuous on the scene, Thomas Cromwell (afterwards lord Cromwell and earl of Essex), who was this year made first secretary of state, and then master of the rolls. In the next session, the parliament, which re-assembled in the end of this same year, passed acts declaring the king's highness to be supreme head of the church of England, and to have authority to redress all errors, heresies, and abuses in the church; and ordering first-fruits and tenths of all spiritual benefices to be paid to the king. After this various persons were executed for refusing to acknowledge the king's supremacy; among others, two illustrious victims, the learned Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and the admirable Sir Thomas More. In 1535 began the dissolution of the monasteries, under the zealous superintendance of Cromwell, constituted for that purpose visitor-general of these establishments. Latimer and other friends of Cranmer and the Reformation were now also promoted to bishoprics; so that not only in matters of discipline and polity, but even of doctrine, the church might be said to have separated itself from Rome. One of the last acts of the parliament under which all these great innovations had been made was to petition the king |