Table Of ContentHenry VIII
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History Makers
Henry VIII
By A. F. Pollard
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First published in 1902.
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Henry VIII
PREFACE
It is perhaps a matter rather for regret than for surprise that
so few attempts have been made to describe, as a whole, the life
and character of Henry VIII. No ruler has left a deeper impress
on the history of his country, or done work which has been the
subject of more keen and lasting contention. Courts of law are
still debating the intention of statutes, the tenor of which he
dictated; and the moral, political, and religious, are as much in
dispute as the legal, results of his reign. He is still the Great
Erastian, the protagonist of laity against clergy. His policy is
inextricably interwoven with the high and eternal dilemma of
Church and State; and it is well-nigh impossible for one who
feels keenly on these questions to treat the reign of Henry VIII. in
a reasonably judicial spirit. No period illustrates more vividly
the contradiction between morals and politics. In our desire to
reprobate the immorality of Henry's methods, we are led to deny
their success; or, in our appreciation of the greatness of the ends
he achieved, we seek to excuse the means he took to - achieve
them. As with his policy, so with his character. There was
nothing commonplace about him; his good and his bad qualities
alike were exceptional. It is easy, by suppressing the one or the
other, to paint him a hero or a villain. He lends himself readily to
polemic; but to depict his character in all its varied aspects,
extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in malice, is a task
of no little difficulty. It is two centuries and a half since Lord
Herbert produced his Life and Reign of Henry VIII.-[1] The late
Mr. Brewer, in his prefaces to the first four volumes of the
Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII., published under
the direction of the Master of the Rolls, dealt adequately with the
earlier portion of Henry's career. But Mr. Brewer died when his
work reached the year 1530; his successor, Dr. James Gairdner,
was directed to confine his prefaces to the later volumes within
the narrowest possible limits; and students of history were
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deprived of the prospect of a satisfactory account of Henry's
later years from a writer of unrivalled learning.
Henry's reign, from 1530 onwards, has been described by the
late Mr. Froude in one of the most brilliant and fascinating
masterpieces of historical literature, a work which still holds the
field in popular, if not in scholarly, estimation. But Mr. Froude
does not begin until Henry's reign was half over, until his
character had been determined by influences - and events which
lie outside the scope of Mr. Froude's inquiry. Moreover, since
Mr. Froude wrote, a flood of light has been thrown on the period
by the publication of the above-mentioned Letters and Papers;-
[2] they already comprise a summary of between thirty and forty
thousand documents in twenty thousand closely printed pages,
and, when completed, will constitute the most magnificent body
of materials for the history of any reign, ancient or modern,
English or foreign. Simultaneously there have appeared a dozen
volumes containing the State papers preserved at Simancas,-[3]
Vienna and Brussels and similar series comprising the
correspondence relating to Venice,-[4] Scotland-[5] and Ireland;-
[6] while the despatches of French ambassadors have been
published under the auspices of the Ministry for Foreign -
Affairs at Paris.-[7] Still further information has been provided
by the labours of the Historical Manuscripts Commission,-[8] the
Camden,-[9] the Royal Historical,-[10] and other learned
Societies.
These sources probably contain at least a million definite
facts relating to the reign of Henry VIII.; and it is obvious that
the task of selection has become heavy as well as invidious. Mr.
Froude has expressed his concurrence in the dictum that the
facts of history are like the letters of the alphabet; by selection
and arrangement they can be made to spell anything, and
nothing can be arranged so easily as facts. Experto crede. Yet
selection is inevitable, and arrangement essential. The historian
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has no option if he wishes to be intelligible. He will naturally
arrange his facts so that they spell what he believes to be the
truth; and he must of necessity suppress those facts which he
judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the scale on which
he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts compels both
selection and suppression, it counsels no less a restraint of
judgment. A case in a court of law is not simplified by a cloud of
witnesses; and the - new wealth of contemporary evidence does
not solve the problems of Henry's reign. It elucidates some
points hitherto obscure, but it raises a host of others never before
suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements written
hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no
better; in modern history we frequently have half a dozen
witnesses giving inconsistent accounts of what they have seen
with their own eyes. Dogmatism is merely the result of
ignorance; and no honest historian will pretend to have
mastered all the facts, accurately weighed all the evidence, or
pronounced a final judgment.
The present volume does not profess to do more than
roughly sketch Henry VIII.'s more prominent characteristics,
outline the chief features of his policy, and suggest some reasons
for the measure of success he attained. Episodes such as the
divorce of Catherine of Aragon, the dissolution of the
monasteries, and the determination of the relations between
Church and State, would severally demand for adequate
treatment works of much greater bulk than the present. On the
divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan
Ehses in his Römische Dokumente.-[11] The dissolution of the
monasteries has been exhaustively treated from one point of
view by Dr. Gasquet;-[12] but an adequate and impartial history
of what is called the Reformation still - remains to be written.
Here it is possible to deal with these questions only in the
briefest outline, and in so far as they were affected by Henry's
personal action. For my facts I have relied entirely on
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contemporary records, and my deductions from these facts are
my own. I have depended as little as possible even on
contemporary historians,-[13] and scarcely at all on later
writers.-[14] I have, however, made frequent use of Dr.
Gairdner's articles in the Dictionary of National Biography,
particularly of that on Henry VIII., the best summary extant of
his career; and I owe not a little to Bishop Stubbs's two lectures
on Henry VIII., which contain some fruitful suggestions as to his
character.-[15]
A.F. POLLARD.
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CONTENTS
PREFACE ..................................................................................... 3
THE EARLY TUDORS ............................................................... 8
PRINCE HENRY AND HIS ENVIRONMENT ........................ 19
THE APPRENTICESHIP OF HENRY VIII .............................. 40
THE THREE RIVALS ............................................................... 67
KING AND CARDINAL ........................................................... 90
FROM CALAIS TO ROME ..................................................... 111
THE ORIGIN OF THE DIVORCE. ......................................... 139
THE POPE'S DILEMMA ......................................................... 155
THE CARDINAL'S FALL ....................................................... 178
THE KING AND HIS PARLIAMENT .................................... 194
"DOWN WITH THE CHURCH" ............................................. 214
THE CRISIS ............................................................................. 251
REX ET IMPERATOR............................................................. 273
THE FINAL STRUGGLE ........................................................ 298
CONCLUSION ......................................................................... 321
FOOTNOTES ........................................................................... 332
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THE EARLY TUDORS
In the whole range of English history there is no monarch
whose character has been more variously depicted by
contemporaries or more strenuously debated by posterity than
the "majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome". To one
historian an inhuman embodiment of cruelty and vice, to
another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and
strength of will, Henry VIII. has, by an almost universal consent,
been placed above or below the grade of humanity. So unique
was his personality, so singular his achievements, that he
appears in the light of a special dispensation sent like another
Attila to be the scourge of mankind, or like a second Hercules to
cleanse, or at least to demolish, Augean stables. The dictates of
his will seemed as inexorable as the decrees of fate, and the
history of his reign is strewn with records of the ruin of those
who failed to placate his wrath. Of the six queens he married,
two he divorced, and two he beheaded. Four English cardinals-
[16] lived in his reign; one perished by the executioner's axe, one
escaped it by absence, and a - third by a timely but natural death.
Of a similar number of dukes-[17] half were condemned by
attainder; and the same method of speedy despatch accounted
for six or seven earls and viscounts and for scores of lesser
degree. He began his reign by executing the ministers of his
father,-[18] he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold.
The Tower of London was both palace and prison, and
statesmen passed swiftly from one to the other; in silent
obscurity alone lay salvation. Religion and politics, rank and
profession made little difference; priest and layman, cardinal-
archbishop and "hammer of the monks," men whom Henry had
raised from the mire, and peers, over whose heads they were
placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More,
Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same dizzy path to the same
fatal end; and the English people looked on powerless or
unmoved. They sent their burgesses and knights of the shire to
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Westminster without let or hindrance, and Parliament met with
a regularity that grew with the rigour of Henry's rule; but it
seemed to assemble only to register the royal edicts and clothe
with a legal cloak the naked violence of Henry's acts. It
remembered its privileges only to lay them at Henry's feet, it
cancelled his debts, endowed his proclamations with the force of
laws, and authorised him to repeal acts of attainder and dispose
of his crown at will. Secure of its support Henry turned and rent
the spiritual unity of Western Christendom, and settled at a blow
that perennial struggle between Church and State, - in which
kings and emperors had bitten the dust. With every epithet of
contumely and scorn he trampled under foot the jurisdiction of
him who was believed to hold the keys of heaven and hell.
Borrowing in practice the old maxim of Roman law, cujus regio,
ejus religio,-[19] he placed himself in the seat of authority in
religion and presumed to define the faith of which Leo had
styled him defender. Others have made themselves despots by
their mastery of many legions, through the agency of a secret
police, or by means of an organised bureaucracy. Yet Henry's
standing army consisted of a few gentlemen pensioners and
yeomen of the guard; he had neither secret police nor organised
bureaucracy. Even then Englishmen boasted that they were not
slaves like the French,-[20] and foreigners pointed a finger of
scorn at their turbulence. Had they not permanently or
temporarily deprived of power nearly half their kings who had
reigned since William the Conqueror? Yet Henry VIII. not only
left them their arms, but repeatedly urged them to keep those
arms ready for use.-[21] He eschewed that air of mystery with
which tyrants have usually sought to impose on the mind of the
people. All his life he moved familiarly and almost unguarded in
the midst of his subjects, and he died in his bed, full of years,
with the spell of his power unbroken and the terror of his name
unimpaired.
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What manner of man was this, and wherein lay the secret -
of his strength? Is recourse necessary to a theory of supernatural
agency, or is there another and adequate solution? Was Henry's
individual will of such miraculous force that he could ride
roughshod in insolent pride over public opinion at home and
abroad? Or did his personal ends, dictated perhaps by selfish
motives and ignoble passions, so far coincide with the interests
and prejudices of the politically effective portion of his people,
that they were willing to condone a violence and tyranny, the
brunt of which fell after all on the few? Such is the riddle which
propounds itself to every student of Tudor history. It cannot be
answered by pæans in honour of Henry's intensity of will and
force of character, nor by invectives against his vices and
lamentations over the woes of his victims. The miraculous
interpretation of history is as obsolete as the catastrophic theory
of geology, and the explanation of Henry's career must be sought
not so much in the study of his character as in the study of his
environment, of the conditions which made things possible to
him that were not possible before or since and are not likely to be
so again.
It is a singular circumstance that the king who raised the
personal power of English monarchy to a height to which it had
never before attained, should have come of humble race and
belonged to an upstart dynasty. For three centuries and a half
before the battle of Bosworth one family had occupied the
English throne. Even the usurpers, Henry of Bolingbroke and
Richard of York, were directly descended in unbroken male line
from Henry II., and from 1154 to 1485 all the sovereigns of
England were Plantagenets. But who were the Tudors? They -
were a Welsh family of modest means and doubtful
antecedents.-[22] They claimed, it is true, descent from
Cadwallader, and their pedigree was as long and quite as
veracious as most Welsh genealogies; but Henry VII.'s great-
grandfather was steward or butler to the Bishop of Bangor. His
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