should exercise the papal powers till Clement's liberation. As Wolsey was
to preside over this assembly, it would be easy to win from it a
favourable answer to Henry's request.

[Sidenote: The Legatine Commission]

But Clement had no mind to surrender his power, and secret orders from the
Pope prevented the Italian Cardinals from attending such an assembly. Nor
was Wolsey more fortunate in another plan for bringing about the same end
by inducing Clement to delegate to him his full powers westward of the
Alps. Henry's trust in him was fast waning before these failures and the
steady pressure of his rivals at court, and the coldness of the king on
his return in September was an omen of his minister's fall. Henry was in
fact resolved to take his own course; and while Wolsey sought from the
Pope a commission enabling him to try the case in his legatine court and
pronounce the marriage null and void by sentence of law, Henry had
determined at the suggestion of the Boleyns and apparently of Thomas
Cranmer, a Cambridge scholar who was serving as their chaplain, to seek
without Wolsey's knowledge from Clement either his approval of a divorce,
or if a divorce could not be obtained a dispensation to re-marry without
any divorce at all. For some months his envoys could find no admission to
the Pope; and though in December Clement succeeded in escaping to Orvieto
and drew some courage from the entry of the French army into Italy, his
temper was still too timid to venture on any decided course. He refused
the dispensation altogether. Wolsey's proposal for leaving the matter to a
legatine court found better favour; but when the commission reached
England it was found to be "of no effect or authority." What Henry wanted
was not merely a divorce but the express sanction of the Pope to his
divorce, and this Clement steadily evaded. A fresh embassy with Wolsey's
favourite and secretary, Stephen Gardiner, at its head reached Orvieto in
March 1528 to find in spite of Gardiner's threats hardly better success;
but Clement at last consented to a legatine commission for the trial of
the case in England. In this commission Cardinal Campeggio, who was looked
upon as a partisan of the English king, was joined with Wolsey.

[Sidenote: The Papal difficulties]

Great as the concession seemed, this gleam of success failed to hide from
the minister the dangers which gathered round him. The great nobles whom
he had practically shut out from the king's counsels were longing for his
fall. The Boleyns and the young courtiers looked on him as cool in Anne's
cause. He was hated alike by men of the old doctrine and men of the new.
The clergy had never forgotten his extortions, the monks saw him
suppressing small monasteries. The foundation of Cardinal College failed
to reconcile to him the scholars of the New Learning; their poet, Skelton,
was among his bitterest assailants. The Protestants, goaded by the
persecution of this very year, hated him with a deadly hatred. His French
alliances, his declaration of war with the Emperor, hindered the trade
with Flanders and secured the hostility of the merchant class. The country
at large, galled with murrain and famine and panic-struck by an outbreak
of the sweating sickness which carried off two thousand in London alone,
laid all its suffering at the door of the Cardinal. And now that Henry's
mood itself became uncertain Wolsey knew his hour was come. Were the
marriage once made, he told the French ambassador, and a male heir born to
the realm, he would withdraw from state affairs and serve God for the rest
of his life. But the divorce had still to be brought about ere marriage
could be made or heir be born. Henry indeed had seized on the grant of a
commission as if the matter were at an end. Anne Boleyn was installed in
the royal palace, and honoured with the state of a wife. The new legate,
Campeggio, held the bishoprick of Salisbury, and had been asked for as
judge from the belief that he would favour the king's cause. But he bore
secret instructions from the Pope to bring about if possible a
reconciliation between Henry and the queen, and in no case to pronounce
sentence without reference to Rome. The slowness of his journey presaged
ill; he did not reach England till the end of September, and a month was
wasted in vain efforts to bring Henry to a reconciliation or Catharine to
retirement into a monastery. A new difficulty disclosed itself in the
supposed existence of a brief issued by Pope Julius and now in the
possession of the Emperor, which overruled all the objections to the
earlier dispensation on which Henry relied. The hearing of the cause was
delayed through the winter, while new embassies strove to induce Clement
to declare this brief also invalid. Not only was such a demand glaringly
unjust, but the progress of the Imperial arms brought vividly home to the
Pope its injustice. The danger which he feared was not merely a danger to
his temporal domain in Italy. It was a danger to the Papacy itself. It was
in vain that new embassies threatened Clement with the loss of his
spiritual power over England. To break with the Emperor was to risk the
loss of his spiritual power over a far larger world. Charles had already
consented to the suspension of the judgement of his diet at Worms, a
consent which gave security to the new Protestantism in North Germany. If
he burned heretics in the Netherlands, he employed them in his armies.
Lutheran soldiers had played their part in the sack of Rome. Lutheranism
had spread from North Germany along the Rhine, it was now pushing fast
into the hereditary possessions of the Austrian House, it had all but
mastered the Low Countries. France itself was mined with heresy; and were
Charles once to give way, the whole continent would be lost to Rome.

[Sidenote: The Trial of the Divorce]

Amidst difficulties such as these the Papal court saw no course open save
one of delay. But the long delay told fatally for Wolsey's fortunes. Even
Clement blamed him for having hindered Henry from judging the matter in
his own realm and marrying on the sentence of his own courts, and the
Boleyns naturally looked upon his policy as dictated by hatred to Anne.
Norfolk and the great peers took courage from the bitter tone of the girl;
and Henry himself charged the Cardinal with a failure in fulfilling the
promises he had made him. King and minister still clung indeed
passionately to their hopes from Rome. But in 1529 Charles met their
pressure with a pressure of his own; and the progress of his arms decided
Clement to avoke the cause to Rome. Wolsey could only hope to anticipate
this decision by pushing the trial hastily forward, and at the end of May
the two Legates opened their court in the great hall of the Blackfriars.
King and queen were cited to appear before them when the court again met
on the eighteenth of June. Henry briefly announced his resolve to live no
longer in mortal sin. The queen offered an appeal to Clement, and on the
refusal of the Legates to admit it flung herself at Henry's feet. "Sire,"
said Catharine, "I beseech you to pity me, a woman and a stranger, without
an assured friend and without an indifferent counsellor. I take God to
witness that I have always been to you a true and loyal wife, that I have
made it my constant duty to seek your pleasure, that I have loved all whom
you loved, whether I have reason or not, whether they are friends to me or
foes. I have been your wife for years; I have brought you many children.
God knows that when I came to your bed I was a virgin, and I put it to
your own conscience to say whether it was not so. If there be any offence
which can be alleged against me I consent to depart with infamy; if not,
then I pray you to do me justice." The piteous appeal was wasted on a king
who was already entertaining Anne Boleyn with royal state in his own
palace; the trial proceeded, and on the twenty-third of July the court
assembled to pronounce sentence. Henry's hopes were at their highest when
they were suddenly dashed to the ground. At the opening of the proceedings
Campeggio rose to declare the court adjourned to the following October.

[Sidenote: Henry's wrath]

The adjournment was a mere evasion. The pressure of the Imperialists had
at last forced Clement to summon the cause to his own tribunal at Rome,
and the jurisdiction of the Legates was at an end. "Now see I," cried the
Duke of Suffolk as he dashed his hand on the table, "that the old saw is
true, that there was never Legate or Cardinal that did good to England!"
The Duke only echoed his master's wrath. Through the twenty years of his
reign Henry had known nothing of opposition to his will. His imperious
temper had chafed at the weary negotiations, the subterfuges and perfidies
of the Pope. Though the commission was his own device, his pride must have
been sorely galled by the summons to the Legates' court. The warmest
adherents of the older faith revolted against the degradation of the
crown. "It was the strangest and newest sight and device," says Cavendish,
"that ever we read or heard of in any history or chronicle in any region
that a King and Queen should be convented and constrained by process
compellatory to appear in any court as common persons, within their own
realm and dominion, to abide the judgement and decree of their own
subjects, having the royal diadem and prerogative thereof." Even this
degradation had been borne in vain. Foreign and Papal tribunal as that of
the Legates really was, it lay within Henry's kingdom and had the air of
an English court. But the citation to Rome was a summons to the king to
plead in a court without his realm. Wolsey had himself warned Clement of
the hopelessness of expecting Henry to submit to such humiliation as this.
"If the King be cited to appear in person or by proxy and his prerogative
be interfered with, none of his subjects will tolerate the insult.... To
cite the King to Rome, to threaten him with excommunication, is no more
tolerable than to deprive him of his royal dignity.... If he were to
appear in Italy it would be at the head of a formidable army." But Clement
had been deaf to the warning, and the case had been avoked out of the
realm.

[Sidenote: Wolsey's fall]

Henry's wrath fell at once on Wolsey. Whatever furtherance or hindrance
the Cardinal had given to his re-marriage, it was Wolsey who had dissuaded
him from acting at the first independently, from conducting the cause in
his own courts and acting on the sentence of his own judges. Whether to
secure the succession by a more indisputable decision or to preserve
uninjured the prerogatives of the Papal See, it was Wolsey who had
counselled him to seek a divorce from Rome and promised him success in his
suit. And in this counsel Wolsey stood alone. Even Clement had urged the
king to carry out his original purpose when it was too late. All that the
Pope sought was to be freed from the necessity of meddling in the matter
at all. It was Wolsey who had forced Papal intervention on him, as he had
forced it on Henry, and the failure of his plans was fatal to him. From
the close of the Legatine court Henry would see him no more, and his
favourite, Stephen Gardiner, who had become chief Secretary of State,
succeeded him in the king's confidence. If Wolsey still remained minister
for a while, it was because the thread of the complex foreign negotiations
which he was conducting could not be roughly broken. Here too however
failure awaited him. His diplomacy sought to bring fresh pressure on the
Pope and to provide a fresh check on the Emperor by a closer alliance with
France. But Francis was anxious to recover his children who had remained
as hostages for his return; he was weary of the long struggle, and
hopeless of aid from his Italian allies. At this crisis of his fate
therefore Wolsey saw himself deceived and outwitted by the conclusion of
peace between France and the Emperor in a new treaty at Cambray. Not only
was his French policy no longer possible, but a reconciliation with
Charles was absolutely needful, and such a reconciliation could only be
brought about by Wolsey's fall. In October, on the very day that the
Cardinal took his place with a haughty countenance and all his former pomp
in the Court of Chancery, an indictment was preferred against him by the
king's attorney for receiving bulls from Rome in violation of the Statute
of Præmunire. A few days later he was deprived of the seals. Wolsey was
prostrated by the blow. In a series of abject appeals he offered to give
up everything that he possessed if the king would but cease from his
displeasure. "His face," wrote the French ambassador, "is dwindled to half
its natural size. In truth his misery is such that his enemies, Englishmen
as they are, cannot help pitying him." For the moment Henry seemed
contented with his disgrace. A thousand boats full of Londoners covered
the Thames to see the Cardinal's barge pass to the Tower, but he was
permitted to retire to Esher. Although judgement of forfeiture and
imprisonment was given against him in the King's Bench at the close of
October, in the following February he received a pardon on surrender of
his vast possessions to the Crown and was permitted to withdraw to his
diocese of York, the one dignity he had been suffered to retain.

CHAPTER IV
THOMAS CROMWELL
1529-1540

[Sidenote: The new Despotism]

The ten years which follow the fall of Wolsey are among the most momentous
in our history. The Monarchy at last realized its power, and the work for
which Wolsey had paved the way was carried out with a terrible
thoroughness. The one great institution which could still offer resistance
to the royal will was struck down. The Church became a mere instrument of
the central despotism. The people learned their helplessness in rebellions
easily suppressed and avenged with ruthless severity. A reign of terror,
organized with consummate and merciless skill, held England panic-stricken
at Henry's feet. The noblest heads rolled from the block. Virtue and
learning could not save Thomas More; royal descent could not save Lady
Salisbury. The putting away of one queen, the execution of another, taught
England that nothing was too high for Henry's "courage" or too sacred for
his "appetite." Parliament assembled only to sanction acts of unscrupulous
tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the fabric of absolute rule.
All the constitutional safeguards of English freedom were swept away.
Arbitrary taxation, arbitrary legislation, arbitrary imprisonment were
powers claimed without dispute and unsparingly used by the Crown.

The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing less, is the
history of a single man. In the whole line of English statesmen there is
no one of whom we would willingly know so much, no one of whom we really
know so little, as of Thomas Cromwell. When he meets us in Henry's service
he had already passed middle life; and during his earlier years it is
hardly possible to do more than disentangle a few fragmentary facts from
the mass of fable which gathered round them. His youth was one of roving
adventure. Whether he was the son of a poor blacksmith at Putney or no, he
could hardly have been more than a boy when he was engaged in the service
of the Marchioness of Dorset, and he must still have been young when he
took part as a common soldier in the wars of Italy, a "ruffian," as he
owned afterwards to Cranmer, in the most unscrupulous school the world
contained. But it was a school in which he learned lessons even more
dangerous than those of the camp. He not only mastered the Italian
language but drank in the manners and tone of the Italy around him, the
Italy of the Borgias and the Medici. It was with Italian versatility that
he turned from the camp to the counting-house; he was certainly engaged as
a commercial agent to one of the Venetian traders; tradition finds him as
a clerk at Antwerp; and in 1512 history at last encounters him as a
thriving wool merchant at Middelburg in Zealand.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and Wolsey]

Returning to England, Cromwell continued to amass wealth as years went on
by adding the trade of scrivener, something between that of a banker and
attorney, to his other occupations, as well as by advancing money to the
poorer nobles; and on the outbreak of the second war with France we find
him a busy and influential member of the Commons in Parliament. Five years
later, in 1528, the aim of his ambition was declared by his entering into
Wolsey's service. The Cardinal needed a man of business for the
suppression of the smaller monasteries which he had undertaken as well as
for the transfer of their revenues to his foundations at Oxford and
Ipswich, and he showed his usual skill in the choice of men by finding
such an agent in Cromwell. The task was an unpopular one, and it was
carried out with a rough indifference to the feelings it aroused which
involved Cromwell in the hate that was gathering round his master. But his
wonderful self-reliance and sense of power only broke upon the world at
Wolsey's fall. Of the hundreds of dependants who waited on the Cardinal's
nod, Cromwell, hated and in danger as he must have known himself to be,
was the only one who clung to his master at the last. In the lonely hours
of his disgrace at Esher Wolsey "made his moan unto Master Cromwell, who
comforted him the best he could, and desired my Lord to give him leave to
go to London, where he would make or mar, which was always his common
saying." His plan was to purchase not only his master's safety but his
own. Wolsey was persuaded to buy off the hostility of the courtiers by
giving his personal confirmation to the prodigal grants of pensions and
annuities which had been already made from his revenues, while Cromwell
acquired importance as the go-between in these transactions. "Then began
both noblemen and others who had patents from the King," for grants from
the Cardinal's estate, "to make earnest suit to Master Cromwell for to
solicit their causes, and for his pains therein they promised not only to
reward him, but to show him such pleasure as should be in their power."
But if Cromwell showed his consummate craft in thus serving himself as
well as his master, he can have had no personal reasons for the stand he
made in the Parliament which was summoned in November against a bill for
disqualifying the Cardinal for all after employment, which was introduced
by Norfolk and More. It was by Cromwell that this was defeated and it was
by him that the negotiations were conducted which permitted the fallen
minister to withdraw pardoned to York.

A general esteem seems to have rewarded this rare instance of fidelity to
a ruined patron. "For his honest behaviour in his master's cause he was
esteemed the most faithfullest servant, and was of all men greatly
commended." Cromwell however had done more than save himself from ruin.
The negotiations for Wolsey's pensions had given him access to the king,
and "by his witty demeanour he grew continually in the King's favour." But
the favour had been won by more than "witty demeanour." In a private
interview with Henry Cromwell boldly advised him to cut the knot of the
divorce by the simple exercise of his own supremacy. The advice struck the
key-note of the later policy by which the daring counsellor was to change
the whole face of Church and State; but Henry still clung to the hopes
held out by the new ministers who had followed Wolsey, and shrank perhaps
as yet from the bare absolutism to which Cromwell called him. The advice
at any rate was concealed; and, though high in the king's favour, his new
servant waited patiently the progress of events.

[Sidenote: The Howards]

The first result of Wolsey's fall was a marked change in the system of
administration. Both the Tudor kings had carried on their government
mainly through the agency of great ecclesiastics. Archbishop Morton and
Bishop Fox had been successively ministers of Henry the Seventh. Wolsey
had been the minister of Henry the Eighth. But with the ruin of the
Cardinal the rule of the churchmen ceased. The seals were given to Sir
Thomas More. The real direction of affairs lay in the hands of two great
nobles, of the Duke of Suffolk who was President of the Council, and of
the Lord Treasurer, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk. From this hour to
the close of the age of the Tudors the Howards were to play a prominent
part in English history. They had originally sprung from the circle of
lawyers who rose to wealth and honour through their employment by the
Crown. Their earliest known ancestor was a judge under Edward the First;
and his descendants remained wealthy landowners in the eastern counties
till early in the fifteenth century they were suddenly raised to
distinction by the marriage of Sir Robert Howard with a wife who became
heiress of the houses of Arundel and Norfolk, the Fitz-Alans and the
Mowbrays. John Howard, the issue of this marriage, was a prominent Yorkist
and stood high in the favour of the Yorkist kings. He was one of the
councillors of Edward the Fourth, and received from Richard the Third the
old dignities of the house of Mowbray, the office of Earl Marshal and the
Dukedom of Norfolk. But he had hardly risen to greatness when he fell
fighting by Richard's side at Bosworth Field. His son was taken prisoner
in the same battle and remained for three years in the Tower. But his
refusal to join in the rising of the Earl of Lincoln was rewarded by Henry
the Seventh with his release, his restoration to the Earldom of Surrey,
and his employment in the service of the crown where he soon took rank
among the king's most trusted councillors. His military abilities were
seen in campaigns against the Scots which won back for him the office of
Earl Marshal, and in the victory of Flodden which restored to him the
Dukedom of Norfolk. The son of this victor of Flodden, Thomas, Earl of
Surrey, had already served as lieutenant in Ireland and as general against
Albany on the Scottish frontier before his succession to the dukedom in
1524. His coolness and tact had displayed themselves during the revolt
against Benevolences, when his influence alone averted a rising in the
Eastern Counties. Since Buckingham's death his house stood at the head of
the English nobility: his office of Lord Treasurer placed him high at the
royal council board; and Henry's love for his niece, Anne Boleyn, gave a
fresh spur to the duke's ambition. But his influence had till now been
overshadowed by the greatness of Wolsey. With the Cardinal's fall however
he at once came to the front. Though he had bowed to the royal policy, he
was known as the leader of the party which clung to alliance with the
Emperor, and now that such an alliance was needful Henry counted on
Norfolk to renew the friendship with Charles.

[Sidenote: The Parliament]

An even greater revolution was seen in the summons of a Parliament which
met in November 1529. Its assembly was no doubt prompted in part by the
actual needs of the Crown, for Henry was not only penniless but
overwhelmed with debts and Parliament alone could give him freedom from
these embarrassments. But the importance of the questions brought before
the Houses, and their repeated assembly throughout the rest of Henry's
reign, point to a definite change in the royal system. The policy of
Edward the Fourth, of Henry the Seventh, and of Wolsey was abandoned.
Instead of looking on Parliament as a danger the monarchy now felt itself
strong enough to use it as a tool. The obedience of the Commons was seen
in the readiness with which they at once passed a bill to release the
crown from its debts. But Henry counted on more than obedience. He
counted, and justly counted, on the warm support of the Houses in his
actual strife with Rome. The plan of a divorce was no doubt unpopular. So
violent was the indignation against Anne Boleyn that she hardly dared to
stir abroad. But popular feeling ran almost as bitterly against the
Papacy. The sight of an English king and an English queen pleading before
a foreign tribunal revived the old resentment against the subjection of
Englishmen to Papal courts. The helplessness of Clement in the grasp of
the Emperor recalled the helplessness of the Popes at Avignon in the grasp
of the kings of France. That Henry should sue for justice to Rome was
galling enough, but the hottest adherent of the Papacy was outraged when
the suit of his king was granted or refused at the will of Charles. It was
against this degradation of the Crown that the Statutes of Provisors and
Præmunire had been long since aimed. The need of Papal support to their
disputed title which had been felt by the Houses of Lancaster and York had
held these statutes in suspense, and the Legatine Court of Wolsey had
openly defied them. They were still however legally in force; they were
part of the Parliamentary tradition; and it was certain that Parliament
would be as ready as ever to enforce the independent jurisdiction of the
Crown.

[Sidenote: Hopes of the New Learning]

Not less significant was the attitude of the New Learning. On Wolsey's
fall the seals had been offered to Warham, and it was probably at his
counsel that they were finally given to Sir Thomas More. The chancellor's
dream, if we may judge it from the acts of his brief ministry, seems to
have been that of carrying out the religious reformation which had been
demanded by Colet and Erasmus while checking the spirit of revolt against
the unity of the Church. His severities against the Protestants,
exaggerated as they have been by polemic rancour, remain the one stain on
a memory that knows no other. But it was only by a rigid severance of the
cause of reform from what seemed to him the cause of revolution that More
could hope for a successful issue to the projects of reform which the
council laid before Parliament. The Petition of the Commons sounded like
an echo of Colet's famous address to the Convocation. It attributed the
growth of heresy not more to "frantic and seditious books published in the
English tongue contrary to the very true Catholic and Christian faith"
than to "the extreme and uncharitable behaviour of divers ordinaries." It
remonstrated against the legislation of the clergy in Convocation without
the king's assent or that of his subjects, the oppressive procedure of the
Church Courts, the abuses of ecclesiastical patronage, and the excessive
number of holydays. Henry referred the Petition to the bishops, but they
could devise no means of redress, and the ministry persisted in pushing
through the Houses their bills for ecclesiastical reform. The importance
of the new measures lay really in the action of Parliament. They were an
explicit announcement that church-reform was now to be undertaken, not by
the clergy, but by the people at large. On the other hand it was clear
that it would be carried out in a spirit of loyalty to the church. The
Commons forced from Bishop Fisher an apology for words which were taken as
a doubt thrown on their orthodoxy. Henry forbade the circulation of
Tyndale's translation of the Bible as executed in a Protestant spirit. The
reforming measures however were pushed resolutely on. Though the questions
of Convocation and the Bishops' courts were adjourned for further
consideration, the fees of the courts were curtailed, the clergy
restricted from lay employments, pluralities restrained, and residence
enforced. In spite of a dogged opposition from the bishops the bills
received the assent of the House of Lords, "to the great rejoicing of lay
people, and the great displeasure of spiritual persons."

[Sidenote: Death of Wolsey]

Not less characteristic of the New Learning was the intellectual pressure
it strove to bring to bear on the wavering Pope. Cranmer was still active
in the cause of Anne Boleyn; he had just published a book in favour of the
divorce; and he now urged on the ministry an appeal to the learned opinion
of Christendom by calling for the judgement of the chief universities of
Europe. His counsel was adopted; but Norfolk trusted to coarser means of
attaining his end. Like most of the English nobles and the whole of the
merchant class, his sympathies were with the House of Burgundy; he looked
upon Wolsey as the real hindrance to the divorce through the French policy
which had driven Charles into a hostile attitude; and he counted on the
Cardinal's fall to bring about a renewal of friendship with the Emperor
and to ensure his support. The father of Anne Boleyn, now created Earl of
Wiltshire, was sent in 1530 on this errand to the Imperial Court. But
Charles remained firm to Catharine's cause, and Clement would do nothing
in defiance of the Emperor. Nor was the appeal to the learned world more
successful. In France the profuse bribery of the English agents would have
failed with the university of Paris but for the interference of Francis
himself, eager to regain Henry's goodwill by this office of friendship. As
shameless an exercise of the king's own authority was needed to wring an
approval of his cause from Oxford and Cambridge. In Germany the very
Protestants, then in the fervour of their moral revival and hoping little
from a proclaimed opponent of Luther, were dead against the king. So far
as could be seen from Cranmer's test every learned man in Christendom but
for bribery and threats would have condemned the royal cause. Henry was
embittered by failures which he attributed to the unskilful diplomacy of
his new counsellors; and it was rumoured that he had been heard to regret
the loss of the more dexterous statesman whom they had overthrown. Wolsey,
who since the beginning of the year had remained at York, though busy in
appearance with the duties of his see, was hoping more and more as the
months passed by for his recall. But the jealousy of his political enemies
was roused by the king's regrets, and the pitiless hand of Norfolk was
seen in the quick and deadly blow which he dealt at his fallen rival. On
the fourth of November, on the eve of his installation feast, the Cardinal
was arrested on a charge of high treason and conducted by the Lieutenant
of the Tower towards London. Already broken by his enormous labours, by
internal disease, and the sense of his fall, Wolsey accepted the arrest as
a sentence of death. An attack of dysentery forced him to rest at the
abbey of Leicester, and as he reached the gate he said feebly to the
brethren who met him, "I am come to lay my bones among you." On his
death-bed his thoughts still clung to the prince whom he had served. "Had
I but served God as diligently as I have served the king," murmured the
dying man, "He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is
my due reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but
only my duty to my prince."

[Sidenote: Cromwell's Policy]

No words could paint with so terrible a truthfulness the spirit of the new
despotism which Wolsey had done more than any of those who went before him
to build up. From tempers like his all sense of loyalty to England, to its
freedom, to its institutions, had utterly passed away, and the one duty
which the statesman owned was a duty to his "prince." To what issues such
a conception of a statesman's duty might lead was now to be seen in the
career of a greater than Wolsey. The two dukes had struck down the
Cardinal only to set up another master in his room. Since his interview
with Henry Cromwell had remained in the king's service, where his steady
advance in the royal favour was marked by his elevation to the post of
Secretary of State. His patience was at last rewarded by the failure of
the policy for which his own had been set aside. At the close of 1530 the
college of cardinals formally rejected the king's request for leave to
decide the whole matter in his own spiritual courts; and the defeat of
Norfolk's project drove Henry nearer and nearer to the bold plan from
which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall. Cromwell was again ready with his
suggestion that the king should disavow the Papal jurisdiction, declare
himself Head of the Church within his realm, and obtain a divorce from his
own Ecclesiastical Courts. But he looked on the divorce as simply the
prelude to a series of changes which the new minister was bent upon
accomplishing. In all his chequered life what had left its deepest stamp
on him was Italy. Not only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his
designs, but in their larger scope, their clearer purpose, and their
admirable combination, the Italian state-craft entered with Cromwell into
English politics. He is in fact the first English minister in whom we can
trace through the whole period of his rule the steady working out of a
great and definite aim, that of raising the king to absolute authority on
the ruins of every rival power within the realm. It was not that Cromwell
was a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we may trust the tale that carries
him in his youth to Florence or no, his statesmanship was closely modelled
on the ideal of the Florentine thinker whose book was constantly in his
hand. Even as a servant of Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal,
Reginald Pole, by bidding him take for his manual in politics the "Prince"
of Machiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in Cæsar Borgia or in the later
Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyrannies might
unite and regenerate Italy; and terrible and ruthless as his policy was,
the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim
of securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration of
all authority in the crown.

[Sidenote: The Headship of the Church]

The first step towards such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its
spiritual obedience to Rome. What the first of the Tudors had done for the
political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its
ecclesiastical independence. Henry the Seventh had freed England from the
interference of France or the House of Burgundy; and in the question of
the divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry the Eighth to free it
from the interference of the Papacy. In such an effort resistance could be
looked for only from the clergy. But their resistance was what Cromwell
desired. The last check on royal absolutism which had survived the Wars of
the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and jurisdiction, and
the religious claims of the church; and for the success of the new policy
it was necessary to reduce the great ecclesiastical body to a mere
department of the State in which all authority should flow from the
sovereign alone, his will be the only law, his decision the only test of
truth. Such a change however was hardly to be wrought without a struggle;
and the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters
furnished ground on which the crown could conduct this struggle to the
best advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the
struggle was to be waged. A year had passed since Wolsey had been
convicted of a breach of the Statute of Præmunire. The pedantry of the
judges declared the whole nation to have been formally involved in the
same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal absurdity was
now redressed by a general pardon, but from this pardon the clergy found
themselves omitted. In the spring of 1531 Convocation was assembled to be
told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the payment
of a fine amounting to a million of our present money, and the
acknowledgement of the king as "the chief protector, the only and supreme
lord, and Head of the Church and Clergy of England." Unjust as was the
first demand, they at once submitted to it; against the second they
struggled hard. But their appeals to Henry and Cromwell met only with
demands for instant obedience. A compromise was at last arrived at by the
insertion of a qualifying phrase "So far as the law of Christ will allow";
and with this addition the words were again submitted by Warham to the
Convocation. There was a general silence. "Whoever is silent seems to
consent," said the Archbishop. "Then are we all silent," replied a voice
from among the crowd.

[Sidenote: Catharine put away]

There is no ground for thinking that the "Headship of the Church" which
Henry claimed in this submission was more than a warning addressed to the
independent spirit of the clergy, or that it bore as yet the meaning which
was afterwards attached to it. It certainly implied no independence of
Rome, for negotiations were still being carried on with the Papal Court.
But it told Clement plainly that in any strife that might come between
himself and Henry the clergy were in the king's hand, and that he must
look for no aid from them in any struggle with the crown. The warning was
backed by an address to the Pope from the Lords and some of the Commons
who assembled after a fresh prorogation of the Houses in the spring. "The
cause of his Majesty," the Peers were made to say, "is the cause of each
of ourselves." They laid before the Pope what they represented as the
judgement of the Universities in favour of the divorce; but they faced
boldly the event of its rejection. "Our condition," they ended, "will not
be wholly irremediable. Extreme remedies are ever harsh of application;
but he that is sick will by all means be rid of his distemper." In the
summer the banishment of Catharine from the king's palace to a house at
Ampthill showed the firmness of Henry's resolve. Each of these acts was no
doubt intended to tell on the Pope's decision, for Henry still clung to
the hope of extorting from Clement a favourable answer, and at the close
of the year a fresh embassy with Gardiner, now Bishop of Winchester, at
its head was despatched to the Papal court. But the embassy failed like
its predecessors, and at the opening of 1532 Cromwell was free to take
more decisive steps in the course on which he had entered.

[Sidenote: More's withdrawal]

What the nature of his policy was to be had already been detected by eyes
as keen as his own. More had seen in Wolsey's fall an opening for the
realization of those schemes of religious and even of political reform on
which the scholars of the New Learning had long been brooding. The
substitution of the Lords of the Council for the autocratic rule of the
Cardinal-minister, the break-up of the great mass of powers which had been
gathered into a single hand, the summons of a Parliament, the
ecclesiastical reforms which it at once sanctioned, were measures which
promised a more legal and constitutional system of government. The
question of the divorce presented to More no serious difficulty. Untenable
as Henry's claim seemed to the now Chancellor, his faith in the
omnipotence of Parliament would have enabled him to submit to any statute
which named a new spouse as queen and her children as heirs to the crown.
But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he saw that more than this was
impending. The Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent
Christendom and of the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending,
united with More's theological convictions to resist any spiritual
severance of England from the Papacy. His love for freedom, his revolt
against the growing autocracy of the crown, the very height and grandeur
of his own spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a system which
would concentrate in the king the whole power of Church as of State, would
leave him without the one check that remained on his despotism, and make
him arbiter of the religious faith of his subjects. The later revolt of
the Puritans against the king-worship which Cromwell established proved
the justice of the prevision which forced More in the spring of 1532 to
resign the post of Chancellor.

[Sidenote: England and Rome]

But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevitable one. Till now
every Englishman had practically owned a double life and a double
allegiance. As citizen of a temporal state his life was bounded by English
shores and his loyalty due exclusively to his English king. But as citizen
of the state spiritual he belonged not to England but to Christendom. The
law which governed him was not a national law but a law that embraced
every European nation, and the ordinary course of judicial appeals in
ecclesiastical cases proved to him that the sovereignty in all matters of
conscience or religion lay not at Westminster but at Rome. Such a
distinction could scarcely fail to bring embarrassment with it as the
sense of national life and national pride waxed stronger; and from the
reign of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual and temporal
relations of the realm grew daily more difficult. Parliament had hardly
risen into life when it became the organ of the national jealousy whether
of any Papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the separate life and
separate jurisdiction of the clergy within it. The movement was long
arrested by religious reaction and civil war. But the fresh sense of
national greatness which sprang from the policy of Henry the Eighth, the
fresh sense of national unity as the Monarchy gathered all power into its
single hand, would have itself revived the contest even without the spur
of the divorce. What the question of the divorce really did was to
stimulate the movement by bringing into clearer view the wreck of the
great Christian commonwealth of which England had till now formed a part
and the impossibility of any real exercise of a spiritual sovereignty over
it by the weakened Papacy, as well as by outraging the national pride
through the summons of the king to a foreign bar and the submission of
English interests to the will of a foreign Emperor.

[Sidenote: Act of Appeals]

With such a spur as this the movement which More dreaded moved forward as
quickly as Cromwell desired. The time had come when England was to claim
for herself the fulness of power, ecclesiastical as well as temporal,
within her bounds; and in the concentration of all authority within the
hands of the sovereign which was the political characteristic of the time
to claim this power for the nation was to claim it for the king. The
import of that headship of the Church which Henry had assumed in the
preceding year was brought fully out in one of the propositions laid
before the Convocation of 1532. "The King's Majesty," runs this memorable
clause, "hath as well the care of the souls of his subjects as their
bodies; and may by the law of God by his Parliament make laws touching and
concerning as well the one as the other." The principle embodied in these
words was carried out in a series of decisive measures. Under strong
pressure the Convocation was brought to pray that the power of independent
legislation till now exercised by the Church should come to an end, and to
promise "that from henceforth we shall forbear to enact, promulge, or put
into execution any such constitutions and ordinances so by us to be made
in time coming, unless your Highness by your royal assent shall license us
to make, promulge, and execute them, and the same so made be approved by
your Highness's authority." Rome was dealt with in the same unsparing
fashion. The Parliament forbade by statute any further appeals to the
Papal Court; and on a petition from the clergy in Convocation the Houses
granted power to the king to suspend the payments of first-fruits, or the
year's revenue which each bishop paid to Rome on his election to a see.
All judicial, all financial connexion with the Papacy was broken by these
two measures. The last indeed was as yet but a menace which Henry might
use in his negotiations with Clement. The hope which had been entertained
of aid from Charles was now abandoned; and the overthrow of Norfolk and
his policy of alliance with the Empire was seen at the midsummer of 1532
in the conclusion of a league with France. Cromwell had fallen back on
Wolsey's system; and the divorce was now to be looked for from the united
pressure of the French and English kings on the Papal court.

[Sidenote: Marriage of Anne Boleyn]

But the pressure was as unsuccessful as before. In November Clement
threatened the king with excommunication if he did not restore Catharine
to her place as queen and abstain from all intercourse with Anne Boleyn
till the case was tried. But Henry still refused to submit to the
judgement of any court outside his realm; and the Pope, ready as he was
with evasion and delay, dared not alienate Charles by consenting to a
trial within it. The lavish pledges which Francis had given in an
interview during the preceding summer may have aided to spur the king to a
decisive step which closed the long debate. At the opening of 1533 Henry
was privately married to Anne Boleyn. The match however was carefully kept
secret while the Papal sanction was being gained for the appointment of
Cranmer to the See of Canterbury which had become vacant by Archbishop
Warham's death in the preceding year. But Cranmer's consecration at the
close of March was the signal for more open action, and Cromwell's policy
was at last brought fairly into play. The new primate at once laid the
question of the king's marriage before the two Houses of Convocation, and
both voted that the licence of Pope Julius had been beyond the Papal
powers and that the marriage which it authorized was void. In May the
king's suit was brought before the Archbishop in his court at Dunstable;
his judgement annulled the marriage with Catharine as void from the
beginning, and pronounced the marriage with Anne Boleyn, which her
pregnancy had forced Henry to reveal, a lawful marriage. A week later the
hand of Cranmer placed upon Anne's brow the crown which she had coveted so
long.

[Sidenote: Act of Supremacy]

"There was much murmuring" at measures such as these. Many thought "that
the Bishop of Rome would curse all Englishmen, and that the Emperor and he
would destroy all the people." Fears of the overthrow of religion told on
the clergy; the merchants dreaded an interruption of the trade with
Flanders, Italy, and Spain. But Charles, though still loyal to his aunt's
cause, had no mind to incur risks for her; and Clement, though he annulled
Cranmer's proceedings, hesitated as yet to take sterner action. Henry on
the other hand, conscious that the die was thrown, moved rapidly forward
in the path that Cromwell had opened. The Pope's reversal of the primate's
judgement was answered by an appeal to a General Council. The decision of
the cardinals to whom the case was referred in the spring of 1534, a
decision which asserted the lawfulness of Catharine's marriage, was met by
the enforcement of the long-suspended statute forbidding the payment of
first-fruits to the Pope. Though the King was still firm in his resistance
to Lutheran opinions and at this moment endeavoured to prevent by statute
the importation of Lutheran books, the less scrupulous hand of his
minister was seen already striving to find a counterpoise to the hostility
of the Emperor in an alliance with the Lutheran princes of North Germany.
Cromwell was now fast rising to a power which rivalled Wolsey's. His
elevation to the post of Lord Privy Seal placed him on a level with the
great nobles of the Council board; and Norfolk, constant in his hopes of
reconciliation with Charles and the Papacy, saw his plans set aside for
the wider and more daring projects of "the blacksmith's son." Cromwell
still clung to the political engine whose powers he had turned to the
service of the Crown. The Parliament which had been summoned at Wolsey's
fall met steadily year after year; and measure after measure had shown its
accordance with the royal will in the strife with Rome. It was now called
to deal a final blow. Step by step the ground had been cleared for the
great Statute by which the new character of the English Church was defined
in the session of 1534. By the Act of Supremacy authority in all matters
ecclesiastical was vested solely in the Crown. The courts spiritual became
as thoroughly the king's courts as the temporal courts at Westminster. The
Statute ordered that the king "shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the
only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and shall have and
enjoy annexed and united to the Imperial Crown of this realm as well the
title and state thereof as all the honours, jurisdictions, authorities,
immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity belonging, with
full power to visit, repress, redress, reform, and amend all such errors,
heresies, abuses, contempts, and enormities, which by any manner of
spiritual authority or jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed."

[Sidenote: The Vicar-General]

The full import of the Act of Supremacy was only seen in the following
year. At the opening of 1535 Henry formally took the title of "on earth
Supreme Head of the Church of England," and some months later Cromwell was
raised to the post of Vicar-General or Vicegerent of the king in all
matters ecclesiastical. His title, like his office, recalled the system of
Wolsey. It was not only as Legate but in later years as Vicar-General of
the Pope that Wolsey had brought all spiritual causes in England to an
English court. The supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the realm passed
into the hands of a minister who as Chancellor already exercised its
supreme civil jurisdiction. The Papal power had therefore long seemed
transferred to the Crown before the legislative measures which followed
the divorce actually transferred it. It was in fact the system of
Catholicism itself that trained men to look without surprise on the
concentration of all spiritual and secular authority in Cromwell.
Successor to Wolsey as Keeper of the Great Seal, it seemed natural enough
that Cromwell should succeed him also as Vicar-General of the Church and
that the union of the two powers should be restored in the hands of a
minister of the king. But the mere fact that these powers were united in
the hands not of a priest but of a layman showed the new drift of the
royal policy. The Church was no longer to be brought indirectly under the
royal power; in the policy of Cromwell it was to be openly laid prostrate
at the foot of the throne.

[Sidenote: Subjection of the Bishops]

And this policy his position enabled him to carry out with a terrible
thoroughness. One great step towards its realization had already been
taken in the statute which annihilated the free legislative powers of the
convocations of the Clergy. Another followed in an act which under the
pretext of restoring the free election of bishops turned every prelate
into a nominee of the king. The election of bishops by the chapters of
their cathedral churches had long become formal, and their appointment had
since the time of the Edwards been practically made by the Papacy on the
nomination of the Crown. The privilege of free election was now with
bitter irony restored to the chapters, but they were compelled on pain of
præmunire to choose whatever candidate was recommended by the king. This
strange expedient has lasted till the present time, though its character
has wholly changed with the developement of constitutional rule. The
nomination of bishops has ever since the accession of the Georges passed
from the King in person to the Minister who represents the will of the
people. Practically therefore an English prelate, alone among all the
prelates of the world, is now raised to his episcopal throne by the same
popular election which raised Ambrose to his episcopal chair at Milan. But
at the moment of the change Cromwell's measure reduced the English bishops
to absolute dependence on the Crown. Their dependence would have been
complete had his policy been thoroughly carried out and the royal power of
deposition put in force as well as that of appointment. As it was Henry
could warn the Archbishop of Dublin that if he persevered in his "proud
folly, we be able to remove you again and to put another man of more
virtue and honesty in your place." By the more ardent partizans of the
Reformation this dependence of the bishops on the Crown was fully
recognized. On the death of Henry the Eighth Cranmer took out a new
commission from Edward for the exercise of his office. Latimer, when the
royal policy clashed with his belief, felt bound to resign the See of
Worcester. If the power of deposition was quietly abandoned by Elizabeth,
the abandonment was due not so much to any deference for the religious
instincts of the nation as to the fact that the steady servility of the
bishops rendered its exercise unnecessary.

[Sidenote: The Religious Houses]

A second step in Cromwell's policy followed hard on this enslavement of
the episcopate. Master of Convocation, absolute master of the bishops,
Henry had become master of the monastic orders through the right of
visitation over them which had been transferred by the Act of Supremacy
from the Papacy to the Crown. The monks were soon to know what this right
of visitation implied in the hands of the Vicar-General. As an outlet for
religious enthusiasm monasticism was practically dead. The friar, now that
his fervour of devotion and his intellectual energy had passed away, had
sunk into a mere beggar. The monks had become mere land-owners. Most of
the religious houses were anxious only to enlarge their revenues and to
diminish the number of those who shared them. In the general carelessness
which prevailed as to the spiritual objects of their trust, in the
wasteful management of their estates, in the indolence and self-indulgence
which for the most part characterized them, the monastic establishments
simply exhibited the faults of all corporate bodies that have outlived the
work which they were created to perform. They were no more unpopular
however than such corporate bodies generally are. The Lollard cry for
their suppression had died away. In the north, where some of the greatest
abbeys were situated, the monks were on good terms with the country gentry
and their houses served as schools for their children; nor is there any
sign of a different feeling elsewhere.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries]

But they had drawn on themselves at once the hatred of the New Learning
and of the Monarchy. In the early days of the revival of letters Popes and
bishops had joined with princes and scholars in welcoming the diffusion of
culture and the hopes of religious reform. But though an abbot or a prior
here or there might be found among the supporters of the movement, the
monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The
quarrel only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of
Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers
of darkness" and of the cloister. In England Colet and More echoed with
greater reserve the scorn and invective of their friends. The Monarchy had
other causes for its hate. In Cromwell's system there was no room for
either the virtues or the vices of monasticism, for its indolence and
superstition, or for its independence of the throne. The bold stand which
the monastic orders had made against benevolences had never been forgiven,
while the revenues of their foundations offered spoil vast enough to fill
the royal treasury and secure a host of friends for the new reforms. Two
royal commissioners therefore were despatched on a general visitation of
the religious houses, and their reports formed a "Black Book" which was
laid before Parliament in 1536. It was acknowledged that about a third of
the houses, including the bulk of the larger abbeys, were fairly and
decently conducted. The rest were charged with drunkenness, with simony,
and with the foulest and most revolting crimes. The character of the
visitors, the sweeping nature of their report, and the long debate which
followed on its reception, leaves little doubt that these charges were
grossly exaggerated. But the want of any effective discipline which had
resulted from their exemption from all but Papal supervision told fatally
against monastic morality even in abbeys like St. Albans; and the
acknowledgement of Warham, as well as a partial measure of suppression
begun by Wolsey, go some way to prove that in the smaller houses at least
indolence had passed into crime. A cry of "Down with them" broke from the
Commons as the report was read. The country however was still far from
desiring the utter downfall of the monastic system, and a long and bitter
debate was followed by a compromise which suppressed all houses whose
income fell below £200 a year. Of the thousand religious houses which then
existed in England nearly four hundred were dissolved under this Act and
their revenues granted to the Crown.

[Sidenote: Enslavement of the Clergy]

The secular clergy alone remained; and injunction after injunction from
the Vicar-General taught rector and vicar that they must learn to regard
themselves as mere mouthpieces of the royal will. The Church was gagged.
With the instinct of genius Cromwell discerned the part which the pulpit,
as the one means which then existed of speaking to the people at large,
was to play in the religious and political struggle that was at hand; and
he resolved to turn it to the profit of the Monarchy. The restriction of
the right of preaching to priests who received licenses from the Crown
silenced every voice of opposition. Even to those who received these
licenses theological controversy was forbidden; and a high-handed process
of "tuning the pulpits" by express directions as to the subject and tenor
of each special discourse made the preachers at every crisis mere means of
diffusing the royal will. As a first step in this process every bishop,
abbot, and parish priest was required by the new Vicar-General to preach
against the usurpation of the Papacy and to proclaim the king as supreme
Head of the Church on earth. The very topics of the sermon were carefully
prescribed; the bishops were held responsible for the compliance of the
clergy with these orders; and the sheriffs were held responsible for the
obedience of the bishops.

[Sidenote: The Terror]

While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress
England looked silently on. In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in
the contest over the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform
of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative
independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the king.
But from the enslavement of the priesthood, from the gagging of the
pulpits, from the suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation
stood aloof. There were few voices indeed of protest. As the royal policy
disclosed itself, as the Monarchy trampled under foot the tradition and
reverence of ages gone by, as its figure rose bare and terrible out of the
wreck of old institutions, England simply held her breath. It is only
through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of
the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of the people.
For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell's rise and after
his fall from power the reign of Henry the Eighth witnessed no more than
the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Cromwell's
administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name
that men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English Terror.
It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could plead for
him at a later time with Henry as "one whose surety was only by your
Majesty, who loved your Majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God." But
the attitude of Cromwell towards the king was something more than that of
absolute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was "so vigilant to
preserve your Majesty from all treasons," adds the Primate, "that few
could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from the
beginning." Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but
tremulously sensitive to the lightest breath of hidden disloyalty; and it
was on this dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was
hardly secretary before spies were scattered broadcast over the land.
Secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was
thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and with the detection and
suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the king.

As it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it was by terror that he
mastered the people. Men felt in England, to use the figure by which
Erasmus paints the time, "as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every
stone." The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's talk with
their closest friends found its way to his ear. "Words idly spoken," the
murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as
the nobles cried passionately at his fall, "tortured into treason." The
only chance of safety lay in silence. "Friends who used to write and send
me presents," Erasmus tells us, "now send neither letter nor gifts, nor
receive any from any one, and this through fear." But even the refuge of
silence was closed by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted
the Statute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but men
were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very silence being
punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of
liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The
noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though
Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost he had made no open attack on
the freedom of justice. If he shrank from assembling Parliaments it was
from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty. But under Cromwell
the coercion of juries and the management of judges rendered the courts
mere mouthpieces of the royal will: and where even this shadow of justice
proved an obstacle to bloodshed, Parliament was brought into play to pass
bill after bill of attainder. "He shall be judged by the bloody laws he
has himself made," was the cry of the Council at the moment of his fall,
and by a singular retribution the crowning injustice which he sought to
introduce even into the practice of attainder, the condemnation of a man
without hearing his defence, was only practised on himself.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's Temper]

But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell it was of a nobler type than
the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or
stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective
just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If
he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and
the most renowned of English Churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, it
was through Lady Salisbury, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. If
he struck at the New Learning, it was through the murder of Sir Thomas
More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper
indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which lingered among
his friends, he was a generous, kindly-hearted man, with pleasant and
winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with
a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But
no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course. The student of
Machiavelli had not studied the "Prince" in vain. He had reduced bloodshed
to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a
business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual
"remembrances" of the day. "Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to
be tried and executed at Reading." "Item, to know the King's pleasure
touching Master More." "Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his
execution, and the other." It is indeed this utter absence of all passion,
of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most
terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is
pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way
through the forest, axe in hand.

[Sidenote: Cromwell and More]

The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless precision with which
Cromwell was to strike. In the general opinion of Europe the foremost
Englishman of the time was Sir Thomas More. As the policy of the divorce
ended in an open rupture with Rome he had withdrawn silently from the
ministry, but his silent disapproval of the new policy was more telling
than the opposition of obscurer foes. To Cromwell there must have been
something specially galling in More's attitude of reserve. The religious
reforms of the New Learning were being rapidly carried out, but it was
plain that the man who represented the very life of the New Learning
believed that the sacrifice of liberty and justice was too dear a price to
pay even for religious reform. In the actual changes which the divorce
brought about there was nothing to move More to active or open opposition.
Though he looked on the divorce and re-marriage as without religious
warrant, he found no difficulty in accepting an Act of Succession passed
in 1534 which declared the marriage of Anne Boleyn valid, annulled the
title of Catharine's child, Mary, and declared the children of Anne the
only lawful heirs to the crown. His faith in the power of Parliament over
all civil matters was too complete to admit a doubt of its competence to
regulate the succession to the throne. But by the same Act an oath
recognizing the succession as then arranged was ordered to be taken by all
persons; and this oath contained an acknowledgement that the marriage with
Catharine was against Scripture and invalid from the beginning. Henry had
long known More's belief on this point; and the summons to take this oath
was simply a summons to death. More was at his house at Chelsea when the
summons called him to Lambeth, to the house where he had bandied fun with
Warham and Erasmus or bent over the easel of Holbein. For a moment there
may have been some passing impulse to yield. But it was soon over.
Triumphant in all else, the monarchy was to find its power stop short at
the conscience of man. The great battle of spiritual freedom, the battle
of the Protestant against Mary, of the Catholic against Elizabeth, of the
Puritan against Charles, of the Independent against the Presbyterian,
began at the moment when More refused to bend or to deny his convictions
at a king's bidding.

[Sidenote: More sent to the Tower]

"I thank the Lord," More said with a sudden start as the boat dropped
silently down the river from his garden steps in the early morning, "I
thank the Lord that the field is won." At Lambeth Cranmer and his
fellow-commissioners tendered to him the new oath of allegiance; but, as
they expected, it was refused. They bade him walk in the garden that he
might reconsider his reply. The day was hot and More seated himself in a
window from which he could look down into the crowded court. Even in the
presence of death the quick sympathy of his nature could enjoy the humour
and life of the throng below. "I saw," he said afterwards, "Master Latimer
very merry in the court, for he laughed and took one or twain by the neck
so handsomely that if they had been women I should have weened that he
waxed wanton." The crowd below was chiefly of priests, rectors, and
vicars, pressing to take the oath that More found harder than death. He
bore them no grudge for it. When he heard the voice of one who was known
to have boggled hard at the oath a little while before calling loudly and
ostentatiously for drink, he only noted him with his peculiar humour. "He
drank," More supposed, "either from dryness or from gladness" or "to show
quod ille notus erat Pontifici." He was called in again at last, but only
repeated his refusal. It was in vain that Cranmer plied him with
distinctions which perplexed even the subtle wit of the ex-chancellor;
More remained unshaken and passed to the Tower. He was followed there by
Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the most aged and venerable of the English
prelates, who was charged with countenancing treason by listening to the
prophecies of a religious fanatic called "The Nun of Kent." But for the
moment even Cromwell shrank from their blood. They remained prisoners
while a new and more terrible engine was devised to crush out the silent
but widespread opposition to the religious changes.

[Sidenote: Death of More]

By a statute passed at the close of 1534 a new treason was created in the
denial of the king's titles; and in the opening of 1535 Henry assumed as
we have seen the title of "on earth supreme head of the Church of
England." The measure was at once followed up by a blow at victims hardly
less venerable than More. In the general relaxation of the religious life
the charity and devotion of the brethren of the Charter-house had won the
reverence even of those who condemned monasticism. After a stubborn
resistance they had acknowledged the royal Supremacy and taken the oath of
submission prescribed by the Act. But by an infamous construction of the
statute which made the denial of the Supremacy treason, the refusal of
satisfactory answers to official questions as to a conscientious belief in
it was held to be equivalent to open denial. The aim of the new measure
was well known, and the brethren prepared to die. In the agony of waiting
enthusiasm brought its imaginative consolations; "when the Host was lifted
up there came as it were a whisper of air which breathed upon our faces as
we knelt; and there came a sweet soft sound of music." They had not long
however to wait, for their refusal to answer was the signal for their
doom. Three of the brethren went to the gallows; the rest were flung into
Newgate, chained to posts in a noisome dungeon where, "tied and not able
to stir," they were left to perish of gaol-fever and starvation. In a
fortnight five were dead and the rest at the point of death, "almost
despatched," Cromwell's envoy wrote to him, "by the hand of God, of which,
considering their behaviour, I am not sorry." Their death was soon
followed by that of More. The interval of imprisonment had failed to break
his resolution, and the new statute sufficed to bring him to the block.
With Fisher he was convicted of denying the king's title as only supreme
head of the Church. The old Bishop approached the scaffold with a book of
the New Testament in his hand. He opened it at a venture ere he knelt, and
read, "This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God." In July
More followed his fellow-prisoner to the block. Just before the fatal blow
he moved his beard carefully from the reach of the doomsman's axe. "Pity
that should be cut," he was heard to mutter with a touch of the old sad
irony, "that has never committed treason."

[Sidenote: Cromwell and the Nobles]

Cromwell had at last reached his aim. England lay panic-stricken at the
feet of the "low-born knave," as the nobles called him, who represented
the omnipotence of the crown. Like Wolsey he concentrated in his hands the
whole administration of the state; he was at once foreign minister and
home minister, and vicar-general of the Church, the creator of a new
fleet, the organizer of armies, the president of the terrible Star
Chamber. His Italian indifference to the mere show of power stood out in
strong contrast with the pomp of the Cardinal. Cromwell's personal habits
were simple and unostentatious; if he clutched at money, it was to feed
the army of spies whom he maintained at his own expense, and whose work he
surveyed with a ceaseless vigilance. For his activity was boundless. More
than fifty volumes remain of the gigantic mass of his correspondence.
Thousands of letters from "poor bedesmen," from outraged wives and wronged
labourers and persecuted heretics flowed in to the all-powerful minister
whose system of personal government turned him into the universal court of
appeal. But powerful as he was, and mighty as was the work which he had
accomplished, he knew that harder blows had to be struck before his
position was secure. The new changes, above all the irritation which had
been caused by the outrages with which the dissolution of the monasteries
was accompanied, gave point to the mutinous temper that prevailed
throughout the country; for the revolution in agriculture was still going
on, and evictions furnished embittered outcasts to swell the ranks of any
rising. Nor did it seem as though revolt, if it once broke out, would want
leaders to head it. The nobles who had writhed under the rule of the
Cardinal, writhed yet more bitterly under the rule of one whom they looked
upon not only as Wolsey's tool, but as a low-born upstart. "The world will
never mend," Lord Hussey had been heard to say, "till we fight for it."
"Knaves rule about the king!" cried Lord Exeter, "I trust some day to give
them a buffet." At this moment too the hopes of political reaction were
stirred by the fate of one whom the friends of the old order looked upon
as the source of all their troubles. In the spring of 1536, while the
dissolution of the monasteries was marking the triumph of the new policy,
Anne Boleyn was suddenly charged with adultery, and sent to the Tower. A
few days later she was tried, condemned, and brought to the block. The
queen's ruin was everywhere taken as an omen of ruin to the cause which
had become identified with her own, and the old nobility mustered courage
to face the minister who held them at his feet.

[Sidenote: Pilgrimage of Grace]

They found their opportunity in the discontent of the north, where the
monasteries had been popular, and where the rougher mood of the people
turned easily to resistance. In the autumn of 1536 a rising broke out in
Lincolnshire, and this was hardly quelled when all Yorkshire rose in arms.
From every parish the farmers marched with the parish priest at their head
upon York, and the surrender of this city determined the waverers. In a
few days Skipton Castle, where the Earl of Cumberland held out with a
handful of men, was the only spot north of the Humber which remained true
to the king. Durham rose at the call of the chiefs of the house of
Neville, Lords Westmoreland and Latimer. Though the Earl of Northumberland
feigned sickness, the Percies joined the revolt. Lord Darcy, the chief of
the Yorkshire nobles, surrendered Pomfret, and was acknowledged as their
chief by the insurgents. The whole nobility of the north were now enlisted
in the "Pilgrimage of Grace," as the rising called itself, and thirty
thousand "tall men and well horsed" moved on the Don demanding the
reversal of the royal policy, a reunion with Rome, the restoration of
Catharine's daughter, Mary, to her rights as heiress of the Crown, redress
for the wrongs done to the Church, and above all the driving away of
base-born councillors, or in other words, the fall of Cromwell. Though
their advance was checked by negotiation, the organization of the revolt
went steadily on throughout the winter, and a Parliament of the North
which gathered at Pomfret formally adopted the demands of the insurgents.
Only six thousand men under Norfolk barred their way southward, and the
Midland counties were known to be disaffected.

[Sidenote: Its Suppression]

But Cromwell remained undaunted by the peril. He suffered indeed Norfolk
to negotiate; and allowed Henry under pressure from his Council to promise
pardon and a free Parliament at York, a pledge which Norfolk and Darcy
alike construed into an acceptance of the demands made by the insurgents.
Their leaders at once flung aside the badge of the Five Wounds which they
had worn with a cry, "We will wear no badge but that of our Lord the
King," and nobles and farmers dispersed to their homes in triumph. But the
towns of the North were no sooner garrisoned and Norfolk's army in the
heart of Yorkshire than the veil was flung aside. A few isolated outbreaks
in the spring of 1537 gave a pretext for the withdrawal of every
concession. The arrest of the leaders of the "Pilgrimage of Grace" was
followed by ruthless severities. The country was covered with gibbets.
Whole districts were given up to military execution. But it was on the
leaders of the rising that Cromwell's hand fell heaviest. He seized his
opportunity for dealing at the northern nobles a fatal blow. "Cromwell,"
one of the chief among them broke fiercely out as he stood at the Council
board, "it is thou that art the very special and chief cause of all this
rebellion and wickedness, and dost daily travail to bring us to our ends
and strike off our heads. I trust that ere thou die, though thou wouldst
procure all the noblest heads within the realm to be stricken off, yet
there shall one head remain that shall strike off thy head." But the
warning was unheeded. Lord Darcy, who stood first among the nobles of
Yorkshire, and Lord Hussey, who stood first among the nobles of
Lincolnshire, went alike to the block. The Abbot of Barlings, who had
ridden into Lincoln with his canons in full armour, swung with his brother
Abbots of Whalley, Woburn, and Sawley from the gallows. The Abbots of
Fountains and of Jervaulx were hanged at Tyburn side by side with the
representative of the great line of Percy. Lady Bulmer was burned at the
stake. Sir Robert Constable was hanged in chains before the gate of Hull.

[Sidenote: Ireland]

The defeat of the northern revolt showed the immense force which the
monarchy had gained. Even among the rebels themselves not a voice had
threatened Henry's throne. It was not at the king that they aimed these
blows, but at the "low-born knaves" who stood about the king. At this
moment too Henry's position was strengthened by the birth of an heir. On
the death of Anne Boleyn he had married Jane Seymour, the daughter of a
Wiltshire knight; and in 1537 this queen died in giving birth to a boy,
the future Edward the Sixth. The triumph of the Crown at home was doubled
by its triumph in the great dependency which had so long held the English
authority at bay, across St. George's Channel. Though Henry the Seventh
had begun the work of bridling Ireland he had no strength for exacting a
real submission; and the great Norman lords of the Pale, the Butlers and
Geraldines, the De la Poers and the Fitzpatricks, though subjects in name,
remained in fact defiant of the royal authority. In manners and outer
seeming they had sunk into mere natives; their feuds were as incessant as
those of the Irish septs; and their despotism combined the horrors of
feudal oppression with those of Celtic anarchy. Crushed by taxation, by
oppression, by misgovernment, plundered alike by native marauders and by
the troops levied to disperse them, the wretched descendants of the first
English settlers preferred even Irish misrule to English "order," and the
border of the Pale retreated steadily towards Dublin. The towns of the
seaboard, sheltered by their walls and their municipal self-government,
formed the only exceptions to the general chaos; elsewhere throughout its
dominions the English Government, though still strong enough to break down
any open revolt, was a mere phantom of rule. From the Celtic tribes
without the Pale even the remnant of civilization and of native union
which had lingered on to the time of Strongbow had vanished away. The
feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their hatred of the stranger;
and the Government at Dublin found it easy to maintain a strife which
saved it the necessity of self-defence among a people whose "nature is
such that for money one shall have the son to war against the father, and
the father against his child." During the first thirty years of the
sixteenth century the annals of the country which remained under native
rule record more than a hundred raids and battles between clans of the
north alone.

[Sidenote: Ireland and Cromwell]

But the time came at last for a vigorous attempt on the part of England to
introduce order into this chaos of turbulence and misrule. To Henry the
Eighth the policy of forbearance, of ruling Ireland through the great
Irish lords, was utterly hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland as
thoroughly and effectively as he ruled in England, and during the latter
half of his reign he bent his whole energies to accomplish this aim. From
the first hour of his accession indeed the Irish lords felt the heavier
hand of a master. The Geraldines, who had been suffered under the
preceding reign to govern Ireland in the name of the Crown, were quick to
discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their tool. Their
head, the Earl of Kildare, was called to England and thrown into the
Tower. The great house resolved to frighten England again into a
conviction of its helplessness; and a rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald in
1534 followed the usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the
Archbishop of Dublin, a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle,
a harrying of the Pale, ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels
among the bogs and forests of the border on the advance of the English
forces. It had been usual to meet such an onset as this by a raid of the
same character, by a corresponding failure before the castle of the
rebellious noble, and a retreat like his own which served as a preliminary
to negotiations and a compromise. Unluckily for the Fitzgeralds Henry
resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he had Cromwell to execute
his will. Skeffington, a new Lord Deputy who was sent over in 1535,
brought with him a train of artillery which worked a startling change in
the political aspect of the island. The castles that had hitherto
sheltered rebellion were battered into ruins. Maynooth, a stronghold from
which the Geraldines threatened Dublin and ruled the Pale at their will,
was beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen was the blow
that resistance was at once at an end. Not only was the power of the great
Norman house which had towered over Ireland utterly broken, but only a
single boy was left to preserve its name.

[Sidenote: Conquest of Ireland]

With the fall of the Fitzgeralds Ireland felt itself in a master's grasp.
"Irishmen," wrote one of the Lord Justices to Cromwell, "were never in
such fear as now. The king's sessions are being kept in five shires more
than formerly." Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale at Henry's feet
but the kerns of Wicklow and Wexford sent in their submission; and for the
first time in men's memory an English army appeared in Munster and reduced
the south to obedience. The border of the Pale was crossed, and the wide
territory where the Celtic tribes had preserved their independence since
the days of the Angevins was trampled into subjection. A castle of the
O'Briens which guarded the passage of the Shannon was taken by assault,
and its fall carried with it the submission of Clare. The capture of
Athlone brought about the reduction of Connaught, and assured the loyalty
of the great Norman house of the De Burghs or Bourkes who had assumed an
almost royal authority in the west. The resistance of the tribes of the
north was broken in a victory at Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through
the vigour of Skeffington's successor, Lord Leonard Grey, and still more
through the resolute will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown,
which had been limited to the walls of Dublin, was acknowledged over the
length and breadth of the land.

[Sidenote: Henry's Irish Government]

But submission was far from being all that Henry desired. His aim was to
civilize the people whom he had conquered--to rule not by force but by
law. But the only conception of law which the king or his ministers could
frame was that of English law. The customary law which prevailed without
the Pale, the native system of clan government and common tenure of land
by the tribe, as well as the poetry and literature which threw their
lustre over the Irish tongue, were either unknown to the English statesmen
or despised by them as barbarous. The one mode of civilizing Ireland and
redressing its chaotic misrule which presented itself to their minds was
that of destroying the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people--that of
"making Ireland English" in manners, in law, and in tongue. The Deputy,
Parliament, Judges, Sheriffs, which already existed within the Pale,
furnished a faint copy of English institutions; and it was hoped that
these might be gradually extended over the whole island. The English
language and mode of life would follow, it was believed, the English law.
The one effectual way of bringing about such a change as this lay in a
complete conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English
settlers; but from this course, pressed on him as it was by his own
lieutenants and by the settlers of the Pale, even the iron will of
Cromwell shrank. It was at once too bloody and too expensive. To win over
the chiefs, to turn them by policy and a patient generosity into English
nobles, to use the traditional devotion of their tribal dependence as a
means of diffusing the new civilization of their chiefs, to trust to time
and steady government for the gradual reformation of the country, was a
policy safer, cheaper, more humane, and more statesmanlike.

It was this system which, even before the fall of the Geraldines, Henry
had resolved to adopt; and it was this that he pressed on Ireland when the
conquest laid it at his feet. The chiefs were to be persuaded of the
advantages of justice and legal rule. Their fear of any purpose to "expel
them from their lands and dominions lawfully possessed" was to be
dispelled by a promise "to conserve them as their own." Even their
remonstrances against the introduction of English law were to be regarded,
and the course of justice to be enforced or mitigated according to the
circumstances of the country. In the resumption of lands or rights which
clearly belonged to the Crown "sober ways, politic shifts, and amiable
persuasions" were to be preferred to rigorous dealing. It was this system
of conciliation which was in the main carried out by the English
Government under Henry and his two successors. Chieftain after chieftain
was won over to the acceptance of the indenture which guaranteed him in
the possession of his lands and left his authority over his tribesmen
untouched on condition of a pledge of loyalty, of abstinence from illegal
wars and exactions on his fellow-subjects, and of rendering a fixed
tribute and service in war-time to the Crown. The sole test of loyalty
demanded was the acceptance of an English title and the education of a son
at the English court; though in some cases, like that of the O'Neills, a
promise was exacted to use the English language and dress, and to
encourage tillage and husbandry. Compliance with conditions such as these
was procured not merely by the terror of the royal name but by heavy
bribes. The chieftains in fact profited greatly by the change. Not only
were the lands of the suppressed abbeys granted to them on their
assumption of their new titles, but the English law-courts, ignoring the
Irish custom by which the land belonged to the tribe at large, regarded
the chiefs as the sole proprietors of the soil. The merits of the system
were unquestionable; its faults were such as a statesman of that day could
hardly be expected to perceive. The Tudor politicians held that the one
hope for the regeneration of Ireland lay in its absorbing the civilization
of England. The prohibition of the national dress, customs, laws, and
language must have seemed to them merely the suppression of a barbarism
which stood in the way of all improvement.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's Reform of Religion]

With England and Ireland alike at his feet Cromwell could venture on a
last and crowning change. He could claim for the monarchy the right of
dictating at its pleasure the form of faith and doctrine to be taught
throughout the land. Henry had remained true to the standpoint of the New
Learning; and the sympathies of Cromwell were mainly with those of his
master. They had no wish for any violent break with the ecclesiastical
forms of the past. They desired religious reform rather than religious
revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any radical change in
it, the purification of worship rather than the introduction of any wholly
new ritual. Their theology remained, as they believed, a Catholic
theology, but a theology cleared of the superstitious growths which
obscured the true Catholicism of the early Church. In a word their dream
was the dream of Erasmus and Colet. The spirit of Erasmus was seen in the
Articles of religion which were laid before Convocation in 1536, in the
acknowledgement of Justification by Faith, a doctrine for which the
founders of the New Learning, such as Contarini and Pole, were struggling
at Rome itself, in the condemnation of purgatory, of pardons, and of
masses for the dead, as it was seen in the admission of prayers for the
dead and in the retention of the ceremonies of the church without material
change. A series of royal injunctions which followed carried out the same
policy of reform. Pilgrimages were suppressed; the excessive number of
holy days was curtailed; the worship of images and relics was discouraged
in words which seem almost copied from the protest of Erasmus. His appeal
for a translation of the Bible which weavers might repeat at their shuttle
and ploughmen sing at their plough received at last a reply. At the outset
of the ministry of Norfolk and More the king had promised an English
version of the scriptures, while prohibiting the circulation of Tyndale's
Lutheran translation. The work however lagged in the hands of the bishops;
and as a preliminary measure the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten
Commandments were now rendered into English, and ordered to be taught by
every schoolmaster and father of a family to his children and pupils. But
the bishops' version still hung on hand; till in despair of its appearance
a friend of Archbishop Cranmer, Miles Coverdale, was employed to correct
and revise the translation of Tyndale; and the Bible which he edited was
published in 1538 under the avowed patronage of Henry himself.

[Sidenote: The Lutheran Alliance]

But the force of events was already carrying England far from the
standpoint of Erasmus or More. The dream of the New Learning was to be
wrought out through the progress of education and piety. In the policy of
Cromwell reform was to be brought about by the brute force of the
Monarchy. The story of the royal supremacy was graven even on the
titlepage of the new Bible. It is Henry on his throne who gives the sacred
volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to the
throng of priests and laymen below. Hitherto men had looked on religious
truth as a gift from the Church. They were now to look on it as a gift
from the king. The very gratitude of Englishmen for fresh spiritual
enlightenment was to tell to the profit of the royal power. No conception
could be further from that of the New Learning, from the plea for
intellectual freedom which runs through the life of Erasmus or the craving
for political liberty which gives nobleness to the speculations of More.
Nor was it possible for Henry himself to avoid drifting from the
standpoint he had chosen. He had written against Luther; he had persisted
in opposing Lutheran doctrine; he had passed new laws to hinder the
circulation of Lutheran books in his realm. But influences from without as
from within drove him nearer to Lutheranism. If the encouragement of
Francis had done somewhat to bring about his final breach with the Papacy,
he soon found little will in the French king to follow him in any course
of separation from Rome; and the French alliance threatened to become
useless as a shelter against the wrath of the Emperor. Charles was goaded
into action by the bill annulling Mary's right of succession; and in 1535
he proposed to unite his house with that of Francis by close intermarriage
and to sanction Mary's marriage with a son of the French king, if Francis
would join in an attack on England. Whether such a proposal was serious or
no, Henry had to dread attack from Charles himself and to look for new
allies against it. He was driven to offer his alliance to the Lutheran
princes of North Germany, who dreaded like himself the power of the
Emperor, and who were now gathering in the League of Schmalkald.

[Sidenote: The Articles of 1536]

But the German Princes made agreement as to doctrine a condition of their
alliance; and their pressure was backed by Henry's partizans among the
clergy at home. In Cromwell's scheme for mastering the priesthood it had
been needful to place men on whom the king could rely at their head.
Cranmer became Primate, Latimer became Bishop of Worcester, Shaxton and
Barlow were raised to the sees of Salisbury and St. David's, Hilsey to
that of Rochester, Goodrich to that of Ely, Fox to that of Hereford. But
it was hard to find men among the clergy who paused at Henry's theological
resting-place; and of these prelates all except Latimer were known to
sympathize with Lutheranism, though Cranmer lagged far behind his fellows
in their zeal for reform. The influence of these men as well as of an
attempt to comply at least partly with the demand of the German Princes
left its stamp on the Articles of 1536. For the principle of Catholicism,
of a universal form of faith overspreading all temporal dominions, the
Lutheran states had substituted the principle of territorial religion, of
the right of each sovereign or people to determine the form of belief
which should be held within their bounds. The severance from Rome had
already brought Henry to this principle; and the Act of Supremacy was its
emphatic assertion. In England too, as in North Germany, the repudiation
of the Papal authority as a ground of faith, of the voice of the Pope as a
declaration of truth, had driven men to find such a ground and declaration
in the Bible; and the Articles expressly based the faith of the Church of
England on the Bible and the three Creeds. With such fundamental
principles of agreement it was possible to borrow from the Augsburg
Confession five of the ten articles which Henry laid before the
Convocation. If penance was still retained as a sacrament, baptism and the
Lord's Supper were alone maintained to be sacraments with it; the doctrine
of Transubstantiation which Henry stubbornly maintained differed so little
from the doctrine maintained by Luther that the words of Lutheran
formularies were borrowed to explain it; Confession was admitted by the
Lutheran Churches as well as by the English. The veneration of saints and
the doctrine of prayer to them, though still retained, was so modified as
to present little difficulty even to a Lutheran.

[Sidenote: The Irish Churches]

However disguised in form, the doctrinal advance made in the Articles of
1536 was an immense one; and a vehement opposition might have been looked
for from those of the bishops like Gardiner, who while they agreed with
Henry's policy of establishing a national Church remained opposed to any
change in faith. But the Articles had been drawn up by Henry's own hand,
and all whisper of opposition was hushed. Bishops, abbots, clergy, not
only subscribed to them, but carried out with implicit obedience the
injunctions which put their doctrine roughly into practice; and the
failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace in the following autumn ended all
thought of resistance among the laity. But Cromwell found a different
reception for his reforms when he turned to extend them to the sister
island. The religious aspect of Ireland was hardly less chaotic than its
political aspect had been. Ever since Strongbow's landing there had been
no one Irish Church, simply because there had been no one Irish nation.
There was not the slightest difference in doctrine or discipline between
the Church without the Pale and the Church within it. But within the Pale
the clergy were exclusively of English blood and speech, and without it
they were exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by law from abbeys
and churches within the English boundary, and the ill-will of the natives
shut out Englishmen from churches and abbeys outside it. As to the
religious state of the country, it was much on a level with its political
condition. Feuds and misrule told fatally on ecclesiastical discipline.
The bishops were political officers, or hard fighters like the chiefs
around them; their sees were neglected, their cathedrals abandoned to
decay. Through whole dioceses the churches lay in ruins and without
priests. The only preaching done in the country was done by the begging
friars, and the results of the friars' preaching were small. "If the King
do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525, "there will be no more
Christentie than in the middle of Turkey."

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Supremacy]

Unfortunately the remedy which Henry provided was worse than the disease.
Politically Ireland was one with England, and the great revolution which
was severing the one country from the Papacy extended itself naturally to
the other. The results of it indeed at first seemed small enough. The
Supremacy, a question which had convulsed England, passed over into
Ireland to meet its only obstacle in a general indifference. Everybody was
ready to accept it without a thought of the consequences. The bishops and
clergy within the Pale bent to the king's will as easily as their fellows
in England, and their example was followed by at least four prelates of
dioceses without the Pale. The native chieftains made no more scruple than
the Lords of the Council in renouncing obedience to the Bishop of Rome,
and in acknowledging Henry as the "Supreme Head of the Church of England
and Ireland under Christ." There was none of the resistance to the
dissolution of the abbeys which had been witnessed on the other side of
the Channel, and the greedy chieftains showed themselves perfectly willing
to share the plunder of the Church. But the results of the measure were
fatal to the little culture and religion which even the past centuries of
disorder had spared. Such as they were, the religious houses were the only
schools that Ireland contained. The system of vicars, so general in
England, was rare in Ireland; churches in the patronage of the abbeys were
for the most part served by the religious themselves, and the dissolution
of their houses suspended public worship over large districts of the
country. The friars, hitherto the only preachers, and who continued to
labour and teach in spite of the efforts of the Government, were thrown
necessarily into a position of antagonism to the English rule.

[Sidenote: Ireland and the Religious Changes]

Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the country ended here
however, in the end little harm would have been done. But in England the
breach with Rome, the destruction of the monastic orders, and the
establishment of the Supremacy, had roused in a portion of the people
itself a desire for theological change which Henry shared and was
cautiously satisfying. In Ireland the spirit of the Reformation never
existed among the people at all. They accepted the legislative measures
passed in the English Parliament without any dream of theological
consequences or of any change in the doctrine or ceremonies of the Church.
Not a single voice demanded the abolition of pilgrimages, or the
destruction of images, or the reform of public worship. The mission of
Archbishop Browne in 1535 "for the plucking down of idols and
extinguishing of idolatry" was a first step in the long effort of the
English Government to force a new faith on a people who to a man clung
passionately to their old religion. Browne's attempts at "tuning the
pulpits" were met by a sullen and significant opposition. "Neither by
gentle exhortation," the Archbishop wrote to Cromwell, "nor by evangelical
instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly taken, nor yet by threats of
sharp correction may I persuade or induce any whether religious or secular
since my coming over once to preach the Word of God nor the just title of
our illustrious Prince." Even the acceptance of the Supremacy, which had
been so quietly effected, was brought into question when its results
became clear. The bishops abstained from compliance with the order to
erase the Pope's name out of their mass-books. The pulpits remained
steadily silent. When Browne ordered the destruction of the images and
relics in his own cathedral, he had to report that the prior and canons
"find them so sweet for their gain that they heed not my words." Cromwell
however was resolute for a religious uniformity between the two islands,
and the Primate borrowed some of his patron's vigour. Recalcitrant priests
were thrown into prison, images were plucked down from the rood-loft, and
the most venerable of Irish relics, the staff of St. Patrick, was burned
in the market-place. But he found no support in his vigour save from
across the Channel. The Irish Council looked coldly on; even the Lord
Deputy still knelt to say prayers before an image at Trim. A sullen dogged
opposition baffled Cromwell's efforts, and their only result was to unite
all Ireland against the Crown.

[Sidenote: The English Protestants]

But Cromwell found it easier to deal with Irish inaction than with the
feverish activity which his reforms stirred in England itself. It was
impossible to strike blow after blow at the Church without rousing wild
hopes in the party who sympathized with the work which Luther was doing
over-sea. Few as these "Lutherans" or "Protestants" still were in numbers,
their new hopes made them a formidable force; and in the school of
persecution they had learned a violence which delighted in outrages on the
faith which had so long trampled them under foot. At the very outset of
Cromwell's changes four Suffolk youths broke into a church at Dovercourt,
tore down a wonder-working crucifix, and burned it in the fields. The
suppression of the lesser monasteries was the signal for a new outburst of
ribald insult to the old religion. The roughness, insolence, and extortion
of the Commissioners sent to effect it drove the whole monastic body to
despair. Their servants rode along the road with copes for doublets or
tunicles for saddle-cloths, and scattered panic among the larger houses
which were left. Some sold their jewels and relics to provide for the evil
day they saw approaching. Some begged of their own will for dissolution.
It was worse when fresh ordinances of the Vicar-General ordered the
removal of objects of superstitious veneration. Their removal, bitter
enough to those whose religion twined itself around the image or the relic
which was taken away, was embittered yet more by the insults with which it
was accompanied. A miraculous rood at Boxley, which bowed its head and
stirred its eyes, was paraded from market to market and exhibited as a
juggle before the Court. Images of the Virgin were stripped of their
costly vestments and sent to be publicly burned at London. Latimer
forwarded to the capital the figure of Our Lady, which he had thrust out
of his cathedral church at Worcester, with rough words of scorn: "She with
her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, and their two
other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster at
Smithfield." Fresh orders were given to fling all relics from their
reliquaries, and to level every shrine with the ground. In 1538 the bones
of St. Thomas of Canterbury were torn from the stately shrine which had
been the glory of his metropolitan church, and his name was erased from
the service-books as that of a traitor.

The introduction of the English Bible into churches gave a new opening for
the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of royal injunctions that it should
be read decently and without comment, the young zealots of the party
prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited hearers during
the service of mass, and accompanied their reading with violent
expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English primer to church with
them and studied it ostentatiously during matins. Insult passed into open
violence when the Bishops' Courts were invaded and broken up by Protestant
mobs; and law and public opinion were outraged at once when priests who
favoured the new doctrines began openly to bring home wives to their
vicarages. A fiery outburst of popular discussion compensated for the
silence of the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of
complaint, were "disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and
alehouse." The articles which dictated the belief of the English Church
roused a furious controversy. Above all, the Sacrament of the Mass, the
centre of the Catholic system of faith and worship, and which still
remained sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility
and profaneness which passes belief. The doctrine of Transubstantiation,
which was as yet recognized by law, was held up to scorn in ballads and
mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands
when the priest elevated the Host. The most sacred words of the old
worship, the words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into
a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus."

[Sidenote: The Six Articles]

It was by this attack on the Mass, even more than by the other outrages,
that the temper both of Henry and the nation was stirred to a deep
resentment. With the Protestants Henry had no sympathy whatever. He was a
man of the New Learning; he was proud of his orthodoxy and of his title of
Defender of the Faith. And above all he shared to the utmost his people's
love of order, their clinging to the past, their hatred of extravagance
and excess. The first sign of reaction was seen in the Parliament of 1539.
Never had the Houses shown so little care for political liberty. The
Monarchy seemed to free itself from all parliamentary restrictions
whatever when a formal statute gave the king's proclamations the force of
parliamentary laws. Nor did the Church find favour with them. No word of
the old opposition was heard when a bill was introduced granting to the
king the greater monasteries which had been saved in 1536. More than six
hundred religious houses fell at a blow, and so great was the spoil that
the king promised never again to call on his people for subsidies. But the
Houses were equally at one in withstanding the new innovations in
religion, and an act for "abolishing diversity of opinions in certain
articles concerning Christian religion" passed with general assent. On the
doctrine of Transubstantiation, which was reasserted by the first of six
Articles to which the Act owes its usual name, there was no difference of
feeling or belief between the men of the New Learning and the older
Catholics. But the road to a further instalment of even moderate reform
seemed closed by the five other articles which sanctioned communion in one
kind, the celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, private masses, and
auricular confession. A more terrible feature of the reaction was the
revival of persecution. Burning was denounced as the penalty for a denial
of transubstantiation; on a second offence it became the penalty for an
infraction of the other five doctrines. A refusal to confess or to attend
Mass was made felony. It was in vain that Cranmer, with the five bishops
who partially sympathized with the Protestants, struggled against the bill
in the Lords: the Commons were "all of one opinion," and Henry himself
acted as spokesman on the side of the articles. In London alone five
hundred Protestants were indicted under the new act. Latimer and Shaxton
were imprisoned, and the former forced into a resignation of his see.
Cranmer himself was only saved by Henry's personal favour.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's last Struggle]

But the first burst of triumph was no sooner spent than the hand of
Cromwell made itself felt. Though his opinions remained those of the New
Learning and differed little from the general sentiment which found itself
represented in the act, he leaned instinctively to the one party which did
not long for his fall. His wish was to restrain the Protestant excesses,
but he had no mind to ruin the Protestants. In a little time therefore the
bishops were quietly released. The London indictments were quashed. The
magistrates were checked in their enforcement of the law, while a general
pardon cleared the prisons of the heretics who had been arrested under its
provisions. A few months after the enactment of the Six Articles we find
from a Protestant letter that persecution had wholly ceased, "the Word is
powerfully preached and books of every kind may safely be exposed for
sale." Never indeed had Cromwell shown such greatness as in his last
struggle against Fate. "Beknaved" by the king, whose confidence in him
waned as he discerned the full meaning of the religious changes which
Cromwell had brought about, met too by a growing opposition in the Council
as his favour declined, the temper of the man remained indomitable as
ever. He stood absolutely alone. Wolsey, hated as he had been by the
nobles, had been supported by the Church; but Churchmen hated Cromwell
with an even fiercer hate than the nobles themselves. His only friends
were the Protestants, and their friendship was more fatal than the hatred
of his foes. But he showed no signs of fear or of halting in the course he
had entered on. So long as Henry supported him, however reluctant his
support might be, he was more than a match for his foes. He was strong
enough to expel his chief opponent, Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, from
the royal Council. He met the hostility of the nobles with a threat which
marked his power. "If the lords would handle him so, he would give them
such a breakfast as never was made in England, and that the proudest of
them should know."

[Sidenote: The Courtenays and the Poles]

He soon gave a terrible earnest of the way in which he could fulfil his
threat. The opposition to his system gathered above all round two houses
which represented what yet lingered of the Yorkist tradition, the
Courtenays and the Poles. Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, was of royal
blood, a grandson through his mother of Edward the Fourth. He was known to
have bitterly denounced the "knaves that ruled about the King"; and his
threats to "give them some day a buffet" were formidable in the mouth of
one whose influence in the western counties was supreme. Margaret, the
Countess of Salisbury, a daughter of the Duke of Clarence by the heiress
of the Earl of Warwick, and a niece of Edward the Fourth, had married Sir
Richard Pole, and became mother of Lord Montacute as of Sir Geoffry and
Reginald Pole. The temper of her house might be guessed from the conduct
of the younger of the three brothers. After refusing the highest favours
from Henry as the price of his approval of the divorce, Reginald Pole had
taken refuge at Rome, where he had bitterly attacked the king in a book on
"The Unity of the Church." "There may be found ways enough in Italy,"
Cromwell wrote to him in significant words, "to rid a treacherous subject.
When Justice can take no place by process of law at home, sometimes she
may be enforced to take new means abroad." But he had left hostages in
Henry's hands. "Pity that the folly of one witless fool," Cromwell wrote
ominously, "should be the ruin of so great a family. Let him follow
ambition as fast as he can, those that little have offended (saving that
he is of their kin), were it not for the great mercy and benignity of the
prince, should and might feel what it is to have such a traitor as their
kinsman." The "great mercy and benignity of the prince" was no longer to
shelter them. In 1538 the Pope, Paul the Third, published a bull of
excommunication and deposition against Henry, and Pole pressed the Emperor
vigorously though ineffectually to carry the bull into execution. His
efforts only brought about, as Cromwell had threatened, the ruin of his
house. His brother Lord Montacute and the Marquis of Exeter, with other
friends of the two great families, were arrested on a charge of treason
and executed in the opening of 1539, while the Countess of Salisbury was
attainted in Parliament and sent to the Tower.

[Sidenote: The Lutheran Marriage]

Almost as terrible an act of bloodshed closed the year. The abbots of
Glastonbury, Reading, and Colchester, men who had sate as mitred abbots
among the lords, were charged with a denial of the king's supremacy and
hanged as traitors. But Cromwell relied for success on more than terror.
His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim was to bind
England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry helplessly to
his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid afterwards to
Cromwell's charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his
system, "In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the King
with all his power should not be able to hinder him." His plans rested,
like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his
master. Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, had died in childbirth; and in
the opening of 1540 Cromwell replaced her by a German consort, Anne of
Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran Elector of Saxony. He dared even
to resist Henry's caprice when the king revolted on their first interview
from the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the
moment Cromwell had brought matters "to such a pass" that it was
impossible to recoil from the marriage, and the minister's elevation to
the Earldom of Essex seemed to proclaim his success. The marriage of Anne
of Cleves however was but the first step in a policy which, had it been
carried out as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of
Richelieu. Charles and the House of Austria could alone bring about a
Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation;
and Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany than
he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of the Emperor.

[Sidenote: Fall of Cromwell]

Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have been changed,
Southern Germany would have been secured for Protestantism, and the Thirty
Years War averted. But he failed as men failed who stand ahead of their
age. The German princes shrank from a contest with the Emperor, France
from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism; and Henry, left alone
to bear the resentment of the House of Austria and chained to a wife he
loathed, turned savagely on his minister. In June the long struggle came
to an end. The nobles sprang on Cromwell with a fierceness that told of
their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execrations burst from the Lords at
the Council table as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been entrusted with the
minister's arrest, tore the ensign of the Garter from his neck. At the
charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a passionate
cry of despair. "This then," he exclaimed, "is my guerdon for the services
I have done! On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?" Then with a
sudden sense that all was over he bade his foes make quick work, and not
leave him to languish in prison. Quick work was made. A few days after his
arrest he was attainted in Parliament, and at the close of July a burst of
popular applause hailed his death on the scaffold.

END OF VOL. III