Cassell's Illustrated History of England/Volume 2/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH—(Continued).
On the departure of the emperor, Henry commanded the Earl of Surrey to scour the Channel before him; and Charles, out of compliment to Henry, named Surrey, who was Lord Admiral of England, also admiral of his own fleet of one hundred and eighty sail. Surrey, having seen Charles safely landed in Spain, returned along the coast of France, ravaging it on all accessible points. He landed at Cherbourg, in Normandy, burnt the town of Morlaix, in Brittany, and many other maritime villages, houses of the people, and castles of the aristocracy. This was preparatory to the great invasion which Henry contemplated. For this purpose he had recalled Surrey from Ireland, where he had conducted himself with great ability, repressed the disorders of the natives, and won the esteem of the chief population. Henry now gave him the command of the army destined to invade France. That army, Henry boasted, should consist of forty thousand men; but the question was, whence the money was to come for its assembly and payment. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, and the entertainment of the emperor, following on many other extravagances, had entirely dissipated the treasures which his father had left him; and, as he was now endeavouring to rule without a parliament, he was compelled to resort to those unconstitutional measures of forced loans, which had always covered with odium the monarchs who applied to them.
In this unpopular attempt Wolsey was his instrument, and the work he had now to do ensured him a plentiful growth of dislike. In the first place, he exacted a loan of £20,000 from the merchants of London, and scarcely had he obtained possession of it, when he summoned the leading citizens before him, and demanded fresh advances. On the 20th of August, 1522, the lord mayor, aldermen, and the most substantial merchants of London appeared before him, to whom he announced that the king had sent commissioners into the whole realm, to inquire into the actual rents of the lands in each township, what were the names of the owners and occupiers, and what the value of each man's movable property. According to his account, a new Doomsday Book was in preparation; and he, moreover, informed them that his majesty had ordered a muster in the maritime counties of all the men betwixt the ages of sixteen and sixty, to enrol their names, and the names of the lords of whom they held their lands. "For," said the cardinal, "the King of France is preparing to invade these realms,"—a most gratuitous falsehood—"wherefore," continued Wolsey, after making this parade of the universal order, "certify to me the number of all such amongst you as be worth £100 and upwards, to the intent I may swear them of their values; for first, the king asketh of you your loving hearts and due obedience; and when the value is taken, he desireth only the tenth part of goods and lands, which is the least reasonable thing you can aid your prince with. I think every one of you will offer no less. As for the spirituality, every man is in the shires sworn, and shall gladly pay the fourth part to the king, and live on the three parts. Now to your part, I am sure you will not grudge; therefore name me the men of substance, and for the meaner sort meaner commissioners shall be appointed." "Oh, my lord," said the aldermen, "it is not two months since the king had of the City £20,000 in ready money, whereby the City is very bad of money." "Well," replied the cardinal, "the thing must be done, and therefore go about it."
The deputation returned to the City in deep dejection, and made out their lists of such as were merchants and dealers, and reputed men of substance. These men, then, themselves waited on the cardinal, and besought him not to put them to their oath as to their real amount of property, for that it was difficult for themselves to make a correct estimate of it, and that, in fact, many an honest man's credit was more than his substance. Wolsey replied that he "dare swear that the substance of London was no less than two millions of gold." From this it was obvious that the cardinal expected from them at least £200,000. But the citizens replied, "Would to God the City were so rich, but it is sore afflicted by the occupying of strangers." The cardinal promised to see that rectified, and, moreover, that their loans should be repaid them out of the first subsidy voted by Parliament, which it was intended to call. But the victims did not appear much cheered by these assurances: they knew that Henry was not fond of calling parliaments. If he meant it, why borrow money, when it could be voted? And they went away, saying that for the last loan some lent a fifth, and now to ask a tenth again was too much.
By these means, however, money enough was raised to put an army in motion. About the middle of August the Earl of Surrey landed at Calais with 12,000 men, paid by the king, and 3,000 volunteers. There he was joined by a body of German, Flemish, and Spanish horse, making a total force of 16,000. At the head of these he advanced through Picardy and Artois, desolating the country as he went, burning the defenceless towns, the castles of the nobles, and the huts of the peasants, and destroying whatever they could not carry off as spoil. They left the fortified cities, making no attempt except against Hesdin, which they soon quitted, finding their artillery not of weight enough. The French, under the Duke de Vendòme, avoided a general engagement, but they harassed the outskirts of the army, cut off the supplies, and occasionally a number of stragglers. The weather was the great ally of the French, for it was extremely rainy and cold, and occasioned dysentery to break out in the camp. On the appearance of this fatal foe, the foreign troops hastily retired into Bethune, and Surrey soon after led back his main body to Calais, having done the French much mischief, but obtained no single advantage except the seizure of a quantity of booty.
Francis, meantime, had not only kept his army hovering in front of the invaders, but he had sent active emissaries to rouse the Irish and Scotch, and thus to distract the attention of the English. In Ireland he turned his attention to the Earl of Desmond, who still maintained in a great measure his independence of the English crown. Francis offered him an annual pension, on condition that he should take up arms in Ireland against the English power, and the earl, moreover, seduced by the promise that a French army should be sent over, engaged to join it, and never to lay down his arms till he had won for himself a strong dominion in the island, and the remainder for Richard de la Pole, the heir of the house of York. But Francis having obtained his object by the very alarm created by this negotiation, never sent any troops, never paid the Earl of Desmond any annuity, and the unfortunate chieftain was left to pay the penalty of his rash credulity in the vengeance of the English Government.
In Scotland affairs assumed a more formidable aspect. After the return of Margaret the queen-mother from England, she quarrelled with her weak but headstrong husband the Earl of Angus, and in 1521 sent and invited her old antagonist the Duke of Albany to return to Scotland from France, promising to support him at the head of the Government. Nothing could suit the views of France better than this, for it was already menaced by Henry of England. Albany landed at Gairloch on the 19th of November, and thence hastened to the Queen at Sterling. This strange, bold, and dissimulating woman, who had all the imperiousness and the sensuality of a Tudor, received him with open arms, and entered at once on such terms of familiarity with him as scandalised all Scotland.
Her husband and his relatives, the Douglases, being summoned by the regent before Parliament, fled towards the borders, and took refuge in the kirk of Steyle, and by means of the celebrated Gawain Douglas, the Bishop of Dunkeld, and one of Scotland's finest poets, who was the uncle of Angus, the fugitives opened a communication with Henry of England. The bishop represented the conduct of Margaret of the most flagitious kind, attributing to her the design of marrying Albany, and setting aside her own son. It was even asserted, and Lord Dacre, warden of the Western Marches, joined in the assertion, that the life of the young king was in danger, and as much from his own mother as from Albany. There is no question that the conduct of Margaret was most disgraceful, and though Albany was anxious to establish quietness and order in Scotland, and to obtain peace with England, the emissaries of Henry took care to foment strife betwixt the nobles and the Government. Lord Dacre was—according to the system introduced by Henry VII., and continued so long as there was a Tudor on the throne of England—plentifully supplied with money to bribe the most powerful nobles, especially the Homes, to harass the Government by their factions. The state papers which have been published give the most unquestionable testimony to this fact. Wolsey, writing to Henry, says he has instructed Dacre "to entertain the Homes and other rebels after his accustomable manner, so that they may continue the divisions and seditions in Scotland, whereby the said Duke of Albany may be put in danger; and though some money be employed for the entertainment of the said Homes and rebels, it will quit the cost at length, wherein I have amply instructed the said Lord Dacre."
It was in vain, therefore, that Queen Margaret wrote to her brother, the King of England, protesting that the accusations against her were base and abominable calumnies, that the Duke of Albany ruled by the choice and advice of Parliament, and that without him there would be no peace in Scotland, nor safety for the king or herself. Henry only replied by upbraiding her with living in shameful adultery, and insisting that Albany should quit Scotland, or that he would make war upon it. He did not stop there—he made the same demand of Parliament, and hearing that Margaret was applying to the Pope for a divorce from Angus, in order to marry Albany, he exerted all his influence with the Church to prevent it. The Scottish Parliament, notwithstanding it contained many traitors, made such by Henry's gold, yet rejected his proposition for the dismissal of Albany: whereupon Henry ordered all Scottish subjects found in England to be driven with insult across the borders, having a white cross marked upon their backs; and at the same time that he sent Surrey across to France, in the spring of 1522, he also bade the Earl of Shrewsbury march across the Tweed to punish the Scots. Shrewsbury obeyed the order with great celerity, and speedily laid waste the fine pastoral country round Kelso, but was met by a superior force and driven back.
Instead, therefore, of an invasion of Scotland by the English, Henry was threatened with a descent of the Scots on his own kingdom, whilst the gallant Surrey was absent in France. The Duke of Albany, incensed at the reproaches of Henry regarding his connection with Queen Margaret, at his demands for his extradition, and at the ferocious inroad of the Earl of Shrewsbury, declared war against England, with the consent of Parliament. He called for the muster of all the feudal force of the kingdom, and the call was answered with such promptness that he beheld himself at the head of 80,000 men. With such a force, nothing would have been easier to all appearance than to have overrun the north of England, left almost wholly destitute of defence. But though the Scottish people were in earnest, there was treason not only in the camp, but in the very tent of Albany. The money of Dacre was in the pockets of the most powerful nobles, who silently but actively spread disunion through his host; and worst of all, Margaret, who, like her brother, was continually roving in her affections from one person to another, was already weary of Albany, and was in covert communication with Lord Dacre, and betraying all the secrets and plans of Albany to him. It is said that Henry, through Lord Dacre, had completely corrupted the queen, probably by assisting her with money, but still more by offering to receive her again to his favour, and to secure her interests by marrying Mary, the Princess of England, to her son, the young King of Scots. Influenced by these hopes, the unprincipled queen exerted herself to weaken the measures of Albany, and to diminish the influence of France in the country as much as possible.
Albany, therefore, though he advanced to the banks of the Tweed, and even reached within a few miles of Carlisle, found the spirit of his host continually on the decline. On the other hand, Lord Dacre had expended his money in extensive bribery, and was almost destitute of soldiers; yet he pretended that a great army was on the march to him, which would show the Scots another Flodden Field, and so imposed on Albany, that he was willing to retreat, instead of being ready to fight. He engaged to disband his forces, if Dacre would engage to keep back the imaginary advancing troops of England. Wolsey, who was watching in the northern counties with deep anxiety the result of this contest between military multitudes and political cunning, could not sufficiently express his astonishment, as he saw the stupendous armament of Scotland melt away before the empty bugbears of Lord Dacre's creation. "By the great wisdom and policy of my Lord Dacre, and by means of the safe-conduct lately sent at the desire and contemplation of the Queen of Scots, the said Duke of Albany hath, our Lord be praised, not only forborne his invasion, but also dissolved his army; which, being dispersed, neither shall nor can, for this year, be gathered or assembled again." And the cardinal proceeds to give us a specimen of the easy nature of his political morality, in saying, "And yet the said abstinence (armistice) concluded by my Lord Dacre, he not having your authority for the same, nothing bindeth your grace; but, at your liberty, ye may pursue your wars against the said Scots, if it shall be thought to your highness convenable." On the 11th of September, 1322, the treaty betwixt Albany and Dacre was concluded, and Albany went over to France for fresh supplies of men and money, leaving the Earls of Huntly, Arran, and Argyle to administer affairs during his absence. Thus, about the same time, Henry saw his French and his Scotch campaign for that year terminated.
His great and difficult business was now to raise the necessary funds for prosecuting his further designs against France. For eight years he had forborne to call a Parliament, but to postpone a summons of this engine of supply further was not possible. He had pushed to the extreme point all the modes of extracting funds from his subjects, legal and illegal; and the reluctance with which his last forced loan had been conceded, and the solemn promises which he had made to call a Parliament, left him no alternate. No king who ever reigned had a higher notion of the kingly prerogative, and the hearty commendation he afterwards bestowed on Charles V. for destroying the last vestiges of free institutions in Spain, showed plainly what he would fain have carried out in this country. But sturdy as was his Tudor soul, he found that the people of England had an equally stubborn will, and on the 15th of April, 1523, he summoned a Parliament at Blackfriars, London, where Wolsey sat at his feet as chancellor.
The Commons chose, as was supposed through the influence of the Court, Sir Thomas More as speaker. Sir Thomas was not only a man of profound learning, but a felicitous genius, and extremely witty. His conversation was greatly relished by the queen, who had introduced him to the private suppers with the king, who became as much fascinated by his society. Sir Thomas was evidently well aware of the difficult part which he would have to sustain in such a post, for he hung back from it, declaring how unfit he was for it. But Wolsey, who calculated greatly on his genius, protested that he was qualified for it by his great abilities and judgment more than almost any man. After a few days' session of Parliament, Wolsey went down to the House, contrary to all custom and privilege, and presented a royal message, to the effect that Francis, by his conduct, had made a war absolutely necessary, that the honour of the country was deeply concerned, and that it was a fine opportunity for England to recover all that it had lost in that country. He concluded his address by recommending them to vote immediately a property-tax of twenty per cent., which would raise the sum of £800,000.
Such a sum had never before been asked by any English king in his wildest dreams of foreign conquest. The House sat as thunderstruck, and in profound silence. Wolsey had imagined that his presence, surrounded by all the symbols of his grandeur, would completely overawe the House; and that with a Court favourite of such distinction as Sir Thomas More, he should carry the monstrous demand by surprise. He had, therefore, come environed by his pompous retinue of prelates and nobles, and with his silver pillars and crosses, his maces, his pole-axes, and with his hat and great seal borne before him. But not all his magnificence moved the Commons where its privileges had been thus grossly invaded, and its money was thus boldly demanded. The whole House sat as silent as the senate of Rome when Brennus and his savage Gauls burst in upon it. Wolsey gazed upon them in amazement, looking from one to another. The proud cardinal then addressed a member by name. The member arose, bowed, and sat down again without uttering a word. Still more surprised at this dumb show, Wolsey called upon another member for an explanation, but obtained none. Growing wrathful, for he was not accustomed to such treatment, he broke out:—"Masters, as I am sent here by the king, it is not unreasonable to expect an answer. Yet, unless it be the manner of your House, as very likely it may, by your speaker only in such cases to express your mind, here is, without doubt, a most marvellous silence."
Whilst he said this, he looked fixedly and angrily at Sir Thomas More, unquestionably expecting different conduct from him. But Sir Thomas, dropping on his knee, said that the House felt abashed in the presence of so great a personage; which, he added, was enough to amaze the wisest and most learned men of the realm. That the House, according to its ancient privileges, was not bound to return any answer; and as for himself, unless all the members present could put their several thoughts into his head, he was unable to give his grace an answer on so weighty a matter. The cardinal then retired, very much displeased with the House, and still more with the speaker.
After the great minister had retired, the House went into a warm debate. Some of the members affirmed that there was not above £800,000 of cash in the kingdom; and if all the money were gathered into the king's hands, no trade could be carried on except by barter. The courtiers urged all the ingenious arguments that they could invent, or with which they were supplied, to show the necessity of the grant; and the king was in such a rage that he is said to have even threatened some of the members with death. It was, in fact, one of the most determined stands for privilege of Parliament, and resistance to oppression of the people, which has ever been made in this country. The feeling and spirit in the House were taken up and flew everywhere out of doors. Henry beheld the popular agitation with infinite wrath and indignation, "that people should talk about his affairs;" and Wolsey was equally irate that "no sooner was anything said or done in the House than it was blown abroad in every ale-house." In the Commons the debate went on day after day; and we may obtain some idea of the heat to which it rose, from a letter written by a member to the Earl of Surrey, whilst in the north watching the Scots. "Since the beginning of this Parliament, there hath been the greatest and sorest hold in the lower House for the payment of two shillings in the pound that was ever seen, I think, in any Parliament. This matter hath been debated and beaten for fifteen or sixteen days together; the highest necessity being alleged on the king's behalf to us, as was ever heard of; the highest poverty confessed as well by knights, squires, and gentlemen of every quarter, as by commoners, citizens, and burgesses. There hath been such hold that the House was like to have been dissevered."
The contest grew to such a pitch that the cardinal, fearful of the result, determined to go to the House a second time, notwithstanding the clear intimation given him that his presence was considered a breach of privilege. He made them a speech, going over all the arguments which had been advanced by the opposition, and then begged them to tell him what they had to object; but they only returned him the answer, through the speaker, that they would hear his grace with humility, but could only reason amongst themselves; and he was obliged to go away as he came.
When he had departed, they resumed the debate; and at length, at the earnest entreaty of the speaker, they voted two shillings in the pound on all who enjoyed twenty pounds a year or upwards; one shilling on all who possessed from two pounds to twenty; and on all subjects with incomes below that scale, a groat a head. This was not a moiety of what the king had demanded, and the payment was spread over four years, so that it did not really amount to above sixpence in the pound. The lesson which Henry here received did not incline him to call another Parliament speedily. He had summoned none for eight years before; and there is no doubt that he asked for this extravagant sum that he might dispense with Parliament for another term as long. He did not, as it was, call another for seven years.
The king, in his anger at the Commons, boasted to the mayor and aldermen of London that he should find a very different spirit amongst the clergy; but even these he tried beyond their patience. He demanded no less than fifty per cent, of the incomes of their benefices, to make up the deficiency from the laity. But the clergy were not disposed to be mulcted of half their incomes at a blow; they made as stout a resistance as the House of Commons. Wolsey, to make sure of them, summoned the convocations of the two provinces, which had met in their usual manner, by his legative authority, to assemble in a national synod in Westminster Abbey. But there the proctors declared that they had only power to grant money in regular convocation, not in synod; and he was obliged to permit them to depart, and vote in their ordinary way. The convocation of the cardinal's own province of York waited to see what Canterbury would first do, which were more independent of Wolsey's power. In the lower House the resistance was resolute, and was kept alive by the eloquence of a preacher of the name of Philips, till he was won over to the Court by substantial promotion. In the higher House, the Bishops of Winchester and Rochester animated the prelates to such opposition, that the grant was not carried for four months, and then, being spread over five years, amounted, not to fifty, but only to ten per cent.
The money voted had yet to be levied; and there were many who entertained great fears of what might occur in that unpleasant process. "I beseech Almighty God," writes a member of the Parliament, "it may be well and peaceably levied, and surely paid unto the king's grace without grudge, and without losing the good-will and true hearts of the subjects."
Old Greenwich Palace, as it appeared in the Reign of Henry VIII.
This view of the danger had been impressed on the members of the Commons by the excitement abroad during their debates. As they had passed to and fro to the House, people in the streets had caught them by the sleeve, saying, "Sirs, will ye grant four shillings in the pound." Do it, and take our curses and our threats home with you to your households!" But the king, incensed at the opposition shown, ordered the whole, which was voted for four years, to be collected at once; and thus excited the most menacing disturbances in various parts of the kingdom. The five northern provinces were exempt from the tax, on account of the Scottish war; the Cinque Ports, in virtue of their charter; and Ludlow, in consequence of a grant from Edward IV., confirmed by both Henry's father and himself, but in Kent. Essex, Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, London, and other places, the people refused to pay the tax-gatherers; and in some parts resisted them arms in hand.
King Henry and his Council. From Hall's Chronicle.
Francis I., King of France, taken prisoner at the Battle of Pavia.(See page 175.)
the party of Albany, who was now absent in France collecting fresh means for maintaining the war. He sent the Earl of Surrey, son of the victor of Flodden Field, to co-operate with her, to win over as many as possible of the nobles with money, and to lay waste the borders, so that they should be incapable of furnishing supplies to an invading army.
It was agreed that Surrey should march into the country to support the queen, who, on her part, should proceed to Edinburgh, and there proclaim her son as king, though he was only twelve years old. These plans were defeated by the return of Albany from France, who landed at Dumbarton on the 23rd of December, with 2,000 soldiers, and a great quantity of stores, arms, artillery, and ammunition. Surrey had just laid the large town of Jedburgh in ashes; but he found it necessary to retire before the impending storm. At the summons of the Scottish Parliament, the whole nation flew to arms. Sixty thousand men flocked to the standard of Albany on the Burrow Moor, whilst Surrey had not more than 9,000. In this situation, he dispatched messengers in all haste to the council, urging instant reinforcements. He wrote to the king, praying him to send to him all the young lords who were wasting their time at Court in cards, dice, and balls; and as he regarded his position as very critical, he commended to the royal notice his family. He requested the king to send him, amongst the other troops, a body of 4,000 Germans, who were somewhere in Henry's service, that they might teach the English to observe the order of battle, and, remembering the effect of the Scotch pikemen at Flodden, that he might be able to oppose pikemen to pikemen.
The Earl of Surrey was promptly responded to by the Court, and he soon found his army swelled from 9,000 to 50,000 men. With these he garrisoned the castles of Berwick, Norham, and Wark, and fixed his head-quarters at Bedford. Albany, on the other hand, posted himself at Eccles, and laid siege to Wark. He had made a breach, and penetrated to the interior court, when the storming party were repulsed; and, hearing that Surrey was on the march to take him in the rear, he retired to Lander, in the night, daring a heavy fall of snow. Albany, indeed, seems to have been utterly destitute of the courage or the talents of a general. This disgraceful transaction, bringing with it the memory of his former one, completely destroyed his influence: he returned to France, and never came again to Scotland.
Margaret now had every opportunity which a woman of spirit and reputation could wish. She was strongly supported by the power of England, and her great opponent was for ever defeated. She proclaimed her son, and assumed the regency; but her worst enemy was herself. She fell into her old habits; and her scandalous attachment to Henry Stuart, the son of Lord Evandale, soon ruined her prospects. Henry once more abandoned her, and raised her husband, the Earl of Angus, to the chief power. It was in vain that Margaret applied for assistance to Francis I., and humiliated herself so far as to solicit the return of Albany. From this moment there was more tranquillity in Scotland. The French faction, seeing support from France hopeless, were compelled to remain quiet. Truce after truce was established with England; and for eighteen years the borders rested from hostilities.
The position of the King of France was, at this crisis, becoming more and more critical. His kingdom was environed with perils, and menaced with ruin, which could only be averted by singular courage and address. Against him was arrayed a most formidable confederacy of the Pope, the emperor, the King of England, and the various states of Italy. He had not a single ally, except the King of Scotland, a minor, and without authority. The internal condition of France was extremely discouraging. The wars of Francis in Italy and at home, his gay life and expensive pleasures, with his extravagant grants to his favourites, had exhausted his treasury, and involved him in great embarrassments. The troops were ill-paid, and, as is usual in such cases, became disorderly and infested the highways, plundered the peasantry, and filled the whole kingdom with alarm and discontent. The Court partook of the licence and distraction of the nation; it was rent by faction, and the most dangerous secret conspiracy was at work in it.
Francis himself, amid these hosts of enemies, external and domestic, was undaunted, and even resolved to march into Italy, to recover his possessions there. "All the world," said the intrepid monarch, "have conspired against me, but I fear them not. The emperor has no money, the English cannot penetrate far into my kingdom, the militia of the Low Countries can do me little harm. I will march into Italy, subdue my enemies there, and return soon enough to recover what I may have lost in France." He appointed his mother, Louise of Savoy, regent of the kingdom, put himself at the head of his army, and commenced his march. But he had advanced no further than Lyons, when he was overtaken by despatches from his mother of so serious a nature, that he gave the command of his troops to his favourite the gallant Bonivet, the Admiral of France, who led them on to Italy.
Francis, on his return to Paris, received from his mother the most extraordinary disclosures regarding the treason of the Duke of Bourbon, Constable of France. Bourbon was one of the most distinguished and influential nobles of the kingdom, and circumstances had occurred, betwixt Francis, his mother, and him, which made him a very dangerous man to have been left behind. By birth he was very near the throne itself. Handsome, brave, popular, strongly and extensively allied, the richest man in the realm, not a breath of suspicion of disloyalty had over been raised against him. But Louise, the mother of Francis, though no longer young, was deeply enamoured of him, and proposed that he should marry her. Bourbon was as haughty and vindictive as he was otherwise generous and agreeable, and from this temperament had acquired the name of Charles the Impatient. He received the overtures of the Duchess Louise with disdain, and with some severe strictures on her gallantries. He intimated that he was by no means inclined to marry a woman old enough to be his mother; and the despised princess, who had been a beauty in her day, conceived the most implacable spirit of revenge for the insult. She had unbounded influence over her son; and, complaining to him that the constable withheld lands in the name of his deceased wife from her, to whom they had now justly fallen, Francis had entered into her views with such warmth, that great animosity had arisen betwixt him and the constable. This grew to such a pitch, that the constable was treated with the most open discourtesy at Court, and in his turn absented himself from it. But this did not shield him from the undying resentment of the slighted Louise. At her instigation, Francis commenced a suit against him for the recovery of the great estates which Louise demanded from him. The constable, on the other hand, insisted on the repayment of large sums of money which he had disbursed in the Italian campaigns; these were insultingly refused; his salaries were stopped, his offices and trusts withdrawn, and the baton of constable taken from him.
These impolitic persecutions drove the proud duke into a condition of the most violent resentment, and when at length the Parliament of Paris decided the process against him, which made over to the woman whom he had made an enemy by his contemptuous rejection, a formidable proportion of his fiefs and estates, his anger knew no bounds, and he was just in the temper of mind to listen to the temptations of the enemies of France. This circumstance had not been neglected, and both Charles V. and Henry of England had entered into a secret treaty with the disaffected prince, to betray his sovereign and his native country. The transaction was a disgraceful one to all parties concerned. In Bourbon, notwithstanding his grievous wrongs, it was a base as well as an impolitic deed; in Henry and Charles, it was one destructive of the security of the throne, and of every principle of honour which should guide the counsels of kings. Henry felt the vileness of the proceeding, but endeavoured to justify it as a fair retaliation for that Francis had tampered with his Irish subject, the Earl of Desmond. What salve Charles provided for his conscience does not appear.
The Lord of Beaurain had boon employed as the secret agent of the emperor; and Sir John Russell—this being one of the first public notices of the Russells in history—that of Henry. A private treaty was concluded, of which the substance was as follows:—The emperor and the King of England were to invade the kingdom simultaneously, the one in the north, the other in the south, whilst Bourbon himself was to excite a rebellion in the heart of the kingdom, supported by all the connections of his family, whom he calculated at 200 knights and gentlemen, with their retainers. The attempt was to be made the moment Francis had crossed the Alps; and when the conquest of France was complete, Bourbon, in addition to his appanage of the Bourbonnais and Auvergne, was to receive Provence and Dauphiny, which together were to constitute a kingdom for him. He was, moreover, to receive the hand of the emperor's sister, Eleanor, Queen-Dowager of Portugal. The emperor was to have as his share of the spoil, Languedoc, Burgundy, Champagne, and Picardy, and Henry VIII. the rest of France.
Such was the traitorous scheme which was now opened up to the astonished gaze of Francis. Had he crossed the Alps before he received the intelligence, it might have been fatal. He had received some dark hints of mischief to be apprehended from Bourbon previously; and, on his way south, he had suddenly presented himself at the duke's castle, and called upon him to accompany the expedition to Italy; but the duke made it appear that the state of his health rendered that impossible. Francis, not by any means satisfied, set a strict but secret guard upon his castle, and proceeded to Lyons; but there the news reached him that the pretended sick man had managed to escape in disguise, and was on his way, through the intricacies of the mountains of Auvergne and Dauphiny, to join the emperor's army in Italy.
The powers of England and the Netherlands appeared, in pursuance of the secret treaty with Bourbon, on the soil of France about the same time. The Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon, the commander of the English army, landed at Calais on the 24th of August, and, joining to his troops those collected from the garrisons of Calais, Hams, and Guisnes, found himself at the head of 13,000 men. He marched on the 19th of September, and the next day fell in with the imperial troops from the Netherlands, under De Buren. The allies now amounted to 20,000; but instead of marching to join the imperial forces coming from Germany, they remained under the walls of St. Omer, debating whether they should do this, or invest Boulogne. After having wasted a precious month, they decided to leave Boulogne, and endeavour to form a junction with the Germans. But they had now allowed Francis ample time to thwart all their objects. He had sent a strong detachment, under the Duke of Guise, to throw themselves in the way of the Germans; whilst the Dukes of Vendòme and Tremouillo kept a sharp watch over the movements of the allied army. Suffolk and De Buren traversed Artois and Picardy, crossed the Somme and the Oise, and alarmed Paris by pitching their tents near Laon, within twenty miles of the capital. They had stopped by the way to invest Bray, Montdidier, and some other small places, and now confidently expected the arrival of the German army.
But the Germans by this time wore in full flight before the Duke of Guise, and Vendòme and Tremouille manœuvred more menacingly on the front and flank of the allies. Tremouille, in particular, grew more and more audacious, beat up their quarters with his cavalry, harassed them by frequent skirmishes, and intercepted their convoys. The position of the allied troops became every day more critical. They were threatened with a growing force in their rear, drawn from the garrisons of Picardy, and there was danger of their supplies, which were all derived from Calais, being cut off. The troops were become sickly, and discontented with their situation. It was high time to retrace their steps, and they commenced their march by way of Valenciennes. But the weather was very rainy, the roads were almost impassable, cold and frost succeeded, and the sickness and murmurs of the troops augmented every day. Numbers perished on the march; all were eager to reach their homes; and, as the Flemings drew near their frontiers, they deserted in shoals. The armies then separated, and Suffolk reached Calais in December, with his forces greatly reduced, and all in miserable condition.
Henry, who had calculated most confidently on the effect of this concerted scheme, was highly enraged at the failure of the Duke of Suffolk; who, though he was a very handsome and gallant man at a tournament, had shown himself thoroughly destitute of the talents of a general. The duke, though he was so nearly allied to the king, yet dreaded so justly his resentment, that he prudently remained at Calais till the fury of it abated, and it required all the address of the cardinal to restore him to Henry's good-will. The emperor had scarcely effected anything during this campaign, and thus allowed Francis more completely to baffle the invasion in the north. It was long before he could prevail on the Cortes to grant supplies for the payment of the German auxiliaries: the arrival of the troops was retarded by other difficulties, when the want of money had been obviated; and when they did come, it was so late in the season, that the Spanish lords refused to entangle themselves in the wild fastnesses of the Pyrenees, on the march towards Guienne, in the depth of winter. Charles could only compel them to follow him by the exertion of his authority, and they accomplished nothing but the reduction of Fontarabia.
The troops which Francis had sent into Italy under Bonivet had effected considerable service. Descending from Mount Cenis, Bonivet poured his army of French, Germans, and Swiss over all the north of Lombardy. Asti, Alexandria, and Novara fell into his hands. But he lost time in manœuvring by the river Ticino; and when he arrived before Milan, he found it put into so complete a state of defence by Prospero Colonna, that it resisted all his efforts to take it, either by storm or by the slower process of famine. The inhabitants, who had already experienced the tyranny of French conquerors, were enthusiastic in their maintenance of it; and in November the weather became so severe that Bonivet was compelled to retire into winter quarters at Rosate and Biagrasso.
On the 14th of September, whist Bonivet was investing Milan, and the Duke of Suffolk was advancing on Paris, an event occurred which arrested the attention of Cardinal Wolsey even more than the engrossing moves on the great chess-board of war. This was the death of the Pope Adrian. He had occupied the papal chair only about twenty months; and so impatient were the Italians of the Flemish pope and his strict economy, that they styled the doctor who attended him in his last sickness the saviour of his country. Wolsey lost no time in putting in his claim; and wrote to Dr. Clark, the English ambassador at Rome, telling him to spare neither money nor promises, for that it was by command of the king, who would undoubtedly see all his engagements performed. This time Wolsey was put in nomination, and obtained a considerable number of votes; but there was no real chance for him, for the Italians were clamorous to have no more altramontane, or, as they styled them, barbarian popes. Charles V., spite of all his promises to Wolsey, not only did not move a finger in his favour, but threw all his influence into the scale to carry the election of Giulio dei Medici; whilst the French cardinals, to a man, were opposed to Wolsey as the most dangerous enemy to their sovereign. The conclave met in October, and the discussion was continued through six stormy weeks. The election at length was seen to be betwixt Jacovaccio Romano and Giulio dei Medici. Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who held the most decisive influence in the conclave, threw his weight into the scale for Romano, and the balance hung undecided; but all at once it gave way. Colonna, who hated the Medici, gave up his opposition, and Giulio dei Medici was unanimously elected. The causes of this sudden change were supposed to be entreaties from Prospero Colonna, who was in the interest of Charles V., and the offer to make Cardinal Pompeo Colonna vice-chancellor of the papal court—a most lucrative office, with the use of the superb palace of San Giorgio.
Wolsey, to all appearance, bore this second disappointment with the equanimity of a philosopher; yet we may justly imagine that it produced a deep change in his feelings towards the emperor, and led to a hostile policy against his interests and those of Queen Catherine, his aunt, in England. But Wolsey had prepared for either event, his election or rejection; and the moment the latter became certain, the whole of the influence of the English Government was employed in favour of the election of Giulio dei Medici. On the strength of this, the English ambassadors congratulated Giulio on his elevation, and solicited the continuance of the legative commission to Wolsey. The Pope, who assumed the name of Clement VII., not only renewed the commission, but granted it for life, with augmented powers; and added to it a commission to reform or suppress certain religious houses in England. This was a dangerous power, and as Wolsey, in 1525—only two years afterwards—by this authority suppressed a number of monasteries, it is by no means improbable that it led Henry to think of those more sweeping changes of the same kind which he afterwards effected. The money thus procured was devoted, notwithstanding the necessities of the state, to the erection of colleges, where both Wolsey and his master declared they were anxious to educate able men in order to oppose effectually the fast-growing heresies of Martin Luther.
The campaign in Italy opened in the spring of 1524, with wonderfully increased difficulties for the French. Charles V. had appointed the renegade Duke of Bourbon his generalissimo in that country against his own sovereign and compatriots. Henry of England engaged to furnish 100,000 crowns for the first month's pay of the duke's army, and to make a diversion by invading Picardy in July. The emperor promised to defray the cost of the Italian army for the remainder of the campaign, and to invade Languedoc at the same time. Thus supported, Bourbon took the field early in the spring; the genius of Bonivet paled before him, and by the end of May the duke had completely freed Italy of his countrymen, and driven them across the Alps. The losses of the French in this retreat were dreadful, and perhaps the greatest calamity was the death of the famous Chevalier Bayard, the knight "sans peur et sans reproche," who was killed as he was protecting the rear of the army, on the banks of the Sesia.
Bourbon, ardent and impatient to secure the kingdom, which had been promised him in France, as well as thirsting with desire to take the utmost vengeance on Francis I., entreated the emperor to allow him to quit Italy and enter France with his victorious army. The emperor consented, and the imperial forces soon found themselves descending from the Alps. Unfortunately, Charles had divided the command of this expedition betwixt Bourbon and the Marquis of Pescara, and the certain result was divided councils. Bourbon urged to push forward to Lyons, calculating on his friends and dependants in France flocking to him there; but Pescara had probably different instructions, and accordingly advised that they should descend on Provence, and lay siege to Marseilles. This was palpably the suggestion of the emperor, for he was ambitious of securing Marseilles, and holding it as a key to the south of France, as Calais was to the north, in the hands of the English. Thither, therefore, they marched, entered Provence on the 2nd of July, and on the 19th of August they sat down before Marseilles with an army of 16,000 men.
But the situation of the imperial troops very soon became extremely hazardous there. The place was strongly fortified; it contained a garrison of 3,200 men, and these were zealously supported by 9,000 of the inhabitants, who, detesting the Spaniards, took up arms and fought most gallantly. Bourbon and Pescara spent forty days in mining and bombarding the place, when they became aware of a tempest gathering which boded their utter destruction. This was Francis marching from Avignon at the head of 40,000 men. Neither Henry nor the emperor had made those diversions in Languedoc and Picardy which they had promised, and thus the whole weight of the army of Francis was at liberty to descend upon them.
Bourbon and Pescara precipitately abandoned the siege, and made for the Alps, in order to regain Italy. If Francis had been contented with this success, he would have stood at the close of the year 1524 on most advantageous ground: spite of the threatened combination of attacks upon him, he would have stood victorious over them all within the boundaries of France. But it was not his nature to rest satisfied with such a position. His ardent temperament spurred him on to secure yet more signal benefits, to pursue and complete the blow upon his adversaries. He therefore resolved to pursue the imperialists into Italy, and he flattered himself that he should speedily wrest from them all that they had won from him. He hastened along the beaten road over Mount Cenis, whilst his imperial foes were working their arduous way through the intricate rocks and ravines of the Riviera del Mare. It became a regular race for the first arrival. Francis hoped to descend upon the plains of Piedmont and Lombardy, and reach Milan before Bourbon and Pescara; but, apprised of his intentions, they put out all their energies, and by the time Francis had arrived at Vercelli, they had reached Alva. They pushed by forced marches to Milan, but there they found a pestilence raging; and, throwing a garrison into the castle, they hastened out at the Porta Romana, as the troops of Francis entered the Porta Ticina.
At this moment Francis committed a military error, which probably deprived him of the triumph of thoroughly routing his enemies. To have continued the pursuit was almost certainly to have destroyed the imperialist force, for it was worn down by its severe marches, and the road to Lodi by which Pescara retreated was actually strewn with his exhausted horses. The army of Pescara was the sole imperial force now in Italy, and its defeat would have been the immediate recovery of the Milanese territory. But Francis was beguiled into the delay of besieging Pavia, in which Pescara had left a strong garrison under Antonio da Leyva. Pavia was a well-fortified city, situated on the deep and rapid Ticino, in a peculiarly strong position, and had repeatedly defied armies for a long time together, particularly those of the Lombards and of Charlemagne. The moment Pescara heard of Francis sitting down before it, he exclaimed that he was saved! Every exertion was made by the imperialists to profit by the time thus given them. The Duke of Bourbon hastened over the Alps to Germany to raise 12,000 men, for which purpose he had pawned his jewels. Lannoy, the viceroy of Naples, pledged the regular revenues of that kingdom for ready cash for the hiring of troops, and great activity was displayed in raising an army and posting it betwixt the Adda and Ticino.
For three months Francis continued lying before Pavia, and committed the further error of weakening his forces, by detaching 6,000 of them, under Albany, the late regent of Scotland, to menace the kingdom of Naples. There Francis contrived to lie during the winter, whilst his enemies were inciting the King of England to aid their efforts to crush him in the spring. This mission to England would appear to have been hastened by some mysterious coquetting which was discovered to be carrying on betwixt the Court of England and Louise, the mother of Francis, in his absence. An Italian, named Giovanni Joacchino, appeared in England under the character of a merchant. It was soon known that this pretended merchant was the emissary of Louise, and De Praet, the ambassador of the emperor, became alarmed at his presence. Wolsey did not conceal the real character of the man, but promised to disclose to De Praet whatever overtures he should make from the Court of France. But for eight months Joacchino stayed at London, and was in such close intercourse with the cardinal that De Praet grew more and more suspicious. He wrote these suspicions to the emperor, and to Margaret of Savoy, the governess of the Netherlands, and had the mortification to find one of his messengers intercepted on the way, his despatches seized, and carried to the English council. It is patent that the tide of Wolsey's hopes and feeling was on the turn; that the repeated neglect of Charles V. to keep his promise of securing the popedom, had converted him already from an open friend to a secret enemy, and this was the more marked by the circumstance of Henry now demanding payment from the emperor of the sums he had borrowed when in England, and the greater sums due from Francis, for which Charles had made himself responsible.
These disclosures, however, and the remonstrances of Clement VII., by the Archbishop of Capua, aroused Henry to a display of affected zeal for the imperial cause. He ordered Sir John Russell to pay over to the Duke of Bourbon 50,000 crowns, with a power to add five or ten thousand more, if he thought it advisable, and instructions were sent to Dr. Pace to urge the Venetians to secure the Alpine passes, so as to cut off the reinforcements of the French; and Sir Gregory da Casale was instructed to concert with Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, for the protection of that kingdom from the attacks of Albany, and to drive the French wholly out of Italy.
In the beginning of February, 1525, the imperialist generals thought themselves strong enough to attack the French in their entrenchments. These entrenchments were very formidable. The rear-guard was posted in the beautiful castle of Mirabello, in the midst of an extensive park, enclosed by high and solid walls. But the garrison in the city, under Leyva, found means to communicate with the imperial generals outside, and he sent them word that they must either relieve him, or that he must attempt, to cut his way out, for famine was urgent amongst his troops. The generals themselves were suffering from want of provisions and pay for their troops. In the French camp the wisest commanders counselled Francis to raise the siege, and retire to Milan, confident that the enemy must soon disband from want of pay. But Bonivet treated this counsel as mean and dastardly; and, unfortunately, that was the tone most likely to captivate the chivalrous mind of the French king. He resolved to stand his ground.
Louise reading of the Capture of the King.(page 176).
Bird's-eye View of Rhodes in the Sixteenth Century. From an Ancient Manuscript.
annihilated to a man. The Spanish musketeers then broke the French ranks; and the king, being already wounded twice in the face, and once in the hand, refused to surrender to the Spaniards who environed him. Fortunately, Pomperant, a French gentleman in the service of the Duke of Bourbon, recognised him, and called Lannoy, to whom the king resigned his sword. Lannoy kneeling, kissed the king's hand, took the sword, and gave him his own in return, saying it did not become a monarch to appear unarmed in the presence of a subject. The king was relieved of his helmet by James D'Avila; and the Spanish soldiers, who admired his valour, came crowding around him, and snatched the feathers from it, and, when they were all gone, even cut pieces from his clothes, to keep as memorials that they had fought hand to hand with him. Francis was soon left standing in his jerkin and hose, and, spite of his misfortune, could not help laughing at his situation, and at the eagerness of the soldiers for something belonging to him.
Presently Bourbon presented himself with his sword in his hand, dripping with the blood of his own countrymen. At that sight the king was seized with the deadly paleness of indignation. Bourbon fell on his knees, and requested permission to kiss his sovereign's hand, but Francis turned from him with contempt. "Ah, sire!" exclaimed the constable, bursting into tears, "had you followed my advice in some things, you would not be now in this condition, nor would the plains of Italy be soaked with the best blood of France." There was too much truth in the statement; for Francis had been misled by the arts of a vengeful woman, and Bourbon had been driven by crying injustice into rebellion. But Francis, mounting a horse which was brought him, rode away with Pescara and Lannoy, without deigning another look at the duke. He was conveyed to the fortress of Pizzighitone, where he was strictly guarded, but with all honour, till the pleasure of the emperor should be ascertained. Francis wrote to his mother by Pennalosa, to whom he also gave a passport to pass through France, and convey the news to the emperor. Louise was at Lyons when the messenger arrived there, and delivered the royal letter. It contained simply the words, "Madame, all is lost, except our honour!"
Admiral Bonivet, Marshal de Chabannes, and Richard de la Pole, a pretender to the crown of England, with more than 8,000 of the French army, fell in this action. The titular King of Navarre, the bastard of Savoy, and many distinguished officers, were taken with the king. All the artillery, arms, ammunition, military chest, and baggage of the vanquished army fell into the hands of the allies, who were astounded at the greatness of their victory.
The amazement and consternation which fell on France at the news of this terrible disaster are scarcely to be imagined. Nothing, indeed, could be more melancholy than the situation of that kingdom. Her king was captive, her most distinguished generals and the flower of the army were taken or slain, powerful and triumphant enemies on all sides were ready to seize her as a spoil, and she was equally destitute of allies, of money, of troops, or wise counsel. Scarcely less was the terror of the princes and the states of Italy, for their only safety—the balance of power—was destroyed, and there appeared no defence against the predominant power of the emperor.
Charles himself assumed an air of singular composure and moderation on the receipt of this brilliant news. He had been daily expecting to hear of the defeat of his army, when, on the 10th of March, came the tidings of this great victory. We may imagine, therefore, his real joy. But such was his command of his feelings, that nothing of this appeared in his manner. He perused the despatches with the most perfect composure, affected even to commiserate the fall of his rival, and moralised sagely on the uncertainty of all human greatness. A little time, however, was sufficient to show that all this was dissimulation, and his conduct to Francis was ample proof that he had neither pity nor generosity.
Henry of England, on the contrary, gave freedom to his expressions of joy. Though he was actually on his way to coalesce with Francis against Charles, he saw at once the immense advantages this defeat and capture offered for aggressions on his kingdom, and he therefore ordered the most public rejoicings in London and all his other cities, and rode himself in state to St. Paul's, where the cardinal performed mass, assisted by eleven bishops, in presence of the Court and all the foreign ambassadors; and afterwards "Te Deum" was sung. Henry then posted off Tunstal, Bishop of London, and Sir Richard Wingfield, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, into Spain to congratulate the emperor on his splendid triumph, and modestly to propose that they should divide France between them. Nay, Henry had the assurance to claim, by the treaty betwixt those two exemplary monarchs, that he should be crowned King of France at Paris, and that Charles should satisfy himself with certain northern and southern provinces. By another article of this treaty it was stipulated that any prince taken prisoner during the war should be delivered over to that sovereign whose territories he had invaded. Henry, therefore, instructed his ambassadors to claim the surrender of Francis to him, on the plea that he had not only invaded Normandy and Guienne, but France itself, which he contended was rightfully his inheritance. These extravagant and absurd demands, which could have risen in the mind of no man who was not puffed up by the most insane vanity, were not very likely to be received with any degree of attention by Charles in the very hour of his triumph, and conscious of the immensely augmented power of his position. To induce Charles to consent to this improbable arrangement, Henry proposed at once to put the Princess Mary, who was betrothed to Charles, into his hands—in fact, to make the exchange of her person for that of Francis. Henry was the more buoyed up in these wild notions by the fact that the ambassador of Charles had just been applying for the delivery of the princess.
So confident was Henry of the cession of his claims by the emperor, that he instantly took measures to raise the money necessary for the invasion of France. As he had resolved to rule without the interference of parliaments, he sent out commissioners to every part of the country to levy the sixth part of the goods of the laity and a fourth of those of the clergy. The scheme was entirely unconstitutional, the commissioners performed their part in a harsh and over-bearing manner, trusting thus to intimidate the people into compliance, and the consequence was a universal resentment and resistance. Clergy and laity, rich and poor, all alike denounced the arbitrary and illegal impost. "How the great men took it," says Hall, "was marvel: the poor cursed, the rich repugned, the lighter sort railed, and, in conclusion, all men execrated the cardinal as the subverter of the laws and liberties of England. For, said they, if men should give their goods by a commission, then were it worse than the taxes of France, and so England would be bond and not free." This was the more just because the cardinal in person acted as commissioner in London, and lent all the weight of his office and position to sanction the oppression. He used all his arts to prevail on the citizens to comply, but neither threats nor blandishments moved them. The resistance was obstinate and universal.
Archbishop Warham, formerly the wise minister of Henry, now full of years and experience, addressed a letter to the haughty cardinal, saying: "I have heard that when the people be commanded to make fires and tokens of rejoicing for the taking of the French king, divers of them have spoken, that they have more cause to weep than to rejoice thereat. And divers, as it hath been shown me secretly, have wished openly that the French king were at his liberty again, so as there was a good peace, and the king should not attempt again to win France, the winning whereof should be more chargeable to England than profitable, and the keeping thereof much more chargeable than the winning."
In London the excitement became excessive: the people placarded the walls with their complaints, and the clergy preached against the arbitrary tax, and declared that for themselves they would pay no money which was not voted in convocation. From London the fire spread through the other towns, the people began to take up arms, the clergy to encourage them, and Henry, who was soon terrified, with all his bluster, took the alarm, and declared that he wanted nothing from his loving subjects but as a benevolence. But the very word benevolence awoke a host of hateful recollections. The tumult was only increased by it; and a lawyer in the city published the passage from the Act of Richard III., by which benevolences were abolished for ever. This seemed to arouse the lion spirit in Henry. The prospect of the crown of France was too fascinating to be lightly surrendered; he therefore called together the judges, and demanded their opinion on his power to tax his subjects without Parliament. The venal judges reminded the king that Richard III. was a usurper, and that his Parliament was a factious Parliament, all the acts of which were illegal and void, and could in no wise bind a legitimate and absolute king, who, like him, held the crown by hereditary right. This bold and base doctrine was loudly echoed by the Privy Council, but vain were such authorities with the people. On hearing this decision, they again flew to arms. In Kent they speedily drove the commissioners and tax-gatherers out of the county; in Suffolk they marched in an armed body of 4,000 or 5,000 men, and even threatened the duke of the county, Brandon, the king's brother-in-law, who was the chief commissioner there, with death. Surrey, who stood high in the estimation of the people, interfered to calm them, and to prevent mischief; and Henry saw that the contest was hopeless, and by proclamation retracted his demand. Wolsey, who had been extremely prominent in endeavouring to enforce the detested tax, now caused a report to be industriously circulated, that he had, in truth, never been favourable to it, but the people only replied when they heard it, "God save the king! we know the cardinal well enough."
But Henry might have spared himself all this tumult and unpopularity. The emperor was never less likely than now to conceed such favours and advantages to him. He was a deep and subtle prince; no man could see more intuitively and instantly the wonderful change in his power and position which the battle of Pavia created. He was at once freed from a potent and ambitious rival. His own plans were no longer thwarted, his own territories were no longer threatened; but, on the contrary, the whole of the Continent lay, as it were, at his feet. He seemed to stand upon it a huge imperial Colossus, almost without the shadow of a rival. Henry was the only man from whom he had anything to fear, and Henry, he saw, was destitute of money, and unsupported in his desires for continental conquest by his people. Charles at once, therefore, assumed a lofty tone, and determined not only to mortify Henry's pride, but to punish him for neglecting to invade Picardy, according to agreement, so as to alleviate the pressure of the French arms in Italy. He therefore received Henry's ambassadors with marvellous coldness. So far from consenting to his propositions, he informed them that, by the advice of his council, he had determined not to invade France at all. He insinuated that the engagements of Henry were not to be relied on, and gave his breach of contract with regard to Picardy as a proof. Ho did not forget to remind them of Henry's recent negotiations with France. So far from being anxious to receive the Princess Mary, the ambassadors discovered that Charles was actually contemplating another marriage, and was in treaty for the Infanta Isabella of Portugal.
Charles had calculated upon Henry for large subsidies during the war, but instead of receiving these he had found Henry as much straitened for money as he was himself. It was now discovered that the emperor had already made a truce for six months with France, and he now coolly advised the ambassadors to seek from their sovereign power, not negotiations for the invasion of France, but the terms on which the French king should be liberated. To crown all, and leave no question of the feeling which Henry's late conduct had produced in Charles's Court, he wrote to Henry, no longer styling himself his loving uncle, and penning the grossest flatteries with his own hand, but he simply and curtly signed himself Charles, to official communications duly and officially prepared.
This was a rebuff not to be received complacently by a man of Henry's vain and volcanic spirit. He read the astounding despatches with an amazement which burst into a tempest of rage. At once a tide of impetuous revulsion flowed over his whole soul. He abandoned in a moment all ideas of conquests, invasions, and the crown of France, and determined to do everything in his power to procure the liberation of Francis, and to unite with him against the perfidious and insulting Spaniard. He had dismissed the French envoys, who were residing privately in London, on the news of the capture of Francis, but he now let it be understood that their presence would be heartily welcome. Louise accepted the hint with all alacrity, and John Brenon, president of the council of Normandy, and her favourite envoy, Giovanni Joacchino, were again dispatched to London. A truce for four mouths was immediately concluded, and Wolsey, who fanned the new flame in Henry's bosom for objects and resentments of his own soon arranged the terms of a treaty with them. These terms were extremely acceptable to Henry, as they furnished him with a prospect of a considerable addition to his income, without the disagreeable necessity of having to go to Parliament for it. The treaty consisted of six articles. By the first, the contracting parties engaged to guarantee the integrity of each other's territories against all the princes in the world. The object of this was to prevent Francis bartering any of his provinces with Charles for his liberty. By the second, Francis and his heirs were made to guarantee to Henry the payment of 2,000,000 crowns, by half-yearly instalments, and 100,000 crowns for life, after the payment of that amount. Nine of the chief noblemen of France, and nine of the richest cities, also, gave their bonds for the security of these payments. By the third article, the King of France engaged to pay up all the arrears of the dowry of Mary, the Queen-Dowager of France. The rest of the articles were for the prevention of depredations at sea, for comprehending the King of Scots in the treaty, and for the prevention of the return of the Duke of Albany to Scotland during the minority of James V. This treaty was signed at the Moore, the king's house in Hertfordshire, on the 30th of August. The cardinal, who never forgot himself on these occasions, was well rewarded for his trouble in promoting and arranging this alliance. He received a grant of 100,000 crowns for his good offices in the affair, and the arrears of his pension in lieu of his surrender of the bishopric of Tournay, the whole to be paid in equal instalments in the course of seven years and a half.
Boudoir of Anne Boleyn, in the Gateway of Hever Castle.
But whilst the French regent, Louise, made those liberal concessions for the friendship of Henry, and showed every apparent disposition to guarantee the conditions, Louise swearing to them, and Francis ratifying them, care was taken to leave a loop-hole of escape at any future period. The attorney and solicitor-generals of the French Government entered a secret protest against the whole treaty, so that Francis might, if occasion required, plead the illegality of the whole transaction.
But it was not so easy to procure the liberation of the captive King of France. Moderate as Charles had professed to be, and sympathetic regarding the misfortunes of Francis, he soon showed that he was determined to extort every possible advantage from having the royal captive in his hands. He had been detained in the strong castle of Pizzighitone, near Cremona; but, thinking that he should be able to influence the emperor by his presence, he petitioned to be removed to the Aleazar of Madrid. The ministers of Charles, fearful that the French king might so far win upon him as to draw from him some imprudent concessions, got him away to Toledo, to preside at an assembly of the Cortes, before the arrival of Francis. The captive king, impatient of the recovery of his liberty, now offered to give up all claim to Naples, Milan, Genoa, and all the other territories in Italy; to relinquish the superiority over Flanders and Artois; to restore the Duke of Bourbon and his followers to their estates and honours; to marry Eleanora, the emperor's sister, and to pay 3,000,000 crowns for his ransom. These enormous concessions did not, however, satisfy the exacting spirit of Charles. He demanded the surrender of Burgundy, which, he maintained, had been wrested unjustly from his family. This Francis positively declined, and was thereupon informed that he must either restore it, or calculate on remaining a prisoner for life. But so determined on this point was Francis, knowing that with the possession of Burgundy his enemies could at any time penetrate into the very heart of his kingdom, that he signed his abdication in favour of the dauphin, and gave way so completely to the distressing influence of despair, that his health failed rapidly; and the emperor, alarmed lest his captive should escape out of his hands, and with him all the advantages he was endeavouring to extort from him, hastened from Toledo to Madrid, and, visiting Francis with an air of kindness, gave him hopes that all difficulties should be removed. This had such a cheering effect on the health of the captive, that Charles now again thought his fears unnecessary, and returned quietly to Toledo, leaving Francis in a confinement as strict as ever.
The chagrin of the French monarch brought back his dangerous symptoms, and the greedy emperor was once more seized with his old fears. His position at this moment was anything but enviable. His affairs in Germany were in a condition to excite many anxieties. The Turks had taken Rhodes, entered Hungary, and menaced his own dominions: but a far more formidable enemy was growing and becoming every day more fearful. This was the Reformation, which now had a very powerful body of adherents, and threatened to prostrate all the supporters of the ancient church. Barbarossa, who, from a pirate, was become a great prince, obstructed his commerce and menaced the coasts of Spain. His relative, the King of England, resenting his treatment, was become the fast friend of France; and France, under the able management of Louise, was again in a respectable posture of defence. His exchequer was empty, and he had no means of wresting Burgundy from France; and he might lose the very countries and the money offered him, should the king die, or should he effect his escape. He was aware that plots were on foot for the purpose; that no money would be spared by the lady regent; and the escape of the King of Navarre, in his servant's clothes, though he had been as strictly guarded since the battle of Pavia as Francis himself, brought the possibility of such a chance very vividly to his mind.
At length, therefore, on the 14th of January, 1526, was signed the famous treaty called the Concord of Madrid, one of the most grasping and impudent pieces of extortion which one prince ever forced from another in his necessity. By this treaty Francis gave up all that he had offered before—namely, all claims of superiority over Flanders and Artois, and the possession of Naples, Milan, Genoa, and the other Italian territories, for which France had spent so much blood and treasure. But besides this, Francis was to deliver to the emperor his two sons, the dauphin and the Duke of Orleans, as hostages, and also bind himself, if he did not, or could not, fulfil all his engagements within four months, to return and yield himself once more prisoner. He was to marry Queen Eleanora, and the dauphin the Princess Maria, the daughter of Eleanora. But these were but a small part of the demands of the insatiable emperor. Francis was bound to persuade the King of Navarre to surrender all his rights in that kingdom to Charles, and the Duke of Gueldres to appoint Charles the heir to his dominions; and if he could not persuade them, he was to give them no aid when the emperor invaded their states. Next, Francis was to lend his whole navy, 500 men-at-arms, and 6,000 foot soldiers, to put down the princes of Italy, who were uniting to effect his own freedom! Then, Francis was to pay to the King of England all those sums which the emperor himself had engaged to pay. Still more, he was to restore Bourbon and the rest of the rebels to their estates and honours. The whole of the conditions were so monstrous, that they cannot be read without astonishment at the rapacity of this triumphant prince.
When the treaty was signed, the emperor assumed once more his mien of kindness, fawned upon the man whom he had held in such rigorous durance, and from whom he had extorted not only his possessions, but his honour. He introduced him to his future queen, called him his dearest brother and most beloved friend, and vainly hoped to make his victim forget the royal rack on which he had stretched him. But such things never are forgotten. In the soul of Francis they lived strong and imperishably, and whilst he complied with the detestable pressure of this imperial vampire, he secretly swore to break every engagement, as forced, excessive, and unwarrantable. Could we have expected anything else, or could the unprincipled emperor have expected anything else, had he not been blinded by his greed? In all ages and nations, such forced and iniquitous engagements have been held void. It was a game played betwixt a man whose avarice had no bounds, and whose honour had no existence, and another, who consents to feign acquiescence to defeat the hideous machinations of his oppressor.
Hating and loathing the monster who had thus extracted from him in his captivity things more precious than his life's-blood, Francis set out for the frontiers under strong guard; and in a ship moored in the middle of the river Bidassoa, which separates France from Spain, Francis was permitted for a moment to embrace his two sons, who were going into captivity, that he might come out shorn to the quick. No sooner did he land in his own territory, than he mounted a Turkish horse, and shouting in transport, "I am a king again!" he galloped forward to St. Jean de Luz, and thence to Bayonne, where his subjects thronged out and welcomed him with the most enthusiastic delight. Can any one doubt what were his feelings towards his intended brother-in-law of Spain at that moment?
Henry VIII. was one of the first amongst princes to send ambassadors to congratulate Francis on his restoration to freedom, and to urge him to break every article of the infamous terms which had been forced upon him. Sir Thomas Cheney was sent from England to meet Dr. Taylor, the English ambassador at Paris; and together they proceeded to Bayonne, and were introduced to Francis, who told them he greatly felt the friendship of Henry, who had, indeed, remonstrated with Charles on his behalf, though Charles had not paid much respect to the intercession. There was no need of any arguments from the two English casuists to induce Francis to break the engagements he had entered into. He had never meant to keep them. Before signing the document, he had protested, before two notaries and a few confidential friends, that he acted under restraint, and that he should hold himself bound to observe none of the conditions that were not just and reasonable.
Hever Castle, Kent: Residence of Anne Boleyn.
Two ambassadors had attended him from Spain to take his signature of the treaty, when he was free and on his own soil, as a ratification of it, which he had engaged to give; but when the ambassadors presented themselves for this purpose, Francis declined, affirming that he could not enter into any such engagements without the advice of his council and the approbation of his subjects. He assured them, however, that he would immediately summon an assembly of the notables at Cognac, and requested them to attend him thither, to learn the decision of the assembly. This body met at that place in June, and declared, with one voice, that the king had no right or power to sever Burgundy from the kingdom without their consent, and such consent they would never give. The Spanish ambassadors were present when this decision was pronounced, and they said that the king, not being able to fulfil his contract, was bound to return to his captivity, and they called upon him to obey. Instead of a direct answer to this demand, a treaty betwixt the King of France, the Pope, the Venetians, and the Duke of Milan, which had been secretly concluded a few days before, was produced, and published in their hearing. As this was tantamount to a declaration of war, the ambassadors demanded their passports, and returned to Spain. The Pope, on entering into this league, absolved Francis from all the forced oaths that he had sworn.
This confederacy of Francis and the Italian princes and states against the emperor, bound the allies to raise and pay an army of 30,000 foot and 3,000 horse, with a certain number of ships and galleys. The King of France was to be put in possession of the county of Asti and the lordship of Genoa, and Francis Sforza, Duke of Milan, engaged to pay him 50,000 crowns annually, Naples was to be wrested from Charles, and its crown placed at the disposal of the Pope; but the king that he appointed was to pay an annuity of 75,000 crowns to the King of France. Henry of England, though he declined to take any active part in the league, but consented merely to be nominated its protector, was to have a principality in Naples, with 36,000 ducats a year; and the cardinal, who always came in for his share of spoil, was to have a lordship worth 10,000.
Entrance to Wolsey’s College, Ipswich.
Though the league was formed expressly against the emperor, yet, to give it an air of justice and fairness, he was invited to become a party to it, provided he approved of the arrangements designed for Italy, dropped his demand on Burgundy, and consented to liberate the sons of Francis for a liberal ransom. If he declined the terms, as they well knew that he would, the confederates bound themselves to assist the King of France in enforcing them. The completion of this treaty was duly notified to the emperor by the ambassadors of the different confederates. Charles received the information with extreme anger. He severely upbraided the Pope for his part in it, when he knew that he had been the chief means of placing him in the Papal chair, though a bastard; and as for Francis, he denounced him as a thoroughly perjured prince, who had violated every article of the Treaty of Madrid, and he challenged him to justify his conduct by a direct appeal to single combat.
Francis not only replied, but published his reply in every court of Europe, in an able and eloquent defence, drawn up by Duprat, the Chancellor of France. He, in his turn, upbraided Charles with his selfish, grasping, and dishonourable conduct, when the fortune of war put him into his power; stating that he had broken the treaty of Noyon by retaining the kingdom of Navarre; had induced the Duke of Bourbon and his adherents to rebel, and had extorted terms and oaths from him by violence, whilst he was his prisoner, in the most cruel and ignominious manner; that all the world held such oaths and engagements to be utterly void, and that, when they were forced upon him, he had told him that they were void, and could not be kept; that he knew very well that he had no power to surrender Burgundy, but that he was quite willing to pay a just amount of money in lieu of it, and another for the ransom of his children.
Charles replied in a strain of great bitterness, and he did not confine himself to words; he put his troops in motion, and, in the first place, advanced to punish the Pope, and break up the Italian confederacy. The Spaniards, from the kingdom of Naples, advanced on one side, and the German and Spanish subjects of the emperor, from Lombardy, Parma, and Piacenza, on the other: there was no French prince to support him, and Clement was speedily compelled to sue for peace. Moncada, the Governor of Naples, signed a treaty with him; and a month afterwards, in a most perfidious manner, in concert with the family of Colonna, surprised the city of Rome, plundered the Vatican, and compelled the Pope to seek refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo. This took place on the 21st of September, 1526; and Moncada and the Colonna princes, finding they could not reach the person of the Pope, made a new treaty with him, and withdrew. No sooner was Clement at liberty, than he declared all the conditions forced from him, by the perfidy and violence of his enemies, were void; and to protect himself, he invited the Count of Vaudemont, who had claims to the throne of Naples, to bring troops from France, and assert his right. To avert this mischief, Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, marched a body of troops against Rome; but this time the Pope was prepared for his reception, having obtained reinforcements from his Italian allies. These allies, chiefly the Florentines and Venetians, repelled Lannoy, entered the Neapolitan states with an army of 6,000 men, and made themselves masters of the greatest part of the Abruzzi and of the city of Aquila, the capital of the province.
So closed the year 1526; and the new year opened with preparations for still more terrors for devoted Italy. The Emperor Charles had no money to maintain the troops necessary for the extensive domination that he aimed at, and he therefore allowed the mercenary troops in his employment, rather than in his pay, to indemnify themselves by the plunder of the wretched inhabitants of the countries where they were collected. These troops consisted of a mob of vagabonds, outlaws, and marauders, from every country in Europe, who, by their long course of licentious freedom, were become utterly callous to the sufferings which they inflicted. Freundesberg, a German soldier of fortune, was at the head of 15,000 of these adventurers, consisting of Germans, Spaniards, and Swiss; and Bourbon, at the head of 10,000 more half-starved and half-clad mercenaries, was in possession of the whole duchy of Milan, but with no means of supporting his position. These two ferocious hordes having formed a junction under his banner, clamoured for their pay. Bourbon told them he had no money, and that Milan had been so repeatedly overrun and ravaged, that it was destitute of all means of supporting them; but that he would lead them into the enemy's country—into the richest cities of Italy—where they might amply indemnify themselves for all their past sufferings. Animated by these assurances, they swore to follow him whithersoever he might lead them.
On the 30th of January, 1527, he marched out of Milan, with this army of hungry desperadoes. They directed their course to the opulent cities of Piacenza, Bologna, and Florence; but the allied army made a rapid movement, and succeeded in covering those towns. But this rush of the allies northward left Rome exposed, and Bourbon pushed forward to seize the advantage. It was time, for his lawless troops, disappointed in their expectations of plundering the cities mentioned, were growing furious, and it required all the authority of Bourbon to keep down the mutiny. Their hopes raised again by his promises, they rushed on in rapid march towards the Eternal City, where they were met by Lannoy, the Viceroy of Naples, who informed them that he had besieged Rome, and compelled the Pope to make peace, on condition that he prevented the troops of Bourbon approaching the city. At this declaration the clamour in the invading army became terrible. They refused to listen to Lannoy; they threatened to murder him, and called on Bourbon to lead them forward. Bourbon, who was now the sole commander, for Freundesberg had fallen sick, and was left behind at Ferrara, assured Lannoy that it was not possible for him to arrest the march of his troops, for he had no means of satisfying their demands but by the sacking of Rome. The Germans in his army were chiefly Lutherans, and were equally on fire with a desire of destroying the Pope and Rome, and with the hope of the spoil of that ancient seat of pagan and of Christian power. To them it was a holy crusade, made sweet—like all crusades—by the mingled feelings of avarice and fanaticism. They marched on, and on the 5th of May they encamped in the fields of the Eternal City. Bourbon rode amongst them, exclaiming, "Behold yonder churches and palaces, the receptacles of the wealth of the Christian world. Repose yourselves to-night, and to-morrow all that affluence shall be your own!"
With the first light of morning this wild and savage host was on foot, eager to seize the hoarded opulence of ages. A thick fog covered their approach, and they rushed to scale the walls with all the fury of a famishing and sanguinary host. But the walls were well manned, and on every side they were repelled and flung back with such slaughter, that they began to waver and lose heart. Bourbon, perceiving the ominous impression, seized a scaling-ladder, and planting it against the wall, began to mount, calling on his soldiers to follow his example. But a shot from an arquebuse struck him in the groin as he was ascending, and he fell into the ditch. Perceiving that his wound was mortal, he bade those about him to throw a cloak over him, to conceal his death, and to advance and avenge it. The death of their commander, however, could not be concealed. It flew like wild-fire through the host, and, infuriated at the news, they rushed forward with dreadful shouts of, "Bourbon, blood, and slaughter!"
On every side they clambered the walls like maniacs, fighting hand to hand for four hours, and seeing a thousand of their comrades fall around them. In the afternoon they were in entire possession of the suburbs, burst their way across the Sistine bridge, and were in the city. To describe the horrors that followed, would be to reiterate the catalogue of every crime, cruelty, and abomination that men perpetrate on such occasions. For five days the city was given up to the licence and plunder of this demoniac soldiery. The savage and maddened vagabonds ran through the streets, crying, "Blood! blood! Bourbon! Bourbon!" Every building, public and private, was burst open and plundered and desecrated. Churches, palaces, private houses were stripped of everything valuable, and the miserable people were treated with every imaginable horror, insult, and indignity. The Pope again escaped into the strong Castle of St. Angelo, but several of the cardinals and bishops fell into the merciless hands of the barbarian soldiers. All the writers of the time agree in the statement that the horror of this sacking of the capital of Christendom by a Christian army, transcends everything of the kind in history. For months the city was in the hands of this terrible concourse of savages.
The news of the sacking of Rome, and the imprisonment of the Pope, excited the most lively sensations of horror and indignation throughout the Christian, and especially the Catholic world. None appeared more affected than the emperor, by whose troops the sacrilegious deed had been perpetrated. He put himself and his Court into the deepest mourning, forbade all rejoicing for the birth of his son, and commanded prayers to be offered in all the churches throughout Spain for the liberation of His Holiness. No one could play off a piece of solemn hypocrisy more solemnly than Charles V.
Francis and Henry, who were making a fresh treaty of alliance, were at once affected with real or pretended horror. They agreed immediately to invade Italy with 30,000 foot, and 1,000 horse, to join the confederate army there, and drive out the troops of Spain, and liberate the Pope. Sir Francis Pointz was dispatched as ambassador to the emperor in Spain, and Cardinal Wolsey proceeded to France to concert with Francis the plans of the two kings. Wolsey travelled with his usual kingly pomp, attended by a retinue of nobles, and of 1,200 horse. He was met on the frontiers of France by the Cardinal of Lorraine, also with a splendid attendance of prelates, nobles, and gentlemen, and conducted through the different towns with processions, pageants, and all the homage that could be paid to a monarch. The King of France, as a mark of his especial favour, granted him the privilege of setting at liberty all the prisoners in the towns through which he passed. Wolsey remained at Abbeville a few days to rest, and then proceeded to Amiens, where he was received by the king and the whole Court on the 4th of August. There the cardinal remained for fourteen days, more for a show of amity betwixt France and England than for any real business, which had been already settled; one article of which was that Francis' son, the Duke of Orleans, should marry Mary, the Princess of England.
Meantime, Sir Francis Pointz had presented his demands to the emperor, which were of such a nature that Charles, aware that they were intended rather to justify a war with him than to be accepted, evaded them, by declaring that he would treat of them with his dear uncle by his ambassadors in England. Seeing, however, that the confederates in Italy were gathering strength, and that should they be reinforced by an army from France, kept on pay by Henry of England, the Pope would be taken out of his hands without having been of any profit to him, he sent orders to Moncada, his minister at Rome, to alarm the fears of His Holiness, and to extract as much money as he could out of him. Moncada managed so well, that the Pope, impatient for his liberty, agreed never to take any part against the emperor in Italy again; to pay 100,000 crowns down, another 100,000 in a fortnight, and 130,000 at the end of three months, besides granting to the emperor the tenth of all ecclesiastical revenues in Spain. The unfortunate Pope paid the first instalment, and then contrived to make his escape to Orvieto, whence he wrote to the King of England and to Wolsey, thanking them for their effectual interposition in his favour.
But the time was now approaching which was to interrupt the friendship of Henry with the head of the Church of Rome. Providence, through the headlong passions and unrestrainable will of Henry VIII., was preparing a marvellous revolution in the Church, and an opening to the liberty of religious faith in England, which he was the last of all men to occasion or to grant from the freedom of his opinions or the liberality of his inquiries. The Reformation in Germany had made an immense progress, and produced the most astonishing events. The whole mind and intellect of that country had been convulsed by the preaching of the doctrines of Luther. State had been set against state, prince against prince; and the bold monk of Wittemberg had only escaped the vengeance of the Church of Rome by the undaunted championship of the Elector of Saxony. In England, the reformed faith, derived from Wickliffe and the Lollards, had been making steady, wide, but silent progress; but little of this had risen into the region of the Court or the Government, for there Henry and his Spanish Queen were firmly attached to the Catholic Church, and any demonstration of any other religion would have brought down on the professor of it the sudden thunders of the arbitrary king and his pompous and all-powerful minister. Henry, fond of school divinity from his youth, and a great reader and admirer of Thomas Aquinas, had looked across to Germany with a grim and truculent glance, which seemed to rest on the blunt and unconventional reformer with an expression of one who longed to strike down the daring heretic, and rid the world of him. As this was out of his power, he determined to annihilate him by his pen; and for this purpose he had written a book against him, with the title of "A Treatise on the Seven Sacraments, against Martin Luther, the Heresiarch, by the Illustrious Prince Henry VIII." This he had caused to be presented to the Pope by the English ambassador, beautifully written and magnificently bound, and Leo X. received it with the most extravagant laudations, and conferred on Henry the title of "Defender of the Faith," in a bull signed by himself and twenty-seven cardinals.
Henry really believed, for some time, that he had crushed Luther and all his sect, but the free-mouthed reformer, who paid no flatteries to king or Pope, soon convinced the literary monarch that he was as much alive as ever. He wrote a reply to Henry, in which, giving him commendation for writing in elegant language, he abused him and his work as broadly as he would have done that of the obscurest mortal. Henry, in his estimation, was a fool, a liar, an ass, and a blasphemer. Henry complained to Luther's patron, the Elector of Saxony, and Luther tried to write an apology; but it turned out to be a more bitter infliction than the original, for he excused his rudeness by saying that he now believed the book not to be written by Henry himself, but to have been falsely attributed to him. He went further, and abused the Cardinal Wolsey in good round terms, pronouncing him the bane of England, "the caterpillar," "the monster," "the nuisance to God and man." He concluded by offering to write a book in praise of Henry, insinuating that he was quite of opinion that Henry was in secret a favourer of the new doctrines. This was worse than all. If ever there was a man puffed with vanity of his handiwork, it was Henry; if over there was a bigot to the old opinions, he was that man; and to find himself treated as a sham author, a protector of a mischievous minister, and a secret disciple of the heretics, was too much for his endurance. He again took the field with his pen, owned himself the author of the book, defended Wolsey as the best, the most faithful, religious, and beloved of men, and declared that he should now love him the more for Luther's abuse. He did not forget to taunt Luther with marrying a nun, he being a monk: and Luther, incensed at this reception of that for which he expected praise, declared that he deserved this treatment, for the folly of supposing "that virtue could exist in a Court, or that Christ might be found in a place where Satan reigned." Henceforth, he said, let his enemies beware; he would use no more blandishments, but treat them according to their deserts.
The great defender of the faith, at the time at which we are now arrived, was growing dissatisfied with his wife, and was about to seek a divorce from her, which must necessarily involve the Pope in difficulties with the queen's nephew, the emperor. Henry was married to Catherine when she was in her twenty-sixth year. So long as the disparity of their ages did not appear, for he was five or six years younger, and she was pleasing in her person, he appeared not only satisfied with, but really attached to her. But she was now forty-two years of age, had undergone much anxiety in her earlier years in England, had borne the king five children, three sons and two daughters, all of whom died in their infancy, except the Princess Mary, who lived to mount the throne. Catherine, of late years, had suffered much in her health, and we may judge from the best-known portrait of her that she had now lost her good looks, and had a bowed-down and sorrow-stricken air.
Anne Boleyn had been living in France, at first as attendant on Mary, King Henry's sister, the queen of Louis XII., and afterwards in the family of the Duke of Alençon. She returned to England on the breaking out of the war with Francis I., in 1521 or 1522; and seems, by her beauty, wit, and accomplishments, to have created a great sensation in the English Court, where she was soon attached to the service of Queen Catherine. Henry is said to have first met her by accident, in her father's garden, at Hever Castle, in Kent; and was so charmed with her that he told Wolsey that he had been "discoursing with a young lady who had the wit of an angel, and was worthy of a crown." She is supposed at that time to have been about one-and-twenty, tall, of a most graceful figure, of a brunette complexion, and extremely accomplished. Her great admirer, Sir Thomas Wyatt, the celebrated poet, describes her as of "a beauty not so whitely, clear, and fresh, but above all we may esteem; which appeareth much more excellent by her favour, passing sweet and cheerful, and was enhanced by her whole presence of shape and fashion, representing both mildness and majesty, more than can be expressed." He is quite rapturous about her musical skill and the sweetness of her voice, both in singing and speaking. "Beauty and sprightliness sat on her lips," says Sanders; "in readiness of repartee, skill in the dance, and in playing on the lute, she was unsurpassed."
Such was Anne Boleyn when the fading beauty of Queen Catherine ceasing to retain the eye of her unscrupulous husband, it fell on this fascinating object, brilliant with all the gaiety of youth and the graces of her foreign education.
At the Court of Henry she was soon surrounded by lovers; but a real attachment seems to have sprung up betwixt her and Lord Percy, the son of the Duke of Northumberland. Percy was in attendance on Wolsey, and had thus daily opportunity of seeing Anne at Court. But the jealous eye of Henry soon detected this attachment; and he sent for Wolsey in great wrath; chiding him for permitting this engagement, and insisting on its being broken off. The poor young nobleman was severely snubbed by Wolsey, who sent for the duke; and they forced the young man into a marriage with Lady Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, for whom he had no affection. Anne Boleyn was sent for a time home to her father's. It was clear that Henry had now marked Mistress Anne, as she was called, out for himself, and woe betide any man who should cross his path. After a time, Anne was recalled to Court, and Henry soon avowed his passion for her. The proud beauty had probably received a lesson from the fate of her sister, and she replied to the royal lover with great dignity: "Your wife I cannot be, both in respect of mine own unworthiness, and also because you have a queen already; your mistress I will not be."
Anne was probably still smarting under the loss of her accepted lover, Lord Percy; and, believing that the cardinal had had a chief hand in that matter, she never forgave him; and the tearing asunder those two young hearts eventually contributed no little towards his fall. But now Mistress Anne must have begun to see that there was a mover in it beyond the cardinal. There is every reason to believe that Anne did not forgive the royal lover either this circumstance for a long time. She disappeared several years from the Court at this time, and is supposed to have gone back to France. Her father, now created Viscount Rochford, was ambassador in France about this time, and Anne was probably with him, and is said to have returned with him at his recall this year, 1527. Henry's passion had by no means cooled, and the lady would appear to have been more disposed to receive his addresses; for, says Cavendish, "at last knowing the king's pleasure, and the depth of his secrets, she began to look very haughty and stout, lacking no manner of rich apparels or jewels that money could purchase."
The understanding betwixt Henry and Anne Boleyn now became obvious to the whole Court. The queen saw it as clearly as any one else, and upbraided Henry with it, but does not seem to have used any harshness to Anne on that account, though she occasionally gave her some sharp rubs. For instance, the queen was playing at cards with Anne Boleyn when she thus addressed her, "My Lady Anne, you have the good hap ever to stop at a king; but you are like others, you will have all or none." Cavendish, Wolsey's secretary, says the queen, at this trying crisis, "behaved like a very patient Grissel."
Henry now having resolved to marry Anne Boleyn, as he found he could obtain her on no other terms, felt himself incontinently afflicted with lamentable scruples of conscience for being married to his brother's widow, and entertaining equally afflicting doubts of the power of the Pope to grant a dispensation for such a marriage. For seventeen years these scruples had rested in his bosom without disturbing a moment of his repose. It is true that these doubts had been started before the marriage by Archbishop Warham, but they had no weight with Henry or his father. Henry had gone into the marriage at the age of eighteen with his eyes open, having some time before, by his father's order, made a protest against it for state purposes, and had been ever since, till he saw Anne Boleyn, not only contented but jovial. Now, however, he soon ceased to be merely scrupulous—he became positive that his marriage was unlawful, and set to work to write a book to prove it. In the summer of this very year 1527, in a letter to Anne Boleyn, he tells her how hard he was labouring at the treatise that was to convince everybody, and brush away all obstacles to their marriage:—"Mine own sweet heart,—I am right well comforted, insomuch that my book maketh substantially for my matter. In token whereof I have spent above four hours this day upon it, which has caused me to write the shorter letter to you at this time, because of some pain in my head." And, in the consciousness of his triumph over all obstacles, he wrote, for he was no contemptible poet:—
"The eagle's force subdues each bird that flies;
What metal can resist the flaming fire?
Doth not the sun dazzle the clearest eyes,
And melt the ice, and make the frost retire?
The hardest stones are pierced through with tools,
The wisest are with princes made but fools."
The king communicated to Wolsey fully his views regarding the divorce, and Wolsey, who had now his decided quarrel with the emperor for deceiving him in the matter of the Papacy, and who was equally the enemy of Catherine, she having openly expressed her resentment of his procuring the destruction of the Duke of Buckingham, readily fell into the scheme. Little did he dream that Henry proposed to put Anne Boleyn in Catherine's place; for Wolsey, by being the instrument of breaking her engagement with Lord Percy, had been unlucky enough to make her too his mortal enemy. Wolsey was undoubtedly as well aware as any one of the love affair going on between Henry and Anne Boleyn; nothing that was moving at Court could escape him; but he supposed this affair was only of the same kind as the rest of Henry's gallantries, and his notion would be that some foreign princess would be selected for Henry's second queen. That Henry now took every public opportunity of showing his affection for Anne, is evident by what took place at Greenwich in May of this year. The French ambassadors, the Viscount de Turenne and the Bishop of Tarbes, were over at London settling the terms of the marriage of Henry's daughter Mary with Francis, who was now a widower; and before they returned Henry gave them a fête. There was a tournament held at Greenwich on the 5th of May, in which 300 lances were broken in the lists. After the tournament there was a banquet, with orations and songs, followed by a ball. At this ball Catherine and all her ladies were present, who, according to the glowing description of the writer of the time, "seemed to all men to be rather celestial angels descended from heaven, than flesh and bone." The king drew Turenne from the ball into a tiring-room, where, with six other nobles, they put on Venetian dresses of gold and purple satin; and, with vizards on their faces, and beards of gold, they entered the ball-room, attended by a band of musicians, and each took out a lady for the dance. Anne Boleyn was the lady selected of Henry, thus marking his preference to all the world.
But during the discussions on the marriage betwixt the English princess and the French prince, a circumstance had taken place which showed that Henry was resolved to let slip no opportunity of carrying his divorce at all costs. The Bishop of Tarbes suddenly asked the question whether, in proceeding to this marriage, the legitimacy of the Princess Mary was beyond all legal and canonical doubt, considering the nature of the king's marriage with her mother, the queen. Henry and Wolsey affected to be much astonished and agitated at the question; and Henry afterwards made it an argument that the idea of the illegality of his marriage, though it had originated with himself, had been greatly strengthened by the question of the bishop, as it showed how apparent the fact was to strangers and even foreigners. Yet the suggestion had undoubtedly been made to the bishop by Wolsey on Henry's behalf. The meaning of the question was quite obvious—it was to serve the cause of the divorce, which must be an object highly pleasing to Francis I., in his resentment of the treatment of himself by the emperor; but it was not believed for a moment to be a real doubt even by the man who made it, or he would not proceed to confirm the choice of an illegitimate maiden for the Queen of France, or the wife of his son.
At the close of this treaty, Wolsey was sent over to France, rather to show to Europe, and particularly to the King of Spain, the intimate footing betwixt France and England, than for any real use. We have detailed that pompous journey of the cardinal. It was believed that Anne Boleyn and her friends were at the bottom of Wolsey's being sent abroad for a time, that the affairs regarding "the king's secret" might proceed without his cognisance; and, indeed, before his return, it had ceased to be a secret to any one. Anne was become openly acknowledged as the king's favourite, and had assumed an air and style of great magnificence and consequence on account of it. Meantime, Wolsey, misled by his idea that the king meant to marry a foreign princess, had committed himself deeply, and added fresh and serious preparations to his own destruction. He had given great hints of the divorce of Henry, and of his probable marriage with a princess of the Court of France. He told Louise, the king's mother, that "if she lived another year, she should see as great union on one side, and disunion on the other, as she would ask or wish for. "These," he added, "were not idle words. Let her treasure them up in her memory; time would explain them."
The cardinal had, in fact, been looking round him at the French Court for a wife for Henry, and had pitched on the Princess Renée, sister of the late Queen Claude, whilst Henry himself had settled his choice nearer home. On the return of Wolsey, all being now prepared, Henry communicated to the astonished man the secret of his intended marriage with Anne. Confounded at the disclosure, the proud cardinal dropped on his knees, and, it is said, remained there for some hours pleading with the king against this infatuation, as he deemed it, and which he saw compromised himself with the Court of France, and menaced him darkly in the future, from the deep enmity of her who would thus become his queen. His pleadings and arguments were vain. His fair enemy had made her ground wholly secure in his absence, and Wolsey withdrew with gloomy forebodings.
Queen Anne Boleyn. From the original of Holbein, in the collection of the Right Hon. the Earl of Warwick.
Ball at Old Greenwich Palace: Henry VIII. dancing with Anne Boleyn.(See page 185)
temptations cannot be admitted in place of the heroism of virtue. It has been well said by a modern historian, that "in encouraging the addresses of a married man, which she notoriously did, and in entering into schemes of self-aggrandisement, which could only be achieved by degrading Catherine, and wounding to the heart a kind and indulgent mistress and patroness, Anne Boleyn was guilty of crimes of a still deeper dye than that of which she would have been in becoming the king's concubine. It is a quibble, rather than any valid excuse, to urge that she had persuaded herself the marriage with Catherine was illegal and null. She was hardly either an impartial or in any other respect a fit judge of this nice and much disputed question; and even if the canonical objections to the marriage had been as clear as they were the reverse, that would make no difference either to the delicacy or the morality of her conduct."
The communication of the king's secret to Wolsey was immediately followed by more active measures, in which Wolsey, however averse, was obliged to co-operate. The king's treatise was now submitted to Sir Thomas More, who at once saw the peril of acting as a judge in so delicate a matter, declared that he was no theologian, and therefore unqualified to decide. It was next laid before the Bishop of Rochester, who decided against it. Henry then directed Sir Thomas to apply to some other of the bishops; but as he was hostile to the treatise himself, he was not likely to be a very persuasive pleader for it with others. None of the bishops would commit themselves, and Sir Thomas advised Henry to see what St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and the other fathers of the Church, said upon it. Henry then employed the more unscrupulous agency of Wolsey with the prelates, who plied them with all his eloquence; but the most that he could obtain from them was that the arguments of the king's book furnished a reasonable ground for a scruple, and that he had better apply to the Holy See, and abide by its decision.
With the nation at large, the proposal of the amorous king was still loss popular than with the bishops. They had a great veneration for the insulted Catherine, who had maintained for so many years the most fair and estimable character on the throne, and against whose virtue not a breath had ever been heard. They attributed this scheme to the acts of the cardinal, who was the enemy of the emperor and the warm ally of France; and they dreaded that the divorce might lead to war, and the suppression of the profitable trade with the Netherlands.
Unable to obtain much sanction at home, Henry at length referred the cause to the Pope; and Stephen Gardiner—then known by the humble name of Mr. Stephen—and Mr. Fox, proceeded to Italy with the Royal instructions. The grand difficulty was to effect the divorce in so legal and complete a manner that no plea might be able to be brought against the legitimacy of the proposed marriage; and for three months fresh instructions were issued and revoked, and issued in amended form again, which were laid before Dr. Knight, the king's agent at the Papal Court, and the three brothers Casali, Wolsey's agents, and before Staphilæo, Dean of the Rota, who had been gained over whilst lately in London.
But the emperor had not been idle. The Pope, as we have seen, had been shut up by the Imperial troops in the Castle of St. Angelo; and, in negotiation for his liberation, Charles had made it one of the principal stipulations of his release that he should not consent to act preparatory to a divorce without the previous knowledge of Charles himself. Scarcely had the Pope made his escape to Orvieto, as we have related, when the English emissaries appeared before him. Poor Clement was thrown into a terrible dilemma. The Imperialists were still in possession of Rome, and if he consented to the request of Henry, he had nothing to expect but vengeance from the emperor. To make the matter worse, a French army, under the command of Lautrec, and accompanied by Sir Robert Jerningham as the English commissary, which had been sent over the Alps to his assistance, and to enable him to recover his capital, loitered at Piacenza, and delayed the chance of the restoration and defence of Rome.
The English envoys presented to him two instruments, which had been prepared by the learned agents above named, by the first of which he was to empower Wolsey, or in case of any objection to him, Staphilæo, to hear and decide the case of the divorce: and by the second he was to grant Henry a dispensation to marry, in the place of Catherine, any other woman soever, even if she were already promised to another, or related to him in the first degree of affinity. This was a most extraordinary proceeding, an acknowledgment by Henry of the very power in the Pope which he affected to doubt and deny. The objection to the marriage of Henry with Catherine was that she was within the proscribed degree of affinity, having been his brother's wife, and moreover, as Henry was accused, and by this instrument appeared to admit, of having established the same degree of relationship, though illicitly, with the sister of Anne, Mary Boleyn, as had existed betwixt Catherine and his brother legally, this was to prevent any objections to the marriage with Anne.
The Pope signed both documents, but recommended that Henry should keep them secret till the French army, under Lautrec, should arrive, and free him from fears, even for his life, of the vengeance of the emperor. That having taken place, he promised to issue a second commission of the same import, which might at once be publicly proceeded with.
Scarcely, however, had Dr. Knight left Orvieto, when Gregorio da Casali brought a request from the English Court that a legate from Rome might be joined in the commission with Wolsey. To this Clement observed, that the King of England was pursuing a very circuitous course. If the king was really convinced in his conscience that his present marriage was null, he had better marry again, and then he himself or a legate could decide the question at once. But if a legate were to sit in jurisdiction, there must be appeals to himself in Rome, exceptions, and adjournments, which would make an affair of years of it. But, after saying this, the Pope signed the requisition.
At the instigation of Wolsey, who was anxious that the treaty which he had signed with France should be carried into effect, war was now declared formally against the emperor. The ambassadors of both France and England were recalled on the same day from the Imperial Court, and on the 27th of January, Clarenceaux and Guienne, kings-at-arms, defied Charles in the name of their respective sovereigns. Charles made a dignified and fitting reply, in which he had evidently by far the best of it. To Guienne, the French king-at-arms, he observed that his message was superfluous, as he and his master had long been at war; but to Clarenceaux he justified his conduct at length. In reply to the demands of the money which he had borrowed of Henry, he acknowledged the debt, and pledged himself to discharge it in due time and manner. As to those of Francis, which he had engaged to pay on the former declaration of war against him by himself and Henry, he said they were no longer due from him, as Francis had again taken their obligation upon himself, both in the Treaty of Madrid and the recent Treaty of London. To the alleged breach of promise of marriage to Mary of England, and the consequent amount of penalty, he denied the obligation; Henry having refused to allow of the solemnisation of the marriage when demanded, and had, moreover, consented to his marriage with Isabella. "God grant," he continued, "that I may not have better reason to defy him than he has to defy me. Can I pass over the injury with which he threatens my aunt, by his application for a divorce? or the insult which he has offered to me, by soliciting me to marry a daughter whom he now pronounces a bastard? But I am perfectly aware from whom these suggestions proceed. I would not satisfy the rapacity of the Cardinal of York, nor employ my forces to seat him in the chair of St. Peter; and he, in return, has sworn to be revenged, and now seeks to fulfil his purpose. But if war ensue, let the blood that must be shed rest where it ought, on the head of him who was the original instigator of it."
The news of the war with the emperor was received in England with the utmost disgust and discontent. The people denounced the cardinal as the troubler of the kingdom and the interrupter of its commerce. The merchants refused to frequent the new marts in France which were appointed, instead of their accustomed ones in the Netherlands. The wool-combers, spinners, and clothiers were stopped in their sales by this resolve on the part of the merchants; their people were all thrown out of work; and the spirit of commotion grew so strong, that there were serious fears of open outbreaks. In the cabinet, the cardinal had as little support in his policy as out of doors. There was not a member, except himself, who was an advocate of the French alliance; but all his colleagues at the council-table were eagerly watching for some chance which should hasten his downfall. Even the king himself was averse to the war with his nephew, the emperor; and especially as he was aware that the fear of Charles's resentment deterred Clement from cordially proceeding with the divorce; and Henry hinted that if peace were restored, Charles might be induced to withdraw his opposition. Fortunately, the Flemings were as much incommoded by the breach of commercial relations as the English; and the Archduchess Margaret, the Governess of the Netherlands, had the prudence to make a proposition that peace should be restored. Negotiations commenced, and were carried on for some time for a general pacification; but this being proved unattainable, a peace was concluded with the Netherlands, and the war was allowed to remain betwixt England and Spain.
But the fact was, the war, so far as it regarded those two countries, was merely nominal; it raged only in Italy, betwixt the French and the Imperialists. Henry had no money for war, and, besides, all his thoughts and energies were occupied in carrying through the divorce, which he now found a most formidable affair, fresh difficulties starting up at every step. Had Catherine been only an English subject, instead of the aunt of the great monarch of Germany, Flanders, and Spain, Henry would have made short work of it with his conscience, and the poor woman who was in the way. He would have charged her with some heinous and revolting crime, and severed her head from her shoulders at a blow, and all his difficulties with it. But he had not only royal blood to deal with, but all the ancient prejudices that surrounded it, and which would have made him execrated over the whole world, had he spilled it. He knew that Charles was watching intently to catch him at advantage, and he never felt himself safe in his proceedings.
It now occurred to him that, though the Pope had granted permission for Wolsey and the legate to decide this momentous question, yet he might be induced, by the influence of Charles, to revise and revert the sentence pronounced by his delegates: and this might involve him in the most inextricable dilemmas, especially should he have acted on the sentence of divorce, and married again. Once more, therefore, he dispatched Gardiner and Fox to Italy, in quest of more certain and irrevocable powers. They were to proceed to Venice, and there demand, in the names of the French and English kings, the consent of Francis being first obtained, the restoration of Ravenna and Cervia to the Roman state, a restoration for which Clement was extremely anxious. We are not told whether the Venetians were likely to make this sacrifice, or of any compensation to be made them; but the envoys were then to proceed to Orvieto, and calling the brothers Gregorio and Vincenzo da Casali to their aid, they were to demand from Clement, in gratitude for this promised favour, his signature to two especial instruments, which the envoys had brought with them from England. The first of these instruments was a dispensation of the same tenor as the former one, but more complete; the second was called a decretal bull, by which the Pope was to pledge himself to confirm the sentence pronounced by Wolsey and the legate; and, moreover, was to declare that the prohibition of marriage within certain degrees of affinity in Leviticus was a part of the Divine law, admitting of no exception or dispensation, notwithstanding the permission in Deuteronomy.
Clement was placed in a very trying situation. He was anxious to oblige Henry, anxious to secure Ravenna and Cervia; but to grant that bull was to annihilate the dogma of the Church's infallibility, for Julius II. had granted that dispensation, notwithstanding the fact of Catherine's union with Henry's brother. He had been also informed that Henry's object was only to gratify the wish of a woman who was already living in adultery with him. But this was rebutted by a letter already received from Wolsey, assuring the Pope that Anne Boleyn was a lady of unimpeachable character. Driven from this point, Clement still demurred as to the formidable bull; and only consented, after consultation with a convocation of cardinals and theologians, to issue an order for a commission to inquire into the validity of the dispensation granted by Pope Julius, and to revoke it, if it was found to have been by any means surreptitiously obtained.
Fox arrived in England with these instruments in the beginning of May, and was received by Henry in the apartments of Anne, who, on hearing the contents of them, imagining them much more decisive than they were, went into transports of exultation, believing all difficulties now over, and promised all sorts of advancement to the man who had brought them. There was a clause in the commission legitimising the Princess Mary, though the marriage of the mother should be proved invalid. An assembly of divines and casuists was immediately assembled, who subjected every clause of the instruments to a close examination; and Gardiner was again sent off to Italy with new instructions, requesting that Cardinal Campeggio should be joined in the commission with Wolsey, as a prelate more experienced in the forms of the Roman courts. Wolsey, in fact, became alarmed at the weight of responsibility which was threatening him; and it may be said to be this fear which involved Henry in all the difficulties and delays which followed. Wolsey could by the first commission have decided for the divorce, and Henry would have been at liberty to marry; but now the decision would have to be referred back to Rome, and Clement availed himself of this, as we shall see, to defer the dreaded decision, which must involve him irretrievably with the emperor.
Wolsey by this time had taken a serious view of his position in the matter, and it had filled him with the direst apprehensions. He saw on either hand a host of enemies ready to seize an occasion to overthrow him. He was hated by both queens, and by all their relatives and partisans. If he decided for the divorce, the party which was hostile to France, and all those in favour of Catherine, the emperor, and the Flemish alliance, so important to the commerce of the nation, would use every means in their power to destroy him on the first opportunity. If he decided against the divorce, the vengeance of his master, whose furious passions and terrible temper he well knew, would fall like a thunderbolt upon him, and the resentment of Anne, and all her relatives and followers, would ensure his certain downfall; whilst, if he favoured the new mistress, his fate would be little bettor, for he was confident both she and her kins-folk were, one and all, his implacable enemies and rivals, and only waited for her marriage to ruin him with the king, and thrust him down from his high estate. Under these circumstances he began to hesitate, and when Henry urged him to dispatch, he ventured to say that, though he was bound to the king by endless gratitude, and was ready to spend his goods, blood, and life in his service, yet he was under still greater obligations to God, and was bound to do justice, and if the dispensation of Julius was found to be valid, to pronounce it so.
At this declaration from his minister, whom he had raised from the dust, and set on a level with princes, the fury of Henry burst loose, and he heaped on him the most terrible terms of abuse and menace. Wolsey felt that he stood on the edge of a precipice, and prepared for his fall. He hastened to finish his different buildings, and to obtain the charters for his colleges, and declared to his intimate friends that as soon as the divorce was pronounced, and the succession to the crown firmly settled, he would retire to his diocese, and devote the remainder of his life to his ecclesiastical duties. Meantime, he forwarded a fresh despatch to Rome, imploring the Pope, in the most supplicatory terms, to sign the decretal bull, which he promised should be kept secret, considering that his possession of such a bull would be a sure guarantee that his decision would never be revoked. The Pope gave way to the importunities of Gardiner, so far as to sign the bull: but believing that if Wolsey once had it in his hands, he would publish it, and throw the whole onus of the measure upon him, he took care to commit it to the keeping of Campeggio, with the strict injunction never to let it go out of his hands, but to read it to the king, and the cardinal, and then privately to commit it to the flames.
At this exciting crisis, and in the pleasant month of May, the Court and capital were thrown into consternation by the re-appearance of that scourge of the nations in those days, the sweating sickness. We have related the terrible mortality attending this malady on its first appearance in 1485, but the mode of healing the disease was now so well understood by the physicians, that they who followed strictly their regulations were in no real danger. It only required to lie quietly in bed for twenty-four hours, when the danger was over. But any violation of this rule by which the patient was exposed to the air, stopped the profuse perspiration, and the patient died in a few hours. The disorder now appeared first amongst the female attendants of Anne Boleyn, and Henry had her hurried off forthwith to Hever Castle, in Kent, her father's residence. But she carried the aura of the complaint with her, and it spread through the family. She herself, and her father, Lord Rochford, were in extreme danger, but Dr. Butts, the Royal physician, who attended her, brought them safely through. Henry, who was as great a coward as he was a braggadocio of courage and heroism, fled precipitately from the infected place, shut himself up from all approach of his own servants or strangers, and frequently changed the scene of his residence. He was seized with such fear, that he became most pious and amiable. He sent for Queen Catherine, with whom he had long ceased to cohabit; expressed the greatest affection for her, lived with her as a most devoted husband, and attended constant devotions with her. He confessed every day, and took the sacrament with Catherine every Sunday and saint's day. He seemed struck with remorse for his late stern treatment of the cardinal, and sent to him regulations for his diet during the continuance of the pestilence, insisting on hearing from him every day, and on his being so near that the same physician might attend both of them in case of illness.
The cardinal, who had also fled like his sovereign, and concealed himself, was busied in settling the affairs of his soul. He made his will and sent it to Henry, as it no doubt was made magnificently in his favour, and he accompanied it by the most humble assurances that "never for favour, mede, gift, or promysse, had he done or consented to anything that myght in the least poynte re downde to the king's dishonour or disprouffit." Henry, in like manner, made his will, and sent it to Wolsey, "that he might see the tried and harty mynd that he had with him above all men living."
All this piety, humility, and return to domestic kindness and decorum, led people to imagine that the king had determined to abandon the divorce and the favourite lady, but no sooner had the contagion disappeared, than he recalled Anne Boleyn to Court and ordered the nobles to attend her levées as if she were already queen. All the time that she had been absent, and he had been living so like a good husband with his own wife, and had been so zealous in his devotions, he had been corresponding with his mistress in the most passionate and love-sick terms. These letters yet remain. Wolsey had suffered a severe attack of the disorder, or gave out that he had, in July, that he might touch the repentant mind of Henry, or keep him quiet till the arrival of Campeggio; and Anne Boleyn, who, as if to imitate her royal lover, or to flatter the cardinal on the eve of his exercising a fraction of such vital consequence to her ambition, had begun to fawn on Wolsey, wrote to him the most sadly hypocritical letters.
Campeggio, who had most reluctantly undertaken the appointment of commissioner in this case, was all this time slowly, very slowly, progressing towards England. He was an eminent professor of the canon law, and an experienced statesman. He had been a married man, and had a family; but, on the death of his wife, in 1509, he had taken orders, was made cardinal in 1517, and had been employed by Leo and his successors in various arduous cases to their highest satisfaction. Campeggio was now suffering all the agonies of the gout, and was eager to transfer this business to some one else; but Clement was at his wits' end with the difficulties of his situation, and thought that not only the abilities of Campeggio, but his gout itself was a thing to be thankful for, as it might give him plausible grounds for delay.
The poor Pope was environed by perplexities. The Emperor Charles watched all the movements of the affair with the closest attention. He vowed to support and defend his aunt. His ambassador, Guigonez, steadily opposed every proposition of Henry's ambassador, Gardiner. Charles, on the one hand, as well as Henry on the other, threatened, if the Pope decided against him, to renounce his obedience to the Holy See. To make matters worse, the arms of France were on the decline in Italy, those of the emperor in the ascendant. When Clement ventured to sign the decretal bull, there was a very different promise of affairs. Lautrec, the French general, was traversing Italy with a victorious army. He drove the Imperialists to the very walls of Naples, and had every prospect of securing that city by the goodwill of the inhabitants. But his successes were rendered abortive by the folly of Francis, who was spending his time amongst his mistresses, and neglected to send his valiant army either money or reinforcements. A contagious disease broke out in the French camp while vainly waiting for these; and Lautrec, the English commissary, Sir Robert Jerningham, and the greater part of the men perished, the enfeebled remnant being made prisoners of war. To have run in the face of this victorious emperor, with all Italy now prostrate at his feet, would have been madness in the Pope, and his only resource betwixt the two troublesome kings was all possible delay. Clement, indeed, was seriously disposed to make peace with Charles, but secretly: in which case it was quite out of the question that he would decide against Catherine.
Campeggio arrived in London at last, on the 7th of October, but in such a state of exhaustion, from the violent and long attacks of the gout, that he was carried in a litter to his lodgings, and remained for some time confined to his bed. Henry, with his characteristic hypocrisy, on the approach of the legate, again sent away his mistress, and recalled his obliging wife, with whom he appeared to be living on the most affectionate terms. They had the same bed and board, and went regularly through the same devotions. The arrival of the legate raised the courage of the people, who were unanimous in the favour of the queen, and though Wolsey made every exertion to silence and restrain them, they loudly declared that, let the king marry whom he pleased, they would acknowledge no successor in prejudice to Mary.
It was a fortnight before the legate was ready to see the king. On the 22nd of October he made his visit, and was, of course, most graciously received by Henry and the cardinal, but they could extract from him no opinion as to the probable result of the inquiry which was at hand. Henry and Wolsey exerted all their arts to win over the great man. The king paid him constant visits; all to mollify and draw him out, heaped all sorts of flatteries upon him, and made him the most brilliant promises. He had already made him Bishop of Salisbury, and presented him with a splendid palace in Rome; and he now offered to confer on him the rich bishopric of Durham, and knighted his son Ridolfo, by whom he was accompanied. But nothing moved the impenetrable ecclesiastic; for if favour's were heaped on him here, terrors awaited him at Rome, if he betrayed the trust of his master, the Pope. He replied to all solicitations that he had every disposition to serve the king, so far as his conscience would permit him. To produce a favourable bias in the opinions of the inexorable man, the judgments of eminent divines and doctors of the canon law on the king's case were laid before him, which he read, but still locked his own ideas in his own breast.
On the 27th of October Campeggio waited on the queen in private, and afterwards accompanied by Wolsey and four other prelates. Clement had strongly impressed it on the legate to try first to reconcile the king and queen; if that were found impossible, to prevail on Catherine to enter a convent; and if that were unavailing, to conduct the trial with all due form, but to take care to come to no conclusion—at all events, before he had consulted him. Campeggio soon saw that no reconcilement on the part of Henry was possible; he, therefore, as earnestly advised the queen to retire to a convent, stating to her the objections to the validity of her marriage. Catherine was calm, but firm. She said that for herself she took no thought, but that she would never consent to compromise the rights of her daughter by voluntarily admitting the pleas against her marriage. She demanded the aid of able counsel to defend her cause, chosen by herself from amongst the subjects of her nephew. This, to a certain extent, was granted. Several prelates and canonists were appointed, including two natives of Flanders, who came over, but returned again before the trial.
Antechamber in Hever Castle, Kent: Residence of Anne Boleyn.
The murmurs of the people continued so audibly, spite of the endeavours of Wolsey to subdue them, that Henry went into the city himself to strike a terror into the complainers. The king assembled the lord mayor, aldermen, and chief citizens at his palace in the Bridewell, and stated the injuries which he had received from the emperor, the reasons for his alliance with France, the causes of uneasiness with his marriage, his conscientious anxiety to do what was right, and his recourse therefore to the impartial judgment of the Holy See. He then warned all men to beware how they cast aspersions upon him, or arraigned his conduct, declaring that the proudest of them should answer with their heads the presumption of their tongues. He followed up this menacing language by ordering a strict search for all concealed arms, and forbade all foreigners, except ten of each nation, to remain in London.
Having thus shown that he was apprehensive of an insurrection on account of his treatment of the queen, and taken steps to prevent it, Henry next endeavoured to obtain from Campeggio the publication of the decretal bull, or, at least, that it should be shown to the Privy Council, but the legate remained firm to his instructions.
The king's agents at the same time plied Clement with persuasives to the same end, but with the same result. So far from giving way, the agents informed Henry that the emperor had given back to the Pope Civita Vecchia and all the fortresses which he had taken from the Holy See, and that it was to be feared that there was a secret understanding betwixt the Pope and Charles. At this news Henry dispatched Sir Francis Bryan, Master of the Henchmen, and Peter Vannes, his secretary of the Latin tongue, to Francis I., upbraiding him with his neglect in permitting this to go on; and they then went on to Italy, and called on the Pope to cite all Christian princes to meet in Avignon and settle their differences. In the meantime, these agents were to consult the most celebrated canonists at Rome on the following extraordinary points:—"1. Whether, if a wife were to make a vow of chastity, and enter a convent, the Pope could not, in the plenitude of his power, authorise the husband to marry again. 2. Whether, if the husband were to enter into a religious order, that he might induce the wife to do the same, he might not afterwards be released from his vow, and have liberty to marry. 3. Whether, for reasons of state, the Pope could not license a prince to have, like the ancient patriarchs, two wives, of whom one only should be publicly acknowledged, and enjoy the honours of royalty."
Henry was now goaded, by the difficulties by which he was surrounded, to such a pitch of desperation, that he was ready to turn monk, turn bigamist, and set up for an ancient patriarch, and at the same time prepared to play all sorts of unpatriarch-like tricks, to get rid of Catherine, and, like another Proteus, slip through her hands, and outwit her of the sovereignty. But, to his utter amazement, Catherine now showed him that she held him by a band ten times stronger than he had ever dreamed of. His great object was to prove that the dispensation of Julius II. was not valid, and was by no means proved to be authentic. Catherine now produced a copy of a breve of dispensation, which had been sent to her from Spain. It was granted by the same Pope, dated on the same day, but worded in such a manner as quashed all the objections made to the bull. The king and his party were thunderstruck. There was not an argument left them. But, at this awkward crisis, a sudden hope sprung up.
On the 6th of February, 1529, the intelligence arrived that Clement was dying, and by that time was probably dead. Now was the time to place Wolsey in the Papal chair, and thus end all difficulties. Francis promised cordially to aid in the attempt; but, to their dismay, Clement revived, and dashed to the ground all their hopes. Made desperate by these chances, Henry now gave the invalid Pope no rest from his solicitations. His agents forced themselves into his very sick chamber, and demanded that the fatal breve in Spain should be revoked, or that Charles should be compelled to exhibit the original within a certain time. Weak as the Pope's body was, his mind, however, remained firm. He declared that he could not depart from the course already prescribed, that Catherine had even entered a protest in his Court against the persons of her judges, and he recommended Henry, as the best advice he could give him, to lose no time, but to try and determine the matter in his own realm.
Every circumstance, indeed, concurred to recommend the necessity of this course. As the difficulties and delays increased—and Campeggio had been seven months in England—the passion of Henry increased with them. After some time he had recalled Anne Boleyn to Court, and it was now rumoured, that if they were not privately married, they were living as if they were. Anne had a separate establishment, and the king seemed to grudge no extravagance of expenditure on her account. Whilst the Princess Mary had only two payments of £20 each entered in the accounts of the privy purse betwixt November, 1529, and December, 1532, and Queen Catherine none, there were more than forty entries for the "Ladye Anne." There was £100, then £110 at Christmas, "for to disport her with." He paid her bills, one of which amounted to £217, and made her presents of jewels, robes, furs, silks, cloth of gold, a night-gown, and "linen shirts."
It was getting high time that a decision should be arrived at, and in the midst of this pressure, Henry was enraged to learn that there were secret meetings betwixt the Courts of Paris and Madrid, and that Henry's good brother and perpetual ally, Francis, was on the point of making peace with the emperor. Whilst Henry's wrath fell on Francis, that of Anne fell on Wolsey, whom she accused of being at the bottom of all the delays, and no friend to either the king or her. It was suddenly resolved to recall Gardiner from Rome, and proceed to the trial of the divorce at home.
The Court which was to try the cause met in the Parliament chamber in the Blackfriars, and summoned the king and queen to appear before it on the 18th of June. Henry appeared by proxy; Catherine obeyed the summons in person, but only to protest against the judges as the subjects of Henry, her accuser, and to appeal to the Pope. This appeal was overruled, and the Court adjourned to the 21st of June. On this day both Henry and Catherine appeared, the king sitting in state on the right hand of the cardinal and legate, and Catherine sat on their left, attended by four friendly bishops. On their names being called, Henry answered "Here!" but Catherine was unable to reply. On being again cited, however, she rose and repeated her protest on three grounds. First, as being a stranger; secondly, because the judges were subjects, and held benefices, the gift of her adversary; and last, because from such a Court she could not expect impartiality. This protest being held inadmissible, she rose again, crossed herself, and, leaning on her maids, approached the king, threw herself at his feet, and, according to Cavendish, the secretary of Wolsey, addressed him thus:—"Sir, I beseech you, for all the loves that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman and a stranger, born out of your dominions. I have here no assured friend, much less impartial counsel, and I flee to you as the head of justice within this realm. Alas! sir, wherein have I offended you? I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble, and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure. Never have I said or done anything contrary thereto, being always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had delight or dalliance, whether it were in little or much; neither did I ever grudge in word or countenance, or show a visage or spark of discontent. I loved all those whom you loved only for your sake, whether I had cause or no, whether they were my friends or mine enemies. This twenty years have I been your true wife, and by me you have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of the world, which has been no fault of mine. I put it to your conscience whether I came not to you a maid. If you have since found any dishonour in my conduct, then am I content to depart, albeit to my great shame and disparagement; but if none there be, then I beseech you thus lowlily to let me remain in my proper state. The king, your father, was accounted in his day as a second Solomon for wisdom; and my father, Ferdinand, was esteemed one of the wisest kings that had ever reigned in Spain: both, indeed, were excellent princes, full of wisdom and royal behaviour. Also, as me-seemeth, they had in their days as learned and judicious counsellors as are at present in this realm, who then thought our marriage good and lawful; therefore, it is a wander to me to hear what new inveatieas are brought up against me, who never meant aught but honestly. Ye cause me to stand to the judgment of this new Court, wherein yo do me much wrong if ye intend any kind of cruelty; for ye may condemn me for lack of sufficient answer, since your subjects cannot be impartial counsellors for me, as they dare not, for fear of you, disobey your will. Therefore, most humbly do I require you, in the way of charity, and for the love of God, who is the judge of all, to spare me the sentence of this new Court until I be advertised what way my friends in Spain may advise me to take; and if ye will not extend to me this favour, your pleasure be fulfilled, and to God do I commit my cause."
The queen having uttered this admirable speech, as confounding by its home truths and plain common sense, as it was affecting by its genuine pathos, rose up in tears, and instead of returning to her seat, as was expected, made a low obeisance to the king, and walked hastily out of the Court. "Madam," said Griffith, her receiver-general, on whose arm she leant, "you are called back." For the crier cried aloud with this summons, "Catherine, Queen of England, come back again into Court." But the queen said to Griffith, "I hear it well enough, but on—on, go you on; for this is no Court in which I can have justice. Proceed, therefore:" adding, "I never before disputed the will of my husband, and I shall take the first opportunity to ask pardon for my disobedience."
Henry saw the deep impression which the speech of Catherine had made on the Court, and rose to counteract it. He affected to lament "that his conscience should urge him to seek divorce from such a queen, who had ever been a devoted wife, full of gentleness and virtue." And this the king unblushingly said in the presence of numbers of his council, to whom a short time before he had accused the queen of a design against his life, and had been advised by them, in consequence, to keep at a distance from her, and especially to take the Princess Mary out of her power. He then went over all the old story of his conscience, and his scruples, and the opinion of Archbishop Warham, and the French Bishop of Tarbes, and that, in consequence, a licence of inquiry had been signed by all the bishops. On hearing this, Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who was one of the bishops who had attended the queen, cried out that he had never signed it. "But," said Henry, briskly, "here is your hand and seal." Fisher pronounced it a forgery. Warham admitted that it was not Fisher's signature, but that he authorised it to be signed for him. Fisher denied it positively, saying if he wished it to be done, he could have done it himself. At this the Court rose, but the doom of the honest bishop was sealed. He had been the king's tutor, and was supposed to stand high in his favour, but from this hour he was a marked man, and paid the penalty of his truth on the scaffold.
On the 20th of June Catherine was summoned before the Court again, but she refused to appear, sending in, however, and causing to be read, her appeal to the Pope. On this she was declared contumacious; and the king's counsellors asserted that the following points had been clearly proved:—That her marriage with Prince Arthur had been consummated, and, therefore, that with Henry was unlawful; that the dispensation of Julius II. had been obtained under false pretences and a concealment of facts; and that the Papal breve which had been sent from Spain was a manifest forgery. They therefore called on the judges to pronounce for the divorce. But even had all this been proved, which it had not, Campeggio was not intending to do anything of the kind. The peace which had been rumoured betwixt the Pope and the emperor had been signed on the 29th of June, and Clement was now much at his ease. On the 23rd of July, no progress being made, Henry summoned the Court, and demanded judgment in imperious terms. But Campeggio replied with unmoved dignity:—"I have not come so far to please any man for fear, meed, or favour, be he king or any other potentate. I am an old man, sick, decayed, looking daily for death; what should it then avail mo to put my soul in the danger of God's displeasure, to my utter damnation, for the favour of any prince or high estate in this world? Forasmuch, then, that I perceive that the truth in this case is very difficult to be known; that the defendant will make no answer thereunto, but hath appealed from our judgment; therefore, to avoid all injustice and obscure doubts, I intend to proceed no further in this matter until I have the opinion of the Pope and such others of his council as have more experience and learning. I, for this purpose, adjourn this Court till the commencement of the next term, in the beginning of October."
On hearing this astounding announcement, the friends of the king—who was himself a hearer and witness of the whole proceeding, in an adjoining apartment—were struck dumb, all except Brandon, the impetuous Duke of Suffolk, who, in his impatience, struck his fist on the table, and exclaimed, "Now is the old proverb verified: 'Never did cardinal bring good to England.'" Wolsey, who felt the accusation as particularly aimed at him, could not restrain himself; but rising, replied, with mingled warmth and dignity, "Sir, of all men in this realm, ye have the least cause to dispraise or be offended with cardinals; for, but for me, simple cardinal as I am, you at this moment would have had no head upon your shoulders, and no tongue therein to make so rude a report against us, who intend you no manner of displeasure. Know you then, proud lord, that I, and my brother here, will give place neither to you nor to any other in honourable intentions to the king, and a desire to accomplish his lawful wishes. But bethink ye, my lord, were ye the king's commissioner in a foreign country, having a weighty matter to treat upon, would ye not advertise His Majesty, or ever ye went through the same? Doubtless that ye would, right carefully; and, therefore, I advise you to banish all hasty malice, and consider that we be here nothing but commissioners for a time, and dare not proceed to judgment without the knowledge of our supreme head. It is for this cause that we do no more or less than our commission alloweth. Therefore, my lord, take my counsel; hold your peace, pacify yourself, and frame your words like man of honour and wisdom. Ye know best what friendship ye have received at my hands, and which I never before this time revealed to any one alive, either to my own glory or to your dishonour."
It would be difficult to conceive the state of agitation into which the Court of Henry was now thrown. Instead of receiving a decision, it was put off till October; and that was not the worst, for in a few days the news arrived that the commission of the cardinals had been revoked by the Pope on the 15th of July, or eight days previous to this adjournment, and that the Papal Court had entertained the appeal of Queen Catherine, and recalled Campeggio. Thus, not even in October, was there any chance of a decision, and had such taken place at this time it would have been null, the commission having previously expired. Still worse, whilst Henry was in the highest state of irritation, there arrived an instrument from Rome, forbidding him to pursue his cause by the legates, but citing him to appear by attorney in the Papal Court, under a penalty of 10,000 ducats.
All these circumstances fell with accumulating force on Wolsey. Anne Boleyn, in her chagrin, accused him as the cause of all. The king listened to these charges in the worst of moods; and called on Wolsey to try some means by which he could clear himself of such damaging suspicions, and open some new way to the accomplishment of the desired object. Several schemes appear to have been attempted. In the first place, Wolsey prevailed on Campeggio to accompany him in an interview with the queen, for the purpose of seeking to bend her mind to concession. The cause of this was a fiery scene with Henry. He had sent for Wolsey, and had poured out his storm of fury upon him for a good hour. On returning to his barge, the Bishop of Carlisle, who was waiting in it for him, observed that it was warm weather. "Tea, my lord," said Wolsey, "and if you had been where I have been, you would say it was hot." That night, two hours after he had retired to bed, if not to rest, he was called up again by the father of Anne Boleyn, now Earl of Wiltshire, by command of the king, to hasten his going to Bridewell palace, that he might be ready to accompany Campeggio at an earlier hour in the morning, such was the impatience of the king, Lady Anne, and her friends. Wolsey is said again so far to have forgotten prudence as to rate the earl soundly for his eagerness in pushing on this matter; so soundly that the old man sat on the bedside, and wept bitterly all the time the cardinal was dressing. All parties seem to have been worked up at this period into a state in which their patience and their discretion had forsaken them.
Early in the morning Wolsey and Campeggio waited on the queen, and requested an interview. She was at work in the midst of her maids, but she arose just as she was, and came to them in the presence-chamber, with a skein of silk round her neck. "You see," said the queen, showing the silk, "my employment. In this way I pass my time with my maids, who are indeed none of the ablest counsellors. But I have no other in England; and Spain, where there are those on whom I could rely, is, God knoweth, far off." They begged to see Her Majesty in private; but Catherine, at first, said there could be nothing affecting her that the people about her might not hear. Wolsey then addressed her in Latin, but she desired him to speak English. Then Wolsey communicated the king's message, which was to offer her everything which she could name of riches and honours, and the succession of Mary next after the male issue of the next marriage, if she would consent to a divorce. Upon this the queen again repeated that her position was that of a stranger, destitute of the support and counsel of friends; and, begging the cardinals would be good unto her, and advise her for the best, she led the way to her private room. The result of this interview was never known, but it was clear from the future, that it did not move Catherine from her determination to stand on her rights.
This attempt having failed, another was tried. The king set out on a procession, taking Catherine with him, and treating her with all the honours due to the Queen of England. They went first to Moore, the Royal residence in Hertfordshire, where they remained a month, and then went on to Grafton, in Northamptonshire, the ancient seat of the Wydvilles. The design of this journey appears to have been that Henry, by affected kindness and respect, should soften Catherine, and move her to consent to the separation. But the experiment decidedly failed, for we find that at Grafton the Lady Anne was there as well as the queen; that the king had used all his persuasion to induce the queen to become a nun, but that he found it lost time, and again neglected her, spending all his time with Anne Boleyn. Catherine contrived, though strictly watched, to correspond with Rome and Spain, such expedients for her transmission of letters being used as presents of poultry, with which letters passed enclosed in oranges or the like.
All this time Anne Boleyn, her father, and the other enemies of Wolsey, were working hard for his ruin. Everything was brought forward against him that could be thought of. They declared that he was a settled enemy of Anne's; that he had long been in treasonable correspondence with France; and that he had been bribed by Louise, the regent, to order the Duke of Suffolk to retreat from Montdidier, when he might have advanced and taken Paris. Probably, since the cardinal had so sharply snubbed Suffolk in the court at the trial, he might be ready to assert this. All this Henry drank in with obvious avidity. The cardinal was no longer called to Court, and was never consulted on special affairs, except by messengers. His letters were intercepted and read, to find cause of accusation against him. The courtiers, and especially the great families immediately connected with the Boleyns, as Norfolk and others, were all eager for a share of the cardinal's enormous wealth. So open was this become, that they talked of it freely at table, and, moreover, added that the cardinal once gone, they could relieve the Church of its huge estates too.
Wolsey was perfectly aware of all this; and his sole hope was in obtaining an interview with the king, on whom he trusted to exercise some of his old influence. Such an interview came, but it brought little comfort. Campeggio was about to take leave, and return to Rome: Wolsey was allowed to accompany him to Court, and the two legates proceeded to Grafton, where the king was. The Italian legate was received with all the respect due to his rank, and was even presented with some parting gifts, as customary on such occasions; but Wolsey's reception was cold; and he found that though Campeggio had an apartment prepared for him, there was none for himself, and he was obliged to retire for the night to Towcester. At first he had hoped that things were not so bad; for when the cardinals were admitted to kiss the king's hand, and all eyes were fixed on Wolsey, expecting to see the king frown on him, they were greatly confounded and astonished to see Henry raise him up with both hands, and, taking him aside, converse with him for a considerable time with his old familiarity. The cardinals dined with the ministers; Henry, with the Lady Anne, in her chamber. After dinner he sent for him again, led him by the hand into his closet, kept him in private conference till it was dark, and gave him his command to return on the following morning.
This wavering of Henry, this return, as it were, of the old feeling of regard for the cardinal, which continued to the last, warrants the belief that, if the party against him at Court had not been of so peculiar a kind—if the wit, the influence, and the witchcraft of woman had not been set with a deadly power against him, he might still have triumphed over all his enemies, and remained the all-powerful minister, perhaps, till his death. But, as he said, "there was a night-crow that possessed the Royal ear against him, and misrepresented all his actions." No one saw so clearly as Anne the lurking regard in the bosom of the king, the strength of the old habit of consulting with him, and depending on his judgment. This was perceived by Du Bellai, the French ambassador, who attributes the fall of Wolsey entirely to Anne Boleyn. He greatly commiserated his fate, and in one of his letters says, "The worst of the evil is, that Mademoiselle de Boulen has made her friend promise that he will never hear him speak, for she well thinks that he cannot help having pity upon him." Shakespeare makes Wolsey himself assert this as the one insuperable fatality of his case:—
"There was the weight that pulled me down, O Cromwell!
The king has gone beyond me—all my glories
In that one woman I have lost for ever!
No sun shall ever usher forth my honours.
Or gild the noble troops that waited
Upon my smiles."
Accordingly, though all the Court was thrown into consternation by the kind manner in which the king had received the cardinal, and were trembling for their own safety, before morning the night-crow had again succeeded in embittering Henry's mind against his old minister, and extracted from him a promise that he would never speak to him more. In that lay the victory, and she know it. If the cardinal was kept out of sight and hearing, his destiny was sealed by the deadly enmity and art of the new and all-powerful favourite. When, therefore, Wolsey returned in the morning, the king was already on horseback, and, instead of seeing him, he sent him a message to attend the council, and then depart with Campeggio, and so he rode away. Cavendish, Wolsey's faithful secretary, says, "This sudden departure of the king was the especial labour of Mistress Anne Boleyn, who rode with him purposely to draw him away, because he should not return till after the departure of the cardinals. The king rode that morning to view a piece of ground to make a park of (afterwards called Harewell Park), where Mistress Anne had provided him a place to dine in, fearing his return before my lord cardinal's departure."
Campeggio took his leave of England at the commencement of Michaelmas term; but he was not permitted to depart without a gross insult. At Dover the officers of the customs broke into his apartment, and charged him with endeavouring to carry off Wolsey's treasure. The stern old legate, who had repeatedly refused Henry's bribes, by which he might have enriched himself to any extent, was not likely to engage in any such transaction; of which the contents, on being turned out, displayed the most surprising proofs, for there was such an assemblage of old shoes, old clothes, roasted eggs, and dry crusts, as were only the fitting possessions of a most rigorous and abstinent ascetic. The real quest was after the legate's papers, the all-sufficient decretal bull, any letters of Wolsey to the Pope, and, still more anxiously sought after, a set of Henry's love-letters to Anne Boleyn, which, by some means, had got into the legate's hands. The search was fruitless. The wily Italian had probably obeyed the injunction of the Pope to the letter, and burnt the bull, and sent forward before him the especial prize of the love-letters, which arrived safe, and are still shown in the library of the Vatican.
Wolsey did not escape so well as the indignant Campeggio. On the 9th, the same month as he opened the Court of Chancery, ho perceived that there was a deadly coldness as of winter frost around him. No one did him honour—the sun of Royal favour had set to him for ever. On the same day Hales, the attorney-general, filed two bills against him in the King's Bench, charging him with having incurred the penalty of præmunio by acting in the kingdom as the Pope's legate. This was a most barefaced accusation, for he had accepted the legative authority by Henry's express permission; had exercised it for many years with his full knowledge and approbation, and in the affairs of the divorce, at the earnest request of the king. But Henry VIII. had no law but his own will, and never could want reasons for punishing those who had offended him. Wolsey now saw that his doom was fixed, and his spirit sank prostrate and irrevocably.
The fall of Wolsey is one of the most complete and perfect things in the history of man. The hold which he had so long on that fierce and lion-like king—that passionate and capricious king—is amazing; but at once it gives way, and down he goes for ever. But great as he was in his prosperity, so he is great in his ruin. There are those who accuse him of servility and meanness, but they do not well comprehend human nature. Wolsey know himself, his master, and the world. Wolsey knew himself. He knew his own proud ambition, and he knew that his story must stand for ever a brilliant point in the annals of his country; but to give it an effect that would cover a multitude of sins, and make him, who had hitherto been a daring adventurer and a despot of no mean degree, an object of lasting commiseration, it was necessary to fall with dignity and die with penitence. He knew his master, that his favour was gone, his resistance at the pitch, and kept there by a fair enemy whom there was no thrusting away. His cupidity once kindled, there was nothing to expect but destruction, certain and at hand.
"Nay, then, farewell!
I have touched the highest point of all my greatness;
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more."
In the contemplation of Wolsey in his fallen condition, we are so much affected by his humility, his candour, and his sorrow, that we forget his former haughtiness and his crimes. He never accuses his sovereign of injustice; he breaks out in no passion against him; he acknowledges that he was the creature of his favour; and that all he had, rank and fortune, were his to take away, as he had given them. His tears for so great a reverse, for such a stripping down of fame and honour, are natural; and his tears and sorrow for his faithful servants open up the noblest place in his heart, and go far to make one love and honour him. "We cannot help comparing the career of Thomas à Becket and his own. Probably under the same circumstances Wolsey might have put on the same air of menace and defiance. But here matters were in a different position. Henry VIII. was not Henry II., nor was the Papal power now of the same terrible force in England. Bluff Harry was one that could and would have his will, outrageous and bloody as it might be; and the spirit of the Reformation was already shaking the tiara to the ground in this country.
The Dismissal of Cardinal Wolsey.
Of Wolsey, as he appeared at this moment, scathed and stunned by the thunderbolt of the Royal wrath, we have a striking picture. The Bishop of Bayonne, the French ambassador, says in a letter:—"I have been to visit the cardinal in his distress, and I have witnessed the most striking change of fortune. He explained to me his hard case in the worst rhetoric that was ever heard. Both his tongue and his heart failed him. He recommended himself to the pity of the king and madame (Francis I. and his mother) with sighs and tears; and at last left me, without having said anything near so moving as his appearance. His face is dwindled to one-half its natural size. In truth, his misery is such that his enemies, Englishmen as they are, cannot help pitying him. Still, they will carry things to extremities. As for his legation, the seals, his authority, &c., he thinks no more of them. He is willing to give up everything, even the shirt from his back, and live in a hermitage, if the king would but desist from his displeasure."
Wolsey at Leicester.
On the 17th of October Henry sent the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk to demand the Great Seal; and they are said to have done that duty with some ungenerous triumph. But Wolsey delivered up his authority without complaint, and only sent in an offer surrendering all his personal estate to his gracious master, on condition that he might retire to his diocese on his church property. But the property of Wolsey had long been riveting the greedy eye of Henry, and, next to Anne Boleyn, that was, probably, the "weight which pulled him down." A message was soon brought him by the same noblemen, that the king expected an entire and unconditional submission, whereupon he granted to the king the yearly profits of his benefices, and threw himself on his mercy. It was then intimated that His Majesty meant to reside at York Place (Whitehall) during the Parliament, and that Wolsey might retire to Esher Place, in Surrey, a house belonging to his bishopric of Winchester. The fallen cardinal prepared to obey, but before leaving his splendid abode of York Place, he delivered a complete inventory of its contents to the king's messenger. These contents are thus described by Cavendish, his own secretary:—"In his gallery were set divers tables, upon which were laid divers and great stores of rich stuffs; as whole pieces of silk of all colours, velvets, satins, muffs, taffetas, grograms, scarlets, and divers rich commodities. Also, there were a thousand pieces of fine hollands, and the hangings of the gallery with cloth of gold and cloth of silver, and rich cloth of bodkin of divers colours, which were hanged in expectation of the king's coming. Also, on one side of the gallery were hanged the rich suits of capes of his own providing, which were made for the colleges of Oxford and Ipswich; they were the richest that ever I saw in all my life. Then had he two chambers adjoining the gallery, the most commonly called the gilt chambers, wherein were set two broad and long tables, whereupon was set such abundance of plate of all sorts as was almost incredible to be believed, a great part being all of clear gold; and upon every table and cupboard where the plate was set, wore books importing every kind of plate, and every piece, with the contents and weight thereof."
Hampton Court Palace Wolsey had given to the king before; and the unavailing sacrifice which he now made amounted to 500,000 crowns, equal to half a million of our money.
Having delivered over his lordly abode, he descended, and entered his barge. He there found the Thames covered with boats full of people of all degrees, who were waiting to see him conveyed to the Tower, for such was the news which had flown from Court all over the city. But they were greatly disappointed to see his barge turn its prow up the river instead of downwards. He ascended to Putney, where he mounted his mule, and was sorrowfully riding up the hill when there came spurring after him Sir Henry Norris, one of the king's chamberlains, bringing him a ring which the king had taken from his own finger, and accompanied it by a comfortable message. Sir Henry delivered it, saying, "Therefore, take patience, for I trust to see you in a better estate than ever." At this unexpected and extraordinary occurrence, the cardinal, wholly overcome by his emotions, dismounted from his mule, fell on his knees in the road, and, pulling off his cap, fervently thanked God for such happy tidings. Then arising, he told Sir Henry that his message was worth half a kingdom; but that he had scarcely anything left but the clothes on his back, yet he found a small gold chain and crucifix, which he presented to him. He next lamented that he had no token of his gratitude to send to his sovereign, but recollecting himself, he said, "Stay, there is my fool that rides beside me. I beseech thee take him to Court, and give him to His Majesty. I assure you, for any nobleman's pleasure, he is worth a thousand pounds." But the poor fool was so attached to his master, that it required six stout yeomen to force him away, and carry him to the king.
On the 3rd of November, after the long intermission of seven years, a Parliament was called together. The main object of this unusual occurrence was to complete the ruin of Wolsey, and place it beyond the power of the king to restore him to favour—a circumstance of which the courtiers were in constant dread. The committee of the House of Lords presented to the king a string of no less than forty-four articles against the fallen minister, enumerating and exaggerating all his offences, and calling upon the monarch to take such order with him "that he should never have any power, jurisdiction, or authority hereafter, to trouble, vex, and impoverish the Commonwealth of this your realm, as he hath done heretofore, to the great hurt and damage of almost every man, high or low." This address was carried to the Commons for their concurrence; but there Thomas Cromwell, who by the favour of Wolsey had risen from the very lowest condition to be his friend and steward, and was now advanced to the king's service by the particular recommendation of the cardinal, attacked the articles manfully, and caused the Commons to reject them, as the members were persuaded that Cromwell was acting by suggestion of the king; which is very probable, for so far from Henry showing Cromwell any dislike for this proceeding, he continued to promote him, till he became his prime minister, and was created Earl of Essex.
The conduct of the king, moreover, towards the fallen man continued in other respects to keep alive his hopes, and fill his rivals with terror, who felt that if he were returned to power there was no safety for them. Wolsey found the episcopal house at Esher large, but almost destitute of furniture, or of any means of comfort or convenience. He found that neither his accommodation nor his funds would permit him to retain his retinue of attendants, and on the 5th of November he dismissed the greater part of them, amid floods of tears shed both by himself and them; for, with all his pride and injustice out of doors, he had been a kind master at home, and was greatly beloved by his servants. Some of the gentlemen who could support themselves refused to leave him. But when his servants were dismissed, the solitude of Esher Place was no peace. The struggle at Court was going violently on betwixt the king's deep and lingering affection for the cardinal and the resolve of Anne Boleyn and her relatives to make themselves safe against him. This state of things, therefore, produced a constant oscillation of favour and disfavour, gleams of sunshine and then denser gloom, which kept the unhappy man in a murderous alternation of spirit. One day, the 6th of November, the day after he had parted with his servants, and was very low, Sir John Russell came in great secrecy from the king, at Greenwich, bringing a most comfortable assurance that Henry was really not offended with him; and a few days after came Judge Shelley, demanding a formal and perpetual surrender of York Place, which was the property of the See of York, and the alienation of it illegal. In vain he represented that it was a sacrilegious act: he was obliged to comply. "Thus," says Cavendish, "my lord continued at Esher, daily receiving messages from the Court, some good and some bad, but more ill than good."
The design of Wolsey's enemies, we are told, was to drive him to some rash act, by which he should commit himself irrevocably with the king, or to wear him out by anxiety; and in this they nearly succeeded, for at Christmas he fell so dangerously ill that all about him believed him to be dying. This news once more roused all the slumbering regard of Henry for the cardinal. He instantly dispatched Dr. Butts, his own physician, to ascertain his real state; and on Butts reporting that he was dangerously ill, and that if he did not receive some comfort from His Majesty, he would be a dead man in four days, "God forbid," exclaimed the king, "that he should die, for I would not lose him for twenty thousand pounds. Go immediately to him and do your best for him." Nothing, replied the physician, would do him any good if the king did not send him a gracious message. On this, Henry took a ring from his finger, charged with a ruby on which his own picture was engraved, commanding the doctor to deliver it to him, and assure him that he was not offended with him in his heart, adding many kind expressions. At his request, Anne Boleyn also took her tablet of gold that hung at her side and delivered it to the doctor, "with many gentle and loving words." When Butts arrived with these messages, the cardinal rose up in his bed, received the token with every sign of delight, thanked the doctor heartily, and in a few days was out of danger.
Henry having now seized upon all the cardinal's property, the incomes of his bishoprics, abbeys, and other benefices, his colleges at Ipswich and Oxford, with all their furniture and revenues, his pensions, clothes, and even his very tomb, seemed contented to leave him his life. He, therefore, on the 12th of February, 1530, granted him a full pardon for all his real and pretended crimes. He allowed him, moreover, to retain the revenues of York. He gave him also a pension of 1,000 marks a year out of the bishopric of Winchester, and soon after sent him a present of £3,000 in money; and in plate, furniture, &c., the value of £3,374 3s. 7d., and gave him leave to reside at Richmond.
This new flow of Royal favour wonderfully revived the cardinal's hopes, and as vividly excited the fears of the Boleyn party. To have this formidable man residing so near them as Richmond was too perilous to be thought of. Some fine morning the king might suddenly ride over there, and all be undone. Henry was, therefore, besieged with entreaties to remove him further from the Court, and to such a distance as should prevent the possibility of an interview. They prevailed, and Wolsey received an order through his friend Cromwell to go and reside in his archbishopric of York. To the cardinal, who felt a strong persuasion that if he could but obtain an interview with the king all would be set right, this was next to a death-warrant. He entreated Cromwell to obtain leave for him to reside at Winchester, but this was refused, and the Duke of Norfolk, Anne's uncle, sent Wolsey word that if he did not get away immediately into the North, he would come and tear him in pieces with his teeth. "Then," said Wolsey, "it is time for me to be gone."
Cromwell, faithful to the last, obtained a present of 1,000 marks from the king for him, and a most gracious message; and the great fallen man set out, with something of his old state, towards the scene of his true pastoral duties, but of exile to him as a statesman. He went progressing slowly on his way from stage to stage, riding on his mule in a grave sadness, and followed by 160 attendants, a long train of wagons containing his plate and furniture, and paused first at Peterborough, where ho spent Easter. From the moment that he commenced this journey he seemed a new man—to have left the haughty minister of state behind, and brought only the Christian bishop; and in no part of his life did he appear to so much advantage. He seemed really to have adopted the spirit of the words which Shakespeare puts into his mouth—
"I feel my heart new opened."
Wherever he came, he immediately won the esteem and love of people of all ranks, by his hospitality and pleasant affability. He spent the summer and autumn at his diocesan houses of Scroby and Southwell, and arrived at his castle of Cawood, seven miles from York, only at Michaelmas. Both at Southwall, Scroby, and now at Cawood, he set about at once to put the houses of the diocese into perfect repair. His passion for building was as strong upon him as ever. He had soon 300 labourers and artisans engaged in the restoration of Cawood. As at Scroby, so there, he went to some neighbouring church, every Sunday, where he performed mass, and one of his chaplains preached. After service, he invited the clergy and most respectable parishioners to dinner, and distributed alms to the poor. Everywhere on his journey he had shown the same unassuming regard to the people, who flocked to behold him. On a wild moor near Ferrybridge, on the last day of his journey, he had found upwards of 500 children brought together and assembled round a great stone cross, to seek his blessing and confirmation at his hands. He immediately alighted and confirmed them all, so that it was late that night before he reached Cawood. He treated the clergy of his cathedral in the kindest manner, telling them he was come to live amongst them as a friend and brother.
Delighted with their metropolitan, the clergy waited upon him in a body, and begged that he would allow himself to be installed in his cathedral, according to the custom of his predecessors; and Wolsey, after taking time to consider of it, consented, on condition that it should be done with as little splendour as possible. No sooner, however, was this news divulged, than the noblemen, gentlemen, and clergy of the county sent into York great quantities of provisions, and made preparations for a most magnificent feast. But this was suddenly prevented by a very unexpected event. The accounts of the cardinal's doings, his buildings, his hospitality, and his great popularity, were all carried to London, and greatly exaggerated to the king, with every art to excite his jealousy. Cromwell gave him information of this, and warned him earnestly to keep himself as quiet and as much out of public view as possible, or his untiring enemies would bring mischief out of it for him. It was too late. On the 4th of November, only three days before the grand installation was to come off, the Earl of Northumberland, accompanied by Sir William Walsh and a number of horsemen, arrived at Cawood. Wolsey was sitting at dinner, and he rose, expressing a wish that the earl had come a little earlier; for he had been brought up in his household, and he therefore jumped at the conclusion that he had been selected to bear him good tidings. But this selection had probably been made more by the will of Anne Boleyn than of the king, and for a very different object. The Earl was Anne's old lover, who, as the young Lord Percy, had been torn from her by the hand of Wolsey, though at the dictation of the king; and the proud beauty showed that she had not yet forgotten or forgiven the circumstance. Wolsey, believing in good news, went out to receive the earl with a cheerful countenance; and, observing his numerous retinue, he said, "Ah! my lord, I perceive that you observe the precepts and instructions which I gave you, when you were abiding with me in your youth, to cherish your father's old servants." He then took the earl affectionately by the hand, and led him into a bedchamber. There he no doubt expected to hear some good tidings; but the earl was observed to be much affected, and, with much embarrassment and hesitation, he at length laid his hand on the old man's shoulder, and said, "My lord, I arrest you of high treason." Wolsey was struck dumb, and stood motionless as a statue. He then bowed to the order, and prepared for his journey. On Sunday the earl set out with his prisoner, and on the 9th of November, on the third day, they arrived at Sheffield Park, the residence of the Earl of Shrewsbury, steward of the king's household. The earl, Lady Shrewsbury, and their family, received the cardinal with much kindness and respect, and he remained with them a fortnight, awaiting the further orders of the Court. During this anxious time his constitution gave way; he was seized with dysentery. Whilst in this suffering state. Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, arrived, with four-and-twenty of his guards, to conduct him to London. The Earl of Shrewsbury, fearing the effect of this news on the cardinal in his weak condition, requested Cavendish to communicate it to him in the best manner that he could. Cavendish, therefore, told him he brought him good news: the king had sent Sir William Kingston to conduct him to his Royal presence. "Kingston!" cried the cardinal; and clapping his hand on his thigh, gave a great sigh. The Earl of Shrewsbury entered, and told him that he had letters from his friends at Court, who assured him that the king expressed the greatest friendship for him, and was determined to restore him to favour. Then followed Kingston himself, who fell on his knees, and refusing to move from that posture till he had delivered the Royal message, he assured the cardinal of the king's great goodness towards him, and that he had commanded him to obey him in all things. But the cardinal, who was too well acquainted with the real meaning of such things, replied, "Rise, sir; I know what is designed for me. I thank you, sir, for your good news. I am a diseased man, but I will prepare to ride with you tomorrow."
Ruins of Leicester Abbey, the scene of the Death of Cardinal Wolsey.
In a state of great exhaustion, Wolsey set out, and on the third evening reached Leicester Abbey, where the abbot, at the head of a procession of the monks, with lighted torches, received him. He was completely worn out, and being lifted from his mule, said, "I am come, my brethren, to lay my bones amongst you." The monks carried him to his bed, where he swooned repeatedly; and the second morning his servants, who had watched him with anxious affection, saw that he was dying. He called to his bedside Sir William Kingston, and, amongst others, addressed to him these remarkable words:—"Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is the just reward that I must receive for my diligent pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only to my prince. Let me advise you to take care what you put in the king's head, for you can never put it out again. I have often kneeled before him, sometimes three hours together, to persuade him from his will and appetite, but could not prevail. He is a prince of most royal courage, and hath a princely heart; for, rather than miss or want any part of his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom."
In what the dying cardinal said as to the impossibility of ever putting an idea out of Henry's head that you once put in, no doubt he alluded to his having suggested the idea of the divorce and the marriage of a French princess, which suggestion had thus fatally worked for himself. On the 29th of November, 1530, thus died Thomas, Lord Cardinal Wolsey, one of the most extraordinary characters that was ever raised up and again overthrown by the mere will of a king, and who unconsciously contributed to one of the most extensive revolutions of human mind and government which the world has known. No words can more perfectly present the two sides of his character than those of our great dramatist:—
"Queen Catherine . . . . He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one, that by suggestion
Tied all the kingdom: simony was fair play;
His own opinion was his law: i' the presence
He would say untruths; and be ever double.
Both in his words and meaning.
"Griffith. This cardinal,
Though from an humble stock, undoubtedly
Was fashioned to much honour. From his cradle
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading:
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not;
But to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.
And though he were unsatisfied in getting
(Which was a sin), yet in bestowing, madam.
He was most princely."
Cavendish, the faithful secretary of Wolsey, rode on from Leicester to London, to announce the decease of the cardinal to the king. He found him engaged in a match of archery in the park of Hampton Court, that magnificent pile raised and presented to him by that magnificent minister. When the sport was finished, and Cavendish had delivered his solemn message, Henry seemed considerably touched by it, but almost immediately began to inquire with great eagerness after a sum of £1,500, which some one had told him Wolsey had secreted in some private place. Cavendish assured him that it had been put into the hands of a certain priest. Henry questioned him over and over again regarding this coveted sum, and said:—"Then, keep this gear secret between yourself and me: three may keep counsel, if two be away. If I thought my cap knew my mind, I would cast it into the fire and burn it. And if I hear any more of this, I shall know by whom it has been revealed."
In following the story of Wolsey to its close, we have a little overstepped the progress of affairs. As soon as the great man was out of the way, a ministry was formed of of the leading persons of the Boleyn party. The Duke of Norfolk, Anne's uncle, was made president of the council, Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, lord marshal, and the Earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne Boleyn, had a principal place. Sir Thomas More, unfortunately for him as it proved, was made lord chancellor instead of Wolsey, a promotion which he reluctantly accepted. Amongst the king's servants, Stephen Gardiner, who had been introduced and much employed by Wolsey, still remained high in the king's favour, and occupied the post of his secretary. Gardiner, a bigoted Catholic, and afterwards one of the most bloody persecutors of the reformers, now, however, in trying to promote the wishes of the king for the divorce, unconsciously promoted the Reformation.
The king, returning from the progress which he had made to Moore Park, and to Grafton, remained one night at Waltham. Gardiner and Fox were lodged in the house of a Mr. Cressy, a gentleman of good family. After supper the conversation turned on the grand topic of the day—the king's divorce, and Gardiner and Fox detailed the difficulties that surrounded it, and the apparent impossibility of getting the Pope to move in it. A grave clergyman, the tutor of the family, of the name of Thomas Cranmer, after listening to the discourse, was asked by Fox and Gardiner what he thought of the matter. At first ho declined to give his opinion on so high a matter, but being pressed, he said, he thought they were wrong altogether in the way they were seeking the divorce. That as the Pope evidently would not commit himself upon the subject, his opinion was that they should not waste any more time in fruitless solicitations at Rome, but submit this plain question to the most learned men and chief universities of Europe: "Do the laws of God permit a man to marry his brother's widow?" If, as he imagined, the answers were in the negative, the Pope would not dare to pronounce a sentence in opposition to the opinions of all these learned men and learned bodies.
On the return of the Court to Greenwich, Fox and Gardiner related this conversation to the king, who instantly swore that "the man had got the right sow by the ear," and ordered him instantly to be sent for to Court. Cranmer, on his arrival, maintained his opinion in a manner which wonderfully delighted Henry, and raised his hope of having at length hit on the true mode of solving the difficulty. He immediately retained Cranmer in his service, appointed him his chaplain, and placed him in the family of Anne's father, the Earl of Wiltshire, where he was to write a book in favour of the divorce, and to devote himself to the promotion of this great object. Cranmer, like almost every one who took the fancy of Henry, soon rose to great honour, became Archbishop of Canterbury, a great champion of the Reformation, and ended his life, like most others of the great courtiers of that monarch, by a violent death. Fatal were the honours conferred by Henry VIII.: they led rapidly upwards to the block or the fagot.
Cranmer went zealously into the work appointed for him, for it was a grand step towards that object which he had above all others secretly in his heart—the reformation of the Church; and no doubt his friends and coadjutors gave him all possible aid in his labours. The course which he was pursuing went not only to effect Henry's divorce, but to establish the fact that the laws of God were to be appealed to in the Bible, and not in the Pope; and this once determined in so public and notorious a case, would create a broach betwixt Rome and England which never would be filled up. He very soon, therefore, had his treatise ready, which was printed—for now that great engine, the press, was beginning its revolutionising operations—and was diligently circulated, both at home and abroad.
Agents were dispatched to obtain the required opinion from the different universities, both in England and on the Continent, well provided with that most persuasive of rhetoricians—money. At his own universities, however, Henry found no little opposition. The doctors and seniors were, out of hope of promotion, found ready to decide as the king wished; but the younger members were determined and uproarious in resistance. The subject was debated in Convocation at Oxford with great heat and confusion, and the assembly was obliged to be dissolved without coming to any conclusion. Henry was highly indignant at this proceeding, and addressed one of his bullying remonstrances to the university, calling on the heads of houses to bring their juniors into more order, or those young gentlemen, in attempting to play the masters, might find it not good to provoke hornets. "The wise men," as Anthony à Wood terms them, did their best, but they did not silence or bring over the younger men without immense labour. Dr. Fox, Dr. Bell, and Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, were down there, doing everything to overawe or win over the refractory; and, after incredible labour, they succeeded in procuring a formal declaration in favour of the divorce. In Cambridge the same result was obtained by the same coercion—by threats and promises; and the seal of the university was attached to a formal document, declaring the marriage of Henry and Catherine to be illegal.
Thomas Cranmer. From the original of Gerbicus Fliccus, in the British Museum.
Private Marriage of Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII.
Henry as genuine. From Orleans, Toulouse, and Bourges, and from the civilians of Angers, similar decisions were procured, but the theologians of the last city maintained the validity of the existing marriage. The answers from other universities were either not received or were suppressed.
The scheme of Cranmer had not worked particularly well; the opinions of the universities were for the most part either adverse, or were forced, and those of learned men more opposed than coinciding. It had been the intention, when these opinions were collected, to lay them before the Pope as the voice of the united Christian world pronouncing in favour of the divorce; but they were not, after all, of a complexion which was likely to do much good. The plan, therefore, was altered, and a letter, subscribed by the lords spiritual and temporal, and by a certain number of the Commons, as the representatives of the nation, was addressed to the Pope, in which it was asked what crime the King of England had committed that he could not obtain what the most learned men and the most famous universities declared to be his right? that the country was threatened with the calamities of a disputed succession, which could only be averted by the king's marriage; and yet that marriage was prevented by the delays of the Papal Court. To this Clement replied that the delay was the king's own, who had neglected to appoint an attorney to plead for him at Rome.
Baffled thus by the pertinacity of Clement, backed by the constant vigilance and favour of the emperor, Henry began to lose much of his confidence and over-bearing insolence. He complained that he had been assured that nothing would be easier than to procure a divorce, but now he found himself involved in labours and intricacies that threatened to last his life, and even to wear it out. There needed a more determined spirit than that of Cranmer to break the way through the wood of embarrassments in which they were involved, and the right man now stepped forward in Thomas Cromwell, the former secretary of Wolsey. The rise of this man had been extraordinary. He was the son of a blacksmith at Putney, who, as he had acquired capital, became a brewer, or fuller, and could afford to give his son a tolerable education, including some Latin. In early youth he went to the Continent, where, amongst other knowledge, he made himself master of the principal languages. He was, in the commencement of his career on the Continent, a clerk in an English house at Antwerp; after that he went into the army, and was serving under the Duke of Bourbon at the sack of Rome. On the restoration of peace, he again returned to the counting-house, in the employ of a Venetian merchant. At length, stored with knowledge calculated to make him of the most signal service as a politician, he returned to England, and commenced the study of the law. By some means he was brought under the notice of Cardinal Wolsey, who immediately perceived the value of his experience of the world and his accomplishments. Wolsey secured his services, and soon employed him in the great work of dissolving the monasteries, the proceeds of which he destined to the erection and endowment of his colleges. In this employment he gave great satisfaction to his patron, and at the same time is said to have enriched himself. Hated by the clergy, who saw in him a dangerous and able enemy, he was the more strongly supported by the cardinal, who had need of so daring and unscrupulous a man. By his influence he was soon sent to Parliament, where his talents, eloquence, and ready address soon greatly distinguished him.
When Wolsey was disgraced, Cromwell showed that there was a strong principle of gratitude and attachment in his soul. He accompanied the fallen minister to the retreat appointed him at Esher. There he seems to have brooded in the solitude on the evil fortunes which had overtaken his master, and in which his own were involved. Cavendish, the secretary of the cardinal, relates this incident:—"It chanced me, upon Allhallow's Day, to come into the great chamber at Esher, in the morning, to give mine attendance; where I found Master Cromwell leaning in the great window with a primer in his hand, saying Our Lady matins, which since had been a strange sight. He prayed not more earnestly than the tears distilled from his eyes. Whom I bade good morrow, and with that I perceived the tears upon his cheeks. To whom I said, 'Why, Master Cromwell, what meaneth all this sorrow? Is my lord in any danger, that you lament thus? Or is it for any loss ye have sustained for any misadventure? 'Nay, nay,' quoth he, 'it is my unhappy adventure, which am likely to lose all that I have travelled for all the days of my life, for doing my master true and diligent service!'" Cavendish endeavoured to comfort him, but he said, "An ill name once gotten was not likely to be put away." Presently, however, he added, in a more cheerful tone, "But I intend, God willing, this afternoon, when my lord cardinal hath dined, to ride to London, and so to the Court, where I will either make or mar."
Cromwell was intensely ambitious; but with his own aspiring, he—more noble than most courtiers—still desired to unite the interests of his old patron. Wolsey approved of his design to return to the Court, where he could prosecute the advantage of both master and man and it was at this moment that Wolsey addressed those words to his departing servant which have been so beautifully woven into his drama by Shakespeare:—
"Wolsey. Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear
In all my miseries; but thou hast forced me.
Out of thy honest truth, to play the woman.
Let's dry our eyes; and thus far hear me, Cromwell;
And, when I am forgotten, as I shall be,
And sleep in dull, cold marble, where no mention
Of me more must be heard of, say, I taught thee—
Say Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour,
Found thee a way out of his wreck to rise in;
A sure and safe one, though thy master missed it.
Mark but my fall, and that that ruined me.
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition;
By this sin fell the angels; how can man, then,
The image of his Maker, hope to win by't?
Love thyself last: cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.
Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace.
To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not:
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's and truth's: then if thou fall'st, O Cromwell,
Thou fall'st a blessed martyr."
Arrived at Court, Cromwell conducted himself with so much address, that he was continued in the stewardship of the monastic estates which had fallen into the hands of Wolsey, and now of the king. This position necessarily brought him into the frequent presence of Henry, who, like Wolsey, soon discovered the able and accomplished character of the man. When, therefore, Henry expressed his disgust with the obstacles interposed in the way of the divorce, and his impatient declaration that he would now abandon the attempt for ever, had been carried to Anne Boleyn, and dismay had seized on her and all her adherents, the moment was come for a man like Cromwell to step in, and show the pre-eminence of his own genius and courage.
The day after this declaration of the king's had thrown the whole Court into despair, Cromwell sought an interview with Henry, and, determined, according to his own phrase, "to make or mar," thus addressed him:—"It was not," he observed, "for him to affect to give advice, where so many wise and abler men had failed, but when he saw the anxiety of his sovereign, he could no longer be silent, whatever might be the result. It might appear presumption in him to judge, but he thought the difficulties of His Majesty arose from the timidity of his counsellors, who were deterred by outward appearances, and mislead by the opinions of the vulgar. But what were the real facts? The most famous universities, the most learned men, had pronounced in favour of the divorce. What, then, prevented the divorce? The terrors of the Pope. Now, that might be all very well so far as the Pope was concerned, but that did not concern the real case, or the King of England. Let the Pope guard himself against the resentment of the emperor if he chose, but why should the cowardice of Clement cause Henry to forego his rights? There was a clear and obvious course to pursue. Let the king do just what the princes of Germany had done, throw off the yoke of Rome; and let him, by the authority, declare himself, as he should be, the head of the Church within his own dominions. At present England was a monster with two heads. But let the king assume the authority now usurped by a foreign pontiff, an authority from which so many evils and confusions to this realm had flowed, and the monstrosity would be at an end; all would be simple, harmonious, and devoid of difficulty. The clergy, sensible that their lives and fortunes were in the hands of their own monarch—hands which could be no longer paralysed by alien interference—from haughty antagonists would instantly become the obsequious ministers of his will."
Henry listened to this new doctrine with equal wonder and delight, and he thanked Cromwell heartily, and had him instantly sworn of his privy council.
No time was lost in trying the efficacy of Cromwell's daring scheme. It was one at which the stoutest heart and most iron resolution might have trembled, to sever that ancient union which had existed so many ages, and was hallowed in the eyes of the world by so many proud recollections; but Cromwell had taken a profound survey of the region he was about to invade, and had learned its weakest places. He relied on the unscrupulous impetuosity of the king's passion to bear him through; he relied far more on the finesse of his own genius. With the calmest resolution, he laid his finger on one single page of the statute-book, and knew that he was master of the Church. The law which rendered any one guilty of a præmunire who received direct favours from the Pope, permitted the monarch to suspend the action of this statute at his discretion. This he had done in the case of Wolsey. When he accepted the legative authority, he took care to obtain a patent under the great seal, authorising the exercise of this foreign power. But Wolsey, when he was called in question for the administration of an office thus especially sanctioned by the Crown, neglected to produce this deed of indemnity, hoping still to be restored to the royal favour, and unwilling to irritate the king by any show of self-defence. There lay the concealed weapon which the shrewd eye of Cromwell had detected, and by which he could overturn the ecclesiastical fabric of ages. He declared, to the consternation of the whole hierarchy, that not only had Wolsey involved himself in all the penalities of a præmunire, but the whole of the clergy with him. They had admitted his exercise of the Papal authority, and thereby were become, in the language of the statute, his fautors and abettors.
Dire was the dismay which at this charge seized on the whole body of the clergy. The council ordered the Attorney-General to file an information against the entire ecclesiastical corps. The convocation assembled in haste, and offered, as the price of a full pardon, £100,000. But still greater was the amazement and dismay of the clergy, when they found that this magnificent sum was rejected unless the convocation consented to declare, in the preamble to the grant, that the king was "the protector and only supreme head of the Church of England." The clergy now opened their eyes to the real and unexampled fact before them. They were called on to renounce the supremacy of the Holy See—to throw down an authority which their ancestors for a thousand years had held to be sacred and inviolable. The convocation, in this unprecedented dilemma, debated the matter for three days, without coming any nearer to a solution of the difficulty. They then held conferences with Cromwell and the Royal Commissioners, in which various expedients were proposed and rejected, until there came a peremptory message from the king, by the Earl of Wiltshire, that he would accept of no qualification of the sentence proposed, except the addition of the words "under God."
Henry had so greedily imbibed the incense offered him in the proposal of Cromwell, that he already began to talk loftily of having no superior but God, and grew furious with Cromwell for not carrying the thing he had promised off-hand, without any regard to its transcendent difficulty. "Mother of God!" he exclaimed, in a towering passion, to Cromwell and the commissioners for the business, "you have played me a shrewd turn. I thought to have made fools of those prelates, and now you have so ordered the business that they are likely to make a fool of me, as they have done of you already. What is this 'quantum per legem Christi liceat?' Go to them again, and let me have the business passed without any 'quantums' or 'tantums.' I will have no 'quantum' nor no 'tantum' in the matter, but let it be done out of hand."
In the end, however, Henry consented to the "quantums" and the "tantums." By his permission, the venerable Archbishop Warham introduced and carried an amendment in the convocation, by which the grant was voted with this clause in the preamble:—"Of which Church and clergy we acknowledge His Majesty to be the chief protector, the only and supreme lord, and, as far as the law of God will allow, the supreme head." The wedge was introduced; the severance was certain: the perfect accomplishment of it only awaited another opportunity for an easier issue. The northern convocation adopted the same language, and voted a grant of £18,840.
Meantime, every effort had been made to bend the Pope to Henry's view of the case; every opportunity had been seized to that end. Early in 1530 an embassy had been sent to Italy to take advantage of an interview about to be had betwixt the Pope and the Emperor at Bologna. The chief envoy on this occasion was the Earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne Boleyn, accompanied by Stokesley, Bishop of London, Lee, the king's almoner, and Bennet, doctor of laws. To these were added several clergymen, at the head of whom was Cranmer. Henry declared to those about him that this was his last effort, and that, if it failed, he would withdraw from Clement, as a pontiff unfit for his office through ignorance, and still more unfit through simony. On the other hand, the emperor, still pressing the Pope, obtained from him a "breve," forbidding Henry to marry before the publication of his sentence.
Whilst things were in this position, Henry's ambassadors arrived. The Pope still declared he would do all that he possibly could for Henry. But the emperor received them in a very different humour. As soon as the Earl of Wiltshire began to speak, he interrupted him, saying, "Stop, sir! allow your colleagues to speak. You are a party in the cause." The earl, undeterred by this, answered boldly that he stood not there as a father defending the interests of his child, but as a minister representing his sovereign; that if Charles would comply with the wish of Henry, he would be quiet, if not, he would proceed without his permission; and that he now offered him, as the price of his acquiescence, 300,000 crowns, the restoration of the marriage portion of Catherine, and security for her maintenance suitable to her high birth during her life. Charles declared, in reply, that he was not going to sell the honour of his aunt, and that he would support her cause by the means at his disposal. This being the position of things, Cranmer challenged all the learned men of the Papal Court to dispute the question of the king's marriage, but none of them accepted the challenge. The proposal was a very safe one, for the Pope was not likely to permit such a discussion in the very face of the emperor; but it answered Cranmer's object: it highly delighted Henry, who made him ambassador to the emperor; and the Pope, to conciliate Henry, also made him his plenipotentiary in England.
In January, 1531, the brief forbidding Henry to proceed to a marriage with Anne Boleyn, which the Pope had signed, was published by the emperor in Flanders, Henry, to neutralise the effect of this, sent down Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, attended by twelve peers spiritual and temporal, to the House of Commons, to explain all that the king had done towards the discharge of his conscience and the safety of the realm hereafter, in regard to the divorce. Sir Thomas carried thither a box containing the decrees of the universities and the opinions of learned men, which he placed on the table; whereupon Sir Bryan Tuke opened the box, and took out twelve writings sealed, the decrees of the twelve universities, which he read, translated into English. There were, besides, above 100 books and writings, which there was no time to read; and the speaker bade the members, on their return to their several counties and towns, show to all their neighbours that the king had not done these things for his own will and pleasure, but only for the discharge of his conscience and the security of the succession of the realm. Parliament being prorogued, the king, on the 31st of May, sent a deputation of peers to communicate to the queen the decrees of the universities and the dicta of the learned, and to entreat her to quiet the king's conscience by consenting to the divorce. But Catherine was firm as ever. She said:—"I pray God send his grace a quiet conscience; and this shall be your answer—That I say I am his lawful wife, and to him lawfully married, and by the order of the Holy Church I was to him espoused as his true wife, although not so worthy; and by that point I will abide, till the Court of Rome, which was privy to the beginning, have made thereof a determination and final ending." The king was so enraged at this answer that he never saw her again; and in the month of July she was ordered to quit Windsor. "Go where I may," she said, on receiving this harsh command, "I am still his lawful wife, and will pray for him." No woman ever maintained her just rights with more firmness and true dignity than Catherine of Arragon. She retired first to the Moore in Hertfordshire, then to Easthampstead, and finally to Ampthill, where she continued to reside.
After the prorogation of Parliament, Sir Thomas More, who was sincerely attached to the Catholic religion, begged to be permitted to resign the great seal. He saw that a thorough breach with Rome was inevitable, and he desired to have no hand it. Indeed, Sir Thomas had allowed the spirit of the times already too much to influence his nobler nature. He was one of the most learned, witty, and light-hearted of men. In the silence of his closet he had arrived at the most admirable ideas of the rights of conscience, and in his celebrated work, the "Utopia," he had tolerated all religious opinions in his imaginary kingdom. But on being raised to power he forgot the liberality of his sentiments, and was seized with that very persecuting spirit which he had in his writings so entirely condemned. His treatment of one man is peculiarly disgraceful to a writer who knew so much better. This was James Bainham, a gentleman of the Temple, who was accused of the new opinions, and whom More had taken to his own house, where he ordered him to be whipped in his presence, and then sent him to the Tower, and put him to the torture. This unfortunate gentleman was induced by the force of agonies to abjure his opinions; but returning to them, and openly advocating them, was condemned and burnt in Smithfield, a fate which soon became common to those who denied the dogmas of the Church, against which Henry himself was in arms.
Well had it been for More had he sooner retired from a position which so lamentably injured his spirit and his fame. But having made up his mind to it, he descended to a private station in May, 1532, with the utmost gaiety and contentment, though his family were extremely averse to what they deemed a needless and mortifying sacrifice. The king accepted his resignation with great reluctance, and transferred the great seal to Sir Thomas Audley. Henry, under the guidance of Cromwell, made progressive steps towards this separation which More feared. He now procured an act to be passed by Parliament, abolishing the annats, or first-fruits, which furnished a considerable annual income to the Pope, and another abrogating the authority of the clergy in convocation, and attaching that authority to the Crown. Feeling that in this struggle he should need the friendship of Francis, he proposed a new treaty with France, which was signed in London on the 23rd of June; and, the more to strengthen the alliance, the two monarchs proposed a meeting between Calais and Boulogne. Great preparations were made on both sides, and Henry begged Francis to bring his favourite mistress with him. This was as an excuse for Henry to bring Anne Boleyn, who was now created the Marchioness of Pembroke, and without whom he could go nowhere. Francis did not bring his fair friend to the royal meeting, but Henry paraded his new marchioness in great state before the world. He issued orders for a great train of noblemen, prelates, and gentlemen to assemble at Canterbury on the 26th of September, to attend him to the Continent, and he embarked at Dover on the 11th of October, and landed at Calais the same afternoon. The two kings met in a valley near the marches, on the 21st, and proceeded to Boulogne, where Francis entertained the king and Court of England in the most magnificent manner for four days; and on the fifth the two kings, with their attendants, set out for Calais, where Henry entertained the king and Court of France with equally royal hospitality for the same period of time. On the Sunday evening, Anne got up a masque for the pleasure of the French guests. She came in after supper with seven ladies in masking apparel of strange fashion, made of cloth of gold, slashed with crimson tinsel satin, with tabards of fine cypress. Then the lady marchioness took the French king, the Countess of Derby the King of Navarre, and every lady took a lord. In dancing, King Henry removed the ladies' visors, so that their beauties were shown. The French king then discovered that he had been dancing with an old acquaintance, the lovely English maid of honour to his first queen. He conversed with her awhile apart, and the next morning sent her a jewel worth 15,000 crowns. On the 30th of the month, the two kings mounted their horses, and Henry conducted the French king to the border of his dominions, where they took leave of each other with many protestations of perpetual friendship, as they had done at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
The two monarchs had proclaimed with great diligence that the object of their meeting was to concert an expedition against the Turks, but it is more probable that Henry sought to induce Francis to co-operate with him, and withdraw from the Court of Rome—a circumstance which would have been equally detrimental to the Pope and the emperor; but Francis was not prepared for so violent a measure—in fact, he had no stubborn desire to spur him on to it. It is said that Francis, during the interview, had urged Henry to wait no longer for the permission of the Pope, but to marry the Marchioness of Pembroke without further delay; but it is quite certain that another counsellor was more urgent, and that was—Time. It was high time, indeed, that the marriage should take place, if they meant to legitimate his child, for Anne Boleyn was far advanced in her pregnancy. Accordingly, the marriage took place some time about now, but there are various accounts of the time and place of this event. Some authors affirm that she was privately married to the king at Dover, the same day as they returned from France; others that the nuptials were secretly performed in the presence of her father and mother, and of the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, in the chapel of Sopewell Nunnery. To that nunnery, Anne, indeed, retired for some purpose immediately on her return from France, and Henry, who could not visit her in the nunnery, is said by tradition to have met her, occasionally, at a yew-tree, about a mile from that convent. There is also a tradition that she was married at Blickling Hall, in Norfolk; but Wyatt, her great admirer, as well as Stowe and Godwin, with far more probability, assert that this event took place in the following manner and place, on St. Paul's day, January 25th, 1533.
"On the morning of that day," says a contemporary, "at a very early hour. Dr. Rowland Lee, one of the royal chaplains, received the unwonted order to celebrate mass in an unfrequented attic in the west turret of Whitehall. There he found the king, attended by Norris and Heneage, two of the grooms of the chamber, and the Marchioness of Pembroke, attended by her train-bearer, Anne Saville, afterwards Lady Berkeley. On being requested to perform the nuptial rite between his sovereign and the marchioness in the presence of the three witnesses assembled, the chaplain hesitated; but Henry is said to have assured him that the Pope had pronounced in favour of the divorce, and that he had the dispensation for a second marriage in his possession. As soon as the marriage ceremony had been performed, the parties separated in silence before it was light; and Viscount Rochford, the brother of the bride, was dispatched to announce the event in confidence to Francis I."
This marriage was kept so secret that it was not even communicated to Cranmer, who had just returned from Germany, and taken up his abode in the family of Anne Boleyn. Cranmer whilst in Germany had married, Catholic priest as he was, the niece of Osiander, the Protestant minister of Nuremberg. This lady he had brought secretly to England, and was now living a married priest, in direct violation of the Church that he belonged to. Archbishop Warham was now dead, and Henry nominated Cranmer to the vacant primacy. He was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on the 30th of March, 1533, and he was immediately ordered to proceed with the divorces. The new primate, therefore, wrote on the 11th of April, a formal letter to the king, soliciting the issue of a commission to try that cause, and pronounce a definite sentence. This was immediately done; and Cranmer, as the head of this commission, accompanied by Gardiner, now Bishop of Winchester, the Bishops of London, Lincoln, Bath and Wells, with many other divines and canonists, opened their court at Dunstable, in the monastery of St. Peter's, six miles from Ampthill, where the queen resided. To this court they summoned both the king and the queen. Henry appeared by proxy; but Catherine ignored the court and its proceedings altogether. It was not likely, indeed, that, having denied all authority in the matter but that of the Pope, she should now recognise a tribunal which was proceeding as the devoted instrument of a monarch who had declared, in a letter to those very judges, that he, their sovereign, recognised no superior on earth, but only God, and was not subject to the laws of any earthly creature. All officers and institutions—the Church itself—had now shown that it was scarcely influenced by any law or motive but the will and fear of this self-inflated king. Parliament and convocation had heaped fresh insults upon Catherine before proceeding to try her. Parliament, acting on the dicta of Cranmer and of Cromwell, had passed an act, strictly prohibiting any appeals to the Court of Rome, so that Catherine was cut off from all application to the only authority that she acknowledged; and another, stripping her of the title of queen, and designating her solely as the Princess Dowager of Wales, the widow of Prince Arthur, her first and only lawful husband. On the 12th of April, Henry again—and now openly—solemnised his marriage with Anne Boleyn.
Cardinal Pole. From the Original Picture.
Dr. Lee, the same clergyman who had married Henry to Anne, was sent to cite Catherine to appear. Every precaution was used to prevent Catherine knowing that it was intended by this court to proceed to a final judgment; but that mattered little; for, from first to last, she disallowed the authority of any trial by the king's subjects. On the 12th of May Cranmer pronounced Catherine contumacious, and on the 23rd, that her marriage was null and invalid from the beginning. On the 28th, in a court held at Lambeth, the archbishop pronounced the king's marriage with Anne Boleyn to be good and valid. On the 1st of June, being Whit Sunday, Anne was crowned with every possible degree of pomp and display. She was first brought by the Lord Mayor from the palace at Greenwich in a gay procession of barges to the Tower. Then, after some days, a brilliant procession of noblemen, great prelates, and ambassadors, conducted her through the streets of London in an open litter covered with cloth of gold shot with white, and the two palfreys which supported the litter clad, heads and all, in a garb of white damask. The queen was dressed in a surcoat of silver tissue, and a mantle of the same lined with ermine. Her dark tresses were worn flowing down her shoulders; but on her head she wore a coif with a circlet of precious rubies. Over her head was borne a canopy carried by four knights on foot.
The streets were hung with crimson and scarlet, and that part of Cheapside with cloth of gold and velvet. There were all sorts of pageants, in which pagan deities mingled freely with Christian emblems. No coronation had ever been witnessed at Westminster more costly or brilliant. Anne, being now far advanced in pregnancy, must have found it a most fatiguing ceremony. Cranmer, of course, placed the crown upon her head.
Place of Execution within the Tower of London.
Henry, notwithstanding his separation from Rome, was anxious to obtain the sanction of his marriage by the Pope; but instead of that, Clement fulminated his denunciations against him over Europe. He annulled Cranmer's sentence on Henry's first marriage, and published a bull excommunicating Henry and Anne, unless they separated before the next September, when the new queen expected her confinement. Henry dispatched ambassadors to the different foreign courts to announce his marriage, and the reasons which had led him to it; but from no quarter did he receive much gratulation. One person in particular wrote to him in the most cutting and unsparing strain. This was Cardinal Pole, a near kinsman of his, whom he had used great endeavours to win to his side.
When the bishoprics of Winchester and York became vacant by the death of Wolsey, the king would fain have conferred one of them on Pole, whom he had educated and destined for the highest offices of the Church. The young clergyman could not conscientiously approve of Henry's divorce scheme, and accordingly fell under his displeasure. Henry, however, permitted him to retire to the Continent, and, having been educated in Italy, he there soon received the cardinal's hat from the Pope.
The people, from one end of the country to the other, were on the side of Catherine. They justly looked upon her as a virtuous, amiable, and religious queen, who was thrust aside to make way for a younger rival; and they did not hesitate to express their opinion of that rival's conduct. They cried out against "Nan Bullen" lustily on all occasions, and declared that they would have none of her. The monastic orders, who were writhing under the privation of their ancient houses and estates, and who foresaw further and more extensive spoliations in the Reformation tendencies of Cranmer and the new queen, preached everywhere hatred to the "Bullen" usurper of the throne, and bold denunciations of the licentious conduct of the king himself. One Friar Peyto, a very devout and zealous member of the order of Observants, preached before the king and queen at Greenwich, and denounced, in uncompromising terms, the most terrible judgments on them both. He reminded them of the story of Ahab, and cried out, "Even where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, shall they lick the blood of Jezebel." He told Henry that, like the King of Israel of old, he had got his lying prophets to prophecy what he willed: "but," continued he, "I am Micheas (Micaiah), whom thou wilt hate because I must tell thee truly that this marriage is unlawful; and I know I shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the waters of sorrow; yet, because our Lord hath put it into my mouth, I must speak of it."
Henry, for a wonder, restrained himself, and preferred to set one of his chaplains to answer the friar. Probably the knowledge that the general opinion was that of the friar might induce Henry to this course, so different to his conduct in after years. The next Sunday, being the 8th of May, Dr. Curwen preached in the same place, and, after endeavouring to answer his arguments, made a furious attack on the friar himself, calling him a dog, a slanderer, a base, beggarly friar, a rebel and traitor. He denounced him as a foul slanderer of persons in authority and asserted that, so far from the king's marriage being an offence to God or man, it was a measure both highly desirable and highly commendable, as that which was to establish a righteous royal seed for ever; and then, supposing that his eloquence had completely defeated and put to flight the friar, he challenged him by name, shouting, "I speak to thee, Peyto, that makest thyself Micheas, that thou mayest speak evil of king; but now thou art not to be found, being fled for fear and shame, as being unable to answer my arguments."
But there came an answer—though not from Peyto—which was not greatly to the credit or the foresight of the preacher, for in the rood-loft, one Elstow, a friar of the same house as Peyto, stood up, and in a loud and undaunted manner said, "Good sir, you know well enough that Father Peyto, as he was commanded, is gone to a provincial council holden at Canterbury, and is not fled from any fear of you, but to-morrow will return again. And meantime, here am I, another Micheas, ready to lay down my life to prove all those things true which he hath taught out of the Holy Scriptures; and to this combat I challenge thee before God and all equal judges; even unto thee, Curwen, I say it, which art one of the four hundred prophets into whom the spirit of lying is entered, and seekest by adultery to establish succession; betraying the king into endless perdition, more for thine own vain-glory and hope of promotion than for the discharge of thy clogged conscience, and the king's salvation." The friar went on in the same strain, growing bolder and bolder, and hurling the most awful denunciations at the head of the king, and none could bring him to silence, till Henry, in a voice of thunder, commanded him to be still. The king did not pass this over. The two friars the next day were summoned before the council, and sternly rebuked and threatened. The Earl of Essex told them they deserved to be put into sacks and thrown into the Thames. "Threaten those things," said Elstow, smiling, "to the rich and dainty folk, which are clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day, and have their chiefest hope in this world; but we heed them not—nay, we are joyful that for the discharge of our duties we are driven hence; and, thanks to God, we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land, and therefore care not which way we go." The end of this plain speaking was, that the friars, with all their order, were soon after banished; and Curwen, as Friar Elstow had prophesied, was promoted to the episcopal bench.
Yet no complaints of the clergy or the people could prevent the ruthless king wringing the heart of his forsaken wife, by demands of her renunciation of all title to royalty. On the 3rd of July Lord Mountjoy, who had formerly been her page, waited on her from the king to announce to her the completion of the divorce, and to warn her to take a lower style and address than that of queen. Catherine was living quietly at Ampthill, and the martyrdom through which she had lately been made to pass had shaken her health severely. It was some days before she could see the messenger, and when she did she was still lying sick on her couch, and suffering from a thorn which by some accident she had run into her foot. She had a number of her servants assembled to hear what was said, and she then demanded whether the message were in writing or was to be delivered by word of mouth. Lord Mountjoy said he had both a verbal and a written command, but when he began to address her as the Princess of Wales, she stopped him, and let him know that she was not princess dowager, but the queen, and withal the king's true wife; had been crowned and anointed queen, and by the king had had lawful issue; had committed no crime by which real forfeiture of her rank and estate could come, but that the estate and name of queen she would vindicate, challenge, and maintain during her lifetime.
Mountjoy begged to remind her that she had not only been divorced but that this divorce was confirmed by the Act of Parliament in both Houses, and that the Lady Anne had also been anointed and crowned Queen of England, which act was also confirmed by the lords spiritual and temporal, and the commoners of the realm; but Catherine, with undaunted spirit, repudiated all such proceedings, as effected by bribery and unfair means, declaring that neither universities, convocations, nor parliaments had power to divorce, but the Court of Rome alone, to which she still appealed. Mountjoy then represented to her that her obstinacy might occasion popular commotions in the kingdom, to which she replied that she should much regret that; she trusted there would be no dissensions in the realm on her account, which she never contemplated, nor ever would; but she would never consent to injure her daughter's rights and the health of her own soul by compliance; and if she should be so unfortunate as to forfeit the favour of the people, still, she trusted to go to heaven "cum fama et infama," for it was not for the favour of the people, nor yet for any trouble or adversity that might be devised for her, that she would lose the favour of God. When Mountjoy showed her the report which he had drawn up of the interview, she called for pen and ink, and carefully struck out the words princess-dowager wherever they occurred. She also treated the whole divorce as a mere farce, being pronounced in the king's own realm, by "a man of the king's own making," Cranmer, whom she asserted to be a person by no means impartial.
Henry had accomplished his long striven-for object: he had deposed his old queen, and secured his new one; he had assumed great power over the Church, and derived some wealth from it, but he had no satisfaction in it. His movements had originated in passion, not in principle; he was no Reformer by nature, but fast bound in the prejudices of his education, and he felt a constant longing to reconcile himself again with the Pope. His proceedings were nowhere popular. Over the whole of Europe Catherine was an object of sincere sympathy. In his own dominions we have seen the vehemence of popular expression against his marriage, and the women were more indignant than the men. In his own Court, and amongst the very relatives of Anne Boleyn, he found stout partisans of the discarded queen. The wife of Anne's own brother, the Countess of Rochford, had been lady of the bedchamber to Catherine, and with other Court ladies were so open and violent in condemning the treatment of her, that Henry sent Lady Rochford and another lady of high rank to the Tower.
On the other hand, the Pope was as unwilling to break entirely with Henry. England was a valuable fief of the Holy See, but Clement was held tight to his opposition to Henry's proceedings by the emperor, who may be said, with his aunt, Queen Catherine, to have been far more really the artificers of the severance of England from Rome, than Henry, Cranmer, or Anne Boleyn. If Queen Catherine had submitted readily to the divorce, induced by an easy disposition or the offer of rewards and honours, and if Charles had not exerted all his power and all his menaces to keep the Pope firm, there would have come no break with Henry. As it was, led by their mutual regrets, and by the active offices of Francis I., who was eager to join a fresh coalition against Charles, the Pope consented to meet Henry's ambassadors at Marseilles. In July, under the influence of Charles and his brother Ferdinand, he had annulled the sentence of divorce pronounced by Cranmer, and excommunicated Henry and Anne if they did not separate before the end of September; and now, on the 25th of September, he embarked on board the French fleet to meet Francis and the English envoys. No sooner, however, was it settled that Clement and Francis should meet than Henry was seized with alarm lest they should enter into a secret league prejudicial to him. He sent over to Francis the Duke of Norfolk, accompanied by the Viscount Rochford, Parolet, Brown, and Bryan, with a retinue of 160 horsemen, as if to accompany Francis, but in reality furnished with secret instructions to dissuade Francis from proceeding to the interview, and offering him a large subsidy if he would countenance him by establishing a patriarch in France, and forbid the transmission of money to the papal treasury. When Francis refused to listen to this advice, Henry recalled the Duke of Norfolk, who was a zealous Catholic, and whom Henry probably thought too anxious to agree with the Pope, and sent in his place the Bishop of Winchester and Bryan.
These envoys professed that they were come to execute the wishes of Francis, and encouraged by this, Francis refused to proceed with other business until Clement had done everything possible to arrange amicably the affairs of Henry. Great, therefore, was the astonishment of both the Pope and the King of France to find, on proceeding to this business, that these ambassadors had come unfurnished with any powers to treat either with the Pontiff or the French King. They were only commissioned to watch the proceedings, and report them to their master. Henry, with all his desire of reconciliation, was still in constant fear of committing himself, and finding that the Pope had been prevailed on to decide against him, Francis insisted that the envoys should dispatch a messenger for full powers to treat; and, in the meantime, a marriage was concluded betwixt the Duke of Orleans, the son of Francis, and Catherine de Medici, the niece of Clement, an alliance which proved a great curse to France. The result of the dispatch to England appeared in the arrival of Bouner, afterwards Bishop of London, and one of the bitterest persecutors who ever lived, who, on the 7th of November, instead of proceeding to an accordance with Francis and the Pope, to their amazement presented from Henry an appeal from the Pope to a general council.
This unexpected renunciation of the authority of the Pope spoke plainly the distrust in Henry's mind of him, or of the influence behind him. All parties were now aiming at impossibilities. Henry would fain be reconciled with the ancient Church, but he was mortally afraid of the power of Charles over the Pontiff, and these fears were sedulously stimulated by the party at home, headed by Cromwell, Cranmer, and his own queen. Clement desired the reunion, but was a puppet in the hands of the emperor and Francis was bent upon his own views without possessing the confidence of either the Pope or Henry. Both Clement and Francis resented the conduct of Henry, yet neither was willing to give him up. Bonner pretended that the appeal to a council would throw no real obstacles in the way, and Francis, knowing that the Bishop of Bayonne stood well with Henry, sent him to London to propose that he should undertake the management of his affair with the Pope. Henry readily consented, and the bishop, in high spirits, hastened back, proceeded to Rome in the depth of winter, and set zealously to work to bring the matter to a favourable issue. The concession which the bishop flattered himself that he should now obtain was, that the divorce should be once more tried in England, and that the Pope should ratify the sentence, and England should remain in full obedience to the Papal See. So conceding did Henry appear, that he authorised the Bishop of Bayonne to promise, not merely obedience, but benefits to Rome, in proportion to the readiness of Clement to oblige him.
The long-contested question of the divorce, and the threatened consequence—severance of England from the Papal See—now appeared in a fair way of being settled. They were never farther off from such a consummation. However sincere and earnest the two principals in this contest, the Pope and Henry, might be, there were at work in the Court of England and the Court of Rome parties really more powerful than their principals, who were resolved that the two desiderata to this pacification never should be yielded. No sooner had the Bishop of Bayonne set out for Rome, than Cromwell and his party commenced an active campaign in Parliament for breaking beyond remedy the tie with Rome, and establishing an independent church in this country. This able man, who for his past services was now made Chancellor of the Exchequer for life, framed two bills, and introduced them to Parliament, soon after the Christmas holidays. The first was an act establishing the title of the king as supreme head of the English Church, and vesting in him the right to appoint to all bishoprics, and to decide all ecclesiastical causes. All payments or appeals to Rome were strictly forbidden; and the submission of the clergy to these enactments, which in the former bill confined it to one year, was made perpetual, by the omission of that qualification.
By the second bill, the marriage of Catherine, strangely enough at the very moment that Henry had conceded its final decision at Rome, was declared unlawful, and that of Anne Boleyn confirmed. The issue by the first marriage was declared illegitimate, and excluded from the succession, and the issue of the marriage of Anne was made inheritable of the crown, and that only and any one casting any slander on this marriage, or endeavouring to prejudice the succession of its issue, was declared guilty of high treason, if by writing, printing, or deed, and misprision of treason if by word. Thus was a new power established by the crown; every person of full age, or on hereafter coming to full age, were to be sworn to obey this act. Not only new powers were thus created, but a new crime invented; and though this statute was swept away in the course of a few years, yet it is a remarkable one, for it became the precedent for many a succeeding and despotic government.
Thus Henry, at the very time that he appeared anxiously seeking reconciliation with Rome, was in reality severing himself from it. Who shall say what were his reasonings on the subject? Was it his love of power which induced him, as it were, against his own wishes, to accept these measures from his ministers and Parliament? or did he hope to receive a favourable and irrevocable decision from Rome, before these strange proceedings became known? Be that as it may, at Rome, where, too, the king's agent, the zealous Bishop of Bayonne, was flattering himself with success, the party of the emperor and of Catherine acquired the ascendancy, and the consistory decided not against the validity of Catherine's marriage, but for it!
On the 23rd of March, 1534, the consistory in Rome pronounced this important decision, and on the 30th of the same month the royal assent was given in London to these bills. It is stated by De Bellay that the Papal Court were waiting for the receipt of a despatch from Henry, assenting to his return to obedience to the Papal See, and that the messenger not arriving, the imperial influence pushed forward the decision, and that the very next day Henry's messenger arrived, bringing his full acquiescence. The story is piquant and startling, but it does not appear to be fact. Both parties seem to have been using every exertion to carry their point, and the passing of these bills through both Lords and Commons on the 20th of March, three days only before the act of the consistory, shows that the English party was proceeding without any reference to what was agitating in Rome; and even the date of the royal assent to those bills, the 30th of March, does not allow time for the decision at Rome to have arrived, and produced, as it has been said, the determination of Henry to sanction the acts.
In Rome the Imperialists received the decision of the consistory with transports and acclamations of joy. They fired cannon, they lit bonfires, they cried through the streets, "The emperor and Spain," as if they had won a great victory; and in truth they had, but it was at the cost to the Church of Rome of the fairest and the most affluent of its tributary kingdoms. The emperor had given to the Popedom a blow which time was never destined to repair, and for which all the vast realms of the rejoicing Charles could furnish no recompense.
Thus was the religious independence of England—drawing after it, as a necessary sequence, civil liberty—established for ever. It is by far the most memorable day in the history, not only of England, but of modern Europe; and it has been well said by an historian of the last age, that "those who believe in an over-ruling Providence, and think the reformation of religion has been a blessing to England, will gratefully acknowledge its influence on this occasion." This great revolution was brought about by those who were its greatest enemies.