Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 3

by Gilbert William Child

CHAPTER III

REIGN OF HENRY VIII

Nothing is more difficult, glibly as it is often talked and written of, than successfully to place ourselves in the circumstances of men living in another period of history, or even in another climate or under another government. So vastly do the circumstances of our daily and hourly lives, the atmosphere of the society which we meet, the tone of the books and newspapers which we read, mould every thought which we think and modify every view which we take of the occurrences which surround us, that it is all but an impossibility to judge how those best known to us, or how even we ourselves, would think or speak or act in a set of circumstances widely different from those in which our actual experience has been cast.

The Tudor times are often and justly thought of as being those in which modern history took its rise, in which the great inventions and the great discoveries—the revival of learning, the printing-press, the discovery of America—tended of themselves to evolve great ideas and to develop great men; but when we are discussing the characters and achievements of those great men, we are apt sometimes to underrate the difference between their surroundings and our own—to forget, for instance, that they lived under a 'reign of terror,' as complete as that which has obtained that name in the history of modern France, and far more permanent. It is less this fact, the difficulty which we experience in realising the men of comparatively modern ideas acting under circumstances so very much the reverse of modern, which makes the characters of some of the more distinguished men of that period such a puzzle to us, and which causes them to be painted in such widely different colours, by writers who are far removed from mere prejudice or conscious partisanship.

This is a reflection, the truth of which will strike us more and more as we proceed. The statesmen of Henry VIII.'s reign were men of like passions with ourselves. Had they lived in other times they might have been like the statesmen that have followed them—like Walpole or Pulteney, Chatham or Bute, Pitt, Peel, or Palmerston; but it is surely not too much to say that these modern statesmen would have been very different from what they were, had they lived all their time with a halter round their necks, and worked under a master who, upon almost any displeasure conceived against them, instead of merely accepting their resignation would have ordered them at once to the block. When we perceive the difficulty which a modern statesman finds in preserving a strict integrity, when the price he may have to pay for it is the loss of office and popularity, and the defeat at worst of some cherished plan for the benefit as he conceives it, of his country, and that loss in most cases a merely temporary one; and when he is left in possession, at the worst, of wealth and friends and high social position, and the prospect of restoration to more than his former greatness by the next turn of the political wheel, can we wonder if Wolsey and Cranmer and Cromwell and Gardiner, when, in addition to all this, the stake for which they played included their own heads and the complete finality which decapitation involves as well, should have failed to maintain on all occasions the high level of an ideal morality? In studying the history of the Reformation in England, nothing is more necessary than to keep its different stages distinct from one another. We are too apt to think of the Reformation as if it had been all one process, or at least as if some person or persons had deliberately set it going, with a distinct perception of the results to which it was to lead, and had consciously adapted the means employed to the production of those results. Such a notion is not only not true, but is almost the direct reverse of the truth. The many recent additions to our materials for the history of the Reformation in England, all seem to me to point to the conclusion that, of several persons who may be named as the chief agents in bringing it about, the only one who set a distinct object before his eyes and worked constantly for it was Thomas Cromwell; and with him the Reformation of religion was not the object at which he aimed, but was only incidentally connected with it. Cromwell intended to make Henry VIII. absolute master of England, and himself absolute master of Henry VIII.^[1] He succeeded in the first object, and the absolutism which he constructed maintained its ground in a greater or less degree as long as there remained a Tudor sovereign to wield it, and even subsisted through more than a generation of Stuart feebleness and triviality. In his second object he very nearly succeeded also, but at last he fell into the error, so often fatal to strong and successful statesmen, of overrating his own power, thinking that what had already done so much could surely do a little more—that fortune, who had so often stood his friend, would not desert him just at the last moment; and thus he fell a victim to the tyrant whose will he himself had made irresistible.

The first and greatest distinction, then, of which we are never to lose sight in considering the history of the English Reformation, is that between the separation from Rome and the reformation of doctrine. That these two facts were closely related is true; that many of the same causes which brought about the one also conduced to the occurrence of the other, is also true; but I think that a fair consideration of all the circumstances will tend to show that the connection between them was one which depended upon special circumstances of the times, and not one arising out of the necessity of the case. That this is the true connection between these two important facts, seems to me to be suggested by the different relations in which they stood to one another on the Continent and in England. Thus in Germany and in Switzerland the reformation of doctrine preceded and brought about the separation from Rome. In England the separation from Rome preceded the reformation of doctrine, and contributed to bring it about. Luther professed the utmost deference for the Pope's person and authority long after he had protested against indulgences and had begun to preach justification by faith only.^[2] Henry VIII. and his satellites had begun to call the Pope bad names long before they attempted to meddle with the generally accepted doctrines of the Church. Separation from Rome was necessary to the completion of Cromwell's designs; change of doctrine followed as a consequence, partly of the separation itself, partly of the machinery by which it was accomplished. The time at which Henry and Cromwell chose to separate from Rome on grounds which had nothing to do with doctrine, chanced to coincide with that at which other persons elsewhere were doing the same thing for reasons distinctly doctrinal, and at which doctrinal differences with Rome were rising up all over the civilised world. Hence it became impossible but that the fact of the separation itself should tend to foster the doctrinal differences already growing up in England, though these were in themselves not only not shared by Henry but positively distasteful to him.

Whatever we may think either of the moral characteristics of the man, of the ends for which he worked, or of the means which he employed in pursuing them, it will hardly be denied that the world has seen no bolder statesman than Thomas Cromwell, and few more original; yet, like all so-called original ideas, his were not the spontaneous offspring of his own brain, but were suggested to him in a great degree by the phenomena which he saw around him. Cromwell had been for years Wolsey's confidential man of business; had watched his modes of working from a ground of vantage, and had been employed by him in the business of the suppression of the small monasteries, out of which Wolsey founded his colleges at Oxford and at Ipswich. From all this Cromwell had not failed to learn much. He had seen Wolsey concentrating all the power of the State in the hands of the King, and so indirectly in his own, and he had, further, seen him use his position as cardinal and legate to intercept, as it were, the stream of ecclesiastical administration in its natural course between England and Rome by deciding most of the appeals himself, though always professedly as the Pope's delegate, and thus concentrating still more completely in his own hands the power of the Church. The state of things which Wolsey had thus brought about as a temporary phenomenon, the result of special circumstances (not absolutely without precedent in earlier times), Cromwell proposed to himself to render permanent and normal. What he proposed he also carried out, and in so doing he effected a revolution both in the civil and ecclesiastical government of the country; but the civil revolution was as nothing by comparison of the ecclesiastical, because the Parliament which acted as a check in the one case became an active ally in the other. The civil revolution was but the establishment of the King as an absolute monarch, and he remained, after all, absolute only by the consent, or we might almost say the connivance, of Parliament. Parliament retained its constitutional position and powers, and Henry VIII. showed on more than one occasion his consciousness that his own power, absolute as it practically was, was so only so long as he could reckon upon that connivance. The ecclesiastical revolution was vastly more thorough and complete, for not only did it increase to a great extent the previously existing power of the State over the Church, but it concentrated this power in the hands of the Crown; it destroyed for ever the double government in ecclesiastical matters which had existed in varying degrees in every state of Europe, and in England itself from the time of Augustine downwards; and above all, by placing a preponderating power in the hands of a lay sovereign and his lay vicar-general, and this not as a matter of mere personal submission but as a matter of law, it invaded the region of hitherto exclusively clerical rights in a manner never before seen in the history of the Christian Church.

The history of the celebrated Præmunire will serve well to illustrate both these propositions. The outline of the well-known story is as follows. After using the statute of Præmunire as an instrument in the overthrow of Wolsey, it seems to have occurred to Henry, or more probably to Cromwell, that it might be further usefully employed for the purpose of improving the position of the Crown. The whole nation, therefore, the clergy first and the laity afterwards, were held to have become involved in the penalties of this law, as having been abettors of Wolsey in his illegal exercise of papal authority; but the course followed with the two classes of offenders was widely different. The clergy were compelled to purchase forgiveness by a heavy payment in money, and, what was of infinitely more importance, by passing in their convocation the famous 'Submission of the Clergy,' whereby they accepted the King as supreme head of the Church, and gave up all claim to legislate for the Church except by his permission and consent. Parliament, on the other hand, showed such a temper that Henry recoiled before it, and, in the words of Chapuys, 'granted the exemption which was published in Parliament without any reservation.'^[3]

These few facts speak volumes. They serve to account at once for the widely different measure which Cromwell dealt out to the clergy and to the laity, and, by demonstrating how much more easy it had become to trample on the former than on the latter, may serve as a measure of the little hold which the clergy had retained over the hearts and affections of the people. Of this fact there is ample evidence at hand, though it would be beside the mark were I to discuss it at the present moment. Unimpeachable contemporary evidence on this subject is afforded by the despatches of Chapuys to the Emperor Charles V., recently published in the volume of State papers for this period (1530–1).

Cromwell did a great work, and narrowly missed doing a far greater. Yet the outcome of his work, as of every man's work, was greatly modified by the nature of the material with which he performed it; and one of the great modifying agents was the personal character of Henry VIII. I will not enter here into the interminable dispute as to how far a great man modifies his age, and how far he is himself modified by it; but I think it must be admitted that, in the whole history of our own country at least, there has been no single man who has fixed so strongly or for so long a time upon its institutions, its laws, its history, its whole subsequent national life, the impress of his own vices, virtues, and even caprices as King Henry VIII. There is no man, also, of whose character more divergent estimates have been formed. It is, indeed, a character most difficult to estimate. He was not in any worthy sense a great man, for there was a vein of pettiness as well as a vein of selfishness running through his character from first to last; but he was a man endowed with great talents and versatility, considerable learning, and withal with a vast amount of courage and force of character of an irregular kind, which made him always a powerful force, but one the direction of which could not be calculated beforehand. We should never forget, in trying to unravel the character of Henry VIII., that the son of Henry VII. was also the grandson of Edward IV. He seems to have inherited some of the virtues and almost all the vices of both. From the Lancastrian Henry he inherited in a great degree the shrewdness, the intellectual ability, the love of learning, and the tenacity of purpose, which had made the latter one of the ablest monarchs that ever sat upon the English throne, and also the hard selfishness and grasping acquisitiveness which had made him one of the most unpopular. From the Yorkist Edward he derived his fine person, his frank soldier-like bearing, his popular manners, but also his sensuality, his want of self-restraint, his profusion, and his caprice. Personal courage on the one hand, and a tendency to cruelty on the other, seem to have come to him almost equally from both. The contrary tendencies of some of the above characteristics and the prominent development of them all seem to account in a great degree for that element of versatility and uncertainty to which we have already drawn attention. If we allow due weight to all of these, and consider, further, the peculiar circumstances in which they found their sphere of action—the early age at which he came to the throne, the sudden change from a somewhat strict subjection to his father to the enjo3anent of almost unlimited power in his own hands, the constantly increasing development of the autocratic element in government during his reign, and the difficulties in which his own tyranny and caprice were constantly involving him—we may perhaps be able to reach a fairly accurate conception of Henry's character, and one almost as far removed from the mere brutal, sensual, and capricious tyrant which some historians would have us believe him, as it must be from the politic, patriotic, self-restrained hero which Mr. Froude has persuaded himself to present to us. It is also entirely consistent with such a character, and with his early attainment of autocratic power, that Henry VIII. should have become more arbitrary, more capricious, more unscrupulous, and altogether more unmanageable as age and irresponsible power increased—and both did increase together; and accordingly we find that each of his chief ministers in succession at last fell under his displeasure, and each in successively shorter periods. Wolsey maintained himself for nearly twenty years, Cromwell for ten only. After his fall no minister established the same ascendency over Henry which these had held. Norfolk held the highest position, and he too, after some six years of power, was overthrown, and was saved from the headsman only by the King's own death. It is a significant fact that the only one of Henry's really intimate advisers who continued to be such through the latter half of his reign, and maintained his position to the end of it, was Cranmer—a man who combined beyond a doubt great talents and much learning with many virtues, but also with one capital defect, that he had positively no character at all.

The sixteenth century, not in England alone but throughout Europe, was the golden age of personal government, and it would seem that it was beyond the capacity of human nature to endure the semi-deification which was accorded to all the threat sovereigns of that period, without undergoing a process of moral degeneration. In those days kings governed as well as reigned; their will to a very great extent was law, and it was impossible that youths of nineteen or twenty, as were all the three great European monarchs of the period when they ascended their respective thrones, should endure such a trial without damage to their moral nature; and accordingly we find that each one of them succumbed to it. The moral standard of all of them was certainly what we should now consider low; and, low as it was, they failed to live up to it. But it is no more than just to remember, that the standard of the sixteenth century was not that of the nineteenth,^[4] and that Henry VIII., though very far from irreproachable, shows favourably in this respect when compared with Francis I., or even with Charles V.

Wolsey's dying speech in regard to Henry has been quoted and eulogised as a striking testimony to the great defect in his character, till even its combined force and accuracy and the pathos of the circumstances which surrounded its utterance, fail to save its iteration from becoming wearisome; but it seems scarcely to have been observed that it is almost equally remarkable as a testimony to the character of the age as to that of the King. 'Rather than want any part of his pleasure he will endanger the half of his kingdom.' What king but a sixteenth-century king would have thus acted? But, again, what minister but a sixteenth-century minister would have submitted to a master so acting, and continued to be his responsible agent and adviser? But no scruple or difficulty on this point ever seems to have occurred to a minister of that age, with perhaps the single exception of Sir Thomas More. 'The King's will' was the ultima ratio with ministers, bishops, and judges alike, and the only excuse, however inadequate, for many of the judicial decisions of the period is to be found in the fact that prosecution, when the Crown was prosecutor, was itself equivalent to condemnation.

Henry VIII. came to the throne in the year 1509, at the age of eighteen years. For our present purpose, the early years of his reign, illustrated though they were by the brilliant career of Wolsey, need not detain us long. He found himself in a far better position than any king of England since Edward III. His title was for the time undisputed, and though possible rivals existed the country was in no mood to listen to them. His exchequer was full; his own manners, appearance, and character were all calculated to ensure his popularity, and personally popular he was and continued to be till the end of his reign. The position of the Church at the beginning of his reign was peculiar—in some respects not unlike that of the French Monarchy at the accession of Louis XVI. It apparently retained to the full all its old wealth, grandeur, and power. The Archbishop of Canterbury was Chancellor, the Bishop of Winchester was Secretary, the spiritual peers formed a majority of the House of Lords.^[5] The King's own marriage had depended upon a dispensation of the Pope, and within a very few years of Henry's accession, Wolsey—abbot, archbishop, cardinal, and legate a latere—became the foremost man, not only in England but in all Europe. The King himself was a professed theologian, and rejoiced in none of his possessions more than in his title of Defender of the Faith.

The antipapal statutes still remained upon the statute book, but they had lain dormant so long as to have been almost forgotten, and Rome obtained its Peter'spence and its annates just as before. But underneath all this external magnificence there were not wanting signs that all was not sound. The monasteries were hopelessly corrupt, the friars being probably rather worse than the monks; their estates were mismanaged, wasted, and alienated. The men of the new learning were beginning to spread abroad a contempt for shrines and relics, pilgrimages and modern miracles; and above all, the people hated the priests. Morton and Warham had each made an attempt to reform the monasteries and the ecclesiastical courts, but neither was strong enough to succeed; and Wolsey, who possibly might have been, was too fully occupied with the larger and weightier objects of foreign policy to find leisure, or perhaps inclination, to cleanse such an Augean stable. The general corruption of the clergy, and more especially of the monks and friars, is, in point of fact, undeniable. Most of the more recent and better informed historians of this period have been themselves clergymen, and have, either consciously or unconsciously, held a brief for their predecessors; but the ablest and most learned of them have practically had to give up the case. Dean Hook, who makes no secret of his advocacy, and never disguises his prejudices, is nevertheless transparently honest and diligent, and constantly supplies material for the refutation of his own views; but even Dean Hook has to make so many admissions that, for all intents and purposes, he gives up his own case.^[6] Bishop Stubbs also, in an elaborate chapter upon 'The Clergy, the King, and the People,' says, in regard to the moral influence of the clergy, that 'the records of the spiritual courts of the middle ages remain in such quantity, and in such concord of testimony, as to leave no doubt of the facts; among the laity as well as among the clergy of the towns and clerical centres there existed an amount of coarse vice which had no secrecy to screen it or prevent it from spreading.'^[7] This is no exaggerated statement, and to say, as Canon Dixon does say, ' that no proof of deep corruption has been made good against the English clergy,'^[8] is simply to fly in the face of the evidence, not only of satirists and lampooners but of annalists and historians, of records and of law reports.

Such was the state of things when Henry VIII. came to the throne. Of the changes which took place before he left it, the following chapters will contain the record.

1. He is said to have boasted that in brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the King, with all his power, should not be able to hinder him. (See Green, Short Hist. p. 348.)
2. See D'Aubigne, Ref. vol. i. p. 287, 3rd edition.
3. State papers, Feb. 14, 1531.
4. There seems to be an inclination even in some of the best writers of the present age to question this. (See Brewer, Henry VIII.) I may have occasion to discuss the subject more fully when I come to the story of the general condition of the clergy. At present I will only refer to a single case, which is, however, so remarkable that the mere possibility of its occurrence marks a condition of public opinion almost unconceivable to ourselves. It is that of Nicholas Udall. This person—of whose excellence as a scholar there is, I believe, no question—was head master of Eton from 1534-43. At the latter date there occurred an inquiry into a robbery at Eton, to which he was accused of being privy. In the course of the investigation a charge was brought against him of nameless immorality in relation to his own scholars. He was not only convicted of this but he confessed it; yet a few years afterwards, about 1554, this same man was made head master of Westminster, having in the interval made much interest to be re-appointed to Eton! See Maxwell Lyte's History of Eton College, p. 113, and references there given.
5. See this worked out with great skill in Book V. chapter i. of Green's History.
6. Hook's Archbishops, vol. vi. p. 229.
7. Stubbs's Const. Hist., vol. iii. pp. 384-5.
8. Dixon, op. cit. vol. i. p. 86.