Early Days of Henry VIII.
To-day we front the sixteenth century. Great names and great deeds crop out over it as thickly as leaves grow in summer. At the very outset, three powerful monarchs came almost abreast upon the scene—Henry VIII. of England, Francis I. of France, and Charles V. of Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries.
Before the first quarter of the century had passed, the monk Luther had pasted his ticket upon the doors of the church at Wittenberg; and that other soldier-monk, Loyola, was astir with the beginnings of Jesuitism. America had been planted; the Cape of Good Hope was no longer the outpost of stormy wastes of water with no shores beyond. St. Peter’s church was a-building across the Tiber, and that brilliant, courteous, vicious, learned Leo X. was lording it in Rome. The Moors and their Saracen faith had been driven out of the pleasant countries that are watered by the Guadalquivir. Titian was alive and working; and so was Michael Angelo and Raphael, in the great art-centres of Italy: and Venice was in this time so rich, so grand, so beautiful, so abounding in princely houses, in pictures, in books, in learning, and in all social splendors, that to pass two winters in the City of the Lagoon, was equal to the half of a polite education; and I suppose that a Florentine or Venetian or Roman of that day, thought of a pilgrimage to the far-away, murky London, as Parisians think now of going to Chicago, or Omaha, or San Francisco—excellent places, with delightful people in them; but not the centres about which the literary and art world goes spinning, as a wheel goes spinning on its hub.
We have in the contemporary notes of a well-known Venetian chronicler, Marini Sanuto—who was secretary to the famous Council of Ten—evidence of the impression which was made on that far-off centre of business and of learning, by such an event as the accession of Henry VIII. to the throne of England. This Sanuto was a man of great dignity; and by virtue of his position in the Council, heard all the “relations” of the ambassadors of Venice; and hence his Diary is a great mine of material for contemporary history.
“News have come,” he says, “through Rome of the death of the King of England on April 20th [1509]. ’Twas known in Lucca on the 6th May, by letters from the bankers Bonvisi. The new King is nineteen years old, a worthy King, and hostile to France. He is the son-in-law of the King of Spain. His father was called Henry, and fifty odd years of age; he was a very great miser, but a man of vast ability, and had accumulated so much gold that he is supposed to have [had] more than wellnigh all the other Kings of Christendom. The King, his son, is liberal and handsome—the friend of Venice, and the enemy of France. This intelligence is most satisfactory.”
Certainly the new king was most liberal in his spending, and as certainly was abundantly provided for. And money counted in those days—as it does most whiles: no man in England could come to the dignity of Justice of the Peace—such office as our evergreen friend Justice Shallow holds in Shakespeare—except he had a rental of £20 per annum, equivalent to a thousand dollars of present money—measured by its purchasing power of wheat.[69] By the same standard the average Earl had a revenue of £20,000, and the richest of the peers is put down at a probable income of three times this amount.
What a special favorite of the crown could do in the way of expenditure is still made clear to us by those famous walks, gardens, and gorgeous saloons of Hampton Court, where the great Cardinal Wolsey set his armorial bearings upon the wall—still to be seen over the entrance of the Clock Court. If you go there—and every American visitor in London should be sure to find a way thither—you will see, may be, in the lower range of windows, that look upon the garden court—the pots of geranium and the tabby cats belonging to gentlewomen of rank, but of decayed fortune—humble pensioners of Victoria—who occupy the sunny rooms from which, in the times we are talking of, the pampered servants of the great Cardinal looked out. And when the great man drove to court, or into the city, his retinue of outriders and lackeys, and his golden trappings, made a spectacle for all the street mongers.
Into that panorama, too, of the early days of Henry VIII., enters with slow step, and with sad speech, poor Katharine of Aragon—the first in order of this stalwart king’s wives. Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler used to read that queen’s speech with a pathos that brought all the sadnesses of that sad court to life again: Miss Cushman, too, you may possibly have heard giving utterance to the same moving story; but, I think, with a masculinity about her manner she could never wholly shake off, and which gave the impression that she could—if need were—give the stout king such a buffet on the ears as would put an end to all chaffer about divorce.
Shakespeare, writing that play of Henry VIII., probably during the lifetime of Elizabeth (though its precise date and full authenticity are matters of doubt), could not speak with very much freedom of the great queen’s father: She had too much of that father’s spirit in her to permit that; otherwise, I think the great dramatist would have given a blazing score to the cruelty and Bluebeardism of Henry VIII.
I know that there be those acute historic inquirers who would persuade us to believe that the king’s much-marrying propensities were all in order, and legitimate, and agreeable to English constitutional sanction: but I know, too, that there is a strong British current of common-sense setting down all through the centuries which finds harbor in the old-fashioned belief—that the king who, with six successive wives of his own choice, divorced two, and cut off the heads of other two, must have had—vicious weaknesses. For my own part, I take a high moral delight—Froude to the contrary—in thinking of him as a clever, dishonest, good-natured, obstinate, selfish, ambitious, tempestuous, arrogant scoundrel. Yet, withal, he was a great favorite in his young days;—so tall, so trim, so stout, so rich, so free with his money. No wonder the stately and disconsolate Queen (of Aragon) said:—
“Would I had never trod this English earth,
Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it;
Ye’ve angels faces, but Heaven knows your hearts!”
And this wilful King befriended learning and letters in his own wilful way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own in that direction, when he grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding—in which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports and exercises of the field.