THE VARIOUS VIEWS OF HENRY VIII.’S CHARACTER.
NOTE I.
The progress of an individual, of a people, or even of a movement is never up, and their decadence is never down, an inclined plane. Neither do we see sudden and lofty flights in progress nor headlong falls in decadence. Both move rather by steps—steps up or steps down. The steps are not all alike; one is short another long; one sudden another gradual. They are all moreover the inevitable sequences of those which went before, and they as inevitably lead to those which follow. Our Fathers took a long step in the Tudor epoch, but older ones led up to it and newer ones started from it. The long step could not possibly be evaded by a Teutonic people. Rome lay in the path, and progress must needs step over the body of Rome—not a dead body then, though wounded from within, not a dead body yet, though now deeply and irreparably wounded from without. Civilization must everywhere step over the body of Rome or stand still, or turn backwards.
Two factors are especially needed for progress: brain (racial brain), which by organisation and inheritance tends to be large, free, capable; and secondly, circumstance, which continually calls forth capability, and freedom, and largeness. All the schools of supernaturalism, but above all the Romish school, compress and paralyse at least a portion of the brain: if a portion is disabled all is enfeebled. If a bodily limb even, a mere hand or foot, be fettered and palsied, the body itself either dies or droops into a smaller way of life. It is so with a mental limb—a mental hand or foot in relation to the mental life.
To the group of ever-present and subtle forces which make for progress, there were added in the sixteenth century seemingly new and conspicuous forces. The art of printing or writing by machinery sowed living seed broadcast over a fertile soil; the “new learning” restored to us the inspiring but long hidden thought of old Aryan friends and relatives, and this again in some degree relaxed the grip of alien and enslaving Semitic ideas which the exigencies of Roman circumstance had imposed on Europe with the edge of the sword. New action trod on the heels of new thought. New lands were traversed; new seas were sailed; new heavens were explored. The good steed civilisation—long burdened and blindfolded and curbed,—had lagged somewhat; but now the reins were loose, the spurs were sharp, the path was clear and the leap which followed was long.
While our fathers were taking, or were on the eve of taking, this long step, a notable young man, the son of a capable and wise father and of a not incapable but certainly unwise mother, stepped into the chief place in this country. A student who was in training for an Archbishop was suddenly called upon to be a King. What this King was, what he was not; what organisation and parentage and circumstance did for him; how he bore himself to his time—to its drift, its movements, its incidents, its men, and, alas, to its women—is now our object to inquire. The study of this theological monarch and of his several attitudes is deeply instructive and of unfailing interest.
The Autocrat of the breakfast table wittily comments on the number of John’s characters. John had three. Notable men have more characters than “John.” Henry VIII. had more characters than even the most notable of men. A man of national repute or of high position has the characters given to him by his friends, his enemies, and characters given also by parties, sects, and schools. Henry had all these and two more—strictly, two groups more—one given to him by his own time, another given to him by ours.
If we could call up from their long sleep half a dozen representative and capable men of Henry’s reign to meet half a dozen of Victoria’s, the jury would probably not agree. If the older six could obtain all the evidence which is before us, and the newer six could recall all which was familiar to Henry’s subjects at home and his compeers abroad; if the two bodies could weigh matters together, discuss all things together—could together raise the dead and summon the living—nevertheless in the end two voices would speak—a sixteenth century voice and a nineteenth.
The older would say in effect: “We took our King to be not only a striking personality; not only an expert in all bodily exercises and mental accomplishments; we knew him to be much more—to be industrious, pious, sincere, courageous, and accessible. We believed him to be keen in vision, wise in judgment, prompt and sagacious in action. We looked round on our neighbours and their rulers, and we saw reason to esteem ourselves the most prosperous of peoples and our King the first, by a long way the first, of his fellow Kings. Your own records prove that long years after Henry’s death, in all time of trouble the people longed for Henry’s good sense and cried out for Henry’s good laws. He was a sacrilegious miscreant you say; if it were so the nation was a nation of sacrilegious miscreants, for he merely obeyed the will of the people and carried out a policy which had been called for and discussed and contrived and, in part, carried out long before our Henry’s time. Upwards of a century before, the assembled knights of the shire had more than once proposed to take the property of the Church (much of it gained by sinister methods) and hand it over for military purposes. The spirit of the religious houses had for some time jarred on the awakening spirit of a thinking people. Their very existence cast a slur on a high and growing ideal of domestic life. Those ancient houses detested and strove to keep down the knowledge which an aroused people then, as never before, passionately desired to gain.”
“You say he was a ‘monster of lust.’ Lust is not a new sin: our generation knew it as well as yours; detected it as keenly as yours; hated it almost as heartily. But consider: No king anywhere has been, in his own time, so esteemed, so trusted, nay even so loved and reverenced as our king. Should we have loved, trusted, and reverenced a ‘monster of lust’? If you examine carefully the times before ours and the times since, you will find that monsters of lust, crowned or uncrowned, do not act as Henry acted. The Court, it is true, was not pure, but it was the least voluptuous Court then existing, and Henry was the least voluptuous man in it. While still in his teens the widow of an elder brother, a woman much older than he, and who was also old for her years, was married to him on grounds of state policy. Not Henry only, but wise and learned men, Luther and Melancthon among others, came to believe that the marriage was not legal. Henry himself, indeed, came to believe that God’s curse was on it—in our time we fervently believed in God’s curse. A boy with promise of life and health was the one eager prayer of the people. But boy after boy died and of four boys not one survived. If one of Catharine’s boys had lived: nay more, if Ann Boleyn had been other than a scheming and faithless woman; or if, later, Jane Seymour had safely brought forth her son (and perhaps other sons), Henry would assuredly never have married six wives. You say he should have seen beforehand the disparity of years, the illegality, the incest—should have seen even the yet unfallen curse: in our time boys of eighteen did not see so clearly all these things.” “Alas,” the juror might have added, “marriage and death are the two supreme incidents in man’s life: but marriage comes before experience and judgment—these are absent when they are most needed; experience and judgment attend on death when they are needless.” “Bear in mind, moreover,” resumes the older voice, “that in our time the marriage laws were obscure, perplexing, and unsettled. High ideals of marriage did not exist. The first nobleman in our Court was the Earl of Suffolk who twice committed bigamy and was divorced three times; his first wife was his aunt, and his last his daughter-in-law. Papal relaxations and papal permissions were cheap and common—they permitted every sort of sexual union and every sort of separation. Canon law and the curious sexual relationships of ecclesiastics, high and low, shed no light but rather darkness on the matter. The Pope, it is true, hesitated to grant Henry’s divorce, but not, as the whole world knew, on moral or religious grounds: at heart he approved the divorce and rebuked Wolsey for not settling the matter offhand in England. All the papal envoys urged the unhappy Catharine to retire into a religious house; but Catharine insisted that God had called her to her position”—forgetting, we may interpose, that if He called her to it He also in effect deposed her from it. God called her daughter Mary, so Mary believed, to burn Protestants; God called Elizabeth, so Elizabeth exclaimed (‘it was marvellous in her eyes’), to harass Romanists.
“But the one paramount circumstance which weighed with us, and we remember a thousand circumstances while you remember the ‘six wives’ only, was the question of succession. If succession was the one question which more than all others agitated your fathers in Anne’s time, try to imagine what it was to us. You, after generations of order, peace and security—you utterly fail to understand our position. We had barely come out of a lawless cruel time—a time born of the ferocity and hate of conflicting dynasties. Fathers still lived to tell us how they ate blood, and drank blood, and breathed blood. They and we were weary of blood, and our two Henrys (priceless Henrys to us,) had just taken its taste out of our mouths. No queen, be it well noted, had ruled over us either in peaceful or in stormy times; we believed with our whole souls, rightly or wrongly, that no queen could possibly preserve us from destruction and ruin. It was our importunity mainly—make no mistake on this point,—which drove our king, whenever he was wifeless, to take another wife. His three years of widowhood after Jane Seymour’s death was our gravest anxiety.”
The newer voice replies: “You were a foolish and purblind generation. The simplicity of your Henry’s subjects, and the servility of his parliament have become a bye-word. It is true your king, although less capable than you suppose, was not without certain gifts—their misuse only adds to his infamy. It is true also that he had been carefully educated,—his father was to be thanked for that. It would seem, moreover, that quite early in life he was not without some attractiveness in person and manners, but you forget that bodily grossness and mental irritability soon made him a repulsive object. An eminent Englishman of our century says he was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned and swinish-looking fellow, and that indeed so bad a character could never have been veiled under a prepossessing appearance. Your King was vain, ostentatious, and extravagant. With measured words we declare that his hypocrisy, cruelty, sacrilege, selfishness and lust, were all unbounded. He was above all an unrivalled master of mean excuses: did he wish to humble and oppress the clergy—they had violated the statute of premunire. Did his voluptuous eye fall on a dashing young maid of honour—he suddenly discovered that he was living in incest, and that his marriage was under God’s curse. Did the Pope hesitate to grant him a divorce—he began to see that the proper head of the English Church was the English king. Was his exchequer empty—he was convinced that the inmates of the wealthy religious houses led the lives and deserved the fate of certain cities once destroyed by fire and brimstone. Did a defiant Pole carry his head out of Harry’s reach—it was found that Pole’s mother, Lady Salisbury, was the centre of Yorkist intrigue, and that the mother’s head could be lopped off in place of the son’s.”
The two voices it is clear have much to say for themselves. It is equally clear that the two groups of jurymen will not agree on their verdict.
It is commonly held and as a rule on good grounds, that the judgment of immediate friends and neighbours is less just than the opinion of foreigners and of posterity. This is so when foreigners and posterity are agreed, and are free from the tumult, and passion, and personal bias of time and place. It is not so in Henry’s case. Curiously enough, foreign observers, scholars, envoys, travellers, agree with—nay, outrun Henry’s subjects in their praise of Henry. Curiously too the tumult and passion touching Henry’s matrimonial affairs—touching all his affairs indeed,—have grown rather than diminished with the progress of time. Epochs, like men, have not the gift of seeing themselves as others see them. Unnumbered Frenchmen ate and drank, and made merry, and bought and sold; married their children and buried their parents, not knowing that France was giving a shock to all mankind for all time to come. The assassins of St. Bartholomew believed that in future a united Christendom would bless them for performing a pious and uniting deed. We see all at once the bare and startling fact of six wives. Henry’s subjects saw and became familiar with a slow succession of marriages, each of which had its special cloud of vital yet confusing circumstance. So too the Reformation has its different phases. In the sixteenth century it was looked on as a serious quarrel, no doubt, but no one dreamed it was anything more. Then each side thought the other side would shortly come to its senses and all would be well; no one dreamt of two permanently hostile camps and lasting combat. If personal hate and actual bloodshed have passed away, and at the present moment the combat shews signs of still diminishing bitterness, it is because a new and mysterious atmosphere is slowly creeping over both—slowly benumbing both the armies.
An attempt must be made here to sketch Henry’s character with as much impartiality as is possible. But no impartial sketch will please either his older friends or his newer enemies. Although Henry came to the throne a mere boy, he was a precocious boy. In the precocious the several stages of life succeed each other more quickly than in others, and probably they themselves do not wear so well. When Henry was twenty-five he was little less wise and capable than he was at thirty-five or forty-five. At forty he was probably wiser than he was at fifty. The young king’s presence was striking; he had a fresh rosy complexion, and an auburn though scanty beard. His very limbs, exclaims one foreign admirer, “glowed with warm pink” through his delicately woven tennis costume. He was handsome in feature; large and imposing in figure; open and frank in manners; strong, active, and skilled in all bodily exercises. He was an admirer of all the arts, and himself an expert in many of them. Henry had indeed all the qualities, whatever their worth may be, which make a favourite with the multitude. Those qualities, no matter what change time brought to them, preserved his popularity to the last.
Henry was neither a genius nor a hero; but they who deny that he was a singularly able man will probably misread his character; misread his ideals, his conduct, and his various attitudes. Henry’s education was thorough and his learning extensive. His habit of mind tended perhaps rather to activity and versatility and obedience to old authority than to intensity or depth or independence. His father, who looked more favourably on churchmen and lawyers than on noblemen, destined his second son for the Church. At that time theology, scholastic theology—for Colet and Erasmus and More had not then done their work—was the acutest mental discipline known as well as the highest accomplishment. For when the “new learning” reached this country it found theology the leading study, and therefore it roused theology; in Italy on the other hand it found the arts the predominant study, and there it roused the arts. Henry would doubtless have made a successful bishop and escaped thereby much domestic turmoil; but, on the whole, he was probably better fitted to be a King; while his quiet, contemplative, and kindly father would at any rate have found life pleasanter in lawn sleeves than he found it on a throne.
It would be well if men and women were to write down in two columns with all possible honesty the good and the evil items in the characters (not forgetting their own) which interest them. The exercise itself would probably call forth serviceable qualities, and would frequently bring to light unexpected results. Probably in this process good characters would lose something and the bad would gain. From such an ordeal Henry VIII. would come out a sad figure, though not quite so sad as is popularly considered.
It is not proposed in this sketch of character to separate, if indeed separation is possible, the good qualities which are held to be more or less inborn from those which seem to be attainable by efforts of the will. Freedom of the will must of course be left in its native darkness. Neither can the attempt be made to estimate, even if such estimate were possible, how much the individual makes of his own character and how much is made for him. Some features of character, again, are neither good nor evil, or are good or evil only when they are excessive or deficient or unsuitable to time and place. Love of pageantry is one of these; love of pleasure another; so, too, are the leanings to conservation or to innovation.
In thought and feeling and action Henry was undoubtedly conservative. His conservatism was modified by his self-will and self-confidence, but it assuredly ranked with the leading features of his character—with his piety his egotism and his love of popularity. To shine in well-worn paths was his chief enjoyment: not to shine in these paths, or to get out of them, or to get in advance of them, or to lag behind, was his greatest dread. The innovator may or may not be pious, but conservatism naturally leans to piety, and Henry’s piety, if not deep or passionate, was at any rate copious and sincere. Henry, it has been said, was not a hero, not a genius, neither was he a saint. But if his ideals were not high, and if his conduct was not unstained, his religious beliefs were unquestioning and his religious observances numerous and stringent.
The fiercer the light which beat upon his throne, the better pleased was Henry. He had many phases of character and many gifts, and he delighted in displaying his phases and in exercising his gifts. The use and place of ceremony and spectacle are still matters of debate; but modern feeling tends more and more to hand them over to children, May-day sweeps, and Lord-mayors. In Henry’s reign the newer learning and newer thought had it is true done but little to undermine the love of gewgaws and glitter, but Henry’s devotion to them, even for his time, was so childish that it must be written down in his darker column.
We may turn now to the less debatable items in Henry’s character, and say which shall go into the black list and which into the white. We are all too prone perhaps to give but one column to the men we approve, and one only to the men we condemn. It is imperative in the estimation of character that there be “intellect enough,” as a great writer expresses it, to judge and material enough on which to pronounce judgment. If we bring the “sufficient intellect,” especially one that is fair by habit and effort, to the selection of large facts—for facts have many sizes and ranks, large and small, pompous and retiring—and strip from these the smaller confusing facts, strip off too, personal witcheries and deft subtleties—then we shall see that all men (and all movements) have two columns. The ‘monster’ Henry had two. In his good column we cannot refuse to put down unflagging industry—no Englishman worked harder—a genuine love of knowledge, a deep sense of the value of education, and devotion to all the arts both useful and elevating—the art of ship-building practically began with him. His courage, his sincerity, his sense of duty, his frequent generosity, his placability (with certain striking exceptions) were all beyond question. His desire for the welfare of his people, although tempered by an unduly eager desire for their good opinion, was surely an item on the good side. The good column is but fairly good; the black list is, alas, very black. Henry was fitful, capricious, petulant, censorious. His fitfulness and petulance go far to explain his acts of occasional implacability. Failing health and premature age explain in some degree the extreme irritability and absence of control which characterised his later years. In his best years his love of pleasure, or rather his love of change and excitement, his ostentation, and his extravagance exceeded all reasonable limits. Ostentation and love of show are rarely found apart from vanity, and Henry’s vanity was colossal. Vain men are not proud, and Henry had certainly not the pride which checks the growth of many follies. A proud man is too proud to be vain or undignified or mean or deceitful, and Henry was all these. Pride and dignity usually run together; while, on the other hand, vanity and self-importance keep each other company as a rule. Henry lacked dignity when he competed with his courtiers for the smiles of Ann Boleyn in her early Court days; he lacked it when he searched Campeggio’s unsavoury carpet-bag. He seemed pleased rather than otherwise that his petty gossip should be talked of under every roof in Europe. It is true that in this direction Catharine descended to a still lower level of bed-room scandal; but her nature, never a high one, was deteriorated by a grievous unhappiness and by that incessant brooding which sooner or later tumbles the loftiest nature into the dust.
Henry’s two striking failings—his two insanities—were a huge self-importance and an unquenchable thirst for notoriety and applause. I have said ‘insanities’ designedly, for they were not passions—they were diseases. The popular “modern voice” would probably not regard these as at all grave defects when compared with others so much worse. This voice indeed, we well know, declares him to have been the embodiment of the worst human qualities—of gross selfishness, of gross cruelty, and of gross lust. These charges are not groundless, but if we could believe them with all the fulness and the vehemence with which they are made, we must then marvel that his subjects trusted him, revered him, called (they and their children) for his good sense and his good laws; we can but marvel indeed that with one voice of execration they did not fell him lifeless to the ground. He was unguarded and within reach. If the charges against Henry come near to the truth, Nero was the better character of the two. Nero knew not what he did; he was beyond question a lunatic and one of a family of lunatics. Henry’s enormities were the enormities of a fairly sane and responsible man.
In order to read Henry’s character more correctly, if that be possible, than it is read by the “two voices,” more light is needed. Let us see what an examination of Henry’s bodily organisation, and especially of his parentage, will do for us. In this light—if it be light, and attainable light—it will be well to examine afresh (at the risk of some repetition) the grave charges which are so constantly and so confidently laid at his door and see what of vindication or modification or damning confirmation may follow. Before looking specially at Henry’s organisation and inheritance, I purpose devoting a short chapter to a general view of the principles which can give such an examination any value. It will be for the most part a brief statement of views which I have already put forward in my little work on character as seen in body and parentage.