Little did the uxorious monarch dream that he was at this moment standing on a mine that would blow all his imagined happiness into the air and send his idolised wife to the block. But at the very time that he and Catherine had been showing themselves as so beautifully conjugal a couple to the good people of the north, the mine had been preparing. It was the misfortune of all the queens of Henry VIII. that they had not only to deal with one of the most vindictive and capricious tyrants that ever existed, but that they were invariably, and necessarily, the objects of the hatred of a powerful and merciless party, which was ready to destroy its antagonist, and, as the first and telling stroke in that progress, to pull down the queen. Catherine Howard was now the hope of the Romanists. She was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk, the most resolute lay-Papist in the kingdom, and the political head of that party. The public evidences of the growing influence of Catherine with the king in the northern progress, had been marked by the Catholics with exultation, and by the Protestants with proportionate alarm. Both Rapin and Burnet assert that Cranmer felt convinced, from what he saw passing, that unless some means were found to lessen the influence of the queen, and thus dash the hopes of the Catholics, he must soon follow Cromwell to the block. A most ominous circumstance which reached him was, that the royal party took up their quarters for a night at the house of Sir John Gorstwick, who, but in the preceding spring, had denounced Cranmer in open Parliament, as "the root of all heresies," and that at Gorstwick's there had been held a select meeting of the Privy Council, at which Gardiner, the unhesitating leader of the Romanists, presided. It was the signal for the Protestants to bring means of counter-action into play, and such means, unfortunately for the queen, were already stored up and at hand.
It was discovered that the queen had been guilty of numerous improprieties before marriage, chiefly with a man called Derham, and it was now alleged that an intrigue had been going on between Catherine and her cousin, Thomas Culpepper, in the northern progress, at Lincoln and York, and that one night Culpepper was in the same room with the queen and Lady Rochford for three hours. But when it was attempted to establish this fact on the evidence of women in attendance, Catherine Tylney and Margaret Morton, this evidence dwindled to mere surmise. Tylney deposed that on two nights at Lincoln, the queen went to the room of Lady Rochford, and stayed late, but affirmed "on her peril that she never saw who came unto the queen and my Lady Rochford, nor heard what was said between them." Morton's evidence amounted only to this, that, at Pontefract, Lady Rochford conveyed letters between the queen and Culpepper, as was supposed; and one night when the king went to the queen's chamber, the door was bolted, and it was some time before he could be admitted. This circumstance must have been satisfactorily accounted for to Henry at the time, jealous person as he was, yet on such paltry grounds was it necessary to build the charge of criminal conduct in the queen.
CATHERINE HOWARD BEING CONVEYED TO THE TOWER. (See p. 185.)
On the 21st of January, 1542, a bill of attainder of Catherine Howard, late Queen of England, and of Jane, Lady Rochford, for high treason; of Agnes, Duchess of Norfolk, Lord William Howard, the Lady Bridgewater, and four men and five women, including Derham and Culpepper, already executed, was read in the Lords. On the 28th, the Lord Chancellor, impressed with a laudable sense of justice, proposed that a deputation of Lords and Commons should be allowed to wait on the queen to hear what she had to say for herself. He said it was but just that a queen, who was no mean or private person, but a public and illustrious one, should be tried by equal laws like themselves and thought it would be acceptable to the king himself if his consort could thus clear herself. But that did not suit Henry: he was resolved to be rid of his lately beloved model queen; and as there was no evidence whatever of any crime on her part against him, he did not mean that she should have any opportunity of being heard in her defence. The bill was, therefore, passed through Parliament, passing the Lords in three and the Commons in two days. On the 10th of February the queen was conveyed by water to the Tower, and the next day Henry gave his assent to the bill of attainder. The persons sent to receive the queen's confession were Suffolk, Cranmer, Southampton, Audley, and Thirlby. "How much she confessed to them," Burnet says, "is not very clear, neither by the journal nor the Act of Parliament, which only say she confessed." If she had confessed the crime alleged after marriage, that would have been made fully and officially known. Two days afterwards, February 12th, she was brought to the block.
Thus fell Catherine Howard in the bloom of her youth and beauty, being declared by an eye-witness to be the handsomest woman of her time, paying for youthful indiscretions the forfeit of her life to the king, though some think she had not sinned against him. So conscious was Henry of this, that he made it high treason, in the Act of Attainder, for any one to conceal any such previous misconduct in a woman whom the sovereign was about to marry. With Catherine fell the odious Lady Rochford, who had long deserved her fate, for her false and murderous evidence against her own husband and Anne Boleyn.
Having thus destroyed his fifth wife, Henry now turned his attention to the regulation of religious affairs and opinions. In 1539 he had attempted to set up a standard of orthodoxy by the publication of "The Institution of a Christian Man," or "The Bishops' Book," as it was called, because compiled by the bishops under his direction. After that he published his "Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man," which was called "The King's Book." In this it was observable that, instead of approaching nearer to the Protestant creed, he was going fast back into the strictest principles of Romanism. He had allowed the people to read the Bible, but he now declared that, though the reading of it was necessary to the teachers of religion, it was not so necessary for the learners; and he decreed, by Act of Parliament, that the Bible should not be read in public, or be seen in any private families but such as were of noble or gentle birth. It was not to be read privately by any but householders and women who were well-born. If any woman of the ordinary class, any artificer, apprentice, journeyman, servant, or labourer dared to read the Bible, he or she was to be imprisoned for one month.
Gardiner and the Papist party were more and more in the ascendant, and the timid Cranmer and the more liberal bishops were compelled not only to wink at these bigoted rules, but to order "The King's Book," containing all the dogmas which they held to be false and pernicious, to be published in every diocese, and to be the guide of every preacher. By this means it was hoped to quash the numerous new sects which were springing from the reading of the Bible, and the earnest discussions consequent upon it. Such a flood of new light had poured suddenly into the human mind, that it was completely dazzled by it. Opinion becoming in some degree free, ran into strange forms. There were Anabaptists, who held that every man ought to be guided by the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and that, consequently, there was no need of king, judge, magistrate, or civil law, or war, or capital punishment. There were Antinomians, who contended that all things were free and allowable to the saints without sin. There were Fifth-Monarchy men; members of the Family of Love, or Davidians, from one David George, their leader; Arians, Unitarians, Predestinarians, Libertines, and other denominations, whom we shall find abundant in the time of the Commonwealth. What was strangest of all was to see King Henry, who would allow no man's opinion to be right but his own, and who burnt men for daring to differ from him, lecturing these contending sects on their animosities in his speech in Parliament, and bidding them "behold what love and charity there was amongst them, when one called another heretic and Anabaptist, and he called him again Papist, hypocrite, and pharisee;" and the royal peacemaker threatened to put an end to their quarrellings by punishing them all. During the four remaining years of his reign, he burnt or hanged twenty-four persons for religion—that is, six annually—fourteen of them being Protestants. During these years "The King's Book" was the only authorised standard of English orthodoxy.
It is now necessary to take a brief glance at the proceedings of Henry's government in Ireland and Wales, and towards Scotland. In the Principality of Wales the measures of the king were marked by a far wiser spirit than those which predominated in religion. Being descended from the natives of that country, it was natural that it should claim his particular attention. Wales at that time might be divided into two parts, one of which had been subjected by the English monarchs, and divided into shires, the other which had been conquered by different knights and barons, thence called the lords-marchers. The shires were under the royal will, but the hundred and forty-one small districts or lordships which had been granted to the petty conquerors, excluded the officers and writs of the king altogether. The lords, like so many counts palatine, exercised all sovereign rights within their own districts, had their own courts, appointed their own judges, and punished or pardoned offenders at pleasure. This opened up a source of the grossest confusion and impunity from justice; for criminals perpetrating offences in one district had only to move into another, and set the law at defiance. Henry, by enacting, in 1536, that the whole of Wales should thenceforth be incorporated with England, should obey the same laws and enjoy the same rights and privileges, did a great work. The Welsh shires, with one borough in each, were empowered to send members to Parliament, the judges were appointed solely by the Crown, and no lord was any longer allowed to pardon any treason, murder, or felony in his lordship, or to protect the perpetrators of such crimes. The same regulations were extended to the county palatine of Chester.
The proceedings of Henry in Ireland were equally energetic, if they were not always as just; and in the end they produced an equally improved condition of things there. Quiet and law came to prevail, though they prevailed with severity. On the accession of Henry to the throne, the portion of the island over which the English authority really extended was very limited indeed. It included merely the chief sea-ports, with the five counties of Louth, Westmeath, Dublin, Kildare, and Wexford. The rest of the country was almost independent of England, being in the hands of no less than ninety chieftains—thirty of English origin, and the rest native—who exercised a wild and lawless kind of sway, and made war on each other at will. Wolsey, in the height of his power, determined to reduce this Irish chaos to order. He saw that the main causes of the decay of the English authority lay in the perpetual feuds and jealousies of the families of Fitzgerald and Butler, at the head of which were the Earls of Kildare and of Ormond. The young Earl of Kildare, the chief of the Fitzgeralds, who succeeded his father in 1520, was replaced by the Earl of Surrey, afterwards the Duke of Norfolk, whom we have seen so disgracefully figuring in the affairs of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, his nieces. During the two years that he held the Irish government, he did himself great credit by the vigour of his administration, repressing the turbulence of the chiefs, and winning the esteem of the people by his hospitality and munificence.