Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

Among the useful Statutes which he passed may be mentioned the Statute of Uses and the Statute of Bankruptcy. By the former he put an end to a most mischievous practice of conveying property for the use of certain parties or corporate bodies, which had been introduced to evade the Statute of Mortmain. So many secret modes of conveyance, so many legal fictions had been introduced into the transfer of this property, that it was difficult to ascertain the real owner; and creditors thus became defrauded, widows were deprived of their dowers, and husbands of their estates, by the courtesy. But the great feudal lords also were defrauded of their dues on wardships, marriages, and reliefs. By an Act of the twenty-seventh year of his reign (1536), it was decreed that whoever was found in the possession of such property should be deemed its bonâ-fide owner, and liable to the charges leviable upon it. By this means the dubious and fraudulent practice of uses was abolished, and the lawyers were compelled to resort to the more tangible theory of trusts. The nature of the tenure still remained the same, for the use was but a trust; but it was simplified, and brought more into the region of common sense and common observation.

By the preamble to the Statute of Bankruptcy, we find that the progress of commerce had led to frauds. Men by means of credit got the property of others into their hands and absconded with it. In the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII., therefore, it was enacted that the Chancellor or Keeper of the great seal, with the Lord Treasurer, Lord President, Privy Seal, and others of the privy council, and chief justices, or any three of them—the Chancellor, Keeper, President, or Privy Seal being one—should have power to constitute a court, before which, on complaints from a party aggrieved, they should summon the defaulter, should take possession of all his property, should hear all necessary evidence on oath, and should make a distribution of his effects amongst the creditors according to their claims. Persons concealing effects of the offender were to forfeit double their value; and claimants making fraudulent claims were to forfeit double the amount demanded.

This was the first outline and foundation of our court and law of bankruptcy, the main principles of which are still in force, but considerably modified by the greater development of the action of trade, and a spirit of increased enlightenment and humanity. The bankrupt is no longer treated necessarily as a criminal, but as one who has suffered from misfortune; and where he is innocent of dishonest conduct, is discharged from such obligations as he has no means of fulfilling, and the way opened for future enterprise.

But the laws of Henry were rarely so rational or innocent as these. We have seen, in tracing the events of his reign, that, to stop the mouths of his subjects regarding his many criminal deeds, the cruel calumnies on and divorces of his wives, followed by their execution, and the perpetration of fresh marriages equally revolting, he was continually creating new species of treasons, and loading the Statute book with the most atrocious specimens of legislation which ever disgraced the annals of any nation, Christian or pagan.

The first of these extraordinary enactments was the Statute 25 Henry VIII., c. 22, passed on the occasion of his divorce of Catherine of Aragon, and his marriage of Anne Boleyn. In this he declared that any one who dared to write, print, or circulate anything to the prejudice of this marriage, or the queen herself, or the issue of such marriage, should be guilty of high treason. The same was to be the fate of any one who endeavoured to dispute this alliance by advocating the validity of the former marriage with Catherine, and every one was to take an oath to obey this Act fully; and if any refused to take such oath, they were to be also guilty of misprision of treason. As, however, the tyrant could not prevent people from thinking and speaking their minds in private, next Session he got from his pliant Parliament a fresh Act, forbidding all persons to speak or even think a slander against the king; for if they thought, they could have the oath put to them, and must either deny their very thought, or be found guilty of treason.

But by the twenty-eighth year of his reign the fickle despot had cut off the head of this very queen, against whom nobody had on any account been allowed to whisper the slightest fault, on peril of their lives (1536). The marriage with her, as well as that with Catherine, was declared void, and never to have been otherwise; the issue of both was pronounced illegitimate, and the same penalties were enacted against every one who called in question the tyrant's marriage with Jane Seymour. Thus, on every occasion that this Royal sensualist thought fit to destroy or divorce a wife and marry another, did he compel the whole of his subjects to swear and forswear at his pleasure. In a Statute of the thirty-first of his reign, c. 8, he clearly enunciated that doctrine of Divine right which the Stuarts, his successors, upheld to their perdition. It is worthy of note, too, that by abolishing the authority of the Pope, to serve his own selfish ends, he let loose the human mind from its long thraldom, and prepared the way—a necessary sequence—for that political rebellion which was certain to be assumed by a people who had once triumphed in a religious one. Thus was political freedom the consequence of this lawless monarch's attempt to crush it, as much as the Reformation was that of his rejection of the Papacy for the gratification of his passions.

It is needless to follow Henry VIII. through the still repeated progress of those contradictory oaths as he slew or wedded fresh wives. It was the same in the divorce of Anne of Cleves, on the decapitation of Catherine Howard; but growing perfectly frantic with wrath and shame on finding himself married to an unchaste woman whom he had proclaimed an angel, he went a step farther, and denounced the terrors of high treason against any woman who should dare to marry him if she had been incontinent before marriage, and against all such persons as should know of this and should not warn the king in time. When to these hideous Statutes we add that of 31 Henry VIII., c. 14, which abolished all "Diversity of opinions," and that of 34 and 35 Henry VIII., c. 1, for the "Advancement of true religion and abolishment of the contrary," we have exhibited the most perfect example of what a man may become by the intoxication of unlimited power.

Besides particular laws, Henry VIII. erected two new courts of justice—the Court of the Steward of the Marshalsea, for the trial of all treasons, murders, manslaughters, and blows by which blood was shed in any of the palaces or houses of the king during his residence there; and the Court of the President and Council of the North. This latter court was established in the thirty-first year of his reign to try the rioters who had risen against his suppression of the lesser monasteries; but it included all the powers vested in the king's own Council, and not only decided such civil cases as were brought before it, but was armed with authority, by secret instructions from the Crown, to inquire into presumed illegalities, and to bring before it alleged offenders against the prerogatives of the king. Such oppressive use was made of it by Strafford in the time of Charles I., that it was abolished in the sixteenth year of that monarch's reign.