The second principle in establishing absolutism was the further depression of the nobility, who—again, as in the days of Henry VII.—were steadily kept from offices of State. Even the Howards exercised no control; and the most powerful of all, the Duke of Buckingham, was suddenly brought to the block. In that, as in everything the king did that was unpopular, the minister was charged with being the moving spirit, and his determination to destroy all rivals was accounted the moving cause. As a matter of fact, the duke’s execution fitted in with the Cardinal’s policy: but there is no direct ground for supposing that he had any active share in the matter. On the whole, there is no evidence that he was particularly vindictive. Still, personal ambition apart, since none of the nobles would willingly have been associated with him as a colleague it was necessary to the carrying out of his policy that his rivals should have their talons pared as far as possible; and also of course that there should be none powerful enough to form a disaffected party. Wolsey knew that, except for one or two ecclesiastics who had already in effect retired from the political arena, he stood practically alone. He had to make himself necessary to the king, and, since he could not be loved by the nobles, it undoubtedly suited him that they should fear him. In the result he succeeded so completely in destroying all possibility of opposition to Henry’s will that there was no man in the kingdom whom the king could not destroy if he chose merely to raise a finger.
Successful as he was in building up the power of the Crown, he was still apparently at the height of his own influence when he learnt that the power of the purse still lay elsewhere; and the king learnt a very important lesson at the same time—a lesson which he was to turn to account before very long—the importance of conciliating popular sentiment. Money was needed for the French war. Wolsey would have treated the Parliament, called to provide it, as a mere passive instrument for carrying out the royal behest. Had the House of Commons in 1523 suffered itself to be brow-beaten, it would have virtually surrendered its place in the Constitution. The House refused to be brow-beaten: it refused point-blank to discuss or to vote in the Cardinal’s presence. When he retired in wrath, a substantial sum was voted, but as a free grant to the king, not obligatory. Two years later, more money was wanted. Wolsey did not dare to ask a Parliament for it. He resorted to Benevolences, and found the citizens of London obstinate in their assertion that Benevolences were illegal. However willing Parliaments or burgesses might be to leave measures to the king and his minister, they were absolutely determined to provide nothing out of their own pockets unless their own consent had first been obtained through strictly constitutional channels.
In this thing Henry was quick to prove himself shrewder than the Cardinal. Like his daughter after him, he had an intuitive perception of the national temper, and lost no time in repudiating the idea of coercion. His personal popularity was doubled, and all the odium for the attempt fell upon the minister. But the scheme towards which he was strongly predisposed had been foiled, and Wolsey, though the result favoured his own views, knew that it would be fatal to him if he failed a second time to give effect to the king’s desires.
Therefore the Cardinal now gave himself up to the effort to meet his master’s demands in the matter on which he had set his heart, the separation from Katharine. But in this one matter, success for him was sufficiently improbable from the outset, and as time went on events which he was wholly unable to control made it a sheer impossibility. He failed, and the failure spelt his ruin. Giving himself utterly to the king’s service, his compliance did not save him. Hitherto he had been a statesman, pursuing ends which certainly magnified both his country and his sovereign with extraordinary ability and amazing success, by methods certainly not more unscrupulous than were sanctioned by the universal practice of the time. Now he devoted himself to an object wholly unworthy, which he must have felt to be utterly unrighteous. The king for whom he degraded himself served him—characteristically. Did the fallen man feel that his punishment was just, even while the hand that dealt it was supremely unjust? It would seem so. The sentiment, if not the words, which Shakespeare put in his mouth is authentic:
O Cromwell, Cromwell!
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.
V
THE DIVORCE
The whole story of the divorce is an ugly one; no amount of sophistry will ever make it anything else. Mr. Froude succeeded in persuading himself that pure unsullied patriotism was Henry’s ruling motive: and brings himself, apparently with some difficulty, to grant a qualified pardon to Katharine for her resistance, on the ground that after all she was a woman, and weak. If Henry had acted as some others have done, and had taken up definitely the position that by hook or by crook the legalisation of a new marriage for him was a national necessity, in order that a male heir to the throne might be born, the issue would have been a plain one. If bigamy could be justified on the grounds of national expediency, there was a decently good case for authorising a bigamous union. To provide a technical trick for evading the form of bigamy would no doubt have made the process easier, not affecting the ethics of it one way or other. But it followed logically that national interests alone were first to be taken into consideration in the selection of the new spouse. The fact that in that choice Henry was guided by passion and no other consideration whatever is sufficient proof that the actuating motive with him was not salus populi suprema lex. The grotesque nemesis by which later on Henry found himself with three acknowledged children of his body of whom two were born in what was supposed to be wedlock, both in virtue of marriages which the Courts had subsequently declared void, while the third, a boy, had no pretensions to legitimate birth—that nemesis is really a reductio ad absurdum of the whole position.
If on the other hand the awakening of Henry’s conscientious scruples had not coincided with a violent passion for another woman it would have been easier to believe that they were genuine, and that all he really wanted—as he frequently affirmed—was to have those scruples allayed. A genuine doubt would assuredly have demanded an authoritative pronouncement. Unfortunately, he made it perfectly clear that no authority could allay the scruples; he was absolutely determined that the Pope and the Cardinal between them must see to it that the doubts should be confirmed.
The precise stage at which Henry discovered that the weal of his people required a male heir of his body at any cost; at which his conscience began to question the validity of the dispensation under which he had married Katharine; at which he determined that Anne Boleyn should supplant the queen: all these are matter of some doubt. It is fairly clear that in 1526—certainly in 1527—if not before, Wolsey had been made aware that the king was desirous of exchanging Katharine for Anne; that Wolsey on his knees entreated the king to think better of it; that he found the king obdurate. There is no sign at all that the ethics of the divorce troubled Wolsey in any way; on the other hand no one has ever questioned that the Boleyn marriage was a thing hateful to him from every point of view. But he had to choose between lending himself to the king’s desire and rushing on his own ruin. Perhaps there are not many men who would have dared to take the nobler course; Wolsey, deteriora secutus, none the less fell.
It would seem that Wolsey first set himself to discover some legal expedient for nullifying the marriage, hit upon the idea that the dispensation granted by Julius was invalid, and tried more than one scheme with a view to its being pronounced invalid—hoping, it may be, that the law’s delays would give the king time to get over his infatuation for Anne, and that when—if ever—he should be legally free to take a new wife, the new wife would be a more fitting person.