Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

This was precisely the time at which there is no doubt that the question of divorcing Katharine of Aragon was very much on the minds both of king and Cardinal. In discussing that subject in the preceding study of Wolsey, nothing was said of the theory most adverse to Wolsey—that the idea originated with him, and that he suggested it with the specific intention of breaking the alliance with Charles and substituting a French marriage, a French alliance being now his object. On this theory it is argued that the king’s intention of using the divorce to marry Anne Boleyn was sprung on the Cardinal as something quite new, on his return from the French embassy; his absence having been turned to account by his enemies, with the simple object of wrecking his policy and ruining him. The fact that Henry afterwards publicly acquitted Wolsey of having instigated the divorce may not count for much as evidence of his innocence; but there is another grave objection to the theory. If Henry told him that the divorce must be managed somehow, he would doubtless have considered that the least injurious result would be a French marriage; but it is not easy to imagine that he would himself have sought to bring about a step which would have made so permanent a breach between Henry and Charles. His own policy was to keep it always in the power of England to shift from one side to the other—to trim the balance between Charles and Francis. The theory is put forward to square with a particular view of Henry’s character—that he was managed by any one who could get at him. But it makes the Cardinal himself somewhat unintelligible—or unintelligent.

The view advanced in these pages is, that for the third time the king laid down a policy of his own for the Cardinal to carry out. In the first place he had two personal reasons for wanting the divorce—a superstitious impression that the failure of Katharine to supply him with a male heir was Heaven’s punishment for a marriage which the Pope ought never to have sanctioned; and a passion for Anne Boleyn. In the second place, the policy of alliance with Charles against Francis had worked out badly, and a rupture with Charles must come in any case. Wolsey should manage it, or should help: and if he began with a belief that a French marriage might be the outcome, there would be no harm done. The policy, as before, was a deviation from Wolsey’s, but did not seem superficially to run counter to the broad principle on which it was based, that England was to prove her effective predominance by throwing her weight into the French or the Imperial scale as circumstances might demand. But, as before, the method was short-sighted. On the other hand, we find Wolsey behaving also precisely as he did before. If the king did elect to lay down a policy, he must be the instrument through which it should be carried out. He could not prevent it; he must make the best of it, and as far as possible neutralise the bad effects by skilful handling. He made his attempt, failed, and fell. It would have been better for his credit if he had fallen in open instead of in covert opposition.

It remains in any case impossible to dogmatise; the whole thing is a tangle, and there are difficulties in the way of accepting each solution. To the theory that the divorce was primarily a plan of Wolsey’s in order to facilitate a French alliance, there is a further objection that a negotiation was already on foot for marrying the Princess Mary to Henry of Orleans, the French king’s second son, who afterwards became Henry II. The substitution of the marriage of the king himself to a French princess would have hardly been in itself a closer bond; yet we should be compelled to believe that Wolsey deliberately, with no greater advantage in view, sought to make this change at the cost of a probably irreparable breach with the emperor. The political motive is inadequate. Whereas, for the king, who had a powerful non-political motive thrown in, the plan becomes intelligible enough. The divorce should be so managed that Mary’s legitimacy should still be secured, the marriage with Orleans could go forward, and he himself would get the wife he wanted. That in 1527 his passion for Anne was a very powerful motive is not to be disputed—the love-letters, uncertain as their dates are, cannot be attributed to a still later time.

It is also tolerably clear that the king meant to have the divorce in any case, whether it upset foreign relations or not. Moreover, if the plan was Wolsey’s, he would have been satisfied to leave the Cardinal to work it out, which he was not. From the beginning he appears to have suspected—if there was not more than a suspicion—that his minister disliked the whole idea, and would be only too pleased if it were shelved; and he employed other agents to get the thing done, behind Wolsey’s back. Wolsey was very much in the position of a lawyer whose client, with whom he cannot afford to quarrel, insists on his adopting a certain course in defiance of his own judgment. He devised ingenious expedients; he tried to make his case as safe as possible; he gave nothing away to the other side; but he was reluctant throughout, while the king was invincibly obstinate.

Assuming then that it was Henry, not Wolsey, who from the commencement sought the divorce, the Cardinal’s consistency is restored. So far also the consistency of Henry’s character is maintained. He never laid out a great political scheme, calculating for the future; but when Wolsey formulated a large design, he readily recognised its merits, and recognised Wolsey himself as the man to carry it through. But three times he was moved with a desire to obtain a particular end, without realising that to do so would overturn the main scheme; on each occasion the minister formally and officially obeyed his master’s behest. Over the divorce, however, Henry’s behaviour presents an interesting psychological study.

There have been many statesmen, successful in varying degree, who have quite deliberately ignored moral considerations in their policy. They have not admitted that unrighteous action as such carries any penalty attached to it. Crime which shocks public sentiment violently they may avoid; not because it is criminal, but because public sentiment cannot be ignored. The mere fact that a particular course of action involves injustice or cruelty, or otherwise over-rides the moral law, is not permitted to weigh at all in judging of its expediency. Such a one was Thomas Cromwell. There have been others who would never allow any claim of mere expediency to countervail against the dictates of conscience. Such a one was Thomas More.

The average man is content to compromise: not drawing the line very high, but still drawing it somewhere. Henry belonged to the class who would never violate conscience; but, when any particular course presented itself to his mind as expedient or desirable, he had a quite unique power of convincing himself not only that the thing would not be wrong, but that conscience positively clamoured that it must be done: nothing was so monstrous that he could not solemnly persuade himself that it was a sad duty. There are men who are made that way. They will rob the widow and swindle the orphan, but they must and do first trick themselves into an amazing belief that in so doing they are serving heaven or society. Henry was much more dangerous than a commonplace hypocrite who assumes a mask to deceive the world, since he had to begin by making the deception convincing to himself.

Thus it was in the matter of the divorce. It was of real urgent importance that he should have a male heir, and there was no hope of his wife giving him one; he wanted very much to marry Anne, and he could not do so while his wife was living; but with what conscience could he get rid of that wife? Henry’s conscience gave him the answer he wanted, pat: it always did. Conscience pointed out that the children of the marriage, except one girl, all came to grief—were still-born, or died in a few weeks. Surely, here was Heaven’s judgment on a sinful union. True, the contracting parties had sinned with a Pope’s benediction, and thinking there was nothing wrong. But clearly the Pope must have erred. Conscience therefore did not merely excuse, it demanded, the dissolution of the unholy bond. Conscience permitted Henry to declare fervently that nothing would please him so much as to find that his scruples were groundless; but nothing would ever have persuaded him that they were so except perhaps the death of Anne Boleyn. Having once thoroughly satisfied himself that the divorce was a duty, whatever any one might say to the contrary, it followed that some legal method of accomplishing it must exist. If the Pope did not see the thing in the same light, there must be something defective in the Papal authority after all. The scruple of conscience gradually assumed an axiomatic character to Henry; and the repudiation of Clement, who regarded it as an extremely questionable postulate, followed logically.

Until Clement revoked the cause to Rome—a practical demonstration that he would not sanction a verdict objectionable to the emperor—nothing demanding revolutionary measures had occurred. That event, however, changed the situation. There would have to be a fight with the Papacy, which could not be conducted under the Cardinal’s captaincy. The Cardinal had failed badly; his behaviour had been suspicious. It did not take the conscientious monarch long to discover that advantage had been taken of his own generous trustfulness, that he had been warming a viper in his bosom. Wolsey was thrown to the wolves. It is curiously characteristic of Henry that the instrument by which he shattered Wolsey was the charge of a breach of Præmunire in accepting and exercising the legatine authority. The mere fact that this had been done with the king’s own licence, almost at his instigation, would have checked any other monarch. Henry found in it an additional cause of offence. The Cardinal had not only broken the law—he, whose business it was to see that the king did not accidentally transgress, had actually inveigled the king into transgression. A just man, tricked by his own familiar friend into committing an act of injustice, feels righteous indignation against the friend. Such was the indignation of the king against the Cardinal, as of Adam against Eve.