The history of these later years, in short, lends colour to the view that the political errors—in foreign affairs—committed in Wolsey’s days were forced on him by the king: and also that the king himself did not formulate large political conceptions on his own account. More than that, it shows him capable of such serious blunders as the proposal to re-assert the old fable of English suzerainty in Scotland, and—what was in its own way hardly less short-sighted—the wholesale debasement of the coinage. It was not till he was left to manage things with no strong counsellor to aid him that he gave way completely to this most evil propensity of his last years. The thing did incalculable mischief, ruining credit, driving up prices, robbing creditors for the benefit of debtors, and, of course, driving all the sound coins out of circulation. It is to the credit of Somerset in the next reign that, in spite of the depleted treasury, he did not carry that disastrous experiment further: it was left for Northumberland to degrade the currency even more than Henry had done. And it was Henry who had done it, not Wolsey or Cromwell or Gardiner. These things would seem to mean that, left to himself, it was his tendency to resort to paltry and short-sighted tricks and devices of a kind incompatible with the higher statesmanship; tricks which seem at the moment to effect their purpose, but are a mere evasion of the difficulties with which they pretend to deal. In these years, Henry’s statesmanship makes a poor display. We may plead on his behalf that physical disease weakened his intellectual powers, that practically unchecked despotism produced moral degeneration, that we cannot judge the qualities of a man whose rule had been—for whatever reason—undeniably powerful for a quarter of a century, by the mismanagement of the years when he was wearing into his grave. There is truth in the plea. Yet from the degeneration we can infer the inherent defects. The man who muddled his Scottish policy, and left the arrangements for carrying on the government at his death in a state of chaos, was not he who planned, organised, and carried out the defiance of the Papal power and the subjection of the Church; but he may have been perfectly capable of appreciating that vast scheme, and of playing a formidable part in the execution of it. On the other hand, had he been merely a vain tyrannical bully, there was more than one man in his entourage after Cromwell’s fall, who would have had the wit to make a puppet of him—which no one certainly succeeded in doing.
VIII
HENRY’S MARRIAGES
A study of Henry’s character, however brief, would be incomplete if it omitted to touch on his widely varied marital relations. The Blue Beard legend may by this time be fairly looked upon as exploded. He did not marry one wife after another to gratify capricious passions, and, when he was weary of the new toy, cut her head off and get himself another. Except in the case of Anne Boleyn, and possibly Jane Seymour, passion can have had very little to say to his various ventures. His Court was licentious; but the king himself does not appear to have been worse than his neighbours, even if he was no better. Political intriguers tried to obtain influence through mistresses; there was certainly an attempt to supplant Anne Boleyn by this means, and the Earl of Surrey—who was probably innocent enough of real treason but otherwise deserves very little of the pity that has been wasted on him—tried to persuade his own sister to establish herself at the king’s ear in the same way. There is hardly a shadow of doubt that Anne Boleyn’s elder sister Mary was Henry’s mistress before he turned his eyes upon Anne. Rumour declared, though the statement is not substantiated, that Sir John Perrot, who did good work in Ireland in Elizabeth’s day, was really Henry’s son. It is probable, however, that there were no children of his born out of wedlock except the son of Elizabeth Blount, whom he made Duke of Richmond and was credited with intending to get legitimised, when there was no likelihood of a legitimate male heir appearing. The state of the Court was such that Chapuys declined to believe in the otherwise unimpeached virtue of Jane Seymour, merely on the general principle that no woman could be supposed virtuous under the conditions there prevalent—but Chapuys was writing at a moment when he was feeling particularly hot against the whole Court. An item in the royal accounts has been supposed to indicate that Henry kept a sort of harem, but that is based on what is almost certainly a misinterpretation of the term “mistress.” Henry was licentious enough, but there is no reason to imagine him as a satyr, or as on the same plane with Francis I. The kings of the sixteenth century, bad or good, were not often clean livers. The way to Henry’s favour was never through the good graces of the favourite of the hour; and except in the case of Anne Boleyn it never appears that he allowed any passion to interfere with his politics.
At eighteen, as soon as he ascended the throne, Henry married the wife secured for him by the diplomacy of Henry VII. and Ferdinand and the complaisance of the Pope. Katharine was four years the elder, sufficiently good-looking, capable, and fit to be a queen. She had already been the bride of the young king’s elder brother, who had died very shortly after the nuptials: but the Pope had duly provided a dispensation to permit the second marriage. She and her husband got on satisfactorily enough for a time. In 1513, when he was displaying his martial prowess in Picardy, she was occupied in organising the Flodden campaign and wrote to him in a tone implying that they were excellent friends: yet it is possible to recognise a certain want of tact, in the absence of that adroit flattery which Henry’s vain soul loved, when she dwells on her own achievements instead of praising those of her lord. Henry soon grew cool—there is no reason to suppose that he was ever her ardent lover—and already, when babies died or were still-born, he seems to have turned his mind to a divorce, though he dropped the idea again. When the princess Mary was born and did not die, the big jovial monarch made a great pet of the child; and though he was unfaithful to his wife, and had no compunction about it, the conventional friendliness was maintained. There is no doubt that the queen exercised active influence to secure England’s favour for her nephew Charles V.; and critics have found, in the desire of Henry and Wolsey, a few years later, to break with Charles and form an alliance with France, one of the leading motives which recommended the divorce to them.
About 1522, Anne Boleyn came to Court; and from this time, favours began to flow in the direction of the Boleyn family. The probabilities are, however, that as yet they were due rather to the complaisance of the elder sister Mary than to the attractions of the younger. Four years later, it is clear that Anne had become the object of the king’s pursuit; but, whether because she was more virtuous or more ambitious than Mary, Anne would not surrender herself. The king became the victim of an absorbing passion, which made him determined to procure the divorce from Katharine at any cost—whether or no it was primarily responsible for reviving the idea. Once embarked on it, Henry was far too obstinate to allow anything to divert him. Towards the end of 1532—as soon as Warham was dead—he saw his way. Before the year was out, Anne had become his mistress or his wife; a marriage ceremony was performed in January—possibly in November. It is not easy to believe—though the evidence points that way—that Anne, after holding out till the prize was actually in reach, would have risked everything by yielding without insisting on the ceremony first taking place.
The marriage was extremely unpopular; the new queen was spiteful, flighty, undignified, if nothing worse. In a very short time, Cranmer was the only friend she had left; she lost her charm for her husband, and she annoyed him by the same failure to fulfil his expectations as Katharine. The old idea cropped up again, that on this as on the previous union the blessing of heaven did not rest. The king found himself attracted by the somewhat inconspicuous charms and persistent virtue of Jane Seymour. Charges were brought against Anne, which may or may not have been true; admissions were made to Cranmer, the nature of which we can only guess at; on the strength of the former, she was condemned to death for treason, and on the strength of the latter the marriage was declared void ab initio. The unhappy woman was beheaded; next day, according to Chapuys, the king married Jane Seymour privately. The official marriage was ten days later.
Jane appears to have been a pleasing, colourless, irreproachable person; who, when she had given birth to the much-desired son, departed to another world without having suffered any estrangement from her husband. He, however, was wife-hunting again before long—not because he was attracted by any one, but for purely political ends. Unfortunately he was not satisfied by the possession of purely political qualifications on the part of the ladies, but offended their susceptibilities by wishing to inspect them. At last Cromwell beguiled him into approving the Cleves marriage; but when Anne came over, and retreat seemed impossible, he first found that she was not at all to his taste, and then that the political reasons for wedding her had been quite inadequate. So the ecclesiastical lawyers set to work again to discover an excuse for annulling that marriage; and in the meantime the Duke of Norfolk produced a young niece of his own, Katharine Howard, who took the king’s more than middle-aged fancy. Being quit of Anne, he married the girl, who successfully cajoled him for about a year: after which, the faction opposed to Norfolk discovered and laid before the unfortunate husband evidence of undoubted immorality before and probable immorality after her marriage. So Katharine Howard followed Anne Boleyn to the block. The affair seems to have been a really complete and very painful surprise to Henry.
By this time, the jibe attributed to the Duchess of Milan when Henry was thinking of marrying her—“Had I two heads, one should be at his majesty’s disposal”—would have been quite excusable. Even the ladies of his own Court were not covetous of the queenly throne. Chapuys, ever cynical, hinted that an Act passed at this time would quite account for reluctance on their part: if the king should propose to marry a subject, she must confess any improprieties of which she had been guilty; otherwise, if they were subsequently discovered, she would be held guilty of treason. Still Henry discovered one more lady who was willing to take the risks—a lady of much conjugal experience, now a widow for the second time. This was Katharine Parr, whose last husband had been Lord Latimer. Her virtue, however, was as much above suspicion as Jane Seymour’s had been; she was sensible, careful, and extremely tactful; and when an attempt was made to set her husband against her as a heretic, she satisfied him very easily, and her accuser had to submit to one of Henry’s ratings. She survived him, and married Admiral Thomas Seymour.
The marriages with Katharine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves were both avowedly and professedly political. That with Anne Boleyn was one of passion; that with Katharine Parr one of inclination. It is extremely doubtful whether either was effectively promoted by political intrigue. It is hardly at all doubtful that in the two remaining cases it was political intrigue which brought both Jane Seymour and Katharine Howard under the king’s notice; nevertheless, it is not likely that either of these marriages affected the king’s policy, though the disastrous termination of the second did so.