IX
HENRY’S CHARACTER
The end of Henry’s life was quite characteristic. For some time beforehand every one knew that he could not last long; and intrigues were rife to secure power when he was gone. The Earl of Hertford, Jane Seymour’s brother, was at the head of that one of the two main factions whose leading ecclesiastic was Cranmer; they were balanced by Gardiner, with the old Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Earl of Surrey. A false move on Surrey’s part gave a handle to the enemy; Surrey was executed; Norfolk was attainted and his life saved only by Henry’s own death; Gardiner’s name was excluded from the council of “executors,” which is supposed to have been intended by the king to balance the two parties. Henry, left to himself, did not display wisdom in his government, but he always at the worst held the reins in a fast grip and sat firm in the saddle. His arrangements for carrying on the government after him were short-sighted, and his successor in the saddle, Hertford, was as much his inferior in practical mastery as he was superior in his ethical aims. The results are discussed in another chapter. Henry was almost in articulo mortis before any one ventured to tell him that his hours were numbered. At last he allowed Cranmer to be summoned. When he arrived, the king was speechless; but being besought to give some sign that he put his trust in Christ, wrung the Archbishop’s hand. An hour afterwards, he was dead.
Henry’s career leaves a pretty wide option for forming a judgment of his character. After making every possible allowance for flattery, we know that he was exceptionally accomplished, cultured, athletic; he could hold his own with any one, in an argument or in the tilt-yard. His physical courage has been impugned, principally because in respect of infectious diseases he was notoriously a coward. As a young man, if he was unfaithful to his wife he at any rate observed the expected courtesies; it is not surprising to find that as the divorce proceedings went on his manner deteriorated, till his treatment of Katharine, of his daughter Mary, of Anne Boleyn when she lost her hold on him, can only be described as blackguardly. No one, perhaps, would venture to ascribe to him a fervent zeal for religion; but he was intensely satisfied with the rigidity of his own orthodoxy. It is one of the many ironies of his career that his religiousness has been praised exclusively by people whom he would have sent to the stake as heretics without a moment’s hesitation. If he let Cranmer have his way about an English Bible, it was not from an enthusiastic admiration of the Scriptures, but because he knew that some of the clergy thought it would weaken their influence. The nature of his own creed is conveyed in the Act of the Six Articles. Of his “morality,” in the restricted sense of that term, enough has already been said; it was that of his age and his rank. For his conception of honour, his applications of the Statute of Præmunire, and the return he rendered to Wolsey and Cromwell and More for their services, are sufficient witness. In the case of More, by the way, it was characteristic of him that when the report of the ex-Chancellor’s execution was brought to him, he turned on Anne Boleyn and told her it was all her doing. For a high-minded man, his approval of the schemes for getting James Beton kidnapped when under a safe-conduct, and for the murder of David Beton, seems a little peculiar; yet in those times, it cannot be denied that similar schemes found sanction in most unexpected quarters. As far as politics were concerned, he kept his promises, on the whole, a shade more loyally than Charles and Francis and their successors. Ferdinand and Maximilian, of course, had never begun to think that promises could be looked upon as binding.
As a statesman: we must reject the theory that he was merely a Roi Fainéant who liked to fancy that he was running the machine while he was merely dancing to the tune called by cleverer men than himself: we reject also the theory that the policy followed throughout was his own creation, and that Wolsey and Cromwell stood in the same relation to him as Morton and Fox to his father. He was not a far-seeing man himself, but he knew a far-seeing man when he found one, having an unfailing instinct for judging other men’s capacities and limitations, intellectual and moral. He was ready to recognise their insight and foresight, their organising and administrative powers, to lay the burden—and the reproach—on their shoulders; but if they did not convince his judgment, they had to obey his behests, not he theirs. And yet there is one field wherein credit, and very high credit, attaches to Henry—credit, moreover, which appears to be entirely his own. As Wolsey had his hobby, education, so Henry had his hobby, the navy. A Royal Navy, a fleet whose business was fighting, was practically his creation. It may very well be that he was much wiser than he knew himself in this matter—that his ships were to him something of a toy. But what he did went far to making the glories of his daughter’s reign possible, as the army of Frederick I. of Prussia made the army of Frederick II. possible.
Finally; although we have denied him personally the greatest qualities of statesmanship displayed by his ministers, he did possess in a very high degree certain essential qualities of a successful ruler. No mere blustering tyrant would have held England in his grip for thirty-seven years; the annals of princes of that type may be terrible, but they are brief. The masses may be held in subjection by a powerful upper class for an indefinite period; the continued power of an individual tyrant—of an active and resolutely aggressive autocratic ruler—depends on his preserving the loyalty of the active part of his subjects. That loyalty Henry retained; he never had the smallest difficulty in stamping out every attempt at resistance. Mere ruthlessness will not account for it; ruthlessness by itself rouses new enemies: a reign of sheer terror is brief. To the instinct for gauging men he added the instinct of gauging popular sentiment—a perception of the line which must not be over-stepped; a knack of gracious and timely withdrawal if ever he seemed to have passed the danger-point. Withal, he recognised that the surest method of getting his own way was to make his subjects believe that it was their way too. His figure is very, very far from being god-like; it is quite remote from the heroic; it might, however, have fairly been called Titanic, if that term did not imply ultimate failure—for he did not fail. Neither his intellectual nor his moral qualities permit us to love him, to praise him, or to honour him; and yet, if we have read him aright, it is impossible not to admire.
PROTECTOR SOMERSET
I
MISCONCEPTIONS
Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was Protector and the most prominent personality in English politics for a period only just exceeding two years and a half. As Earl of Hertford, he grasped the reins of power when Henry VIII. died; but since the fall of Thomas Cromwell, Henry had reigned without allowing any of his servants to occupy a pre-eminent position, and the Earl of Hertford had certainly not been an exception. After his overthrow in the autumn of 1549, his political influence was never strong enough to affect the measures of his successor: it sufficed merely to bring about his own execution as a preventive measure. The whole reign of Edward VI. is, in fact, quite sharply divided into the two periods of the Seymour ascendency and the Dudley ascendency; but the distinction somehow seems to be very commonly overlooked, and Somerset is not only credited with his own doings or misdoings, but with a goodly share of those for which Northumberland was responsible, and with which Somerset was entirely out of sympathy.