“The prince himself served the king’s table, as well as the others, with every mark of humility, and would not sit down at it, in spite of all his entreaties for him so to do, saying that ‘he was not worthy of such an honour, nor did it appertain to him to seat himself at the table of so great a king, or of so valiant a man as he had shown himself by his actions that day.’”[211]
One hundred and fifty years of progress had eliminated chivalry. Manners were coarse and morals loose at the court of Henry VIII. Foreign ambassadors spoke with little respect of the society they saw. Chapuys permitted himself to sneer at Lady Jane Seymour, who afterward became queen, because he seems to have thought the ladies of the court venal:—
“I leave you to judge whether, being English, and having frequented the court, ‘si elle ne tiendroit pas à conscience de navoir pourveu et prévenu de savoir que cest de faire nopces.’”[212]
The scandals of the Boleyn family are too well known to need notice,[213] and it would be futile to accumulate examples of the absence of female virtue when the fact is notorious. The rising nobility resembled Cromwell more or less feebly. The mercenary quality was the salient characteristic of the favoured class. Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, made his fortune through his own shrewdness and the beauty of his daughters. Mary, the younger, was an early mistress of Henry; Anne, the elder and the astuter, was his wife. Boleyn’s title and his fortune came through this connection. Boleyn was a specimen of a class; in him the instinct of self-preservation was highly developed. When his daughter Anne, and his son, Lord Rochford, were tried at the Tower for incest, the evidence was so flimsy that ten to one was bet in the court-room on acquittal. At this supreme moment, the attitude of the father was thus described by Chapuys, who had good sources of information:—
“On the 15th the said concubine and her brother were condemned of treason by all the principal lords of England, and the Duke of Norfolk [her uncle] pronounced sentence. I am told the Earl of Wiltshire was quite as ready to assist at the judgment as he had done at the condemnation of the other four.”[214]
The grandfather of Thomas Boleyn had been an alderman of London and a rich tradesman; his son had been knighted, and had retired from business, and Wiltshire himself, though a younger son and with but fifty pounds a year when married, raised himself by his wits, and the use of his children, to be a wealthy earl.
The history of the Cecil family is not dissimilar. David, the first of the name who emerged from obscurity, gained a certain favour under Henry VIII.; his son Richard, a most capable manager, obtained a fair share of the monastic plunder, was groom of the robes, constable of Warwick Castle, and died rich. His son was the great Lord Burleigh, in regard to whom perhaps it may be best to quote an impartial authority. Macaulay described him as possessed of “a cool temper, a sound judgment, great powers of application, and a constant eye to the main chance.... He never deserted his friends till it was very inconvenient to stand by them, was an excellent Protestant when it was not very advantageous to be a Papist, recommended a tolerant policy to his mistress as strongly as he could recommend it without hazarding her favour, never put to the rack any person from whom it did not seem probable that useful information might be derived, and was so moderate in his desires that he left only three hundred distinct landed estates, though he might, as his honest servant assures us, have left much more, ‘if he would have taken money out of the exchequer for his own use, as many treasurers have done.’”[215]
The Howards, though of an earlier time, were of the same temperament. The founder was a lawyer, who sat on the bench of the Common Pleas under Edward I., and who, therefore, did not earn his knighthood on a stricken field, as the Black Prince won his spurs at Crécy. After his death his descendants made little stir for a century, but they married advantageously, accumulated money, and, in the fifteenth century, one Robert Howard married a daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. This he hardly would have done had he not been a man of substance, since he seems not to have been a man of war. The alliance made the fortune of the family. It also appears to have added some martial instinct to the stock, for Richard III. gave John Howard the title of the Mowbrays, and this John was afterwards killed at Bosworth. His son commanded at Flodden, and his grandson was the great spoiler of the convents under Henry VIII., who also suppressed the northern rebellion.
Thomas Howard, the minister of Henry VIII., was one of the most interesting characters of his generation. He was naturally a strong Conservative; Chapuys never doubted that “the change in matters of religion [was] not to his mind”: in 1534 he even went so far as to tell the French ambassador that he would not consent to a change, and this speech having been repeated to the king, occasioned his momentary disgrace.[216] At one time Lord Darcy, the head of the reactionary party, counted on his support against Cromwell, though he warned Chapuys not to trust him implicitly, because of “his inconstancy.”[217] Yet, under a certain appearance of vacillation, he hid a profound and subtle appreciation of the society which environed him; this “inconstancy” made his high fortune. He had a sure instinct, which taught him at the critical moment where his interests lay, and he never was deceived. Henry distrusted him, but could not do without him, and paid high for his support. Howard, on his side, was keenly distressed when he found he had gone too far, and when the northern insurrection broke out, and he was offered the command of the royal forces, the Bishop of Carlisle, with whom he dined, said he had never seen the duke “so happy as he was to-day.”[218]
Once in the field against his friends, there were no lengths to which Thomas Howard would not go. He never wearied of boasting of his lies and of his cruelty, he wrote to assure Henry he would spare no pains to entrap them, and would esteem no promise he made to the rebels, “for surely I shall observe no part thereof, for any respect of that other might call mine honor dystayned.”[219]