On very scanty evidence, he caused his wife to be arraigned for incest, and during the trial appeared in public so gaily dressed, and after her conviction danced before the Court in such open delight, that Chapuys himself was surprised:—
“There are still two English gentlemen detained on her account, and it is suspected that there will be many more, because the king has said he believed that more than 100 had to do with her. You never saw prince or man who made greater show of his horns or bore them more pleasantly.”[233]
His manners, like those of Cromwell and Norfolk, lacked the courtesy which distinguished men, even of his own generation, like Sir Thomas More. He was gluttonous and self-indulgent, and, toward the end of his life, so bloated as to be helpless. His habits were well understood at Court, and suitors tried to approach him in the afternoon, when he was tipsy. Marillac thought his gormandizing would kill him:—
“There has been little doubt about the king, not so much for the fever as for the trouble with the leg which he has had which trouble seizes him very often because he is very gross, and marvellously excessive in eating and drinking, so that you often find him of a different purpose and opinion in the morning from what you do after dinner.”[234]
On May 14, 1538, Castillon wrote:—
“Furthermore the king has had one of the fistulas on his legs closed, and since ten or twelve days the humors, which have no vent, have taken to stifling him, so much so, that he has been some of the time speechless, the face all black, and in great danger.”[235]
The most marked characteristic of the feudal aristocracy had been personal courage; but as centralization advanced and a paid police removed the necessity of self-defence, bravery ceased to be essential to success; Henry apparently was not courageous—certainly was not courageous in regard to disease. When most infatuated with Anne Boleyn, she fell ill of the sweating sickness; he fled at once, and wrote from a distance to beg her to fear nothing, as “few or no women ... have died of it.”[236] Marillac declared roundly that, in such matters, the king was “the most timid person one could know.”[237]
On the other hand, he was habitually so overbearing as to be brutal to the weak. Lambert was a poor sectary, of whom he determined to make an example. He therefore prepared a solemn function, at which he presided, assisted by the bishops and the other dignitaries of the realm. The accused, when brought before this tribunal, apparently showed some confusion, and Foxe has left a striking description of how Henry tried to heighten this terror. Henry was dressed “all in white,” probably emblematic of his purity as the head of the Church, and his “look, his cruel countenance, and his brows bent into severity, did not a little augment this terror; plainly declaring a mind full of indignation, far unworthy such a prince, especially in such a matter, and against so humble and obedient a subject.”[238]
Gifted with such qualities, Henry could not have failed to be a great religious reformer at the opening of a great economic age. More than five hundred years before, when society hung on the brink of dissolution, the Church sustained centralization by electing Hugh Capet king of France. A century later the armed pilgrimages to Palestine had accelerated the social movement, and consolidation again began. Generation by generation the rapidity of movement had increased, communication had been re-established between the East and West, the mariner’s compass and gunpowder had been introduced into Europe, the attack had mastered the defence, and as the forms of competition slowly changed, capital accumulated, until, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, wealth reached the point where it could lay the foundation of the paid police, the crowning triumph of the monied class.
The Reformation was the victory of this class over the archaic type of man, and with the Reformation the old imaginative civilization passed away; but with all its power the monied intellect has certain weaknesses, and neither in ancient Rome nor modern England have capitalists been soldiers. The Tudor aristocracy was not a martial caste. Lacking physical force, this new nobility feared the ancient farming population, whom they slowly exterminated; and they feared them with reason, for from among the yeomanry Cromwell drew his Ironsides. Therefore one of the chief preoccupations of the Tudor nobility was to devise means to hold this dangerous element in check, and as it could not organize an army, it utilized the Church. The land-owners had other purposes for the priesthood than simply to rob it; they had also to enslave it, and Henry’s title to greatness lies in his having attained both ends.