A history of England

by Charles Oman

The debasement of the coinage was only one of the many symptoms of misgovernment which embittered the end of Henry's reign. The general upheaval of society caused by the overthrow of the monasteries, and the sudden transfer of their enormous estates to new holders, had given rise to much distress. Not only were the paupers who had lived on the monks' doles, and the pilgrims who had been wont to wander from abbey to abbey, thrown on the world to beg, but many of the old tenant farmers were displaced. For the new owners often preferred sheep-breeding to agriculture, and drove out the cottiers who had been wont to hold a few acres under the old-fashioned management of the monastic bodies. Contemporary writers speak bitterly of the plague of "sturdy and valiant beggars" who flooded the land—unfrocked monks, pilgrims whose trade was over, disbanded soldiers, and evicted peasantry. The king and his Parliament issued the most ferocious laws against these vagrants—when apprehended they were to be branded, and given as serfs for two years to any one who chose to ask for their services. If caught a second time, they were liable to be hung as incorrigible.

Execution of the Earl of Surrey.

To complete this gloomy picture, there only remains to be added the story of the king's last outburst of suspicion and cruelty. Conceiving that the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were counting on his approaching death to make an attempt to seize the regency, he had them both apprehended, though nothing definite could be alleged against them, save that of late they had taken to quartering the royal arms in their family shield—a distinction to which they were entitled as descended from Edward III. Surrey, a soldier of great promise and a poet of considerable power, was beheaded; his father was doomed to follow him, had not the king's death intervened. It is even said that Henry, in one of his more irritable moods, was threatening to try his blameless wife, Queen Catherine, for concealed Protestantism.

Death of Henry.—Condition of England.

But to the general relief of England, Henry died before this last crime could be consummated (January 28, 1547). He left his realm in a condition of great misery, and for all its troubles he was personally responsible. His breach with the papacy had been the result of private pique, not of conscience or principle. When committed to the anti-Roman cause, he had refused to move forward with the one half of his subjects, or to remain behind with the other. He had anchored the English Church for a time in a middle position, intolerable alike to Protestant Reformers and to the Partisans of the Papacy and subjection to Rome. If the nation owed him a certain debt of gratitude for not committing England to some of the excesses of Continental Protestantism, yet it owed him no thanks for officering the Church with a hierarchy of bishops, some of whom, like Cranmer, were meanly timid and pliant, while others were men of low ideals and unworthy lives, the mere creatures of court favour. Nor is it possible to view with equanimity the way in which Henry wasted on pageants, foreign intrigues, and fawning courtiers, the vast sums which the State had acquired by the very proper and necessary abolition of the monasteries.

Of Henry's unbounded selfishness, of his ingratitude to those who had served him best, of his ruthless cruelty to all who stood in his way, we need not further speak. The story of his reign develops each of these traits in its own particular blackness.

Henry's foreign policy.

Some historians have endeavoured to justify Henry's wavering foreign policy, and all his forcible-feeble wars with Continental powers, by the plea that, if he got no gain in land or gold thereby, yet he raised England to a higher place among European nations than she had held in his father's day. But this statement seems unwise. Henry, though much flattered and courted at times, was in fact the mere dupe of Francis I. and Charles V., each of whom cheated him again and again, and left him hopelessly in the lurch. England's growing wealth and power would have won her back her proper place in Europe far better than Henry's chaotic intrigues. His whole foreign policy was a mistake and a tangle from first to last.

The regency.—The Duke of Somerset Protector.

It remained to be seen who would now sway the sword and sceptre that the dead tyrant had gripped so firmly. In his last years Henry had surrounded himself by ministers less notable and less capable than Wolsey or Cromwell. The chief place was held by his brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of the unfortunate Queen Jane, and the uncle of Prince Edward, the heir to the crown. It was natural that the charge of the young king—a bright and promising, but delicate lad, now in his tenth year—should fall to his uncle; but the late king, distrusting Hertford's wisdom, had left the regency, not to him individually, but to a council of sixteen members, of which he was but the president. Seymour, however, succeeded in getting a more complete control over his colleagues than had been intended, mainly by bribing them to consent with titles and large gifts of money. They allowed him to make himself "Protector of the realm and of the king's person," and to create himself Duke of Somerset. In return he made the two chief members of the council earls; Wriothsley, head of the Anglo-Catholic party, became Earl of Southampton; Dudley—son of that Dudley who had paid with his head for serving Henry VII. too well—was created Earl of Warwick.