A Popular History of England, From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria; Vol. II

by François Guizot

The triumph of Catherine Howard was destined to be of short duration, and to cost her dearly. The king was much attached to her, and had taken her with him on a royal tour of inspection, during the summer of 1541, but when he returned to London, in the month of August, Cranmer revealed to him a grievous discovery, made in his absence, by his servants, with regard to the conduct of the queen before her marriage, during her sojourn with her great aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Jealous and suspicious, Henry VIII. did not demand proofs before losing all confidence in the virtue of his wife; but he wished nevertheless to have the witnesses examined, and they were all arrested and put to the torture. The queen herself, it is said, confessed her transgressions, as did the man accused of complicity with her—her cousin, Francis Dereham. The guilt of Lady Catherine Howard did not suffice, however, to ruin the queen; she positively affirmed her conjugal fidelity, and the king, whose whole love appeared to have been changed to aversion, set every means to work in order to assure himself of her alleged offence towards him. The old Duchess of Norfolk, her daughter, Lady Bridgewater, and her son, Lord William Howard, were placed in the Tower charged with having favoured the bad conduct of the queen; every species of ill-treatment, every ruse, every falsehood was employed in order to extract the truth, or at least to obtain avowals capable of ruining Catherine Howard. All was in vain; "the mother and the daughter are equally stubborn," say the records of the council, and both rejected with indignation the idea of any complicity in the crimes of which the queen was accused. The two gentlemen accused, Dereham and Culpepper, were tried and condemned, and were executed at Tyburn, on the 10th of December, while the Duke of Cleves was hastening to send an ambassador to King Henry, in order to induce him to take again the Princess Anne, his sister, as his wife. The proposal was rejected by Cranmer, the emissary not even being admitted into the presence of the king; Anne of Cleves remained the good sister of his Majesty, and the trial of Catherine Howard continued, without any one protesting in favour of the unhappy woman, deprived of all means of defence, and delivered over, bound hand and foot, to her accusers. Her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, had abandoned her, as he had formerly done in the case of his other niece, Anne Boleyn, protesting to his Majesty "the grief occasioned to him by the abominable actions of two kinswomen towards his Grace, who might in consequence hold even himself in abhorrence." Search was being made meanwhile, in the coffers and hiding-places of all the accused persons, and his Majesty had already collected in this manner large sums, when the council condemned them all to imprisonment for life, with the confiscation of all their property, simply recommending that some consolations should be accorded to them in their captivity, and that certain of their friends should be admitted to them in the Tower. The king took care to cut short this indulgence, and on the same evening he caused a council to be assembled to forbid any modification in the treatment inflicted upon the prisoners, "for great and important reasons," added the conscientious monarch. The trial had established nothing except that the old Duchess of Norfolk and her children had been informed of the reciprocal love of Francis Dereham and Catherine before the marriage of the latter.

The severity which was employed towards her relatives should have enlightened the unhappy queen if she had been able for one moment to believe the promise of her life which the king had transmitted to her through Cranmer. Parliament on the 16th of January addressed an humble petition to the sovereign, asking permission to proceed against Lady Catherine Howard by a bill of attainder, in order to spare his Majesty the grief of hearing the crimes of his wife recapitulated. Henry graciously consented to this delicate request, and on the 11th of February the queen was condemned by Parliament together with Lady Rochford, sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, who had formerly given evidence against her husband and her sister. She was accused of having been an accomplice in the crimes of Catherine since her marriage. The queen and Lady Rochford were executed on the 13th of February, within the precincts of the Tower; Catherine protested even on the scaffold that she had always been faithful to her spouse, "whatever might have been the faults of her past life." The bill of attainder against Catherine Howard made it incumbent on any woman whom the king might admit to the honour of a union with his sacred person, to make a full confession before marriage. "The king had better marry a widow," it was said among the people. Henry appeared for the moment disgusted with marriage; he was absorbed in theology, that second passion of his life, which he treated almost as despotically as his spouses.

The death of Catherine Howard had not, as might have been expected, thrown the king back upon the party of the Reformation; in the month of April, 1542, he retracted the encouragements which he had given to the reading of the Holy Scriptures; he prohibited the use of the old version of Tyndal as heretical, while ordering that the new and authorized translation, without notes or commentary, should be used exclusively; above all, he forbade the reading of the Bible in public even by the orthodox, only permitting the use of the Holy Scriptures in families of the nobility and gentry. People of the inferior class were to be liable to a month's imprisonment if they dared to open the sacred volume. At the same time the revision of the Institution of a Christian Man, formerly published by the bishops by order of the king, was completed. The new work, which appeared in 1543, differed essentially upon several points from the first one; it was entitled The necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man: the people named it the King's Book, and the king imposed it in fact as a model of faith upon his subjects, without troubling himself about the changes which his own mind had undergone since he had caused the Bishop's Book to be drawn up. The King's Book inclined more and more towards the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. Like the first catechism, it insisted upon transubstantiation, oral confession, and the celibacy of the clergy; it also maintained the uselessness of communion in both kinds for the faithful, and recommended masses for the dead. The new Symbol was adopted by the two convocations of the clergy; all the books which were not in conformity with it were forbidden, and the primate, Cranmer, who saw the condemnation of his most cherished convictions, and the affirmation of the dogmas which he rejected, was charged with the duty of watching over the execution of the royal orders. Henry VIII. was accustomed to be obeyed; Cranmer had sent his wife and children away to Germany, since the celibacy of the priests had become legally obligatory.

The servile obedience which the king exacted from his subjects in England was not everywhere exacted with the same rigour; Henry VIII. had furnished proof of skill and foresight by his government of the almost independent principalities ranged under his sceptre. In 1536 he had definitively annexed Wales to England, subjecting the whole territory to English laws, which hitherto had only ruled in a portion of that country. The Welsh counties had been admitted to the privilege of sending members to Parliament, as well as the Palatinate of Chester, hitherto administered according to local customs. But the most important reform which King Henry VIII. effected in this respect was the elevation of Ireland from the rank of a seigniory to that of a kingdom. From generation to generation the hereditary struggle of the Butlers under their chiefs, the Earls of Ormond and Ossory, with the Fitzgeralds, at the head of whom was the Earl of Kildare, had kept the country in a continual state of agitation; by dint of political reverses, treasons, acts of perfidy, executions, and murders, the great Irish Houses had wearied and destroyed each other, and the government had never failed to interpose to further the work. In 1541 the king, wishing to secure the attachment of the more powerful of the Irish chiefs, elevated a number of them to the honours of the peerage. The eagerness of the chiefs was extreme: the great noblemen swore fidelity to the king, undertook military service, and accepted houses at Dublin, whither they were to repair to sit as members of the Parliament of Ireland. The king had granted letters patent to them for their property, which removed their former fears of seeing the English sovereigns one day confiscate all their estates. The appropriation of the ecclesiastical property to the crown was accomplished with prudence; "Do not press them too vigorously," said the instructions of Henry VIII.; "but persuade them discreetly that the Church lands are my legitimate inheritance." The Catholic fervour of the Irish had some difficulty in accepting this mode of succession, but the work proceeded, though slowly, and did not prevent the progress of English authority in Ireland from being real and important under the reign of Henry VIII.

Scotland still remained in a body attached to the old faith. King James distrusted the treacherous manœuvres of his uncle; he had sought the hereditary alliances of his House, and his marriage with Mary of Guise, and the influence which Cardinal David Beaton exercised over him, had drawn closer the bonds which united him to France, as well as to the Church of Rome. All the attempts of the King of England to bring his nephew over to his opinions, and to induce him to follow the English example by the destruction of the monasteries, had completely failed. Cardinal Beaton set out for Rome with secret instructions, a fact which troubled Henry. Hostilities broke out in the month of August, 1542; an English army crossed the frontier; they were vigorously repulsed; but the Duke of Norfolk was advancing with considerable forces; he received the reinforcements of the Earl of Angus, the father-in-law of the young king, who had come with all the members of his family, and who marched, like himself, under the English banners. The duke had scarcely advanced a few steps into Scotland when the king reassembled his forces in order to meet him. But the great noblemen were nearly all disaffected; some were secretly in favour of the Reformation; they wished to enrich themselves at the expense of the monasteries; others were bound by old friendship to the Douglases, and would not fight against them; nearly all regretted the war with England, and wished to remain upon the defensive. Norfolk having been compelled to beat a retreat, in consequence of the bad weather and the want of provisions, the king was anxious to pursue him beyond the frontiers; but his troops refused to follow him to a second battle of Flodden: one after another the barons withdrew with their vassals; the king had now no more than ten thousand men, whom he placed under the command of Lord Maxwell. This faithful little army suddenly entered England. As they were crossing the frontier, the favourite of the king, Oliver Sinclair, produced a warrant which placed him at the head of the troops. All the noblemen refused to obey his command; disorder set in among the soldiers; the English fell upon the Scottish army, made a great slaughter, captured many prisoners of high rank, and put all the rest to flight. The troops, vanquished without a struggle, rejoined the king at Carlaverock Castle, where he awaited the result of the expedition. The blow struck home; the monarch returned in sadness of heart to Edinburgh, and took refuge in his castle of Falkland, where he spent long hours, with his head in his hands, plunged in melancholy thoughts, without uttering a word. He was thirty-one years of age, his constitution had always been vigorous, but he was dying of a broken heart. His wife, Mary of Guise, had borne him two sons, who had both died in infancy; the birth of a daughter, the celebrated and unfortunate Mary Stuart, was announced to James V.; the sadness of the king only became greater. "It came through a daughter," he said, remembering the daughter of Bruce, who had brought the throne to his family, "and it will return through a daughter." A week afterwards, on the 14th of December, 1542, James V. expired, leaving his kingdom rent asunder by political factions and religious dissensions, a prey to all the evils of a long minority and the prospect of the reign of a woman. If he had been able to foresee the future, the last moments of the unhappy king would have been still more gloomy.

Scarcely had King Henry learned the death of his nephew, when he conceived the project of uniting the little queen, who had just opened her eyes to the light, with his son Edward, who was not yet six years of age. The alliance might have been serviceable to the two countries, but Henry claimed to take immediate possession of Scotland in the name of the future sovereigns, and his greedy selfishness caused all his designs to miscarry. He had enrolled in his cause not only all the Douglases, but the Scottish noblemen made prisoners at the rout of Solway Moss; they returned to their country determined to betray its most cherished interests. Cardinal Beaton had claimed the regency, according to a presumed will of the king, but the Earl of Arran, the heir presumptive to the throne and chief of the Protestant party, had been powerful enough to dispossess the cardinal; he held him imprisoned in Blackness Castle. The influence of the Catholic clergy over the common people and a certain portion of the nobility was considerable; the churches were closed, worship suspended, and the clergy worked ardently against the regent, who lent for support upon the Douglases and their friends, who had come back into favour with him. The public voice accused the noblemen of treason and perfidy; the King of England urged them to perform their engagements. He claimed the right to hold in his hands Cardinal Beaton, and demanded the surrender of the fortresses. The truce was only to last until the month of June, and the English troops were already assembling in the northern counties; but public opinion in Scotland was aroused, and Sir George Douglas, the most active of the conspirators in the interest of England, assured King Henry that it would be impossible to lay claim on his behalf to the government of Scotland. "There would be no boys so little that they would not throw stones," he said, "nor a woman who would not raise her spindle. The commoners would willingly give their lives; many noblemen and all the clergy would do likewise rather than consent to it." The Catholic party, uniting the cause of religious liberty with that of the State, opposed both the reading of the New Testament by the common people and the alliance with England. The restoration to liberty of the cardinal was also claimed. All the noblemen repaired to Parliament, and the question of the marriage was there proposed without any opposition; but none dared to speak of the conditions attached by the King of England to this union so much desired by all, and Parliament, while approving of the project of marriage, strongly recommended that care should be taken not to send the little queen to England, at the same time taking the most jealous precautions for the maintenance of the national independence.

The anger of King Henry equalled his aspirations; he heaped the most violent reproaches upon his Scottish allies, at the same time endeavouring to attach them once more to his service by new promises. They protested their good will, but pleaded their powerlessness. Cardinal Beaton had regained his liberty, and opposed to the Earl of Arran the Earl of Lennox, an ally of the royal family, who had served with Francis I. in the wars in Italy. The treaties were renewed; the hand of the little queen was promised to Prince Edward; she was to be left in Scotland, until the age of ten years; an English nobleman and his family were to form part of her household. But besides these open and reasonable conditions there was "a secret understanding;" all the conspirators engaged in the service of Henry promised in case of need to take up arms in his interest and to fight for him until he should have obtained "the things agreed upon," or at least dominion over this side of the Firth, that is to say, over all the southern portion of Scotland.

The treaty was scarcely concluded when Cardinal Beaton raised an army in the north, and employed it from the first to carry off the queen and her mother, in order to place them in safety in Stirling Castle. After having signed the conditions with England, he suddenly changed his party, became reconciled with Beaton, abjured his errors, and returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church. France had sent reinforcements, and notwithstanding the assistance of Lennox, who had abandoned the patriots, the conspirators found themselves once more baffled in their attempts by the national movement brought about by Beaton.