THE LESS CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF HENRY’S CHARACTER.
NOTE V.
It is well now, after considering the question of Henry’s parentage and organisation, to look again and a little more closely, at certain significant features in his character—his caprice, his captiousness, his love of applause, his self-will, self-confidence, and self-importance. These elements of character frequently run together in equal or unequal degrees, and they are extremely characteristic of the more markedly passionless temperament. But before doing this it is well to look, in a brief note, at some features of Henry’s character which are found in the less impassioned and the more impassioned temperaments alike. Both temperaments, for example, may be cruel or kindly; both may tend to conservatism or to innovation; pious persons or worldly may be found in both. But the cruelty or kindliness, the conservatism or innovation, the piety or worldliness differ in the different temperaments—they differ in their motives, in their methods, in their aims.
The cruelty of the unimpassioned man is, for the most part, a reckless disregard for the happiness or well-being or (in mediæval times especially) for the lives of those who stand in his way or thwart his plans or lessen his self-importance. Such cruelty is more wayward resentful and transitory than deliberative or implacable or persistent. The cruelty of the impassioned man is perhaps the darkest of human passions. It is the cruelty born of hate—cruelty contrived with deliberation and watched with glee. Happily it is a kind which lessens with the growth of civilisation. Often it attends on the strong convictions of strong natures obeying strong commands—commands which are always strongest when they are believed to have a supernatural origin; for belief in supernaturalism is the natural enemy of mercy; it demands obedience and forbids compassion. Cruelty was at its worst when supernatural beliefs were strongest; for happily natural reason has grown, and supernatural belief has dwindled. The unimpassioned and the impassioned temperaments may alike scale the highest or descend to the lowest levels of character, although probably the most hateful level of human degredation is reached by the more impassioned nature. It cannot be denied that, even for his time, Henry had a certain unmistakable dash of cruelty in his composition. A grandson of Edward IV., who closely resembled his grandfather, could not well be free from it. But the cruelty of Henry, like that of Edward, was cruelty of the passionless type. He swept aside—swept too often out of existence—those who defied his will or lessened his importance.
How much of Henry’s cruelty was due to the resolve to put down opposition, how much was due to passing resentment and caprice, and how much, if any, to the delight of inflicting pain, not even Henry’s compeers could easily have said. His cruelty in keeping the solitary Mary apart from her solitary mother was singularly persistent in so fickle a man; but even here weak fear and a weak policy were stronger than cruel feeling. It was Henry’s way of meeting persistent obstinacy. It is needless to discuss the cruelty of the executions on religious grounds during Henry’s reign; they were the order of the day and were sanctioned by the merciful and the unmerciful alike. But Henry’s treatment of high personages was a much deeper stain—deeper than the stain of his matrimonial affairs. People and parliament earnestly prayed for a royal son and heir, but no serious or popular prayer was ever offered up for the heads of Fisher or More or Lady Salisbury. Henry’s cruelty had always practical ends in view. Great officials who had failed, or who were done with, were officials in the way, and their heads might be left to the care of those who were at once their rivals and their enemies. The execution of Lady Salisbury will never fail to rouse indignation as long as history is history and men are men. Henry might have learned a noble lesson from his father. Henry VII. put his own intriguing mother-in-law into a religious house, and the proper destination of a female Yorkist intriguer—no matter how high or powerful—was a convent, not a scaffold. In the execution of Elizabeth Barton meanness was added to cruelty, for the wretched woman confessed her impostures and exposed the priests who contrived them for her. The cruelty which shocked Europe most, and has shocked it ever since, was the execution of Sir Thomas More. More’s approval would have greatly consoled the King, but More’s approval fell far short of the King’s demands. The silence of great men does not give consent, and More was silent. More was, next to Erasmus, the loftiest intellect then living on this planet. Throughout Europe men were asking what More thought of “the King’s matter.” More’s head was the only answer. But however indignant we may be, let us not be unjust; Henry, cruel as he was, was less cruel than any of his compeers—royal, imperial, or papal, or other. The cruelty of our Tudor ruler has always been put under a fierce light; the greater cruelty of distant rulers we are too prone to disregard. We are too prone also to forget that the one thing new under the sun in our time is greater kindliness—kindliness to life, to opinion, to pocket. If fate had put a crown on Luther’s head, or Calvin’s, or later, on Knox’s, their methods would have been more stringent than Henry’s. Henry and his Parliament, it is true, proposed an Act of Parliament “to abolish diversity of opinion in matters of religion.” But Luther and Calvin and Knox, nay even More (Erasmus alone stood on a higher level), were each and all confident of their possession of the one truth and of their infallibility as interpreters thereof; each and all were ready, had the power been theirs, to abolish “diversity of religious opinion.”
There are two kinds of religion, or at any rate two varieties of religious character—both are sincere—the religion of the active and passionless and that of the reflective and impassioned. One is a religion of inheritance, of training, of habit, of early and vivid perception; with certain surroundings it is inevitable; if shaken off it returns. George Eliot acutely remarks of one of her notably passionless characters, “His first opinions remained unchanged, as they always do with those in whom perception is stronger than thought and emotion.” The other is a religion (two extremes are spoken of here, but every intermediate gradation exists) a religion of thought and emotion, of investigation and introspection. It is marked by deep love of an ideal or real good, and deep hate of what may also often be called an ideal or real evil. Henry’s religion was of the first sort. It would be deeply interesting to know the sort of religion of the great names of Henry’s time. We lack however the needful light on their organisation, parentage, and circumstance. But in all the provinces of life the men who have imprinted their names on history have been for the most part active, practical, and unimpassioned men. They, in their turn, have owed much to the impassioned, thinking, and often unpractical men whose names history has not troubled itself to preserve.
And now, in the light shed by organisation and inheritance, we may gain further information on the more characteristic features of Henry’s character—his caprice, his captiousness, his uncertainty, and his peevishness, his resolve never to be hidden or unfelt or forgotten.