“But the one paramount circumstance which weighed with us, and we remember a thousand circumstances while you remember the ‘six wives’ only, was the question of succession. If succession was the one question which more than all others agitated your fathers in Anne’s time, try to imagine what it was to us. You, after generations of order, peace and security—you utterly fail to understand our position. We had barely come out of a lawless cruel time—a time born of the ferocity and hate of conflicting dynasties. Fathers still lived to tell us how they ate blood, and drank blood, and breathed blood. They and we were weary of blood, and our two Henrys (priceless Henrys to us,) had just taken its taste out of our mouths. No queen, be it well noted, had ruled over us either in peaceful or in stormy times; we believed with our whole souls, rightly or wrongly, that no queen could possibly preserve us from destruction and ruin. It was our importunity mainly—make no mistake on this point,—which drove our king, whenever he was wifeless, to take another wife. His three years of widowhood after Jane Seymour’s death was our gravest anxiety.”
The newer voice replies: “You were a foolish and purblind generation. The simplicity of your Henry’s subjects, and the servility of his parliament have become a bye-word. It is true your king, although less capable than you suppose, was not without certain gifts—their misuse only adds to his infamy. It is true also that he had been carefully educated,—his father was to be thanked for that. It would seem, moreover, that quite early in life he was not without some attractiveness in person and manners, but you forget that bodily grossness and mental irritability soon made him a repulsive object. An eminent Englishman of our century says he was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned and swinish-looking fellow, and that indeed so bad a character could never have been veiled under a prepossessing appearance. Your King was vain, ostentatious, and extravagant. With measured words we declare that his hypocrisy, cruelty, sacrilege, selfishness and lust, were all unbounded. He was above all an unrivalled master of mean excuses: did he wish to humble and oppress the clergy—they had violated the statute of premunire. Did his voluptuous eye fall on a dashing young maid of honour—he suddenly discovered that he was living in incest, and that his marriage was under God’s curse. Did the Pope hesitate to grant him a divorce—he began to see that the proper head of the English Church was the English king. Was his exchequer empty—he was convinced that the inmates of the wealthy religious houses led the lives and deserved the fate of certain cities once destroyed by fire and brimstone. Did a defiant Pole carry his head out of Harry’s reach—it was found that Pole’s mother, Lady Salisbury, was the centre of Yorkist intrigue, and that the mother’s head could be lopped off in place of the son’s.”
The two voices it is clear have much to say for themselves. It is equally clear that the two groups of jurymen will not agree on their verdict.
It is commonly held and as a rule on good grounds, that the judgment of immediate friends and neighbours is less just than the opinion of foreigners and of posterity. This is so when foreigners and posterity are agreed, and are free from the tumult, and passion, and personal bias of time and place. It is not so in Henry’s case. Curiously enough, foreign observers, scholars, envoys, travellers, agree with—nay, outrun Henry’s subjects in their praise of Henry. Curiously too the tumult and passion touching Henry’s matrimonial affairs—touching all his affairs indeed,—have grown rather than diminished with the progress of time. Epochs, like men, have not the gift of seeing themselves as others see them. Unnumbered Frenchmen ate and drank, and made merry, and bought and sold; married their children and buried their parents, not knowing that France was giving a shock to all mankind for all time to come. The assassins of St. Bartholomew believed that in future a united Christendom would bless them for performing a pious and uniting deed. We see all at once the bare and startling fact of six wives. Henry’s subjects saw and became familiar with a slow succession of marriages, each of which had its special cloud of vital yet confusing circumstance. So too the Reformation has its different phases. In the sixteenth century it was looked on as a serious quarrel, no doubt, but no one dreamed it was anything more. Then each side thought the other side would shortly come to its senses and all would be well; no one dreamt of two permanently hostile camps and lasting combat. If personal hate and actual bloodshed have passed away, and at the present moment the combat shews signs of still diminishing bitterness, it is because a new and mysterious atmosphere is slowly creeping over both—slowly benumbing both the armies.
An attempt must be made here to sketch Henry’s character with as much impartiality as is possible. But no impartial sketch will please either his older friends or his newer enemies. Although Henry came to the throne a mere boy, he was a precocious boy. In the precocious the several stages of life succeed each other more quickly than in others, and probably they themselves do not wear so well. When Henry was twenty-five he was little less wise and capable than he was at thirty-five or forty-five. At forty he was probably wiser than he was at fifty. The young king’s presence was striking; he had a fresh rosy complexion, and an auburn though scanty beard. His very limbs, exclaims one foreign admirer, “glowed with warm pink” through his delicately woven tennis costume. He was handsome in feature; large and imposing in figure; open and frank in manners; strong, active, and skilled in all bodily exercises. He was an admirer of all the arts, and himself an expert in many of them. Henry had indeed all the qualities, whatever their worth may be, which make a favourite with the multitude. Those qualities, no matter what change time brought to them, preserved his popularity to the last.
Henry was neither a genius nor a hero; but they who deny that he was a singularly able man will probably misread his character; misread his ideals, his conduct, and his various attitudes. Henry’s education was thorough and his learning extensive. His habit of mind tended perhaps rather to activity and versatility and obedience to old authority than to intensity or depth or independence. His father, who looked more favourably on churchmen and lawyers than on noblemen, destined his second son for the Church. At that time theology, scholastic theology—for Colet and Erasmus and More had not then done their work—was the acutest mental discipline known as well as the highest accomplishment. For when the “new learning” reached this country it found theology the leading study, and therefore it roused theology; in Italy on the other hand it found the arts the predominant study, and there it roused the arts. Henry would doubtless have made a successful bishop and escaped thereby much domestic turmoil; but, on the whole, he was probably better fitted to be a King; while his quiet, contemplative, and kindly father would at any rate have found life pleasanter in lawn sleeves than he found it on a throne.
It would be well if men and women were to write down in two columns with all possible honesty the good and the evil items in the characters (not forgetting their own) which interest them. The exercise itself would probably call forth serviceable qualities, and would frequently bring to light unexpected results. Probably in this process good characters would lose something and the bad would gain. From such an ordeal Henry VIII. would come out a sad figure, though not quite so sad as is popularly considered.
It is not proposed in this sketch of character to separate, if indeed separation is possible, the good qualities which are held to be more or less inborn from those which seem to be attainable by efforts of the will. Freedom of the will must of course be left in its native darkness. Neither can the attempt be made to estimate, even if such estimate were possible, how much the individual makes of his own character and how much is made for him. Some features of character, again, are neither good nor evil, or are good or evil only when they are excessive or deficient or unsuitable to time and place. Love of pageantry is one of these; love of pleasure another; so, too, are the leanings to conservation or to innovation.
In thought and feeling and action Henry was undoubtedly conservative. His conservatism was modified by his self-will and self-confidence, but it assuredly ranked with the leading features of his character—with his piety his egotism and his love of popularity. To shine in well-worn paths was his chief enjoyment: not to shine in these paths, or to get out of them, or to get in advance of them, or to lag behind, was his greatest dread. The innovator may or may not be pious, but conservatism naturally leans to piety, and Henry’s piety, if not deep or passionate, was at any rate copious and sincere. Henry, it has been said, was not a hero, not a genius, neither was he a saint. But if his ideals were not high, and if his conduct was not unstained, his religious beliefs were unquestioning and his religious observances numerous and stringent.
The fiercer the light which beat upon his throne, the better pleased was Henry. He had many phases of character and many gifts, and he delighted in displaying his phases and in exercising his gifts. The use and place of ceremony and spectacle are still matters of debate; but modern feeling tends more and more to hand them over to children, May-day sweeps, and Lord-mayors. In Henry’s reign the newer learning and newer thought had it is true done but little to undermine the love of gewgaws and glitter, but Henry’s devotion to them, even for his time, was so childish that it must be written down in his darker column.