Dr. Butts, the King’s physician, whose portrait by Holbein is so familiar to us, was one of the most devoted friends of Queen Catherine. During Mary’s illness, Dr. Butts had affected to be afraid of the responsibility of attending upon her. He had consented afterwards, though with apparent reluctance, and had met in consultation Catherine’s doctor, who had also allowed himself to be persuaded. Henry sent Butts down to Eltham with his own horses. The Royal physician found his patient better than he expected, and, instead of talking over her disorders, he talked of the condition of the realm with his brother practitioner. “The Doctor is a very clever man,” wrote Chapuys, reporting the account of the conversation which he received from the Queen’s physician, “and is intimate with the nobles and the Council. He says that there are but two ways of assisting the Queen and Princess and of setting right the affairs of the realm: one would be if it pleased God to visit the King with some little malady.”[319] “The second method was force, of which, he said, the King and his Ministers were in marvellous fear. If it came to a war, he thought the King would be specially careful of the Queen and Princess, meaning to use them, should things turn to the worst, as mediators for peace. But if neither of these means were made use of, he really believed they were in danger of their lives. He considered it was lucky for the King that the Emperor did not know how easy the enterprise of England would be; and the present, he said, was the right time for it.”
His private physician, it is to be remembered, was necessarily, of all Henry’s servants, the most trusted by him; and the doctor was not contented with indirect suggestions, for he himself sent a secret message to Chapuys that twenty great peers and a hundred knights were ready, they and their vassals, to venture fortune and life, with the smallest assistance from the Emperor, to rise and make a revolution.[320]
Dr. Butts with his petite maladie was a “giant traitor,” though, happily for himself, he was left undiscovered. Human sympathies run so inevitably on the side of the sufferers in history, that we forget that something also is due to those whom they forced into dealing hardly with them. Catherine and the faithful Catholics who conspired and lost their lives for her cause and the Pope’s, are in no danger of losing the favourable judgment of the world; the tyranny and cruelty of Henry VIII. will probably remain for ever a subject of eloquent denunciation; but there is an altera pars—another view of the story, which we may be permitted without offence to recognise. Henry was, on the whole, right; the general cause for which he was contending was a good cause. His victory opened the fountains of English national life, won for England spiritual freedom, and behind spiritual freedom her political liberties. His defeat would have kindled the martyr-fires in every English town, and would have burnt out of the country thousands of poor men and women as noble as Catherine herself. He had stained the purity of his action by intermingling with it a weak passion for a foolish and bad woman, and bitterly he had to suffer for his mistake; but the revolt against, and the overthrow of, ecclesiastical despotism were precious services, which ought to be remembered to his honour; and, when the good doctor to whom he trusted his life, out of compassion for an unfortunate lady was, perhaps, willing to administer a doubtful potion to him, or to aid in inviting a Catholic army into England to extinguish the light that was dawning there, only those who are Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards will say that it was well done on the doctor’s part.
The temper of the nation was growing dangerous, and the forces on both sides were ranging themselves for the battle. Bishop Fisher has been seen sounding on the same string. He, with More, had now been for many months in the Tower, and his communications with Chapuys having been cut off, he had been unable to continue his solicitations; but the Ambassador had undertaken for the whole of the clergy on the instant that the Emperor should declare himself. The growth of Lutheranism had touched their hearts with pious indignation; their hatred of heresy was almost the sole distinction which they had preserved belonging to their sacred calling. The regular orders were the most worthless; the smaller monasteries were nests of depravity; the purpose of their existence was to sing souls out of purgatory, and the efficacy of their musical petitionings being no longer believed in, the King had concluded that monks and nuns could be better employed, and that the wealth which maintained them could be turned to better purpose—to the purpose especially of the defence of the realm against them and their machinations. The monks everywhere were the active missionaries of treason. They writhed under the Act of Supremacy. Their hope of continuance depended on the restoration of the Papal authority. When they were discovered to be at once useless and treacherous, it was not unjust to take their lands from them and apply the money for which those lands could be sold, to the fleet and the fortresses on the coast.
In this, the greatest of his reforms, Cromwell had been the King’s chief adviser. He had been employed under Wolsey in the first suppression of the most corrupt of the smaller houses. In the course of his work he had gained an insight into the scandalous habits of their occupants, which convinced him of the impolicy and uselessness of attempting to prolong their existence. Institutions however ancient, organizations however profoundly sacred, cannot outlive the recognition that the evil which they produce is constant and the advantage visionary.
That the monastic system was doomed had become generally felt; that the victims of the intended overthrow should be impatient of their fate was no more than natural. The magnitude of the design, the interests which were threatened, the imagined sanctity attaching to property devoted to the Church, gave an opportunity for outcry against sacrilege. The entire body of monks became in their various orders an army of insurrectionary preachers, well supplied with money, terrifying the weak, encouraging the strong, and appealing to the superstitions so powerful with a people like the English, who were tenacious of their habits and associations.
The Abbots and Priors had sworn to the supremacy, but had sworn reluctantly, with secret reservations to save their consciences. With the prospect of an Imperial deliverer to appear among them, they were recovering courage to defy their excommunicated enemy. Those who retained the most of the original spirit of their religion were the first to recover heart for resistance. The monks of the London Charterhouse, who were exceptions to the general corruption, and were men of piety and character, came forward to repudiate their oaths and to dare the law to punish them. Their tragical story is familiar to all readers of English history. Chapuys adds a few particulars. Their Prior, Haughton, had consented to the Act of Supremacy; but his conscience told him that in doing so he had committed perjury. He went voluntarily, with three of the brotherhood, to Cromwell, and retracted his oath, declaring that the King in calling himself Head of the Church was usurping the Pope’s authority. They had not been sent for; their house was in no immediate danger; and there was no intention of meddling with them. Their act was a gratuitous defiance; and under the circumstances of the country was an act of war. The effect, if not the purpose, was, and must have been, to encourage a spirit which would explode in rebellion. Cromwell warned them of their danger, and advised them to keep their scruples to themselves. They said they would rather encounter a hundred thousand deaths. They were called before a Council of Peers. The Knights of the Garter were holding their annual Chapter, and the attendance was large. The Duke of Norfolk presided, having returned to the Court, and the proceedings were unusually solemn. The monks were required to withdraw their declaration; they were told that the statute was not to be disputed. They persisted. They were allowed a night to reflect, and they spent it on their knees in prayer. In the morning they were recalled; their courage held, and they were sentenced to die, with another friar who had spoken and written to similar purpose.
They had thrown down a challenge to the Government; the challenge was accepted, and the execution marked the importance of the occasion. They were not a handful of insignificant priests, they were the advanced guard of insurrection; and to allow them to triumph was to admit defeat. They were conducted through the streets by an armed force. The Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Richmond, Henry’s illegitimate son, Lord Wiltshire, and Lord Rochford attended at the scaffold. Sir Henry Norris was also there, masked, with forty of the Royal Guard on horseback. At the scaffold they were again offered a chance of life; again they refused, and died gallantly. The struggle had begun for the Crown of England. In claiming the supremacy for the Pope, these men had abjured their allegiance to the King whom the Pope had excommunicated. Conscience was nothing—motive was nothing. Conscience was not allowed as a plea when a Lutheran was threatened with the stake. In all civil conflicts high motives are to be found on both sides, and in earnest times words are not used without meaning. The Statute of Supremacy was Henry’s defence against an attempt to deprive him of his crown and deprive the kingdom of its independence. To disobey the law was treason; and the penalty of treason was death.[321]
Chapuys in telling the story urged it as a proof to Charles that there was no hope of the King’s repentance. It was now expected that More and Fisher, and perhaps the Queen and Princess, would be called on also to acknowledge the supremacy, and, if they refused, would suffer the same fate. The King’s Ministers, Chapuys said, were known to have often reproached the King, and to have told him it was a shame for him and the kingdom not to punish them as traitors. Anne Boleyn was fiercer and haughtier than ever she was.[322] Sir Thomas More was under the same impression that Anne had been instigator of the severities. She would take his head from him, he said, and then added, prophetically, that her own would follow. The presence of her father and brother and her favourite Norris at the execution of the Carthusians confirmed the impression. The action of the Government had grounds more sufficient than a woman’s urgency. More and Fisher received notice that they would be examined on the statute, and were allowed six weeks to prepare their answer. Chapuys did not believe that any danger threatened Catherine, or threatened her household. She herself, however, anticipated the worst, and only hoped that her own fate might rouse the Emperor at last.
The Emperor was not to be roused. He was preparing for his great expedition to Tunis to root out the corsairs, and had other work on hand. In vain Chapuys had tried to make him believe that Cromwell meditated the destruction of the Princess Mary; in vain Chapuys had told him that words were useless, and that “cautery was the only remedy”—that the English Peers were panting for encouragement to take arms. He had no confidence in insurgent subjects who could not use the constitutional methods which they possessed to do anything for themselves. He saw Henry crushing down resistance with the relentless severity of the law. He replied to Chapuys’s entreaties that, although he could not in conscience abandon his aunt and cousin, yet the Ambassador must temporise. He had changed his mind about Mary’s escape: he said it was dangerous, unadvisable, and not to be thought of.[323] The present was not the proper moment. He wrote a cautious letter to the King, which he forwarded for Chapuys to deliver. In spite of Charterhouse monks and Lutheran preachers, the Ambassador was to take up again the negotiations for the treaty.