It was evident that Henry could neither be cajoled nor frightened. Should Charles then give up the point for which he was contending? Once more the Imperial Privy Council sat to consider what was to be done. It had become clear that no treaty could be made with Henry unless the Emperor would distinctly consent that the divorce should not be spoken of. The old objections were again weighed—the injuries to the Queen and to the Holy See, the Emperor’s obligations, the bad effect on Christendom and on England which a composition on such terms would produce, the encouragement to other Princes to act as Henry had done—stubborn facts of the case which could not be evaded. On the other hand were the dangerous attitude of Francis, the obstinacy of Henry, the possibility that France and England might unite, and the inability of the Emperor to encounter their coalition. Both Francis and Henry were powerful Princes, and a quarrel would not benefit the Queen and her daughter if the Emperor was powerless to help them. The divorce was the difficulty. Should the Emperor insist on a promise that it should be submitted to a General Council? It might be advisable, under certain circumstances, to create disturbances in England and Ireland, so as to force the King into an alliance on the Emperor’s terms. But if Henry could be induced to suspend or modify his attacks on the Faith and the Church, to break his connection with France and withdraw from his negotiations with the Germans, if securities could be taken that the Queen and Princess should not be compelled to sign or promise anything without the Emperor’s consent, the evident sense of the Spanish Council of State was that the proceedings against the King should be suspended, perhaps for his life, and that no stipulations should be insisted on, either for the King’s return to the Church or for his consent to the meeting of the General Council. God might perhaps work on the King’s conscience without threat of force or violence; and the Emperor, before starting on his expedition to Tunis, might tell the English Ambassador that he wished to be the King’s friend, and would not go to war with any Christian Prince unless he was compelled. The Queen’s consent would, of course, be necessary; she and the Princess would be more miserable than ever if they were made to believe that there was no help for them.[330] But their consent, if there was no alternative, might be assumed when a refusal would be useless.
If the willingness to make concessions was the measure of the respective anxieties for an agreement between the two countries, Spain was more eager than England, for the Emperor was willing to yield the point on which he had broken the unity of Christendom and content himself with words, while Henry would yield nothing, except the French alliance, for which he had cared little from the time that France had refused to follow him into schism.
An alliance of the Emperor with an excommunicated sovereign in the face of a sentence which he had himself insisted on, and with a Bull of Deposition ready for launching, would be an insult to the Holy See more dangerous to it than the revolt of a single kingdom. The treaty might, however, have been completed on the terms which Wallop and the Imperial Ambassador had agreed on at Paris, and which the Imperial Council had not rejected. The Pope saw the peril, struck in, and made it impossible. In the trial and execution of the Carthusians Henry had shown to Europe that he was himself in earnest. The blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church, and Paul calculated rightly that he could not injure the King of England more effectually than by driving him to fresh severities and thus provoking an insurrection. No other explanation can be given for his having chosen this particular moment for an act which must and would produce the desired consequence. Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More had been allowed six weeks to consider whether they would acknowledge the Statute of Supremacy. More was respected by every one, except the Lutherans, whom he confessed that he hated; Fisher was regarded as a saint by the Catholic part of England; and the King, who was dependent after all on the support of his subjects and could not wish to shock or alienate them, would probably have pressed them no further, unless challenged by some fresh provocation. Fisher had waded deep into treason, but, if the King knew it, there was no evidence which could be produced. Before the six weeks were expired the Court and the world were astonished to hear that Paul had created the Bishop of Rochester a cardinal, and that the hat was already on the way. Casalis, who foresaw the consequences, had protested against the appointment, both to the Pope and the Consistory. Paul pretended to be frightened. He begged Casalis to excuse him to the King. He professed, what it was impossible to believe, that he had intended to pay England a compliment. A general Council was to meet. He wished England to be represented there by a Prelate whom he understood to be distinguished for learning and sanctity. The Roman Pontiffs have had a chequered reputation, but the weakest of them has never been suspected of a want of worldly acuteness. The condition of England was as well understood at Rome as it was understood by Chapuys, and, with Dr. Ortiz at his ear, Paul must have been acquainted with the disposition of every peer and prelate in the realm. Fisher’s name had been familiar through the seven years’ controversy as of the one English Bishop who had been constant in resistance to every step of Henry’s policy. Paul, who had just absolved Silken Thomas for the Archbishop of Dublin’s murder, had little to learn about the conspiracy, or about Fisher’s share in it. The excuse was an insolence more affronting than the act itself. It was impossible for the King to acknowledge himself defied and defeated. He said briefly that he would send Fisher’s head to Rome, for the hat to be fitted on it. Sir Thomas More, as Fisher’s dearest friend, connected with him in opposition to the Reformation and sharing his imprisonment for the same actions, was involved along with him in the fatal effects of the Pope’s cunning or the Pope’s idiotcy. The six weeks ran out. The Bishop and the ex-Chancellor were called again before the Council, refused to acknowledge the supremacy, and were committed for trial.
The French and English Commissioners had met and parted at Calais. Nothing had been concluded there, as Cromwell said with pleasure to Chapuys, prejudicial to the Emperor; but as to submitting the King’s conduct to a Council, Cromwell reiterated that it was not to be thought of. Were there no other reason, the hatred borne to him by all the English prestraylle for having pulled down the tyranny of the Church and tried to reform them, would be cause sufficient. The Council would be composed of clergy. More than this, and under the provocation of the fresh insult, Cromwell said that neither the King nor his subjects would recognise any Council convoked by the Pope. A Council convoked by the Emperor they would acknowledge, but a Papal Council never. They intended to make the Church of England a true and singular mirror to all Christendom.[331]
Paul can hardly have deliberately contemplated the results of what he had done. He probably calculated, either that Henry would not dare to go to extremities with a person of so holy a reputation as Bishop Fisher, or that the threat of it would force Fisher’s and the Queen’s friends into the field in time to save him. They had boasted that the whole country was with them, and the Pope had taken them at their word. Yet his own mind misgave him. The Nuncio at Paris was directed to beg Francis to intercede. Francis said he would do his best, but feared the “hat” would prove the Bishop’s death. Henry, Francis said, was not always easy to deal with. He almost treated him as a subject. He was the strangest man in the world. He feared he could do no good with him.[332] There was not the least likelihood that the King would allow the interposition either of Francis or of any one. The crime created by the Act of Supremacy was the denial by word or act of the King’s sovereignty, ecclesiastical or civil, and the object was to check and punish seditious speaking or preaching. As the Act was first drafted, to speak at all against the supremacy brought an offender under the penalties. The House of Commons was unwilling to make mere language into high treason, and a strong attempt was made to introduce the word “maliciously.” Men might deny that the King was Head of the Church in ignorance or inadvertence; and an innocent opinion was not a proper subject for severity. But persons who had exposed themselves to suspicion might be questioned, and their answers interpreted by collateral evidence, to prove disloyal intention. Chapuys’s letters leave no doubt of Fisher’s real disloyalty. But his desire to bring in an Imperial army was shared by half the Peers, and, if proof of it could be produced, their guilty consciences might drive them into open rebellion. It was ascertained that Fisher and More had communicated with each other in the Tower on the answers which they were to give. But other points had risen for which Fisher was not prepared. Among the papers found in his study were letters in an unknown hand addressed to Queen Catherine, which apparently the Bishop was to have forwarded to her, but had been prevented by his arrest. They formed part of a correspondence between the Queen and some Foreign Prince, carried on through a reverend father spoken of as E. R. ... alluding to things which “no mortal man was to know besides those whom it behoved,” and to another letter which E. R. had received of the Bishop himself. Fisher was asked who wrote these letters: “Who was E. R.? Who was the Prince?” What those things were which no mortal was to know? If trifles, why the secrecy, and from whom were they to be concealed? What were the letters which had been received from the Bishop himself to be sent oversea? The letters found contained also a request to know whether Catherine wished the writer to proceed to other Princes in Germany and solicit them; and again a promise that the writer would maintain her cause among good men there, and would let her know what he could succeed in bringing to pass with the Princes.
The Bishop was asked whether, saving his faith and allegiance, he ought to have assisted a man who was engaged in such enterprises, and why he concealed a matter which he knew to be intended against the King; how the letter came into his hands, who sent it, who brought it. If the Bishop refused to answer or equivocated, he was to understand that the King knew the truth, for he had proof in his hands. The writer was crafty and subtle and had promised to spend his labour with the Princes that they should take in hand to defend the Lady Catherine’s cause.
The King held the key to the whole mystery. The mine had been undermined. The intended rebellion was no secret to Henry or to Cromwell. Catherine, a divorced wife, and a Spanish princess, owed no allegiance in England. But Fisher was an English subject, and conscience is no excuse for treason, until the treason succeeds.
Fisher answered warily, but certainly untruly, that he could not recollect the name either of the Prince who wrote the letter which had been discovered or of the messenger who brought it. It was probably some German prince, but, as God might help him, he could not say which, unless it was Ferdinand, King of Hungary. E. R. was not himself, nor did he ever consent that the writer should attempt anything with the German Princes against the King.
He had been careful. He had desired Chapuys from the beginning that his name should not be mentioned, except in cipher. He had perhaps abstained from directly advising an application to Ferdinand, who could not act without the Emperor’s sanction. His messages to Charles through his Ambassador even Fisher could scarcely have had the hardiness to deny; but these messages, if known, were not alleged. The Anglo-Imperial alliance was on the anvil, and the question was not put to him.[333]
Of Fisher’s malice, however, as the law construed it, there was no doubt. He persisted in his refusal to acknowledge the supremacy of the Crown. Five days after his examination he was tried at Westminster Hall, and in the week following he was executed on Tower Hill. He died bravely in a cause which he believed to be right. To the last he might have saved himself by submission, but he never wavered. He knew that he could do better service to the Queen and the Catholic Church by his death than by his life. Cromwell told Chapuys that “the Bishop of Rome was the cause of his punishment, for having made a Cardinal of the King’s worst enemy.” He was “greatly pitied of the people.” The pity would have been less had his real conduct been revealed.