The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3)

by James Anthony Froude

They sent the speaker, Sir Thomas Audeley, to the king, who "very eloquently declared what dishonour it was to his Majesty and the realm, that they which were elected for the wisest men in the shires, cities, and boroughs within the realm of England, should be declared in so noble a presence to lack faith." It was equivalent to saying "that they were infidels, and no Christians—as ill as Turks and Saracens." Wherefore he "most humbly besought the King's Highness to call the said bishop before him, and to cause him to speak more discreetly of such a number as was in the Commons House."[²⁴⁶] Henry consented to their request, it is likely with no great difficulty, and availed himself of the opportunity to read a lesson much needed to the remainder of the bench. He sent for Fisher, and with him for the Archbishop of Canterbury, and for six other bishops. The speaker's message was laid before them, and they were asked what they had to say. It would have been well for the weak trembling old men if they could have repeated what they believed and had maintained their right to believe it. Bold conduct is ever the most safe; it is fatal only when there is

courage but for the first step, and fails when a second is required to support it. But they were forsaken in their hour of calamity, not by courage only, but by prudence, by judgment, by conscience itself. The Bishop of Rochester stooped to an equivocation too transparent to deceive any one; he said that "he meant only the doings of the Bohemians were for lack of faith, and not the doings of the Commons House"—"which saying was confirmed by the bishops present." The king allowed the excuse, and the bishops were dismissed; but they were dismissed into ignominy, and thenceforward, in all Henry's dealings with them, they were treated with contemptuous disrespect. For Fisher himself we must feel only sorrow. After seventy-six years of a useful and honourable life, which he might have hoped to close in a quiet haven, he was launched suddenly upon stormy waters, to which he was too brave to yield, which he was too timid to contend against; and the frail vessel drifting where the waves drove it, was soon piteously to perish.

Thus triumphant on every side, the parliament, in the middle of December, closed its session, and lay England celebrated its exploits as a national victory. "The king removed to Greenwich, and there kept his Christmas with the queen with great triumph, with great plenty of viands, and disguisings, and interludes, to the great rejoicing of his people;"[²⁴⁷] the members of the House of Commons, we may well believe, following the royal example in town and country, and being the little heroes of the day. Only the bishops carried home sad hearts within them, to mourn over the perils of the church and the impending end of all things; Fisher, unhappily for himself, to listen to the wailings of the Nun of Kent, and to totter slowly into treason.

Here, for the present leaving the clergy to meditate on their future, and reconsider the wisdom of their answer to the king respecting the ecclesiastical jurisdiction (a point on which they were not the less certain to be pressed, because the process upon it was temporarily suspended), we must turn to the more painful matter which, for a time longer, ran parallel with the domestic reformation, and as yet was unable to unite with it. After the departure of Campeggio, the further hearing of the divorce cause had been advoked to Rome, where it was impossible for Henry to consent to plead; while the appearance of the supposed brief had opened avenues of new difficulty which left no hope of a decision within the limits of an ordinary lifetime. Henry

was still, however, extremely reluctant[²⁴⁸] to proceed to extremities, and appeal to the parliament. He had threatened that he would tolerate no delay, and Wolsey had evidently expected that he would not. Queen Catherine's alarm had gone so far, that in the autumn she had procured an injunction from the pope, which had been posted in the churches of Flanders, menacing the king with spiritual censures if he took any further steps.[²⁴⁹] Even this she feared that he would disregard, and in March, 1529-30, a second inhibition was issued at her request, couched in still stronger language.[²⁵⁰] But these measures were needless, or at least premature. Henry expected that the display of temper in the country in the late session would produce an effect both on the pope and on the emperor; and proposing to send an embassy to remonstrate jointly with them on the occasion of the emperor's coronation, which was to take place in the spring at Bologna, he had recourse in the mean time to an expedient which, though blemished in the execution, was itself reasonable and prudent.

Among the many technical questions which had been raised upon the divorce, the most serious was on the validity of the original dispensation; a question not only on the sufficiency of the form the defects of which the brief had been invented to remedy; but on the more comprehensive uncertainty whether Pope Julius had not exceeded his powers altogether in granting a dispensation where there was so close affinity. No one supposed that the pope could permit a brother to marry a sister; a dispensation granted in such a case would be ipso facto void.—Was

not the dispensation similarly void which permitted the marriage of a brother's widow? The advantage which Henry expected from raising this difficulty was the transfer of judgment from the partial tribunal of Clement to a broader court. The pope could not, of course, adjudicate on the extent of his own powers; especially as he always declared himself to be ignorant of the law; and the decision of so general a question rested either with a general council, or must be determined by the consent of Christendom, obtained in some other manner. If such general consent declared against the pope, the cause was virtually terminated. If there was some approach to a consent against him, or even if there was general uncertainty, Henry had a legal pretext for declining his jurisdiction, and appealing to a council.

Thomas Cranmer, then a doctor of divinity at Cambridge,[²⁵¹] is said to have been the person who suggested this ingenious expedient, and to have advised the king, as the simplest means of carrying it out, to consult in detail the universities and learned men throughout Europe. His notorious activity in collecting the opinions may have easily connected him with the origination of the plan, which probably occurred to many other persons as well as to him; but whoever was the first adviser, it was immediately acted upon, and English agents were despatched into Germany, Italy, and France, carrying with them all means of persuasion, intellectual, moral, and material, which promised to be of most cogent potency with lawyers' convictions.

This matter was in full activity when the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn's father, with Cranmer, the Bishop of London, and Edward Lee, afterwards Archbishop of York, was despatched to Bologna to lay Henry's remonstrances before the emperor, who was come at last in person to enjoy his miserable triumph, and receive from the pope the imperial crown. Sir Nicholas Carew, who had been sent forward a few weeks previously, described in piteous language the state to which Italy had been reduced by him. Passing through Pavia, the English emissary saw the children crying about the streets for bread, and dying of hunger; the grapes in midwinter rotting on the vines, because there was no one to gather them; and for fifty miles scarcely a single creature, man or woman, in the fields. "They say," added Carew, "and the pope also showed us the same, that the whole people of that country, with divers other places in Italia,

with war, famine, and pestilence, are utterly dead and gone."[²⁵²] Such had been the combined work of the vanity of Francis and the cold selfishness of Charles; and now the latter had arrived amidst the ruins which he had made, to receive his crown from the hands of a pope who was true to Italy, if false to all the world besides, and whom, but two years before, he had imprisoned and disgraced. We think of Clement as the creature of the emperor, and such substantially he allowed himself to be; but his obedience was the obedience of fear to a master whom he hated, and the bishop of Tarbès, who was present at the coronation, and stood at his side through the ceremony, saw him trembling under his robes with emotion, and heard him sigh bitterly.[²⁵³] Very unwillingly, we may be assured, he was compelled to act his vacillating part to England, and England, at this distance of time, may forgive him for faults to which she owes her freedom, and need not refuse him some tribute of sympathy in his sorrows.