The Parliament
An even greater revolution was seen in the summons of a Parliament which met in November 1529. Its assembly was no doubt prompted in part by the actual needs of the Crown, for Henry was not only penniless but overwhelmed with debts and Parliament alone could give him freedom from these embarrassments. But the importance of the questions brought before the Houses, and their repeated assembly throughout the rest of Henry's reign, point to a definite change in the royal system. The policy of Edward the Fourth, of Henry the Seventh, and of Wolsey was abandoned. Instead of looking on Parliament as a danger the monarchy now felt itself strong enough to use it as a tool. The obedience of the Commons was seen in the readiness with which they at once passed a bill to release the crown from its debts. But Henry counted on more than obedience. He counted, and justly counted, on the warm support of the Houses in his actual strife with Rome. The plan of a divorce was no doubt unpopular. So violent was the indignation against Anne Boleyn that she hardly dared to stir abroad. But popular feeling ran almost as bitterly against the Papacy. The sight of an English king and an English queen pleading before a foreign tribunal revived the old resentment against the subjection of Englishmen to Papal courts. The helplessness of Clement in the grasp of the Emperor recalled the helplessness of the Popes at Avignon in the grasp of the kings of France. That Henry should sue for justice to Rome was galling enough, but the hottest adherent of the Papacy was outraged when the suit of his king was granted or refused at the will of Charles. It was against this degradation of the Crown that the Statutes of Provisors and Præmunire had been long since aimed. The need of Papal support to their disputed title which had been felt by the Houses of Lancaster and York had held these statutes in suspense, and the Legatine Court of Wolsey had openly defied them. They were still however legally in force; they were part of the Parliamentary tradition; and it was certain that Parliament would be as ready as ever to enforce the independent jurisdiction of the Crown.
Hopes of the New Learning
Not less significant was the attitude of the New Learning. On Wolsey's fall the seals had been offered to Warham, and it was probably at his counsel that they were finally given to Sir Thomas More. The chancellor's dream, if we may judge it from the acts of his brief ministry, seems to have been that of carrying out the religious reformation which had been demanded by Colet and Erasmus while checking the spirit of revolt against the unity of the Church. His severities against the Protestants, exaggerated as they have been by polemic rancour, remain the one stain on a memory that knows no other. But it was only by a rigid severance of the cause of reform from what seemed to him the cause of revolution that More could hope for a successful issue to the projects of reform which the council laid before Parliament. The Petition of the Commons sounded like an echo of Colet's famous address to the Convocation. It attributed the growth of heresy not more to "frantic and seditious books published in the English tongue contrary to the very true Catholic and Christian faith" than to "the extreme and uncharitable behaviour of divers ordinaries." It remonstrated against the legislation of the clergy in Convocation without the king's assent or that of his subjects, the oppressive procedure of the Church Courts, the abuses of ecclesiastical patronage, and the excessive number of holydays. Henry referred the Petition to the bishops, but they could devise no means of redress, and the ministry persisted in pushing through the Houses their bills for ecclesiastical reform. The importance of the new measures lay really in the action of Parliament. They were an explicit announcement that church-reform was now to be undertaken, not by the clergy, but by the people at large. On the other hand it was clear that it would be carried out in a spirit of loyalty to the church. The Commons forced from Bishop Fisher an apology for words which were taken as a doubt thrown on their orthodoxy. Henry forbade the circulation of Tyndale's translation of the Bible as executed in a Protestant spirit. The reforming measures however were pushed resolutely on. Though the questions of Convocation and the Bishops' courts were adjourned for further consideration, the fees of the courts were curtailed, the clergy restricted from lay employments, pluralities restrained, and residence enforced. In spite of a dogged opposition from the bishops the bills received the assent of the House of Lords, "to the great rejoicing of lay people, and the great displeasure of spiritual persons."
Death of Wolsey
Not less characteristic of the New Learning was the intellectual pressure it strove to bring to bear on the wavering Pope. Cranmer was still active in the cause of Anne Boleyn; he had just published a book in favour of the divorce; and he now urged on the ministry an appeal to the learned opinion of Christendom by calling for the judgement of the chief universities of Europe. His counsel was adopted; but Norfolk trusted to coarser means of attaining his end. Like most of the English nobles and the whole of the merchant class, his sympathies were with the House of Burgundy; he looked upon Wolsey as the real hindrance to the divorce through the French policy which had driven Charles into a hostile attitude; and he counted on the Cardinal's fall to bring about a renewal of friendship with the Emperor and to ensure his support. The father of Anne Boleyn, now created Earl of Wiltshire, was sent in 1530 on this errand to the Imperial Court. But Charles remained firm to Catharine's cause, and Clement would do nothing in defiance of the Emperor. Nor was the appeal to the learned world more successful. In France the profuse bribery of the English agents would have failed with the university of Paris but for the interference of Francis himself, eager to regain Henry's goodwill by this office of friendship. As shameless an exercise of the king's own authority was needed to wring an approval of his cause from Oxford and Cambridge. In Germany the very Protestants, then in the fervour of their moral revival and hoping little from a proclaimed opponent of Luther, were dead against the king. So far as could be seen from Cranmer's test every learned man in Christendom but for bribery and threats would have condemned the royal cause. Henry was embittered by failures which he attributed to the unskilful diplomacy of his new counsellors; and it was rumoured that he had been heard to regret the loss of the more dexterous statesman whom they had overthrown. Wolsey, who since the beginning of the year had remained at York, though busy in appearance with the duties of his see, was hoping more and more as the months passed by for his recall. But the jealousy of his political enemies was roused by the king's regrets, and the pitiless hand of Norfolk was seen in the quick and deadly blow which he dealt at his fallen rival. On the fourth of November, on the eve of his installation feast, the Cardinal was arrested on a charge of high treason and conducted by the Lieutenant of the Tower towards London. Already broken by his enormous labours, by internal disease, and the sense of his fall, Wolsey accepted the arrest as a sentence of death. An attack of dysentery forced him to rest at the abbey of Leicester, and as he reached the gate he said feebly to the brethren who met him, "I am come to lay my bones among you." On his death-bed his thoughts still clung to the prince whom he had served. "Had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king," murmured the dying man, "He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is my due reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince."
Cromwell's Policy
No words could paint with so terrible a truthfulness the spirit of the new despotism which Wolsey had done more than any of those who went before him to build up. From tempers like his all sense of loyalty to England, to its freedom, to its institutions, had utterly passed away, and the one duty which the statesman owned was a duty to his "prince." To what issues such a conception of a statesman's duty might lead was now to be seen in the career of a greater than Wolsey. The two dukes had struck down the Cardinal only to set up another master in his room. Since his interview with Henry Cromwell had remained in the king's service, where his steady advance in the royal favour was marked by his elevation to the post of Secretary of State. His patience was at last rewarded by the failure of the policy for which his own had been set aside. At the close of 1530 the college of cardinals formally rejected the king's request for leave to decide the whole matter in his own spiritual courts; and the defeat of Norfolk's project drove Henry nearer and nearer to the bold plan from which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall. Cromwell was again ready with his suggestion that the king should disavow the Papal jurisdiction, declare himself Head of the Church within his realm, and obtain a divorce from his own Ecclesiastical Courts. But he looked on the divorce as simply the prelude to a series of changes which the new minister was bent upon accomplishing. In all his chequered life what had left its deepest stamp on him was Italy. Not only in the rapidity and ruthlessness of his designs, but in their larger scope, their clearer purpose, and their admirable combination, the Italian state-craft entered with Cromwell into English politics. He is in fact the first English minister in whom we can trace through the whole period of his rule the steady working out of a great and definite aim, that of raising the king to absolute authority on the ruins of every rival power within the realm. It was not that Cromwell was a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we may trust the tale that carries him in his youth to Florence or no, his statesmanship was closely modelled on the ideal of the Florentine thinker whose book was constantly in his hand. Even as a servant of Wolsey he startled the future Cardinal, Reginald Pole, by bidding him take for his manual in politics the "Prince" of Machiavelli. Machiavelli hoped to find in Cæsar Borgia or in the later Lorenzo de' Medici a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyrannies might unite and regenerate Italy; and terrible and ruthless as his policy was, the final aim of Cromwell seems to have been that of Machiavelli, an aim of securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration of all authority in the crown.
The Headship of the Church
The first step towards such an end was the freeing the monarchy from its spiritual obedience to Rome. What the first of the Tudors had done for the political independence of the kingdom, the second was to do for its ecclesiastical independence. Henry the Seventh had freed England from the interference of France or the House of Burgundy; and in the question of the divorce Cromwell saw the means of bringing Henry the Eighth to free it from the interference of the Papacy. In such an effort resistance could be looked for only from the clergy. But their resistance was what Cromwell desired. The last check on royal absolutism which had survived the Wars of the Roses lay in the wealth, the independent synods and jurisdiction, and the religious claims of the church; and for the success of the new policy it was necessary to reduce the great ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the State in which all authority should flow from the sovereign alone, his will be the only law, his decision the only test of truth. Such a change however was hardly to be wrought without a struggle; and the question of national independence in all ecclesiastical matters furnished ground on which the crown could conduct this struggle to the best advantage. The secretary's first blow showed how unscrupulously the struggle was to be waged. A year had passed since Wolsey had been convicted of a breach of the Statute of Præmunire. The pedantry of the judges declared the whole nation to have been formally involved in the same charge by its acceptance of his authority. The legal absurdity was now redressed by a general pardon, but from this pardon the clergy found themselves omitted. In the spring of 1531 Convocation was assembled to be told that forgiveness could be bought at no less a price than the payment of a fine amounting to a million of our present money, and the acknowledgement of the king as "the chief protector, the only and supreme lord, and Head of the Church and Clergy of England." Unjust as was the first demand, they at once submitted to it; against the second they struggled hard. But their appeals to Henry and Cromwell met only with demands for instant obedience. A compromise was at last arrived at by the insertion of a qualifying phrase "So far as the law of Christ will allow"; and with this addition the words were again submitted by Warham to the Convocation. There was a general silence. "Whoever is silent seems to consent," said the Archbishop. "Then are we all silent," replied a voice from among the crowd.