History of the English People, Volume IV

by John Richard Green

Charles and Henry.

Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and the hopes that were stirring found an echo in England as well as in Germany. We can hardly doubt indeed that it was the revival of these hopes which had brought about the fall of Cromwell and the recall of Norfolk to power. Norfolk, like his master, looked to a purification of the Church by a Council as the prelude to a reconciliation of England with the general body of Catholicism; and both saw that it was by the influence of the Emperor alone that such a Council could be brought about. Charles on the other hand was ready to welcome Henry's advances. The quarrel over Catharine had ended with her death; and the wrong done her had been in part atoned for by the fall of Anne Boleyn. The aid of Henry too was needed to hold in check the opposition of France. The chief means which France still possessed of holding the Emperor at bay lay in the disunion of the Empire, and it was resolute to preserve this weapon against him at whatever cost to Christendom. While Francis remonstrated at Rome against the concessions made to the Lutherans by the Legates, he urged the Lutheran princes to make no terms with the Papacy. To the Protestants he held out hopes of his own conversion, while he promised Pope Paul that he would defend him with his life against Emperor and heretics. His intrigues were aided by the suspicions of both the religious parties. Luther refused to believe in the sincerity of the concessions made by the Legates; Paul the Third held aloof from them in sullen silence. Meanwhile Francis was preparing to raise more material obstacles to the Emperor's designs. Charles had bought his last reconciliation with the king by a promise of restoring the Milanese, but he had no serious purpose of ever fulfilling his pledge, and his retention of the Duchy gave the French king a fair pretext for threatening a renewal of the war.

James the Fifth.

England, as Francis hoped, he could hold in check through his alliance with the Scots. After the final expulsion of Albany in 1524 Scottish history became little more than a strife between Margaret Tudor and her husband, the Earl of Angus, for power; but the growth of James the Fifth to manhood at last secured rest for the land. James had all the varied ability of his race, and he carried out with vigour its traditional policy. The Highland chieftains, the great lords of the Lowlands, were brought more under the royal sway; the Church was strengthened to serve as a check on the feudal baronage; the alliance with France was strictly preserved, as the one security against English aggression. Nephew as he was indeed of the English king, James from the outset of his reign took up an attitude hostile to England. He was jealous of the influence which the two Henries had established in his realm by the marriage of Margaret and by the building up of an English party under the Douglases; the great Churchmen who formed his most trusted advisers dreaded the influence of the religious changes across the border; while the people clung to their old hatred of England and their old dependence on France. It was only by two inroads of the border lords that Henry checked the hostile intrigues of James in 1532; his efforts to influence his nephew by an interview and alliance were met by the king's marriage with two French wives in succession, Magdalen of Valois, a daughter of Francis, and Mary, a daughter of the Duke of Guise. In 1539 when the projected coalition between France and the Empire threatened England, it had been needful to send Norfolk with an army to the Scotch frontier, and now that France was again hostile Norfolk had to move anew to the border in the autumn of 1541.

Defeat at the Solway.

While the Duke was fruitlessly endeavouring to bring James to fresh friendship a sudden blow at home weakened his power. At the close of the year Catharine Howard was arrested on a charge of adultery; a Parliament which assembled in January 1542 passed a Bill of Attainder; and in February the Queen was sent to the block. She was replaced by the widow of Lord Latimer, Catharine Parr; and the influence of Norfolk in the king's counsels gradually gave way to that of Bishop Gardiner of Winchester. But Henry clung to the policy which the Duke favoured. At the end of 1541 two great calamities, the loss of Hungary after a victory of the Turks and a crushing defeat at Algiers, so weakened Charles that in the summer of the following year Francis ventured to attack him. The attack served only to draw closer the negotiations between England and the Emperor; and Francis was forced, as he had threatened, to give Henry work to occupy him at home. The busiest counsellor of the Scotch king, Cardinal Beaton, crossed the seas to negotiate a joint attack, and the attitude of Scotland became so menacing that in the autumn of 1542 Norfolk was again sent to the border with twenty thousand men. But terrible as were his ravages, he could not bring the Scotch army to an engagement, and want of supplies soon forced him to fall back over the border. It was in vain that James urged his nobles to follow him in a counter-invasion. They were ready to defend their country; but the memory of Flodden was still fresh, and success in England would only give dangerous strength to a king in whom they saw an enemy. But James was as stubborn in his purpose as the lords. Anxious only to free himself from their presence, he waited till the two armies had alike withdrawn, and then suddenly summoned his subjects to meet him in arms on the western border. A disorderly host gathered at Lochmaben and passed into Cumberland; but the English borderers followed on them fast, and were preparing to attack when at nightfall on the twenty-fifth of November a panic seized the whole Scotch force. Lost in the darkness and cut off from retreat by the Solway Firth, thousands of men with all the baggage and guns fell into the hands of the pursuers. The news of this rout fell on the young king like a sentence of death. For a while he wandered desperately from palace to palace till at the opening of December the tidings met him at Falkland that his queen, Mary of Guise, had given birth to a child. His two boys had both died in youth, and he was longing passionately for an heir to the crown which was slipping from his grasp. But the child was a daughter, the Mary Stuart of later history. "The deil go with it," muttered the dying king, as his mind fell back to the close of the line of Bruce and the marriage with Robert's daughter which brought the Stuarts to the Scottish throne, "The deil go with it! It will end as it began. It came with a lass, and it will go with a lass." A few days later he died.

The Marriage Treaty.

The death of James did more than remove a formidable foe. It opened up for the first time a prospect of that union of the two kingdoms which was at last to close their long hostility. Scotland, torn by factions and with a babe for queen, seemed to lie at Henry's feet: and the king seized the opportunity of completing his father's work by a union of the realms. At the opening of 1543 he proposed to the Scotch regent, the Earl of Arran, the marriage of the infant Mary Stuart with his son Edward. To ensure this bridal he demanded that Mary should at once be sent to England, the four great fortresses of Scotland be placed in English hands, and a voice given to Henry himself in the administration of the Scotch Council of Regency. Arran and the Queen-mother, rivals as they were, vied with each other in apparent goodwill to the marriage; but there was a steady refusal to break the league with France, and the "English lords," as the Douglas faction were called, owned themselves helpless in the face of the national jealousy of English ambition. The temper of the nation itself was seen in the answer made by the Scotch Parliament which gathered in the spring. If they consented to the young Queen's betrothal, they not only rejected the demands which accompanied the proposal, but insisted that in case of such a union Scotland should have a perpetual regent of its own, and that this office should be hereditary in the House of Arran. Warned by his very partizans that the delivery of Mary was impossible, that if such a demand were pressed "there was not so little a boy but he would hurl stones against it, the wives would handle their distaffs, and the commons would universally die in it," Henry's proposals dropped in July to a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, he suffered France to be included among the allies of Scotland named in it, he consented that the young Queen should remain with her mother till the age of ten, and offered guarantees for the maintenance of Scotch independence.

Scotland and France.

But modify it as he might, Henry knew that such a project of union could only be carried out by a war with Francis. His negotiations for a treaty with Charles had long been delayed through Henry's wish to drag the Emperor into an open breach with the Papacy, but at the moment of the King's first proposals for the marriage of Mary Stuart with his son the need of finding a check upon France forced on a formal alliance with the Emperor in February 1543. The two allies agreed that the war should be continued till the Duchy of Burgundy had been restored to the Emperor and till England had recovered Normandy and Guienne; while the joint fleets of Henry and Charles held the Channel and sheltered England from any danger of French attack. The main end of this treaty was doubtless to give Francis work at home which might prevent the despatch of a French force into Scotland and the overthrow of Henry's hopes of a Scotch marriage. These hopes were strengthened as the summer went on by the acceptance of his later proposals in a Parliament which was packed by the Regent, and by the actual conclusion of a marriage-treaty. But if Francis could spare neither horse nor man for action in Scotland his influence in the northern kingdom was strong enough to foil Henry's plans. The Churchmen were as bitterly opposed to such a marriage as the partizans of France; and their head, Cardinal Beaton, who had held aloof from the Regent's Parliament, suddenly seized the Queen-mother and her babe, crowned the infant Mary, called a Parliament in December which annulled the marriage-treaty, and set Henry at defiance.