History of the English People, Volume IV

by John Richard Green

Charles and the League of Schmalkald.

A still greater part was played by the aspect of affairs in the Empire. Once freed from the check of the war Charles had moved fast to his aim. In 1545 he had adjusted all minor differences with Paul the Third, and Pope and Emperor had resolved on the immediate convocation of the Council, and on the enforcement of its decisions by weight of arms. Should the Emperor be driven to war with the Lutheran princes, the Pope engaged to support him with all his power. "Were it needful" Paul promised "he would sell his very crown in his service." In December the Council was actually opened at Trent, and its proceedings soon showed that no concessions to the Lutherans could be looked for. The Emperor's demand that the reform of the Church should first be taken in hand was evaded; and on the two great questions of the authority of the Bible as a ground of faith, and of justification, the sentence of the Council directly condemned the Protestant opinions. The Lutherans showed their resolve to make no submission by refusing to send representatives to Trent; and Charles carried out his pledges to the Papacy by taking the field in the spring of 1546 to break up the League of Schmalkald. But the army gathered under the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse so far outnumbered the Imperial forces that the Emperor could not venture on a battle. Henry watched the course of Charles with a growing anxiety. The hopes of a purified and united Christendom which had drawn him a few years back to the Emperor's side faded before the stern realities of the Council. The highest pretensions of the Papacy had been sanctioned by the bishops gathered at Trent; and to the pretensions of the Papacy Henry was resolved not to bow. He was driven, whether he would or no, on the policy of Cromwell; and in the last months of his life he offered aid to the League of Schmalkald. His offers were rejected; for the Lutheran princes had no faith in his sincerity, and believed themselves strong enough to deal with the Emperor without foreign help.

Effect on English Religion.

But his attitude without told on his policy at home. To the hotter Catholics as to the hotter Protestants the years since Cromwell's fall had seemed years of a gradual return to Catholicism. There had been a slight sharpening of persecution for the Protestants, and restrictions had been put on the reading of the English Bible. The alliance with Charles and the hope of reconciling England anew with a pacified Christendom gave fresh cause for suppressing heresy. Neither Norfolk nor his master indeed desired any rigorous measure of reaction, for Henry remained proud of the work he had done. His bitterness against the Papacy only grew as the years went by; and at the very moment that heretics were suffering for a denial of the mass, others were suffering by their side for a denial of the supremacy. But strange and anomalous as its system seemed, the drift of Henry's religious government had as yet been in one direction, that of a return to and reconciliation with the body of the Catholic Church. With the decision of the Council and the new attitude of the Emperor this drift was suddenly arrested. It was not that Henry realized the revolution that was opening before him or the vast importance of the steps which his policy now led him to take. His tendency, like that of his people, was religious rather than theological, practical rather than speculative. Of the immense problems which were opening in the world neither he nor England saw anything. The religious strife which was to break Europe asunder was to the king as to the bulk of Englishmen a quarrel of words and hot temper; the truth which Christendom was to rend itself to pieces in striving to discover was a thing that could easily be found with the aid of God. There is something humorous as there is something pathetic in the warnings which Henry addressed to the Parliament at the close of 1545. The shadow of death as it fell over him gave the king's words a new gentleness and tenderness. "The special foundation of our religion being charity between man and man, it is so refrigerate as there never was more dissension and lack of love between man and man, the occasions whereof are opinions only and names devised for the continuance of the same. Some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Anabaptists; names devised of the devil, and yet not fully without ground, for the severing of one man's heart by conceit of opinion from the other." But the remedy was a simple one. Every man was "to travail first for his own amendment." Then the bishops and clergy were to agree in their teaching, "which, seeing there is but one truth and verity, they may easily do, calling therein for the grace of God." Then the nobles and laity were to be pious and humble, to read their new Bibles "reverently and humbly . . . and in any doubt to resort to the learned or at best the higher powers." "I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every alehouse and tavern. This kind of man is depraved and that kind of man, this ceremony and that ceremony." All this controversy might be done away by simple charity. "Therefore be in charity one with another like brother and brother. Have respect to the pleasing of God; and then I doubt not that love I spoke of shall never be dissolved between us."

The Religious Truce.

There is something wonderful in the English coolness and narrowness, in the speculative blindness and practical good sense which could look out over such a world at such a moment, and could see nothing in it save a quarrel of "opinions, and of names devised for the continuance of the same." But Henry only expressed the general feeling of his people. England indeed was being slowly leavened with a new spirit. The humiliation of the clergy, the Lutheran tendencies of half the bishops, the crash of the abbeys, the destruction of chauntries and mass-chapels, a measure which told closely on the actual worship of the day, the new articles of faith, the diffusion of Bibles, the "jangling" and discussion which followed on every step in the king's course, were all telling on the thoughts of men. But the temper of the nation as a whole remained religiously conservative. It drifted rather to the moderate reforms of the New Learning than to any radical reconstruction of the Church. There was a general disinclination indeed to push matters to either extreme, a general shrinking from the persecution which the Catholic called for as from the destruction which the Protestant was desiring. It was significant that a new heresy bill which passed through the Lords in 1545 quietly disappeared when it reached the Commons. But this shrinking rested rather on national than on theological grounds, on a craving for national union which Henry expressed in his cry for "brotherly love," and on an imperfect appreciation of the real nature or consequence of the points at issue which made men shrink from burning their neighbours for "opinions and names devised for the continuance of the same." What Henry and what the bulk of Englishmen wanted was, not indeed wholly to rest in what had been done, but to do little more save the remedying of obvious abuses or the carrying on of obvious improvements. One such improvement was the supplying men with the means of private devotion in their own tongue, a measure from which none but the fanatics of either side dissented. This process went slowly on in the issuing of two primers in 1535 and 1539, the rendering into English of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the publication of an English Litany for outdoor processions in 1544, and the adding to this of a collection of English prayers in 1545.

The Court Factions.

But the very tone of Henry shows his consciousness that this religious truce rested on his will alone. Around him as he lay dying stood men who were girding themselves to a fierce struggle for power, a struggle that could not fail to wake the elements of religious discord which he had striven to lull asleep. Adherents of the Papacy, advocates of a new submission to a foreign spiritual jurisdiction there were few or none; for the most conservative of English Churchmen or nobles had as yet no wish to restore the older Roman supremacy. But Norfolk and Gardiner were content with this assertion of national and ecclesiastical independence; in all matters of faith they were earnest to conserve, to keep things as they were, and in front of them stood a group of nobles who were bent on radical change. The marriages, the reforms, the profusion of Henry had aided him in his policy of weakening the nobles by building up a new nobility which sprang from the Court and was wholly dependent on the Crown. Such were the Russells, the Cavendishes, the Wriothesleys, the Fitzwilliams. Such was John Dudley, a son of the Dudley who had been put to death for his financial oppression in Henry the Seventh's days, but who had been restored in blood, attached to the court, raised to the peerage as Lord Lisle, and who, whether as adviser or general, had been actively employed in high stations at the close of this reign. Such above all were the two brothers of Jane Seymour. The elder of the two, Edward Seymour, had been raised to the earldom of Hertford, and entrusted with the command of the English army in its operations against Scotland. As uncle of Henry's boy Edward, he could not fail to play a leading part in the coming reign; and the nobles of the "new blood," as their opponents called them in disdain, drew round him as their head. Without any historical hold on the country, raised by the royal caprice, and enriched by the spoil of the monasteries, these nobles were pledged to the changes from which they had sprung and to the party of change. Over the mass of the nation their influence was small; and in the strife for power with the older nobles which they were anticipating they were forced to look to the small but resolute body of men who, whether from religious enthusiasm or from greed of wealth or power, were bent on bringing the English Church nearer to conformity with the reformed Churches of the Continent. As Henry drew to his grave the two factions faced each other with gathering dread and gathering hate. Hot words betrayed their hopes. "If God should call the king to his mercy," said Norfolk's son, Lord Surrey, "who were so meet to govern the Prince as my lord my father?" "Rather than it should come to pass," retorted a partizan of Hertford's, "that the Prince should be under the governance of your father or you, I would abide the adventure to thrust a dagger in you!"

Lord Surrey.

In the history of English poetry the name of Lord Surrey takes an illustrious place. An Elizabethan writer tells us how at this time "sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains; who having travelled to Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the rough but vivacious doggrel of Skelton, made way in the hands of Wyatt and Surrey for delicate imitations of the songs, sonnets, and rondels of Italy and France. With the Italian conceits came an Italian refinement whether of words or of thought; and the force and versatility of Surrey's youth showed itself in whimsical satires, in classical translations, in love-sonnets, and in paraphrases of the Psalms. In his version of two books of the Æneid he was the first to introduce into England the Italian blank verse which was to play so great a part in our literature. But with the poetic taste of the Renascence Surrey inherited its wild and reckless energy. Once he was sent to the Fleet for challenging a gentleman to fight. Release enabled him to join his father in an expedition against Scotland, but he was no sooner back than the Londoners complained how at Candlemas the young lord and his comrades "went out with stone bows at midnight," and how next day "there was great clamour of the breaking of many glass windows both of houses and churches, and shooting at men that might be in the streets." In spite of his humorous excuse that the jest only purposed to bring home to men that "from justice' rod no fault is free, but that all such as work unright in most quiet are next unrest," Surrey paid for this outbreak with a fresh arrest which drove him to find solace in paraphrases of Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. Soon he was over sea with the English troops in Flanders, and in 1544 serving as marshal of the camp to conduct the retreat after the siege of Montreuil. Sent to relieve Boulogne, he remained in charge of the town till the spring of 1546, when he returned to England to rime sonnets to a fair Geraldine, the daughter of the Earl of Kildare, and to plunge into the strife of factions around the dying king.