Unalluring and, on the whole, unlovely as it is, the image of Loyola must ever command the homage of the world. No other uninspired man, unaided by military or civil power, and making no appeal to the passions of the multitude, has had the genius to conceive, the courage to attempt, and the success to establish a polity teeming with results at once so momentous and so distinctly foreseen. Amid his ascetic follies and his half-crazy visions, and despite all the coarse daubing with which the miracle-mongers of his church have defaced it, his character is destitute neither of sublimity nor of grace. Men felt that there had appeared among them one of those monarchs who reign in right of their own native supremacy, and to whom the feebler will of others must yield either a ready or a reluctant allegiance. It was a conviction recorded by his disciples on his tomb in these memorable and significant words: “Whoever thou mayst be who hast portrayed to thine own imagination Pompey nor Cæsar or Alexander, open thine eyes to the truth, and let this marble teach thee how much greater a conqueror than they was Ignatius.”
THOMAS CROMWELL, EARL OF ESSEX.
By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Born about 1498, executed 1540. Cromwell began his public career as secretary of Cardinal Wolsey, and made a brilliant reputation for administrative ability before his patron’s fall. He acquired the notice of Henry VIII by his loyalty to the disgraced cardinal when all other friends had deserted him. By the king’s favor he received the highest offices of the state, and was made Prime Minister, finally becoming earl of Essex. Cromwell was the political leader of the English Reformation, and the most effective instrument in concentrating power in the hands of the king. His impeachment and execution for high treason, however he may have deserved his fate for his cruelty and unscrupulousness, was gross ingratitude on the part of Henry.]
The debate on the suppression of the monasteries was the first instance of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some time longer it was to remain the only one. While the great revolution which struck down the Church was in progress, England looked silently on. In all the earlier ecclesiastical changes, in the contest over the Papal jurisdiction and Papal exactions, in the reform of the Church courts, even in the curtailment of the legislative independence of the clergy, the nation as a whole had gone with the king. But from the enslavement of the clergy, from the gagging of the pulpits, from the suppression of the monasteries, the bulk of the nation stood aloof. It is only through the stray depositions of royal spies that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething under this silence of a whole people. For the silence was a silence of terror. Before Cromwell’s rise and after his fall from power the reign of Henry VIII witnessed no more than the common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of Cromwell’s administration form the one period in our history which deserves the name which men have given to the rule of Robespierre. It was the English Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered the king. Cranmer could plead for him at a later time with Henry as “one whose surety was only by your majesty, who loved your majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God.”
But the attitude of Cromwell toward the king was something more than that of absolute dependence and unquestioning devotion. He was “so vigilant to preserve your majesty from all treasons,” adds the primate, “that few could be so secretly conceived but he detected the same from the beginning.” Henry, like every Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but tremulously sensitive to the slightest breath of hidden disloyalty. It was on this inner dread that Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was hardly secretary before a host of spies were scattered broadcast over the land. Secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the minister. The air was thick with tales of plots and conspiracies, and with the detection and suppression of each Cromwell tightened his hold on the king. And as it was by terror that he mastered the king, so it was by terror that he mastered the people. Men felt in England, to use the figure by which Erasmus paints the time, “as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone.” The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men’s talk with their closest friends found its way to his ear. “Words idly spoken,” the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at his fall, “tortured into treason.” The only chance of safety lay in silence. “Friends who used to write and send me presents,” Erasmus tells us, “now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear.”
But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted the statute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but men were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very silence being punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it was unscrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded into instruments of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost, he had made no open attack on the freedom of justice. If he had shrunk from assembling Parliaments, it was from his sense that they were the bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the management of judges rendered the courts mere mouth-pieces of the royal will: and where even this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to bloodshed, Parliament was brought into play to pass bill after bill of attainder. “He shall be judged by the bloody laws he has himself made,” was the cry of the council at the moment of his fall, and, by a singular retribution, the crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even into the practice of attainder—the condemnation of a man without hearing his defense—was only practiced on himself.
But ruthless as was the Terror of Cromwell, it was of a nobler type than the Terror of France. He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner victims of the guillotine. His blows were effective just because he chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If he struck at the Church, it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and the most renowned of English churchmen. If he struck at the baronage, it was through the Courtenays and the Poles, in whose veins flowed the blood of kings. If he struck at the New Learning, it was through the murder of Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with his crime. In temper, indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories which lingered among his friends, he was a generous, kind-hearted man, with pleasant and winning manners which atoned for a certain awkwardness of person, and with a constancy of friendship which won him a host of devoted adherents. But no touch either of love or hate swayed him from his course.
The student of Macchiavelli had not studied the “Prince” in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a business-like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual “remembrances” of the day. “Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading.” “Item, to know the king’s pleasure touching Master More.” “Item, when Master Fisher shall go to his execution, and the other.” It is indeed this utter absence of all passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Cromwell the most terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the end he is pursuing, and he simply hews his way to it as a woodman hews his way through the forest, axe in hand.
His single will forced on a scheme of foreign policy whose aim was to bind England to the cause of the Reformation while it bound Henry helplessly to his minister. The daring boast which his enemies laid afterward to his charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his system. “In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the king with all his power should not be able to hinder him.” His plans rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his master. The short-lived royalty of Anne Boleyn had ended in charges of adultery and treason, and in her death in May, 1536. Her rival and successor in Henry’s affections, Jane Seymour, died the next year in childbirth; and Cromwell replaced her with a German consort, Anne of Cleves, a sister-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared even to resist Henry’s caprice, when the king revolted on their first interview at the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the moment Cromwell had brought matters “to such a pass” that it was impossible to recoil from the marriage.
The marriage of Anne of Cleves, however, was but the first step in a policy which, had it been carried out as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of Richelieu. Charles and the house of Austria could alone bring about a Catholic reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation; and Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany than he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of the emperor. Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have been changed, Southern Germany would have been secured for Protestantism, and the Thirty Years’ War averted. He failed as men fail who stand ahead of their age. The German princes shrank from a contest with the emperor, France from a struggle which would be fatal to Catholicism; and Henry, left alone to bear the resentment of the House of Austria, and chained to a wife he loathed, turned savagely on Cromwell. The nobles sprang on him with a fierceness that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execrations burst from the lords at the council table, as the Duke of Norfolk, who had been charged with the minister’s arrest, tore the ensign of the garter from his neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell flung his cap on the ground with a passionate cry of despair. “This, then,” he exclaimed, “is my guerdon for the services I have done! On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?” Then, with a sudden sense that all was over, he bade his foes “make quick work, and not leave me to languish in prison.” Quick work was made, and a yet louder burst of popular applause than that which hailed the attainder of Cromwell hailed his execution.