But it was long before the nation could estimate all the features of the magnificent but sinister figure which was to dominate England from 1509 to 1547. At his accession Henry VIII. was only eighteen years of age, and, if his character was already formed, it was only the attractive side of it that was yet visible. His personal beauty, his keen intelligence, his scholarship, his love of music and the arts, his kingly ambition, were all obvious enough. His selfishness, his cruelty, his ingratitude, his fierce hatred of criticism and opposition, his sensuality, had yet to be discovered by his subjects. A suspicious observer might have detected something ominous in the first act of his reign—the arrest and attainder of his father’s unpopular ministers, Empson and Dudley, whose heads he flung to the people in order to win a moment’s applause. Whatever their faults, they had served the house of Tudor well, and it was a grotesque perversion of justice to send them to the scaffold on a charge of high treason. A similar piece of cruelty was the execution, some time later, of the earl of Suffolk, who had been languishing long years in the Tower; he was destroyed not for any new plots, but simply for his Yorkist descent. But in Henry’s earlier years such acts were still unusual; it was not till he had grown older, and had learnt how much the nation would endure, that judicial murder became part of his established policy.
Henry’s first outburst of self-assertion took the form of reversing his father’s thrifty and peaceful policy, by plunging into the midst of the continental wars from which England had been held back by his cautious parent. Continental projects of Henry VIII. The adventure was wholly unnecessary, and also unprofitable. But while France was engaged in the “Holy War” against the pope, Venice, the emperor, and Ferdinand of Spain, Henry renewed the old claims of the Plantagenets, and hoped, if not to win back the position of Edward III., at least to recover the duchy of Aquitaine, or some parts of it. He lent an army to Ferdinand for the invasion of Gascony, and landed himself at Calais with 25,000 men, to beat up the northern border of France. Little good came of his efforts. The Spanish king gave no assistance, and the northern campaign, though it included the brilliant battle of the Spurs (August 16th, 1513), accomplished nothing more than the capture of Tournai and Thérouanne. It was soon borne in upon King Henry that France, even when engaged with other enemies, was too strong to be overrun in the old style. Moreover, his allies were giving him no aid, though they had eagerly accepted his great subsidies. With a sudden revulsion of feeling Henry offered peace to France, which King Louis XII. gladly bought, Treaty of Étaples. agreeing to renew the old pension or tribute that Henry VII. had received by the treaty of Étaples. Their reconciliation and alliance were sealed by the marriage of the French king to Henry’s favourite sister Mary, who was the bridegroom’s junior by more than thirty years. Their wedlock and the Anglo-French alliance lasted only till the next year, when Louis died, and Mary secretly espoused an old admirer, Charles Brandon, afterwards duke of Suffolk, King Henry’s greatest friend and confidant.
While the French war was still in progress there had been heavy fighting on the Scottish border. James IV., reverting to the traditionary policy of his ancestors, had taken the opportunity of attacking England while her king War with Scotland. Battle of Flodden. and his army were overseas. He suffered a disaster which recalls that of David II. at Neville’s Cross—a fight which had taken place under precisely similar political conditions. After taking a few Northumbrian castles, James was brought to action at Flodden Field by the earl of Surrey (September 9th, 1513). After a desperate fight lasting the greater part of a day, the Scots were outmanœuvred and surrounded. James IV.—who had refused to quit the field—was slain in the forefront of the battle, with the greater part of his nobles; with him fell also some 10,000 or 12,000 of his men. Scotland, with her military power brought low, and an infant king on the throne, was a negligible quantity in international politics for some years. The queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, aided by a party that favoured peace and alliance with England, was strong enough to balance the faction under the duke of Albany which wished for perpetual war and asked for aid from France.
With the peace of 1514 ended the first period of King Henry’s reign. He was now no longer a boy, but a man of twenty-three, with his character fully developed; he had gradually got rid of his father’s old councillors, and had chosen Thomas Wolsey. for himself a minister as ambitious and energetic as himself, the celebrated Thomas Wolsey, whom he had just made archbishop of York, and who obtained the rank of cardinal from the pope in the succeeding year. Wolsey was the last of the great clerical ministers of the middle ages, and by no means the worst. Like so many of his predecessors he had risen from the lower middle classes, through the royal road of the church; he had served Henry VII.’s old councillor Foxe, bishop of Winchester, as secretary, and from his household had passed into that of his master. He had been an admirable servant to both, full of zeal, intelligence and energy, and not too much burdened with scruples. The young king found in him an instrument well fitted to his hand, a man fearless, ingenious, and devoted to the furtherance of the power of the crown, by which alone he had reached his present position of authority. For fourteen years he was his master’s chief minister—the person responsible in the nation’s eyes for all the more unpopular assertions of the royal prerogative, and for all the heavy taxation and despotic acts which Henry’s policy required. It mattered little to Henry that the cardinal was arrogant, tactless and ostentatious; indeed it suited his purpose that Wolsey should be saddled by public opinion with all the blame that ought to have been laid on his own shoulders. It was convenient that the old nobility should detest the upstart, and that the commons should imagine him to be the person responsible for the demands for money required for the royal wars. As long as his minister served his purposes and could execute his behests Henry gave him a free hand, and supported him against all his enemies. It was believed at the time, and is still sometimes maintained by historians, that Wolsey laid down schemes of policy and persuaded his master to adopt them; but the truth would appear to be that Henry was in no wise dominated by the cardinal, but imposed on him his own wishes, merely leaving matters of detail to be settled by his minister. Things indifferent might be trusted to him, but the main lines of English diplomacy and foreign policy show rather the influence of the king’s personal desires of the moment than that of a statesman seeking national ends.
It has often been alleged that Henry, under the guidance of Wolsey, followed a consistent scheme for aggrandizing England, by making her the state which kept the balance of power of Europe in her hands. And it is pointed out that during the years of the cardinal’s ascendancy the alliance of England was sought in turn by the great princes of the continent, and proved the make-weight in the scales. This is but a superficial view of the situation. Henry, if much courted, was much deceived by his contemporaries. They borrowed his money and his armies, but fed him with vain promises and illusory treaties. He and his minister were alternately gulled by France and by the emperor, and the net result of all their activity was bankruptcy and discontent at home and ever-frustrated hopes abroad. It is hard to build up a reputation for statecraft for either Henry or Wolsey on the sum total of English political achievement during their collaboration.
During the first few years of the cardinal’s ascendancy the elder race of European sovereigns, the kings with whom Henry VII. had been wont to haggle, disappeared one after the other. Louis of France died in 1515, Ferdinand Henry VIII. and the rivalry of Francis I. and Charles V. of Aragon in 1516, the emperor Maximilian—the last survivor of his generation—in 1519. Louis was succeeded by the active, warlike and shifty Francis I.; the heritage of both Ferdinand and Maximilian—his maternal and paternal grandfathers—fell to Charles of Habsburg, who already possessed the Netherlands in his father’s right and Castile in that of his mother. The enmity of the house of Valois and the house of Habsburg, which had first appeared in the wars of Charles VIII. and Maximilian, took a far more bitter shape under Francis I. and Charles V., two young princes who were rivals from their youth. Their wars were almost perpetual, their peaces never honestly carried out. Their powers were very equally balanced; if Charles owned broader lands than Francis, they were more scattered and in some cases less loyal. The solid and wealthy realm of France proved able to make head against Spain and the Netherlands, even when they were backed by the emperor’s German vassals. Charles was also distracted by many stabs in the back from the Ottoman Turks, who were just beginning their attack on Christendom along the line of the Danube. To each of the combatants it seemed that the English alliance would turn the scale in his own favour. Henry was much courted, and wooed with promises of lands to be won from the other side by his ally of the moment. But neither Charles nor Francis wished him to be a real gainer, and he himself was a most untrustworthy friend, for he was quite ready to turn against his ally if he seemed to be growing too powerful, and threatened to dominate all Europe; the complete success of either party would mean that England would sink once more into a second-rate power. How faithless and insincere was Henry’s policy may be gauged from the fact that in 1520, after all the pageantry of the “Field of the Cloth of Gold” and his vows of undying friendship for Francis, he met Charles a few weeks later at Gravelines, and concluded with him a treaty which pledged England to a defensive alliance against the king’s “good brother” of France. Such things happened not once nor twice during the years of Wolsey’s ministry. It was hardly to be wondered at, therefore, if Henry’s allies regularly endeavoured Failure of Henry’s diplomacy. to cheat him out of his share of their joint profits. What use was there in rewarding a friend who might become an enemy to-morrow? The greatest deception of all was in 1522, when Charles V., who had made the extraordinary promise that he would get Wolsey made pope, and lend Henry an army to conquer northern France, failed to redeem his word in both respects. He caused his own old tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, to be crowned with the papal tiara, and left the English to invade Picardy entirely unassisted. But this was only one of many such disappointments.
The result of some twelve years of abortive alliances and ill-kept treaties was that Henry had obtained no single one of the advantages which he had coveted, and that he had lavished untold wealth and many English lives Beginnings of parliamentary resistance. upon phantom schemes which crumbled between his fingers. His subjects had already begun to murmur; the early parliaments of his reign had been passive and complaisant; but by 1523 the Commons had been goaded into resistance. They granted only half the subsidies asked from them, pleading that three summers more of such taxation as the cardinal demanded for his master would leave the realm drained of its last penny, and reduced to fall back on primitive forms of barter, “clothes for victuals and bread for cheese,” out of mere want of coin. Fortunately for the king his subjects laid all the blame upon his mouthpiece the cardinal, instead of placing it where it was due. On Wolsey’s back also was saddled the most iniquitous of Henry’s acts of tyranny against individuals—the judicial murder of the duke of Buckingham, the highest head among the English nobility. For some hasty words, amplified by the doubtful evidence of treacherous retainers, Execution of the duke of Buckingham. together with a foolish charge of dabbling with astrologers, the heir of the royal line of Thomas of Woodstock had been tried and executed with scandalous haste. His only real crime was that, commenting on the lack of male heirs to the crown—for after many years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon Henry’s sole issue was one sickly daughter—he had been foolish enough to remark that if anything should happen to the king he himself was close in succession to the crown. The cardinal bore the blame, because he and Buckingham had notoriously disliked each other; but the deed had really been of the king’s own contriving. He was roused to implacable wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the succession question.
In the later years of Wolsey’s ascendancy, nevertheless, that same question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry’s own mind it was never long absent; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing tired of Question of the king’s divorce. his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid. Somewhere about the end of 1526 those who were in the king’s intimate confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce—a thing not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But Henry’s doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had become enamoured of another lady—the beautiful, ambitious and cunning Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of becoming merely the king’s mistress, but aspired to be his consort.
The question of the king’s divorce soon became inextricably confused with another problem, whose first beginnings go back to a slightly earlier date. What was to be the attitude of England towards the Reformation? It was now England and the Reformation. nearly ten years since Martin Luther had posted up his famous theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and since he had testified to his faith before the diet of Worms. All Germany was now convulsed with the first throes of the revolt against the papacy, and the echoes of the new theological disputes were being heard in England. King Henry himself in 1521 had deigned to write an abusive pamphlet against Luther, for which he had been awarded the magnificent title of Fidei Defensor by that cultured sceptic Pope Leo X. About the same time we begin to read of orders issued by the bishops for the discovery and burning of all Lutheran books—a clear sign that they were reaching England in appreciable quantities. Hitherto it had been only the works of Wycliffe that had merited this attention on the part of inquisitors. In the Wycliffite remnant, often persecuted but never exterminated, there already existed in England the nucleus of a Protestant party. All through the reign of Henry VII. and the early years of Henry VIII. the intermittent burning of “heretics,” and their far more frequent recantations, had borne witness to the fact that the sect still lingered on. The Wycliffites were a feeble folk, compelled to subterraneous ways, and destitute of learned leaders or powerful supporters. But they survived to see Luther’s day, and to merge themselves in one body with the first English travelling scholars and merchants who brought back from the continent the doctrines of the German Reformation. The origins of a Protestant party, who were not mere Wycliffites, but had been first interested in dogmatic controversy by coming upon the works of Luther, can be traced back to the year 1521 and to the university of Cambridge. There a knot of scholars, some of whom were to perish early at the stake, while others were destined to become the leaders of the English Reformation, came together and encouraged each other to test the received doctrines of contemporary orthodoxy by searching the Scriptures and the works of the Fathers. The sect spread in a few years to London, Oxford and other centres of intellectual life, but for many years its followers were not numerous; like the old Lollardy, Protestantism took root only in certain places and among certain classes—notably the lesser clergy and the merchants of the great towns.