Arthur D. Innes

“ Two months before Henry completed his eighteenth year, his father’s death placed him on the throne of England—successor to a king whose later years had been conspicuously sordid and gloomy. Spring with its pulsing, generous life, followed the sapless dreariness of winter. So men dreamed, and so probably Henry reckoned, himself. Ugly things like Empson and Dudley were to vanish into limbo; the king would celebrate his marriage royally—and follow that up by some splendid martial achievement. ”

“ As a statesman: we must reject the theory that he was merely a Roi Fainéant who liked to fancy that he was running the machine while he was merely dancing to the tune called by cleverer men than himself: we reject also the theory that the policy followed throughout was his own creation, and that Wolsey and Cromwell stood in the same relation to him as Morton and Fox to his father. He was not a far-seeing man himself, but he knew a far-seeing man when he found one, having an unfailing instinct for judging other men’s capacities and limitations, intellectual and moral. ”

“ Long before the close of his reign, the first Tudor had made himself a person of very considerable importance, whom none of the continental Powers dreamed of ignoring, and with whom they treated on something very like equal terms. This, however, was in no small degree a matter of personal prestige. Henry’s reputation for astuteness stood so high, not to speak of his credit for accumulated wealth, that the Courts of the continent paid England’s king an amount of respect which they would not have rendered to the power of England. ”

“ At bottom there must have been in the man an essential sweetness and loveableness repressed—dried up in the fires of ambition, parched in the sunshine of prosperity, welling forth in the shadow of adversity. Gone was the power that swayed the politics of a continent; gone the gorgeous pomp, the insolent state, that stirred the impotent malice of the lesser men he had overshadowed. But with their loss, the hidden best that was in the fallen minister found free play.
Wolsey’s chroniclers have been against him. ”

“ Of the three, Walsingham—a Puritan—was the least devoted to the Peace policy, Elizabeth the most determined on that policy; yet it was Elizabeth who habitually endangered it. The Queen’s tortuous methods, pursued in defiance of her counsellors, more than once seemed to have brought her to a point where war was inevitable; yet time after time her ingenuity, or her lucky star, or a return just in time to Cecil’s guidance, saved the situation. Never has a sovereign been better served; never has there been a reign in which rulers and ruled worked in more essential concord. ”

“ The young man had held aloof from intrigues and had declined all temptations to grasp at dangerous power, not from lack of ambition or of patriotism, but because the power would have been too dearly bought and its foundations too unstable. Now, while he was still in the prime of life, yet of ripe experience, power lay ready for him to grasp—power to guide England in the courses which he believed would serve her best interests; power to cure the evils from which she had been suffering for many a year past; power to avert those which menaced her in the future ”

“ In England the Boleyn connection, who knew perfectly well what were Wolsey’s views about Anne, were working hard and not without success to destroy the king’s trust in the Cardinal, who saw his influence tottering. Failure to procure the divorce would certainly mean for him destruction; success, followed by the Boleyn marriage, would place more power in the hands of the most hostile faction, and he would be left absolutely alone to bear the whole obloquy of an extremely unpopular measure, unless the ultimate responsibility could be forced on the reluctant Pope. ”

“ We feel that a great ruler of a great nation ought to have something about him, majestic, splendid, heroic. We even forgive a man for evil deeds done in a grand style; we do not feel our admiration stirred even by good deeds done in a pedestrian style. Magnanimity loses its flavour when we scent policy in it. We are offended with a king who is not kingly, and kingliness demands those Aristotelian virtues which are generally rendered as Magnanimity and Magnificence. They are attributes in which the seventh Henry is conspicuously deficient. ”

“ There he passed away, pathetically forlorn; but at least spared the last undeserved ignominy of a traitor’s doom.
On the high road to success and in the height of his power, Wolsey extorts an admiration which is still somewhat reluctant. His figure cannot be called attractive. Over the business of the divorce it is difficult not to feel him positively repellent. But in his fall he rose to moral heights of which his previous career gives no warning. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? ”

“ In those words Francis Bacon summed up Henry VII., a hundred years after the first Tudor king had been laid in his grave. Bacon’s history still is, and is likely to remain, the classic narrative. Not that he was a “contemporary,” or that he had access to any extraordinary sources of information; but because being at once a practical politician, a student of political theory, and a literary artist, any historical work from his pen could hardly have failed to be of the highest interest, and the subject he actually chose was—to him—peculiarly sympathetic. ”

“ To such a man, however, it is quite certain that the absolute rule of one man would present itself as the sole really strong form of government. Absolutism was taking the place of the old Feudalism all over Europe; Henry VII. had laid sure foundations for it in England; Wolsey had carried on the work; it would be the business of Wolsey’s successor to complete it. The political theory of Machiavelli was not in itself novel; it must have been familiar, as a latent theory, to every one who knew anything of the Italy of the Medicis and the Borgias. The novelty lay in stating it boldly in the open. ”

“ As in the case of Anne Boleyn, it was impossible for him to take up the cudgels in defence of the man who had been less dangerous, perhaps, to him than to most others—dangerous he was to every one, for he spared neither friend nor foe—but who else would have dared, or ever did dare, to appeal to Henry in the day of his wrath? ”

“ It would not only have been a flat contradiction of his whole career, a merely amazing folly in the man who in all England was the most absolutely convinced of the rottenness of the power of Spain; there was also no man alive who more thoroughly appreciated the historical truth, that he who sells his own country to her enemies purchases for himself not power and confidence but suspicion and contempt. ”

“ Why did England go to war with France, instead of resolutely holding aloof? The Cardinal cannot have seriously thought of the war as a means to the recovery of the French crown: nor can he have held it good for England that France should be crippled, and the Emperor magnified. If he went into the war of his own free will, if he urged it on Henry, it can only have been with the purely personal object of so binding Charles to him as to ensure his own election to the Papacy at the next vacancy. Yet at the time of the Calais Conference there was no immediate likelihood of the reigning Pope’s death ”

“ Henry directed them against the nobility. The nation at large had no objection; the king’s treasury was filled and the power of the nobles curtailed by the same operation. Thus the king eliminated the disturbing factor, or allowed it to eliminate itself. When noblemen got themselves mixed up with treasons, they could not complain if their lives were spared and their goods paid the forfeit. They had been wont to maintain great households, every man having in his service the nucleus of an army. These crowds of retainers were forbidden by law, as being, for obvious reasons, a public danger. ”

“ Hence, in Utopia, communism is practicable, and the whole system is as a matter of course communistic, though the principle is not extended to the relations between the sexes. Having arrived at their religion not through the Christian Revelation, but by Reason, any religious views are tolerated which are not manifestly anti-social. It is a corollary of these conditions that government is in the hands of elected magistrates, who have neither class interests nor personal interests to deflect them from their proper function of ruling with a single eye to the interests of the whole people. ”

“ This plain business of securing himself on the throne was necessarily the first consideration. Only an established dynasty could restore steady government in a country which within a hundred years had seen four kings slain and the great bulk of her ancient baronage wiped out. Between foreign wars, successful or the reverse, and a wild warfare of armed factions at home, stability had been destroyed. The prolonged reign of strong rulers maintaining one policy was an absolute condition of recuperation. The way in which Henry secured it was entirely characteristic and entirely successful. ”

“ The Queen’s object was the same as Burghley’s, but she elected, according to her habit,344 to seek it not by straightforward, but by crooked, courses. She would give Orange the minimum of help, but she would, by playing with Alençon, either keep France out of it, or else embroil France and Spain, keeping herself out of it till she could strike in as arbiter. To do which, she had to induce every one to believe that she probably meant marrying, while trusting to her own ingenuity and the chapter of accidents to effect, if the worst came to the worst, an escape not too ruinously ignominious. ”

“ Identifying the foes of the Faith with the enemies of the State, it authorised the use, in self-defence, of every weapon and every artifice employed on the other side. It was not with him as with those to whom the law serves for conscience; who will do with a light heart anything that the law permits, and shrink in horror from anything that it condemns. ”

“ No mere blustering tyrant would have held England in his grip for thirty-seven years; the annals of princes of that type may be terrible, but they are brief. The masses may be held in subjection by a powerful upper class for an indefinite period; the continued power of an individual tyrant—of an active and resolutely aggressive autocratic ruler—depends on his preserving the loyalty of the active part of his subjects. That loyalty Henry retained; he never had the smallest difficulty in stamping out every attempt at resistance. Mere ruthlessness will not account for it ”

“ He has to establish confidence in himself within, and to re-establish confidence in the house without. He avoids palpable injustice; no one can call him dishonest; he knows exactly how far he can trust clients, and rely on the co-operation of other establishments in a joint policy; and he makes that business a distinct success—but he is not very likely to make himself personally popular, or in any sense an object of enthusiasm. For that, something is needed over and above a strict and capable attention to business; and the something over and above was wanting in Henry Tudor. ”

“ He was ready to go to Mass, but not to take a part in the suppression of Protestantism. He would assent to Northumberland’s plot, but he would not further it. His integrity drew a line—lower than a person of finer moral susceptibilities would have drawn it, but with sufficient firmness and decision, and higher than most of his more prominent contemporaries. He did not feel called upon to swim against a stream which would overwhelm him if he did so; but he made for a backwater. It is often difficult to judge when and where courage becomes rashness, and prudence cowardice. ”

“ England never knew a statesman whose politics were so entirely ethical as More; never one who ignored ethics so completely as Cromwell. With the one, conscience stood unmistakeably first; with the other it was non-existent, as far as state-craft was concerned. That is not to say that the man himself was without conscience or moral sense; just as Machiavelli, his master, was the last statesman in Italy who could be called a scoundrel. Cromwell held with Machiavelli that the political end justifies any means ”