Henry VIII

“ Henry VIII of England having grown so unwieldy and corpulent that he was raised up and let down the stairs by a machine, after an illness of some weeks, sank under his disease, and died in the 38th year of his reign, and the 56th of his age. He repudiated his first wife 20 years after marriage, and in the course of about ten years espoused five others. Henry's reign was one of the most remarkable in the annals of the kingdom. He made himself so much feared, that no English king had fewer checks to his power. ”

“ It is perhaps a matter rather for regret than for surprise that so few attempts have been made to describe, as a whole, the life and character of Henry VIII. No ruler has left a deeper impress on the history of his country, or done work which has been the subject of more keen and lasting contention. ”

“ When he was about two, his father, the king, used to take his little son in his arms and stand at the window to show the multitude how bravely his boy was fighting life; and the crowd would clap and cheer for joy, for King Henry VIII was still beloved, and the Tudor succession was at every Englishman’s heart; the awful mental and physical degeneration in the king was still to come, and there is no more delightful scene in Henry VIII’s life than that of him standing at the window holding up his son to be cheered by the crowd. How little we really know of our public men! ”

“ The statesmen of Henry VIII.'s reign were men of like passions with ourselves. Had they lived in other times they might have been like the statesmen that have followed them—like Walpole or Pulteney, Chatham or Bute, Pitt, Peel, or Palmerston; but it is surely not too much to say that these modern statesmen would have been very different from what they were, had they lived all their time with a halter round their necks, and worked under a master who, upon almost any displeasure conceived against them, instead of merely accepting their resignation would have ordered them at once to the block. ”

“ Royalty had become a caste apart. Marriages between royal children and English peers had hitherto been no uncommon thing; since Henry VII.'s accession there have been but four, two of them in our own day. Only one took place in the sixteenth century, and the Duke of Suffolk was by some thought worthy of death for his presumption in marrying the sister of Henry VIII. The peerage was weakened not only by diminishing numbers, but by the systematic depression of those who remained. Henry VII., like Ferdinand of Aragon, [72] preferred to govern by means of lawyers and churchmen ”

“ England was but a country of limited extent, without colonies or even dependencies except Ireland, or any continental possession save Calais. To frame a policy for such a nation required little more than one good diplomatic head, and when that head was the King's there was not much chance of controlling him. Henry VIII was really a monarch of consummate ability, who, if his course had not been misdirected by passion and selfishness, would have left a name behind him as the very founder of England's greatness. ”

“ Henry VIII. persecuted Catholics and Gospellers alike only in carrying out the general scheme of making himself absolute ruler both in Church and State, pope and king at once.
The reign of Henry V., though only nine years in duration, formed a turning-point in ecclesiastical affairs. The King himself, a great soldier, a vigorous governor, a man of strong character, whether for good or for evil, had in him a large element of the fanatic, and the policy which he inherited from his father warned him to stand well with the Church and the priesthood. ”

“ Henry VIII needed always some strong, able, crafty guide to show him a path through the intricacies of European politics, and enable him at the same time to follow the savage dictates of his passion and his whims. ”

“ Henry VIII should then be crowned King of France, but resign to the Emperor not merely Burgundy but also Provence and Languedoc, and cede to the Duke of Bourbon his old possessions and Dauphiné. The motive he alleges is very extraordinary: the Emperor would marry his daughter and heiress, and would at some future time inherit England and France also and then be monarch of the world. [86] Henry declares himself ready to press on with the utmost zeal, provided he can do it with some security, and himself undertake the conduct of the war in the Netherlands and the support of Bourbon. ”

“ Could he but have secured the marriage of Mary to Edward, he would have carried both England and Scotland many a weary stage along the path to Union and to Empire. But, unfortunately, he was not content with this brilliant prospect for his son. He grasped himself at the Scottish crown; he must be not merely a suzerain shadow, but a real sovereign. The Scottish peers, who had been taken at Solway Moss, were sworn to Henry VIII., "to set forth his Majesty's title that he had to the realm of Scotland". ”

“ The union of the crowns of France and England on the head of Henry VIII would in itself have deranged all European relations, above all it would have raised that untrustworthy man, who was still all powerful in his Council, to a most inconvenient height of power. The Spanish kingdoms too were pressing for the settlement of their succession. He was in the full maturity of manly youth: he could not wait for Mary of England who had barely completed her tenth year: he resolved to break off this connexion, and give his hand to a Portuguese princess, who was nearly of his own age. ”

“ With the King's death dropped the policy of peace at any price, for his son was of the new age, eager to join in the battles of Europe and rich enough to afford himself the gratification of military glory. More than once his father, distrusting all men, had fought for peace with his back to the wall, but Henry VIII., who dreamed of entering Paris at the head of a victorious army, regarded distrust of Spain as a mere maggot in the paternal brain, and, with the wealth of the greatest pawnbroker in Europe at his back, was eager to take the offensive against France. ”

“ And let us first look at the king. I am not one of those critics who incline to a very disparaging estimate of Henry VIII. He was not, as a man, more vicious than many kings who have maintained a very fair reputation in history. In force of character there are few indeed that come near him; if he seems to act upon pure self-will, he is able to give a reason for his acts, and that such a reason as we cannot on mere prejudice determine to be unreasonable; he makes his way with good men and bad men alike, and, with a few notable exceptions, he is able to overrule all protest. ”

“ As an authority he is invaluable for the reign of Henry VII, with whose aims and character he thoroughly sympathised, and he realised fully the changes which marked the passing away of the middle ages (cf. Busch, England under the Tudors, transl., p. 397; Gairdner, Early Chroniclers, p. 306; Ellis, passim; for another view, Markham in Engl. Hist. Rev. vi. 254) . When he comes to the time of Henry VIII he is not so trustworthy, owing to his bias against Wolsey. The substance of his history became, through the medium of Hall and later writers, common property. ”

“ Next year he was sent to England as legate to incite Henry VIII to unite with other princes in a crusade against the Turks. He was detained some time at Calais before being allowed to cross, Henry VIII having insisted with the pope that his favourite, Cardinal Wolsey, should be invested with equal legatine functions before he landed. He was, however, very well received, and a few years later (1524) Henry VIII gave him, or allowed him to obtain by papal bull, the bishopric of Salisbury. ”

“ It is easy in England to-day to denounce the cruel sacrifices imposed on individuals in the time of Henry VIII. by their subordination in everything to the interests of the State; but, whenever and wherever like dangers have threatened, recourse has been had to similar methods, to government by proclamation, to martial law, and to verdicts based on political expediency.
The contrast between morals and politics, which comes out in Henry's reign as a terrible contradiction, is inherent in all forms of human society. ”

“ Henry VIII succeeded to the throne of England in April, 1509; three years and five months later, in September, 1513, was fought the battle of Flodden. The causes may soon be told. They fall under three heads. James and Henry were alike headstrong and impetuous, and they were alike ambitious of playing a considerable part in European affairs. They were, moreover, brothers-in-law, and, in the division of the inheritance of Henry VII, the King of England had, with characteristic Tudor avarice, retained jewels and other property which had been left to his sister, the Queen of Scots. ”

“ Henry was, according to Wood, educated at Oxford, and acquired there a taste for literature. Through life his time was mainly occupied with translations and other literary work. After Henry VIII's accession he came to court, and he attracted the king's favourable attention by gifts of translations in his autograph. In 1516 he was a gentleman usher to the king, while his infant son Henry became a page of the royal chamber (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, ii. pt. i. p. 893) . He was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Morley in the right of his maternal grandmother on 15 April 1523. ”

“ The promulgation of these high-sounding pretensions was fatal to (p. 409) the cause which Henry had at heart. Henry VII. had pursued the earlier and wiser part of the Scottish policy of Edward I., namely, union by marriage; Henry VIII. resorted to his later policy and strove to change a vague suzerainty into a defined and galling sovereignty. Seeing no means of resisting the victorious English arms, the Scots in March, 1543, agreed to the marriage between Henry's son and their infant Queen. ”

“ What has not seldom in the history of great kingdoms and states formed a decisive turning point now came to pass: to the father who had founded and maintained his power with foresight and by painful and continuous labour, succeeded a son full of life and energy, who wished to enjoy its possession, and feeling firm ground under his feet determined to live in a way more after his own mind. Henry VIII too felt the need of being popular, like most princes on their accession: he sacrificed the two chiefs of the fiscal commission, Empson and Dudley, to the universal hate. ”

“ Henry VIII is shown full-length on his throne, which is not placed in the centre of the picture, but somewhat to the spectator’s left. He is crowned and dressed in his full robes of state, holding the sword in his right and the charter in his left hand. He is represented as far larger in size than the other figures kneeling in front of him, something in the manner of earlier days, when the importance of the principal person in a painting was brought home to the spectator by the simple plan of depicting him much bigger than those who surrounded him. ”

“ A council trained by Henry VII. was loth to lose the gold of Catherine's dower; it was of the utmost importance to strengthen at once the royal line; and a full-blooded youth of Henry's temperament was not likely to (p. 046) repel a comely wife ready to his hand, when the dictates of his father's policy no longer stood between them. So on 11th June, barely a month after Henry VII.'s obsequies, the marriage, big with destinies, of Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon was privately solemnised by Archbishop Warham "in the Queen's closet" at Greenwich. ”

“ In those days, with thirty years of civil war and fifteen more of conspiracy fresh in men's minds, with no alternative to anarchy (p. 042) save Henry VIII., with a peerage fallen from its high estate, and a Parliament almost lost to respect, royal autocracy was not a thing to dread or distrust. "If a lion knew his strength," said Sir Thomas More of his master to Cromwell, "it were hard for any man to rule him." ”

“ This was the real tyranny of Tudor times; men were dominated by the idea that the State was the be-all and end-all of human existence. In its early days the State is a child; it has no will and no ideas of its own, and its first utterances are merely imitation and repetition. But by Henry VIII.'s reign the State in England had grown to lusty manhood; it dismissed its governess, the Church, and laid claim to that omnipotence and absolute sovereignty which Hobbes regretfully expounded in his Leviathan. ”

“ If it could be established that the conduct of Henry VIII. toward his people, his church, his nobles, and his wives was regulated solely with reference to the succession question, and by his desire to preserve the peace of his kingdom, we believe that few men would be disposed to condemn most of those of his acts that have been long admitted to blacken his memory, and which have placed him almost at the very head of the long roll of heartless tyrants. ”

“ Official precedence appertained to his Chancellor, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Like most of Henry VII.'s prelates, he received his preferment in the Church as a reward for services to the State. Much of the diplomatic work of the previous reign had passed through his hands; he helped to arrange the marriage of Arthur and Catherine, and was employed in the vain attempt to obtain Margaret of Savoy as a bride for Henry VII. As Archbishop he crowned and married Henry VIII., and as Chancellor he delivered orations at the opening of the young King's first three Parliaments. ”