King Henry VIII

“ Next day Surrey was tried at the Guildhall, and he was executed on the 19th. Against Norfolk a Bill of Attainder was passed in Parliament, and only awaited the royal assent, for which a commission was drawn on the 27th; but the King died that night, and the Duke was saved.
The reign of Henry VIII has left deeper marks on succeeding ages than any other reign in English history. Nothing is more extraordinary than that within less than a century after Fortescue had written in praise of the Constitution and Laws of England, a despotism so complete should have been set up in that very country. ”

“ They could boast that their institutions were established—like our railways—for the good of the people, and in the interests of humanity; but while rendering service, waxing into such lustiness of strength and such habits of corruption and rapacity, that at last, when fully bloated, they were broken open and their riches drifted away under the whirlwind of the wrath of King Henry VIII. Great schemes of greed are very apt to carry an avenging Henry VIII. somewhere in their trail. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a singular circumstance that the king who raised the personal power of English monarchy to a height to which it had never before attained, should have come of humble race and belonged to an upstart dynasty. For three centuries and a half before the battle of Bosworth one family had occupied the English throne. Even the usurpers, Henry of Bolingbroke and Richard of York, were directly descended in unbroken male line from Henry II., and from 1154 to 1485 all the sovereigns of England were Plantagenets. ”

“ The King too loved building; the present of a skilfully cut jewel could delight him; and he sought honour in defending the scholastic dogmas against Luther's views; in all this Wolsey seconded and supported him, he combined state-business with conversation. He freed the King from the consultations of the Privy Council, in which the intrinsic importance of the matter always weighs more than one's own will; Henry VIII first felt himself to be really King when business was managed by a favourite thoroughly dependent on him, trusted by him, and in fact very capable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was a new world altogether when Henry VIII, in his eighteenth year, succeeded his father upon the throne. With a full exchequer and an undisputed title, the young King was at the commencement of his reign liberal and generous; and being handsome in person, highly accomplished and fond of manly exercises, he was abundantly popular. ”

“ The young King entered the arena of Europe, a child of generous impulse in a throng of hoary intriguers—Ferdinand, Maximilian, Louis XII., Julius II.—each of whom was nearly three times his age. He was shocked to see them leagued to spoil a petty republic, a republic, too, which had been for ages the bulwark of Christendom against the Turk and from time immemorial the ally of England. Venice had played no small part in the revival of letters which appealed so strongly to Henry's intellectual sympathies. ”

“ Never did England's interests more imperatively demand a secure and peaceful succession. Never before had there been such mortality among the children of an English king; never before had an English king married his brother's widow. So striking a coincidence could be only explained by the relation of cause and effect. Men who saw the judgment of God in the sack of Rome, might surely discern in the fatality that attended the children of Henry VIII. a fulfilment of the doom of childlessness pronounced in the Book of the Law against him who should marry his brother's wife. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But a marriage between Edward VI. and Mary, Queen of Scots, by which it was sought to effect that union, had been the main object of Henry's efforts during the closing years of his reign, and the imperial idea was a dominant note in Henry's mind. No king was more fond of protesting that he wore an imperial crown and ruled an imperial realm. When, in 1536, Convocation declared England to be "an imperial See of itself," it only clothed in decent and formal language Henry's own boast that he was not merely King, but Pope and Emperor, in his own domains. ”

“ In April, 1502, at the age of ten, Henry became the heir-apparent to the English throne. He succeeded at once to the dukedom of Cornwall, but again a precedent was set which was followed but yesterday; and ten months were allowed to elapse before he was, on 18th February, 1503, created Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, the dukedom of York becoming void until a king or an heir apparent should again have a second son. [58] The first sign of his increased importance was his implication in the maze of matrimonial intrigues which formed so large a part of sixteenth-century diplomacy. ”

“ The King of England was king of a loyal nation who obeyed him with heart and mind as loyal and faithful subjects. This was the character borne in the world by the fathers of the generation whom popular historians represent as having dishonoured themselves by subserviency to a bloodthirsty tyrant. It is at least possible that popular historians have been mistaken, and that the subjects of Henry VIII. were neither much better nor much worse than those who preceded or came after them. ”

“ Was son of Thomas, duke of Norfolk, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward, duke of Buckingham. The father of our author held the highest places under King Henry VIII, and had so faithfully and bravely served him, that the nobility grew jealous of his influence, and by their united efforts produced his ruin. After many excellent services in France, he was constituted Lord Treasurer, and made General of the King's whole army design'd to march against the Scots: At the battle of Flodden, in which the Scots were routed and their Sovereign slain, the earl of Surry remarkably distinguished himself ”

“ England in the sixteenth century put its trust in its princes far more than it did in its parliaments; it invested them with attributes almost Divine. By Tudor majesty the poet was inspired with thoughts of the divinity that doth hedge a king. "Love for the King," wrote a Venetian of Henry VIII. in the early years of his reign, "is universal with all who see him, for his Highness does not seem a person of this world, but (p. 036) one descended from heaven." ”

“ In politics, men seek to colour with justice actions based upon considerations of expediency. They first convince themselves, and then they endeavour with less success to persuade mankind.
So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's wife was sin. "The King," he instructed his ambassador to tell Charles V. in 1533, "taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it, but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right.... ”

“ The league between Henry and the Emperor had been hollow from the first; nor had it then been easily adjusted, the objects of the allies being entirely different. Henry had foreseen, long before he entered on it, that his Scottish policy would involve a war with France; the Emperor desired, if he could not drive the Turks out of Hungary, at least to break up the shameful alliance between them and the French King. The Pope meanwhile was urging both the Emperor and Francis to peace, so that a General Council might meet to put down heresy-that of England most of all ”

“ 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. ”

“ Orders are said to have been issued for the Duke's execution the following morning.
That night Norfolk lay doomed in his cell in the Tower, (p. 424) and Henry VIII. in his palace at Westminster. The Angel of Death hovered over the twain, doubting which to take. Eighteen years before, the King had said that, were his will opposed, there was never so noble a head in his kingdom but he would make it fly. [1163] Now his own hour was come, and he was loth to hear of death. His physicians dared not breathe the word, for to prophesy the King's decease was treason by Act of Parliament. ”

“ In 1519, a year after the birth of the Queen's last child, Giustinian reported to the Venetian signiory on the various nobles who had hopes of the crown. The Duke of Norfolk had expectations in right of his wife, a daughter of Edward IV., and the Duke of Suffolk in right of his Duchess, the sister of Henry VIII. But the Duke of Buckingham was the most formidable: "It was thought that, were the King to die without male heirs, that Duke might easily obtain the (p. 182) crown". ”

“ He was Chancellor of Cambridge in 1500, as Warham was of Oxford, but won more enduring fame by founding the college of Corpus Christi in the university over which the Archbishop presided. He had baptised Henry VIII. and advocated his marriage to Catherine; and to him the King extended the largest share in his confidence. Badoer, the Venetian ambassador, called him "alter rex," [91] and Carroz, the Spaniard, said Henry trusted him most ”

“ Nowhere were the advantages of Henry's policy more conspicuous than in his arrangements for the government of Ireland. Ever since Richard, Duke of York, and George, Duke of Clarence, had ruled as Irish viceroys, Ireland had been a Yorkist stronghold. There Simnel had been crowned king, and there peers and peasants had fought for Perkin Warbeck. Something must be done to heal the running sore. Possibly Henry thought that some of Ireland's loyalty might be diverted from Yorkist channels by the selection of a Tudor prince as its viceroy ”

“ But constitutional monarchy was not then invented, and it is not surprising that Giustinian, in 1519, found it impossible to (p. 122) say much for Henry as a statesman. Agere cum rege, he said, est nihil agere; [336] anything told to the King was either useless or was communicated to Wolsey. Bishop West was sure that Henry would not take the pains to look at his and Worcester's despatches; and there was a widespread impression abroad and at home that the English King was a negligible quantity in the domestic and foreign affairs of his own kingdom. ”

“ This the Imperialists had procured on the Queen's demand for justice, which the Pope could not resist, and Henry saw that it was a death-blow to his expectations.
The fall of Wolsey was now inevitable. From the first the business of the divorce had been a source of intense anxiety to him, knowing as he did that, if he failed to give the King satisfaction, his ruin would be easily achieved by the leading lords who had been so long excluded from the King's counsels. And now that the failure was complete he was visibly out of favour. ”