HENRY VIII

XIV.

REX ET IMPERATOR.

Notwithstanding the absence of "Empire" and "Emperor" from the various titles which Henry VIII. possessed or assumed, he has more than one claim to be reputed the father of modern imperialism. It is not till a year after his death that we have any documentary evidence of an intention on the part of the English Government to unite England and Scotland into one Empire, and to proclaim their sovereign the Emperor of Great Britain. 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. The rest of Western Europe was under the temporal sway of Cæsar, as it was under the spiritual sway of the Pope; but neither to one nor to the other did Henry owe any allegiance.

For the word "imperial" itself he had shown a marked predilection from his earliest days. Henry Imperial was the name of the ship in which his admiral hoisted his flag in 1513, and "Imperial" was the name given to one of his favourite games. But, as his reign wore on, the word was translated into action, and received a more definite meaning. To mark his claim to supreme dignity, he assumed the style of "His Majesty" instead of that of "His Grace," which he had hitherto shared with mere dukes and archbishops; and possibly "His Majesty" banished "His Grace" from Henry's mind no less than it did from his title. The story of his life is one of consistent, and more or less orderly, evolution. For many years he had been kept in leading-strings by Wolsey's and other clerical influences. The first step in his self-assertion was to emancipate himself from this control, and to vindicate his authority within the precincts of his Court. His next was to establish his personal supremacy over Church and State in England; this was the work of the Reformation Parliament between 1529 and 1536. The final stage in the evolution was to make his rule more effective in the outlying parts of England, on the borders of Scotland, in Wales and its Marches, and then to extend it over the rest of the British Isles.

The initial steps in the process of expanding the sphere of royal authority had already been taken. The condition of Wales exercised the mind of King and Parliament, even in the throes of the struggle with Rome. The "manifold robberies, murders, thefts, trespasses, riots, routs, embraceries, maintenances, oppressions, ruptures of the peace, and many other malefacts, which be there daily practised, perpetrated, committed and done," obviously demanded prompt and swift redress, unless the redundant eloquence of parliamentary statutes protested too much; and, in 1534, several acts were passed restraining local jurisdictions, and extending the authority of the President and Council of the Marches. Chapuys declared that the effect of these acts was to rob the Welsh of their freedom, and he thought that the probable discontent might be turned to account by stirring an insurrection in favour of Catherine of Aragon and of the Catholic faith. If, however, there was discontent, it did not make itself effectively felt, and, in 1536, Henry proceeded to complete the union of England and Wales. First, he adapted to Wales the institution of justices of the peace, which had proved the most efficient instrument for the maintenance of his authority in England. A more important statute followed. Recalling the facts that "the rights, usages, laws and customs" in Wales "be far discrepant from the laws and customs of this realm," that its people "do daily use a speech nothing like, nor consonant to, the natural mother-tongue used within this realm," and that "some rude and ignorant people have made distinction and diversity between the King's subjects of this realm" and those of Wales, "His Highness, of a singular zeal, love and favour" which he bore to the Welsh, minded to reduce them "to the perfect order, notice and knowledge of his laws of this realm, and utterly to extirp, all and singular, the sinister usages and customs differing from the same". The Principality was divided into shires, and the shires into hundreds; justice in every court, from the highest to the lowest, was to be administered in English, and in no other tongue; and no one who spoke Welsh was to "have or enjoy any manner of Office or Fees" whatsoever. On the other hand, a royal commission was appointed to inquire into Welsh laws, and such as the King thought necessary might still be observed; while the Welsh shires and boroughs were to send members to the English Parliament. This statute was, to all effects and purposes, the first Act of Union in English history. Six years later a further act reorganised and developed the jurisdiction of the Council of Wales and the Marches. Its functions were to be similar to those of the Privy Council in London, of which the Council of Wales, like that of the already established Council of the North, was an offshoot. Its object was to maintain peace with a firm hand in a specially disorderly district; and the powers, with which it was furnished, often conflicted with the common law of England, and rendered the Council's jurisdiction, like that of other Tudor courts, a grievance to Stuart Parliaments.

But Ireland demanded even more than Wales the application of Henry's doctrines of union and empire; for if Wales was thought by Chapuys to be receptive soil for the seeds of rebellion, sedition across St. George's Channel was ripe unto the harvest. Irish affairs, among other domestic problems, had been sacrificed to Wolsey's passion for playing a part in Europe, and on the eve of his fall English rule in Ireland was reported to be weaker than it had been since the Conquest. The outbreak of war with Charles V, in 1528, was followed by the first appearance of Spanish emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs, and from Spanish intrigue in Ireland Tudor monarchs were never again to be free. In the autumn of 1534 the whole of Ireland outside the pale blazed up in revolt. Sir William Skeffington succeeded in crushing the rebellion; but Skeffington died in the following year, and his successor, Lord Leonard Grey, failed to overcome the difficulties caused by Irish disaffection and by jealousies in his council. His sister was wife of Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare, and the revolt of the Geraldines brought Grey himself under suspicion. He was accused by his council of treason; he returned to England in 1540, declaring the country at peace. But, before he had audience with Henry, a fresh insurrection broke out, and Grey was sent to the Tower; thence, having pleaded guilty to charges of treason, he trod the usual path to the block.

Henry now adopted fresh methods; he determined to treat Ireland in much the same way as Wales. A commission, appointed in 1537, had made a thorough survey of the land, and supplied him with the outlines of his policy. As in Wales, the English system of land tenure, of justice and the English language were to supersede indigenous growths; the King's supremacy in temporal and ecclesiastical affairs was to be enforced, and the whole of the land was to be gradually won by a judicious admixture of force and conciliation. The new deputy, Sir Anthony St. Leger, was an able man, who had presided over the commission of 1537. He landed at Dublin in 1541, and his work was thoroughly done. Henry, no longer so lavish with his money as in Wolsey's days, did not stint for this purpose. The Irish Parliament passed an act that Henry should be henceforth styled King, instead of Lord, of Ireland; and many of the chiefs were induced to relinquish their tribal independence in return for glittering coronets. By 1542 Ireland had not merely peace within her own borders, but was able to send two thousand kernes to assist the English on the borders of Scotland; and English rule in Ireland was more widely and more firmly established than it had ever been before.

Besides Ireland and Wales, there were other spheres in which Henry sought to consolidate and extend the Tudor methods of government. The erection, in 1542, of the Courts of Wards and Liveries, of First-fruits and Tenths, and the development of the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber and of the Court of Requests, were all designed to further two objects dear to Henry's heart, the efficiency of his administration and the exaltation of his prerogative. It was thoroughly in keeping with his policy that the parliamentary system expanded concurrently with the sphere of the King's activity. Berwick had first been represented in the Parliament of 1529, and a step, which would have led to momentous consequences, had the idea, on which it was based, been carried out, was taken in 1536, when two members were summoned from Calais. There was now only one district under English rule which was not represented in Parliament, and that was the county of Durham, known as the bishopric, which still remained detached from the national system. It was left for Oliver Cromwell to complete England's parliamentary representation by summoning members to sit for that palatine county. This was not the only respect in which the Commonwealth followed in the footsteps of Henry VIII., for the Parliament of 1542, in which members from Wales and from Calais are first recorded as sitting, passed an "Act for the Navy," which provided that goods could only be imported in English ships. It was, however, in his dealings with Scotland that Henry's schemes for the expansion of England became most marked; but, before he could develop his plans in that direction, he had to ward off a recrudescence of the danger from a coalition of Catholic Europe.

In spite of Henry's efforts to fan the flames of strife between the Emperor and the King of France, the war, which had prevented either monarch from countenancing the mission of Cardinal Pole or from profiting by the Pilgrimage of Grace, was gradually dying down in the autumn of 1537; and, in order to check the growing and dangerous intimacy between the two rivals, Henry was secretly hinting to both that the death of his Queen had left him free to contract a marriage which might bind him for ever to one or the other. To Francis he sent a request for the hand of Mary of Guise, who had already been promised to James V. of Scotland. He refused to believe that the Scots negotiations had proceeded so far that they could not be set aside for so great a king as himself, and he succeeded in convincing the lady's relatives that the position of a Queen of England provided greater attractions than any James could hold out. Francis, however, took matters into his own hands, and compelled the Guises to fulfil their compact with the Scottish King. Nothing daunted, Henry asked for a list of other French ladies eligible for the matrimonial prize. He even suggested that the handsomest of them might be sent, in the train of Margaret of Navarre, to Calais, where he could inspect them in person. "I trust to no one," he told Castillon, the French ambassador, "but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding." This idea of "trotting out the young ladies like hackneys" was not much relished at the French Court; and Castillon, to shame Henry out of the indelicacy of his proposal, made an ironical suggestion for testing the ladies' charms, the grossness of which brought the only recorded blush to Henry's cheeks. No more was said of the beauty-show; and Henry declared that he did not intend to marry in France or in Spain at all, unless his marriage brought him a closer alliance with Francis or Charles than the rivals had formed with each other.

While these negotiations for obtaining the hand of a French princess were in progress, Henry set on foot a similar quest in the Netherlands. Before the end of 1537 he had instructed Hutton, his agent, to report on the ladies of the Regent Mary's Court; and Hutton replied that Christina of Milan was said to be "a goodly personage and of excellent beauty". She was daughter of the deposed King of Denmark and of his wife, Isabella, sister of Charles V.; at the age of thirteen she had been married to the Duke of Milan, but she was now a virgin widow of sixteen, "very tall and competent of beauty, of favour excellent and very gentle in countenance". On 10th March, 1538, Holbein arrived at Brussels for the purpose of painting the lady's portrait, which he finished in a three hours' sitting. Christina's fascinations do not seem to have made much impression on Henry; indeed, his taste in feminine beauty cannot be commended. There is no good authority for the alleged reply of the young duchess herself, that, if she had two heads, she would willingly place one of them at His Majesty's disposal. Henry had, as yet, beheaded only one of his wives, and even if the precedent had been more firmly established, Christina was too wary and too polite to refer to it in such uncourtly terms. She knew that the disposal of her hand did not rest with herself, and though the Emperor sent powers for the conclusion of the match, neither he nor Henry had any desire to see it concluded. The cementing of his friendship with Francis freed Charles from the need of Henry's goodwill, and impelled the English King to seek elsewhere for means to counter-balance the hostile alliance.

The Emperor and the French King had not been deluded by English intrigues, nor prevented from coming together by Henry's desire to keep them apart. Charles, Francis, and Paul III. met at Nice in June, 1538, and there the Pope negotiated a ten years' truce. Henceforth they were to consider their interests identical, and their ambassadors in England compared notes in order to defeat more effectively Henry's skilful diplomacy. The moment seemed ripe for the execution of the long-cherished project for a descent upon England. Its King had just added to his long list of offences against the Church by despoiling the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury and burning the bones of the saint. The saint was even said to have been put on his trial in mockery, declared contumacious, and condemned as a traitor. If the canonised bones of martyrs could be treated thus, who would, for the future, pay respect to the Church or tribute at its shrines? At Rome a party, of which Pole was the most zealous, proclaimed that the real Turk was Henry, and that all Christian princes should unite to sweep him from the face of God's earth, which his presence had too long defiled. Considering the effect of Christian leagues against the Ottoman, the English Turk was probably not dismayed. But Paul III. and Pole were determined to do their worst. The Pope resolved to publish the bull of deprivation, which had been drawn up in August, 1535, though its execution had hitherto been suspended owing to papal hopes of Henry's amendment and to the request of various princes. Now the bull was to be published in France, in Flanders, in Scotland and in Ireland. Beton was made a cardinal and sent home to exhort James V. to invade his uncle's kingdom, while Pole again set out on his travels to promote the conquest of his native land.

It was on Pole's unfortunate relatives that the effects of the threatened bull were to fall. Besides the Cardinal's treason, there was another motive for proscribing his family. He and his brothers were grandchildren of George, Duke of Clarence; years before, Chapuys had urged Charles V. to put forward Pole as a candidate for the throne; and Henry was as convinced as his father had been that the real way to render his Government secure was to put away all the possible alternatives. Now that he was threatened with deprivation by papal sentence, the need became more urgent than ever. But, while the proscription of the Poles was undoubtedly dictated by political reasons, their conduct enabled Henry to effect it by legal means. There was no doubt of the Cardinal's treason; his brother, Sir Geoffrey, had often taken counsel with Charles's ambassador, and discussed plans for the invasion of England; and even their mother, the aged Countess of Salisbury, although she had denounced the Cardinal as a traitor and had lamented the fact that she had given him birth, had brought herself within the toils by receiving papal bulls and corresponding with traitors. The least guilty of the family appears to have been the Countess's eldest son, Lord Montague; but he, too, was involved in the common ruin. Plots were hatched for kidnapping the Cardinal and bringing him home to stand his trial for treason. Sir Geoffrey was arrested in August, 1538, was induced, or forced, to turn King's evidence, and as a reward was granted his miserable, conscience-struck life. The Countess was spared for a while, but Montague mounted the scaffold in December.

With Montague perished his cousin, the Marquis of Exeter, whose descent from Edward IV. was as fatal to him as their descent from Clarence was to the Poles. The Marquis was the White Rose, the next heir to the throne if the line of the Tudors failed. His father, the Earl of Devonshire, had been attainted in the reign of Henry VII.; but Henry VIII. had reversed the attainder, had treated the young Earl with kindness, had made him Knight of the Garter and Marquis of Exeter, and had sought in various ways to win his support. But his dynastic position and dislike of Henry's policy drove the Marquis into the ranks of the discontented. He had been put in the Tower, in 1531, on suspicion of treason; after his release he listened to the hysterics of Elizabeth Barton, intrigued with Chapuys, and corresponded with Reginald Pole; and in Cornwall, in 1538, men conspired to make him King. Less evidence than this would have convinced a jury of peers in Tudor times of the expediency of Exeter's death; and, on the 9th of December, his head paid the price of his royal descent.

These executions do not seem to have produced the faintest symptoms of disgust in the popular mind. The threat of invasion evoked a national enthusiasm for defence. In August, 1538, Henry went down to inspect the fortifications he had been for years erecting at Dover; masonry from the demolished monasteries was employed in dotting the coast with castles, such as Calshot and Hurst, which were built with materials from the neighbouring abbey of Beaulieu. Commissioners were sent to repair the defences at Calais and Guisnes, on the Scottish Borders, along the coasts from Berwick to the mouth of the Thames, and from the Thames to Lizard Point. Beacons were repaired, ordnance was supplied wherever it was needed, lists of ships and of mariners were drawn up in every port, and musters were taken throughout the kingdom. Everywhere the people pressed forward to help; in the Isle of Wight they were lining the shores with palisades, and taking every precaution to render a landing of the enemy a perilous enterprise. In Essex they anticipated the coming of the commissioners by digging dykes and throwing up ramparts; at Harwich the Lord Chancellor saw "women and children working with shovels at the trenches and bulwarks". Whatever we may think of the roughness and rigour of Henry's rule, his methods were not resented by the mass of his people. He had not lost his hold on the nation; whenever he appealed to his subjects in a time of national danger, he met with an eager response; and, had the schemers abroad, who idly dreamt of his expulsion from the throne, succeeded in composing their mutual quarrels and launching their bolt against England, there is no reason to suppose that its fate would have differed from that of the Spanish Armada.

In spite of the fears of invasion which prevailed in the spring of 1539, Pole's second mission had no more success than the first; and the hostile fleet, for the sight of which the Warden of the Cinque Ports was straining his eyes from Dover Castle, never came from the mouths of the Scheldt and the Rhine; or rather, the supposed Armada proved to be a harmless convoy of traders. The Pope himself, on second thoughts, withheld his promised bull. He distrusted its reception at the hands of his secular allies, and dreaded the contempt and ridicule which would follow an open failure. Moreover, at the height of his fervour against Henry, he could not refrain from attempts to extend his temporal power, and his seizure of Urbino alienated Francis and afforded Henry some prospect of creating an anti-papal party in Italy. Francis would gladly join in a prohibition of English commerce, if Charles would only begin; but without Charles he could do nothing, and, even when his amity with the Emperor was closest, he was compelled, at Henry's demand, to punish the French priests who inveighed against English enormities. To Charles, however, English trade was worth more than to Francis, and the Emperor's subjects would tolerate no interruption of their lucrative intercourse with England. With the consummate skill which he almost invariably displayed in political matters, Henry had, in 1539, when the danger seemed greatest, provided the Flemings with an additional motive for peace. He issued a proclamation that, for seven years, their goods should pay no more duty than those of the English themselves; and the thrifty Dutch were little inclined to stop, by a war, the fresh stream of gold. The Emperor, too, had more urgent matters in hand. Henry might be more of a Turk than the Sultan himself, and the Pope might regard the sack of St. Thomas's shrine with more horror than the Turkish defeat of a Christian fleet; but Henry was not harrying the Emperor's coasts, nor threatening to deprive the Emperor's brother of his Hungarian kingdom; and Turkish victories on land and on sea gave the imperial family much more concern than all Henry's onslaughts on the saints and their relics. And, besides the Ottoman peril, Charles had reason to fear the political effects of the union between England and the Protestant princes of Germany, for which the religious development in England was paving the way, and which an attack on Henry would at once have cemented.

The powers conferred upon Henry as Supreme Head of the Church were not long suffered to remain in abeyance. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice Henry's supremacy over the Church was very different from that which Kings of England had hitherto wielded; and from the moment he entered upon his new ecclesiastical kingdom, he set himself not merely to reform practical abuses, such as the excessive wealth of the clergy, but to define the standard of orthodox faith, and to force his subjects to embrace the royal theology. The Catholic faith was to hold good only so far as the Supreme Head willed; the "King's doctrine" became the rule to which "our Church of England," as Henry styled it, was henceforth to conform; and "unity and concord in opinion" were to be established by royal decree.

The first royal definition of the faith was embodied in ten articles submitted to Convocation in 1536. The King was, he said, constrained by diversity of opinions "to put his own pen to the book and conceive certain articles... thinking that no person, having authority from him, would presume to say a word against their meaning, or be remiss in setting them forth". His people, he maintained, whether peer or prelate, had no right to resist his temporal or spiritual commands, whatever they might be. Episcopal authority had indeed sunk low. When Convocation was opened, in 1536, a layman, Dr. William Petre, appeared, and demanded the place of honour above all bishops and archbishops in their assembly. Pre-eminence belonged, he said, to the King as Supreme Head of the Church; the King had appointed Cromwell his Vicar-general; and Cromwell had named him, Petre, his proctor. The claim was allowed, and the submissive clergy found little fault with the royal articles of faith, though they mentioned only three sacraments, baptism, penance and the sacrament of the altar, denounced the abuse of images, warned men against excessive devotion to the saints, and against believing that "ceremonies have power to remit sin," or that masses can deliver souls from purgatory. Finally, Convocation transferred from the Pope to the Christian princes the right to summon a General Council.

With the Institution of a Christian Man, issued in the following year, and commonly called The Bishops' Book, Henry had little to do. The bishops debated the doctrinal questions from February to July, 1537, but the King wrote, in August, that he had had no time to examine their conclusions. He trusted, however, to their wisdom, and agreed that the book should be published and read to the people on Sundays and holy-days for three years to come. In the same year he permitted a change, which inevitably gave fresh impulse to the reforming movement in England and destroyed every prospect of that "union and concord in opinions," on which he set so much store. Miles Coverdale was licensed to print an edition of his Bible in England, with a dedication to Queen Jane Seymour; and, in 1538, a second English version was prepared by John Rogers, under Cranmer's authority, and published as Matthew's Bible. This was the Bible "of the largest volume" which Cromwell, as Henry's Vicegerent, ordered to be set up in all churches. Every incumbent was to encourage his parishioners to read it; he was to recite the Paternoster, the Creed and the Ten Commandments in English, that his flock might learn them by degrees; he was to require some acquaintance with the rudiments of the faith, as a necessary condition from all before they could receive the Sacrament of the Altar; he was to preach at least once a quarter; and to institute a register of births, marriages and deaths.

Meanwhile, a vigorous assault was made on the strongholds of superstition; pilgrimages were suppressed, and many wonder-working images were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a figure whose contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to the market-place at Maidstone, and the ingenious mechanism, whereby the eyes and lips miraculously opened and shut, was exhibited to the vulgar gaze. Probably these little devices had already sunk in popular esteem, for the Blood of St. Januarius could not be treated at Naples to-day in the same cavalier fashion as the Blood of Hailes was in England in 1538, without a riot. But the exposure was a useful method of exciting popular indignation against the monks, and it filled reformers with a holy joy. "Dagon," wrote one to Bullinger, "is everywhere falling in England. Bel of Babylon has been broken to pieces." The destruction of the images was a preliminary skirmish in the final campaign against the monks. The Act of 1536 had only granted to the King religious houses which possessed an endowment of less than two hundred pounds a year; the dissolution of the greater monasteries was now gradually effected by a process of more or less voluntary surrender. In some cases the monks may have been willing enough to go; they were loaded with debt, and harassed by rules imposed by Cromwell, which would have been difficult to keep in the palmiest days of monastic enthusiasm; and they may well have thought that freedom from monastic restraint, coupled with a pension, was a welcome relief, especially when resistance involved the anger of the prince and liability to the penalties of elastic treasons and of a præmunire which no one could understand. So, one after another, the great abbeys yielded to the persuasions and threats of the royal commissioners. The dissolution of the Mendicant Orders and of the Knights of St. John dispersed the last remnants of the papal army as an organised force in England, though warfare of a kind continued for many years.

These proceedings created as much satisfaction among the Lutherans of Germany as they did disgust at Rome, and an alliance between Henry and the Protestant princes seemed to be dictated by a community of religious, as well as of political, interests. The friendship between Francis and Charles threatened both English and German liberties, and it behoved the two countries to combine against their common foe. Henry's manifesto against the authority of the Pope to summon a General Council had been received with rapture in Germany; at least three German editions were printed, and the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse urged on him the adoption of a common policy. English envoys were sent to Germany with this purpose in the spring of 1538, and German divines journeyed to England to lay the foundation of a theological union. They remained five months, but failed to effect an agreement. To the three points on which they desired further reform in England, the Communion in both kinds, the abolition of private masses and of the enforced celibacy of the clergy, Henry himself wrote a long reply, maintaining in each case the Catholic faith. But the conference showed that Henry was for the time anxious to be conciliatory in religious matters, while from a political point of view the need for an alliance grew more urgent than ever. All Henry's efforts to break the amity between Francis and Charles had failed; his proposals of marriage to imperial and French princesses had come to nothing; and, in the spring of 1539, it was rumoured that the Emperor would further demonstrate the indissolubility of his intimacy with the French King by passing through France from Spain to Germany, instead of going, as he had always hitherto done, by sea, or through Italy and Austria. Cromwell seized the opportunity and persuaded Henry to strengthen his union with the Protestant princes by seeking a wife from a German house.

This policy once adopted, the task of selecting a bride was easy. As early as 1530 the old Duke of Cleves had suggested some marriage alliance between his own and the royal family of England. He was closely allied to the Elector of Saxony, who had married Sibylla, the Duke of Cleves' daughter; and the young Duke, who was soon to succeed his father, had also claims to the Duchy of Guelders. Guelders was a thorn in the side of the Emperor; it stood to the Netherlands in much the same relation as Scotland stood to England, and when there was war between Charles and Francis Guelders had always been one of the most useful pawns in the French King's hands. Hence an alliance between the German princes, the King of Denmark, who had joined their political and religious union, Guelders and England would have seriously threatened the Emperor's hold on his Dutch dominions. This was the step which Henry was induced to take, when he realised that Charles's friendship with France remained unbroken, and that the Emperor had made up his mind to visit Paris. Hints of a marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves were thrown out early in 1539; the only difficulty, which subsequently proved very convenient, was that the lady had been promised to the son of the Duke of Lorraine. The objection was waived on the ground that Anne herself had not given her consent; in view of the advantages of the match and of the Duke's financial straits, Henry agreed to forgo a dowry; and, on the 6th of October, the treaty of marriage was signed.

Anne of Cleves had already been described to Henry by his ambassador, Dr. Wotton, and Holbein had been sent to paint her portrait (now in the Louvre), which Wotton pronounced "a very lively image". She had an oval face, long nose, chestnut eyes, a light complexion, and very pale lips. She was thirty-four years old, and in France was reported to be ugly; but Cromwell told the King that "every one praised her beauty, both of face and body, and one said she excelled the Duchess of Milan as the golden sun did the silver moon". Wotton's account of her accomplishments was pitched in a minor key. Her gentleness was universally commended, but she spent her time chiefly in needlework. She knew no language but her own; she could neither sing nor play upon any instrument, accomplishments which were then considered by Germans to be unbecoming in a lady. On the 12th of December, 1539, she arrived at Calais; but boisterous weather and bad tides delayed her there till the 27th. She landed at Deal and rode to Canterbury. On the 30th she proceeded to Sittingbourne, and thence, on the 31st, to Rochester, where the King met her in disguise. If he was disappointed with her appearance, he concealed the fact from the public eye. Nothing marred her public reception at Greenwich on the 3rd, or was suffered to hinder the wedding, which was solemnised three days later. Henry "lovingly embraced and kissed" his bride in public, and allowed no hint to reach the ears of any one but his most intimate counsellors of the fact that he had been led willingly or unwillingly into the most humiliating situation of his reign.

Such was, in reality, the result of his failure to act on the principle laid down by himself to the French ambassador two years before. He had then declared that the choice of a wife was too delicate a matter to be left to a deputy, and that he must see and know a lady some time before he made up his mind to marry her. Anne of Cleves had been selected by Cromwell, and the lady, whose beauty was, according to Cromwell, in every one's mouth, seemed to Henry no better than "a Flanders mare". The day after the interview at Rochester he told Cromwell that Anne was "nothing so well as she was spoken of," and that, "if he had known before as much as he knew then, she should not have come within his realm". He demanded of his Vicegerent what remedy he had to suggest, and Cromwell had none. Next day Cranmer, Norfolk, Suffolk, Southampton and Tunstall were called in with no better result. "Is there none other remedy," repeated Henry, "but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?" Apparently there was none. The Emperor was being fêted in Paris; to repudiate the marriage would throw the Duke of Cleves into the arms of the allied sovereigns, alienate the German princes, and leave Henry without a friend among the powers of Christendom. So he made up his mind to put his neck in the yoke and to marry "the Flanders mare".

Henry, however, was never patient of matrimonial or other yokes, and it was quite certain that, as soon as he could do so without serious risk, he would repudiate his unattractive wife, and probably other things besides. For Anne's defects were only the last straw added to the burden which Henry bore. He had not only been forced by circumstances into marriage with a wife who was repugnant to him, but into a religious and secular policy which he and the mass of his subjects disliked. The alliance with the Protestant princes might be a useful weapon if things came to the worst, and if there were a joint attack on England by Francis and Charles; but, on its merits, it was not to be compared to a good understanding with the Emperor; and Henry would have no hesitation in throwing over the German princes when once he saw his way to a renewal of friendship with Charles. He would welcome, even more, a relief from the necessity of paying attention to German divines. He had never wavered in his adhesion to the cardinal points of the Catholic faith. He had no enmity to Catholicism, provided it did not stand in his way. The spiritual jurisdiction of Rome had been abolished in England because it imposed limits on Henry's own authority. Some of the powers of the English clergy had been destroyed, partly for a similar reason, and partly as a concession to the laity. But the purely spiritual claims of the Church remained unimpaired; the clergy were still a caste, separate from other men, and divinely endowed with the power of performing a daily miracle in the conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Even when the Protestant alliance seemed most indispensable, Henry endeavoured to convince Lutherans of the truth of the Catholic doctrine of the mass, and could not refrain from persecuting heretics with a zeal that shook the confidence of his reforming allies. His honour, he thought, was involved in his success in proving that he, with his royal supremacy, could defend the faith more effectively than the Pope, with all his pretended powers; and he took a personal interest in the conversion and burning of heretics. Several instances are recorded of his arguing a whole day with Sacramentaries, exercises which exhibited to advantage at once the royal authority and the royal learning in spiritual matters. His beliefs were not due to caprice or to ignorance; probably no bishop in his realm was more deeply read in heterodox theology.[1078] He was constantly on the look-out for books by Luther and other heresiarchs, and he kept quite a respectable theological library at hand for private use. The tenacity with which he clung to orthodox creeds and Catholic forms was not only strengthened by study but rooted in the depths of his character. To devout but fundamentally irreligious men, like Henry VIII. and Louis XIV., rites and ceremonies are a great consolation; and Henry seldom neglected to creep to the Cross on Good Friday, to serve the priest at mass, to receive holy bread and holy water every Sunday, and daily to use "all other laudable ceremonies"./span>

With such feelings at heart, a union with Protestants could never for Henry be more than a mariage de convenance; and in this, as in other things, he carried with him the bulk of popular sympathy. In 1539 it was said that no man in London durst speak against Catholic usages, and, in Lent of that year, a man was hanged, apparently at the instance of the Recorder of London, for eating flesh on a Friday. The attack on the Church had been limited to its privileges and to its property; its doctrine had scarcely been touched. The upper classes among the laity had been gorged with monastic spoils; they were disposed to rest and be thankful. The middle classes had been satisfied to some extent by the restriction of clerical fees, and by the prohibition of the clergy from competing with laymen in profitable trades, such as brewing, tanning, and speculating in land and houses. There was also the general reaction which always follows a period of change. How far that reaction had gone, Henry first learnt from the Parliament which met on the 28th of April, 1539.

The elections were characterised by more court interference than is traceable at any other period during the reign, though even on this occasion the evidence is fragmentary and affects comparatively few constituencies. It was, moreover, Cromwell and not the King who sought to pack the House of Commons in favour of his own particular policy; and the attempt produced discontent in various constituencies and a riot in one at least. The Earl of Southampton was required to use his influence on behalf of Cromwell's nominees at Farnham, although that borough was within the Bishop of Winchester's preserves. So, too, Cromwell's henchman, Wriothesley, was returned for the county of Southampton in spite of Gardiner's opposition. Never, till the days of the Stuarts, was there a more striking instance of the futility of these tactics; for the House of Commons, which Cromwell took so much pains to secure, passed, without a dissentient, the Bill of Attainder against him; and before it was dissolved, the bishop, against whose influence Cromwell had especially exerted himself, had taken Cromwell's place in the royal favour. There was, indeed, no possibility of stemming the tide which was flowing against the Vicegerent and in favour of the King; and Cromwell was forced to swim with the stream in the vain hope of saving himself from disaster.

The principal measure passed in this Parliament was the Act of Six Articles, and it was designed to secure that unity and concord in opinions which had not been effected by the King's injunctions. The Act affirmed the doctrine of Transubstantiation, declared that the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds was not necessary, that priests might not marry, that vows of chastity were perpetual, that private masses were meet and necessary, and auricular confession was expedient and necessary. Burning was the penalty for once denying the first article, and a felon's death for twice denying any of the others. This was practically the first Act of Uniformity, the earliest definition by Parliament of the faith of the Church. It showed that the mass of the laity were still orthodox to the core, that they could persecute as ruthlessly as the Church itself, and that their only desire was to do the persecution themselves. The bill was carried through Parliament by means of a coalition of King and laity against Cromwell and a minority of reforming bishops, who are said only to have relinquished their opposition at Henry's personal intervention; and the royal wishes were communicated, when the King was not present in person, through Norfolk and not through the royal Vicegerent.

It was clear that Cromwell was trembling to his fall. The enmity shown in Parliament to his doctrinal tendencies was not the result of royal dictation; for even this Parliament, which gave royal proclamations the force of law, could be independent when it chose. The draft of the Act of Proclamations, as originally submitted to the House of Commons, provoked a hot debate, was thrown out, and another was substituted more in accord with the sense of the House. Parliament could have rejected the second as easily as it did the first, had it wished. Willingly and wittingly it placed this weapon in the royal hands, and the chief motive for its action was that overwhelming desire for "union and concord in opinion" which lay at the root of the Six Articles. Only one class of offences against royal proclamations could be punished with death, and those were offences "against any proclamation to be made by the King's Highness, his heirs or successors, for or concerning any kind of heresies against Christian doctrine". The King might define the faith by proclamations, and the standard of orthodoxy thus set up was to be enforced by the heaviest legal penalties. England, thought Parliament, could only be kept united against her foreign foes by a rigid uniformity of opinion; and that uniformity could only be enforced by the royal authority based on lay support, for the Church was now deeply divided in doctrine against itself.

Such was the temper of England at the end of 1539. Cromwell and his policy, the union with the German princes and the marriage with Anne of Cleves were merely makeshifts. They stood on no surer foundation than the passing political need of some counterpoise to the alliance of Francis and Charles. So long as that need remained, the marriage would hold good, and Henry would strive to dissemble; but not a moment longer. The revolution came with startling rapidity; in April, 1540, Marillac, the French ambassador, reported that Cromwell was tottering. The reason was not far to seek. No sooner had the Emperor passed out of France, than he began to excuse himself from fulfilling his engagements to Francis. He was resolute never to yield Milan, for which Francis never ceased to yearn. Charles would have found Francis a useful ally for the conquest of England, but his own possessions were now threatened in more than one quarter, and especially by the English and German alliance. Henry skilfully widened the breach between the two friends, and, while professing the utmost regard for Francis, gave Charles to understand that he vastly preferred the Emperor's alliance to that of the Protestant princes. Before April he had convinced himself that Charles was more bent on reducing Germany and the Netherlands to order than on any attempt against England, and that the abandonment of the Lutheran princes would not lead to their combination with the Emperor and Francis. Accordingly he returned a very cold answer when the Duke of Cleves's ambassadors came, in May, to demand his assistance in securing for the Duke the Duchy of Guelders.

Cromwell's fall was not, however, effected without some violent oscillations, strikingly like the quick changes which preceded the ruin of Robespierre during the Reign of Terror in France. The Vicegerent had filled the Court and the Government with his own nominees; at least half a dozen bishops, with Cranmer at their head, inclined to his theological and political views; Lord Chancellor Audley and the Earl of Southamton were of the same persuasion; and a small but zealous band of reformers did their best, by ballads and sermons, to prove that the people were thirsting for further religious change. The Council, said Marillac, was divided, each party seeking to destroy the other. Henry let the factions fight till he thought the time was come for him to intervene. In February, 1540, there was a theological encounter between Gardiner and Barnes, the principal agent in Henry's dealings with the Lutherans, and Barnes was forced to recant; in April Gardiner and one or two conservatives, who had long been excluded from the Council, were believed to have been readmitted; and it was reported that Tunstall would succeed Cromwell as the King's Vicegerent. But a few days later two of Cromwell's satellites, Wriothesley and Sadleir, were made Secretaries of State; Cromwell himself was created Earl of Essex; and, in May, the Bishop of Chichester and two other opponents of reform were sent to the Tower. At last Henry struck. On the 10th of June Cromwell was arrested; he had, wrote the Council, "not only been counterworking the King's aims for the settlement of religion, but had said that, if the King and the realm varied from his opinions, he would withstand them, and that he hoped in another year or two to bring things to that frame that the King could not resist it". His cries for mercy evoked no response in that hardened age. Parliament condemned him unheard, and, on the 28th of July, he was beheaded.

Henry had in reality come to the conclusion that it was safe to dispense with Anne of Cleves and her relatives; and with his will there was easily found a way. His case, as stated by himself, was, as usual, a most ingenious mixture of fact and fiction, reason and sophistry. His "intention" had been defective, and therefore his administration of the sacrament of marriage had been invalid. He was not a free agent because fear of being left defenceless against Francis and Charles had driven him under the yoke. His marriage had only been a conditional form. Anne had never received a release from her contract with the son of the Duke of Lorraine; Henry had only gone through the ceremony on the assumption that that release would be forthcoming; and actuated by this conscientious scruple, he had refrained from consummating the match. To give verisimilitude to this last statement, he added the further detail that he found his bride personally repugnant. He therefore sought from "our" Church a declaration of nullity. Anne was prudently ready to submit to its decision; and, through Convocation, Henry's Church, which in his view existed mainly to transact his ecclesiastical business, declared, on the 7th of July, that the marriage was null and void. Anne received a handsome endowment of four thousand pounds a year in lands, was given two country residences, and lived on amicable terms with Henry and his successors till 1558, when she died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Henry's neck was freed from the matrimonial yoke and the German entanglement. The news was promptly sent to Charles, who remarked that Henry would always find him his loving brother and most cordial friend. At Antwerp it was said that the King had alienated the Germans, but gained the Emperor and France in their stead. Luther declared that "Junker Harry meant to be God and to do as pleased himself"; and Melancthon, previously so ready to find excuses, now denounced the English King as a Nero, and expressed a wish that God would put it into the mind of some bold man to assassinate him. Francis sighed when he heard the news, foreseeing a future alliance against him, but the Emperor's secretary believed that God was bringing good out of all these things.