HENRY VIII

I.

THE EARLY TUDORS.

In the whole range of English history there is no monarch whose character has been more variously depicted by contemporaries or more strenuously debated by posterity than the "majestic lord who broke the bonds of Rome". To one historian an inhuman embodiment of cruelty and vice, to another a superhuman incarnation of courage, wisdom and strength of will, Henry VIII has, by an almost universal consent, been placed above or below the grade of humanity. So unique was his personality, so singular his achievements, that he appears in the light of a special dispensation sent like another Attila to be the scourge of mankind, or like a second Hercules to cleanse, or at least to demolish, Augean stables. The dictates of his will seemed as inexorable as the decrees of fate, and the history of his reign is strewn with records of the ruin of those who failed to placate his wrath. Of the six queens he married, two he divorced, and two he beheaded. Four English cardinals lived in his reign; one perished by the executioner's axe, one escaped it by absence, and a third by a timely but natural death. Of a similar number of dukes half were condemned by attainder; and the same method of speedy despatch accounted for six or seven earls and viscounts and for scores of lesser degree. He began his reign by executing the ministers of his father, he continued it by sending his own to the scaffold. The Tower of London was both palace and prison, and statesmen passed swiftly from one to the other; in silent obscurity alone lay salvation. Religion and politics, rank and profession made little difference; priest and layman, cardinal-archbishop and "hammer of the monks," men whom Henry had raised from the mire, and peers, over whose heads they were placed, were joined in a common fate. Wolsey and More, Cromwell and Norfolk, trod the same dizzy path to the same fatal end; and the English people looked on powerless or unmoved. They sent their burgesses and knights of the shire to Westminster without let or hindrance, and Parliament met with a regularity that grew with the rigour of Henry's rule; but it seemed to assemble only to register the royal edicts and clothe with a legal cloak the naked violence of Henry's acts. It remembered its privileges only to lay them at Henry's feet, it cancelled his debts, endowed his proclamations with the force of laws, and authorised him to repeal acts of attainder and dispose of his crown at will. Secure of its support Henry turned and rent the spiritual unity of Western Christendom, and settled at a blow that perennial struggle between Church and State, in which kings and emperors had bitten the dust. With every epithet of contumely and scorn he trampled under foot the jurisdiction of him who was believed to hold the keys of heaven and hell. Borrowing in practice the old maxim of Roman law, cujus regio, ejus religio, he placed himself in the seat of authority in religion and presumed to define the faith of which Leo had styled him defender. Others have made themselves despots by their mastery of many legions, through the agency of a secret police, or by means of an organised bureaucracy. Yet Henry's standing army consisted of a few gentlemen pensioners and yeomen of the guard; he had neither secret police nor organised bureaucracy. Even then Englishmen boasted that they were not slaves like the French, and foreigners pointed a finger of scorn at their turbulence. Had they not permanently or temporarily deprived of power nearly half their kings who had reigned since William the Conqueror? Yet Henry VIII not only left them their arms, but repeatedly urged them to keep those arms ready for use. He eschewed that air of mystery with which tyrants have usually sought to impose on the mind of the people. All his life he moved familiarly and almost unguarded in the midst of his subjects, and he died in his bed, full of years, with the spell of his power unbroken and the terror of his name unimpaired.

What manner of man was this, and wherein lay the secret of his strength? Is recourse necessary to a theory of supernatural agency, or is there another and adequate solution? Was Henry's individual will of such miraculous force that he could ride roughshod in insolent pride over public opinion at home and abroad? Or did his personal ends, dictated perhaps by selfish motives and ignoble passions, so far coincide with the interests and prejudices of the politically effective portion of his people, that they were willing to condone a violence and tyranny, the brunt of which fell after all on the few? Such is the riddle which propounds itself to every student of Tudor history. It cannot be answered by pæans in honour of Henry's intensity of will and force of character, nor by invectives against his vices and lamentations over the woes of his victims. The miraculous interpretation of history is as obsolete as the catastrophic theory of geology, and the explanation of Henry's career must be sought not so much in the study of his character as in the study of his environment, of the conditions which made things possible to him that were not possible before or since and are not likely to be so again.

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. But who were the Tudors? They were a Welsh family of modest means and doubtful antecedents. They claimed, it is true, descent from Cadwallader, and their pedigree was as long and quite as veracious as most Welsh genealogies; but Henry VII's great-grandfather was steward or butler to the Bishop of Bangor. His son, Owen Tudor, came as a young man to seek his fortune at the Court of Henry V, and obtained a clerkship of the wardrobe to Henry's Queen, Catherine of France. So skilfully did he use or abuse this position of trust, that he won the heart of his mistress; and within a few years of Henry's death his widowed Queen and her clerk of the wardrobe were secretly, and possibly without legal sanction, living together as man and wife. The discovery of their relations resulted in Catherine's retirement to Bermondsey Abbey, and Owen's to Newgate prison. The Queen died in the following year, but Owen survived many romantic adventures. Twice he escaped from prison, twice he was recaptured. Once he took sanctuary in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, and various attempts to entrap him were made by enticing him to revels in a neighbouring tavern. Finally, on the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, he espoused the Lancastrian cause, and was beheaded by order of Edward IV after the battle of Mortimer's Cross. Two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were born of this singular match between Queen and clerk of her wardrobe. Both enjoyed the favour of their royal half-brother, Henry VI. Edmund, the elder, was first knighted and then created Earl of Richmond. In the Parliament of 1453, he was formally declared legitimate; he was enriched by the grant of broad estates and enrolled among the members of Henry's council. But the climax of his fortunes was reached when, in 1455, he married the Lady Margaret Beaufort. Owen Tudor had taken the first step which led to his family's greatness; Edmund took the second. The blood-royal of France flowed in his veins, the blood-royal of England was to flow in his children's; and the union between Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort gave Henry VII such claim as he had by descent to the English throne.

The Beauforts were descended from Edward III, but a bar sinister marred their royal pedigree. John of Gaunt had three sons by Catherine Swynford before she became his wife. That marriage would, by canon law, have made legitimate the children, but the barons had, on a famous occasion, refused to assimilate in this respect the laws of England to the canons of the Church; and it required a special Act of Parliament to confer on the Beauforts the status of legitimacy. When Henry IV confirmed this Act, he introduced a clause specifically barring their contingent claim to the English throne. This limitation could not legally abate the force of a statute; but it sufficed to cast a doubt upon the Beaufort title, and has been considered a sufficient explanation of Henry VII's reluctance to base his claim upon hereditary right. However that may be, the Beauforts played no little part in the English history of the fifteenth century; their influence was potent for peace or war in the councils of their royal half-brother, Henry IV, and of the later sovereigns of the House of Lancaster. One was Cardinal-Bishop of Winchester, another was Duke of Exeter, and a third was Earl of Somerset. Two of the sons of the Earl became Dukes of Somerset; the younger fell at St. Albans, the earliest victim of the Wars of the Roses, which proved so fatal to his House; and the male line of the Beauforts failed in the third generation. The sole heir to their claims was the daughter of the first Duke of Somerset, Margaret, now widow of Edmund Tudor; for, after a year of wedded life, Edmund had died in November, 1456. Two months later his widow gave birth to a boy, the future Henry VII; and, incredible as the fact may seem, the youthful mother was not quite fourteen years old. When fifteen more years had passed, the murder of Henry VI and his son left Margaret Beaufort and Henry Tudor in undisputed possession of the Lancastrian title. A barren honour it seemed. Edward IV was firmly seated on the English throne. His right to it, by every test, was immeasurably superior to the Tudor claim, and Henry showed no inclination and possessed not the means to dispute it. The usurpation by Richard III, and the crimes which polluted his reign, put a different aspect on the situation, and set men seeking for an alternative to the blood-stained tyrant. The battle of Bosworth followed, and the last of the Plantagenets gave way to the first of the Tudors.

For the first time, since the Norman Conquest, a king of decisively British blood sat on the English throne. His lineage was, indeed, English in only a minor degree; but England might seem to have lost at the battle of Hastings her right to native kings; and Norman were succeeded by Angevin, Angevin by Welsh, Welsh by Scots, and Scots by Hanoverian sovereigns. The Tudors were probably more at home on the English throne than most of England's kings; and their humble and British origin may have contributed to their unique capacity for understanding the needs, and expressing the mind, of the English nation. It was well for them that they established their throne in the hearts of their people, for no dynasty grasped the sceptre with less of hereditary right. Judged by that criterion, there were many claimants whose titles must have been preferred to Henry's. There were the daughters of Edward IV and the children of George, Duke of Clarence; and their existence may account for Henry's neglect to press his hereditary claim. But there was a still better reason. Supposing the Lancastrian case to be valid and the Beauforts to be the true Lancastrian heirs, even so the rightful occupant of the throne was not Henry VII, but his mother, Margaret Beaufort. England had never recognised a Salic law at home; on occasion she had disputed its validity abroad. But Henry VII was not disposed to let his mother rule; she could not unite the Yorkist and Lancastrian claims by marriage, and, in addition to other disabilities, she had a second husband in Lord Stanley, who might demand the crown matrimonial. So Henry VII's hereditary title was judiciously veiled in vague obscurity. Parliament wisely admitted the accomplished fact and recognised that the crown was vested in him, without rashly venturing upon the why or the wherefore. He had in truth been raised to the throne because men were weary of Richard. He was chosen to vindicate no theory of hereditary or other abstract right, but to govern with a firm hand, to establish peace within his gates and give prosperity to his people. That was the true Tudor title, and, as a rule, they remembered the fact; they were de facto kings, and they left the de jure arguments to the Stuarts.

Peace, however, could not be obtained at once, nor the embers of thirty years' strife stamped out in a moment. For fifteen years open revolt and whispered sedition troubled the rest of the realm and threatened the stability of Henry's throne. Ireland remained a hot-bed of Yorkist sympathies, and Ireland was zealously aided by Edward IV's sister, Margaret of Burgundy; she pursued, like a vendetta, the family quarrel with Henry VII., and earned the title of Henry's Juno by harassing him as vindictively as the Queen of Heaven vexed the pious Æneas. Other rulers, with no Yorkist bias, were slow to recognise the parvenu king and quick to profit by his difficulties. Pretenders to their rivals' thrones were useful pawns on the royal chess-board; and though the princes of Europe had no reason to desire a Yorkist restoration, they thought that a little judicious backing of Yorkist claimants would be amply repaid by the restriction of Henry's energies to domestic affairs. Seven months after the battle of Bosworth there was a rising in the West under the Staffords, and in the North under Lovell; and Henry himself was nearly captured while celebrating at York the feast of St. George. A year later a youth of obscure origin, Lambert Simnel, claimed to be first the Duke of York and then the Earl of Warwick. The former was son, and the latter was nephew, of Edward IV. Lambert was crowned king at Dublin amid the acclamations of the Irish people. Not a voice was raised in Henry's favour; Kildare, the practical ruler of Ireland, earls and archbishops, bishops and barons, and great officers of State, from Lord Chancellor downwards, swore fealty to the reputed son of an Oxford tradesman. Ireland was only the volcano which gave vent to the subterranean flood; treason in England and intrigue abroad were working in secret concert with open rebellion across St. George's Channel. The Queen Dowager was secluded in Bermondsey Abbey and deprived of her jointure lands. John de la Pole, who, as eldest son of Edward IV's sister, had been named his successor by Richard III, fled to Burgundy; thence his aunt Margaret sent Martin Schwartz and two thousand mercenaries to co-operate with the Irish invasion. But, at East Stoke, De la Pole and Lovell, Martin Schwartz and his merry men were slain; and the most serious of the revolts against Henry ended in the consignment of Simnel to the royal scullery and of his tutor to the Tower.

Lambert, however, was barely initiated in his new duties when the son of a boatman of Tournay started on a similar errand with a less congenial end. An unwilling puppet at first, Perkin Warbeck was on a trading visit to Ireland, when the Irish, who saw a Yorkist prince in every likely face, insisted that Perkin was Earl of Warwick. This he denied on oath before the Mayor of Cork. Nothing deterred, they suggested that he was Richard III's bastard; but the bastard was safe in Henry's keeping, and the imaginative Irish finally took refuge in the theory that Perkin was Duke of York. Lambert's old friends rallied round Perkin; the re-animated Duke was promptly summoned to the Court of France and treated with princely honours. When Charles VIII had used him to beat down Henry's terms, Perkin found a home with Margaret, aunt to all the pretenders. As usual, there were traitors in high places in England. Sir William Stanley, whose brother had married Henry's mother, and to whom Henry himself owed his victory at Bosworth, was implicated. His sudden arrest disconcerted the plot, and when Perkin's fleet appeared off the coast of Kent, the rustics made short work of the few who were rash enough to land. Perkin sailed away to the Yorkist refuge in Ireland, but Kildare was no longer deputy. Waterford, to which he laid siege, was relieved, and the pretender sought in Scotland a third basis of operations. An abortive raid on the Borders and a high-born Scottish wife were all that he obtained of James IV, and in 1497, after a second attempt in Ireland, he landed in Cornwall. The Cornishmen had just risen against Henry's extortions, marched on London and been defeated at Blackheath; but Henry's lenience encouraged a fresh revolt, and three thousand men flocked to Perkin's standard. They failed to take Exeter; Perkin was seized at Beaulieu and sent up to London to be paraded through the streets amid the jeers and taunts of the people. Two years later a foolish attempt at escape and a fresh personation of the Earl of Warwick by one Ralf Wulford led to the execution of all three, Perkin, Wulford, and the real Earl of Warwick, who had been a prisoner and probably the innocent centre of so many plots since the accession of Henry VII. Warwick's death may have been due to the instigation of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who were negotiating for the marriage of Catherine of Aragon with Prince Arthur. They were naturally anxious for the security of the throne their daughter was to share with Henry's son; and now their ambassador wrote triumphantly that there remained in England not a doubtful drop of royal blood. There were no more pretenders, and for the rest of Henry's reign England enjoyed such peace as it had not known for nearly a century. The end which Henry had sought by fair means and foul was attained, and there was no practical alternative to his children in the succession to the English throne.

But all his statecraft, his patience and labour would have been writ in water without children to succeed him and carry on the work which he had begun; and at times it seemed probable that this necessary condition would remain unfulfilled. For the Tudors were singularly luckless in the matter of children. They were scarcely a sterile race, but their offspring had an unfortunate habit of dying in childhood. It was the desire for a male heir that involved Henry VIII in his breach with Rome, and led Mary into a marriage which raised a revolt; the last of the Tudors perceived that heirs might be purchased at too great a cost, and solved the difficulty by admitting its insolubility. Henry VIII had six wives, but only three children who survived infancy; of these, Edward VI withered away at the age of fifteen, and Mary died childless at forty-two. By his two mistresses he seems to have had only one son, who died at the age of eleven, and as far as we know, he had not a single grandchild, legitimate or other. His sisters were hardly more fortunate. Margaret's eldest son by James IV died a year after his birth; her eldest daughter died at birth; her second son lived only nine months; her second daughter died at birth; her third son lived to be James V, but her fourth found an early grave. Mary, the other sister of Henry VIII, lost her only son in his teens. The appalling death-rate among Tudor infants cannot be attributed solely to medical ignorance, for Yorkist babies clung to life with a tenacity which was quite as inconvenient as the readiness with which Tudor infants relinquished it; and Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII all found it necessary to accelerate, by artificial means, the exit from the world of the superfluous children of other pretenders. This drastic process smoothed their path, but could not completely solve the problem; and the characteristic Tudor infirmity was already apparent in the reign of Henry VII. He had three sons; two predeceased him, one at the age of fifteen years, the other at fifteen months. Of his four daughters, two died in infancy, and the youngest cost the mother her life. The fruit of that union between the Red Rose and the White, upon which so much store had been set, seemed doomed to fail.

The hopes built upon it had largely contributed to the success of Henry's raid upon the English throne, and before he started on his quest he had solemnly promised to marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV, and heiress of the House of York. But he was resolute to avoid all appearance of ruling in her right; his title had been recognised by Parliament, and he had been five months de facto king before he wedded his Yorkist wife (18th January, 1486). Eight months and two days later, the Queen gave birth, in the priory of St. Swithin's, at Winchester, to her first-born son. Four days later, on Sunday, 24th September, the child was christened in the minster of the old West Saxon capital, and given in baptism the name of Arthur, the old British king. It was neither Yorkist nor Lancastrian, it evoked no bitter memories of civil strife, and it recalled the fact that the Tudors claimed a pedigree and boasted a title to British sovereignty, beside the antiquity of which Yorkist pretentions were a mushroom growth. Duke of Cornwall from his birth, Prince Arthur was, when three years old, created Prince of Wales. Already negotiations had been begun for his marriage with Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Both were cautious sovereigns, and many a rebellion had to be put down and many a pretender put away, before they would consent to entrust their daughter to the care of an English king. It was not till 2nd October, 1501, that Catherine landed at Plymouth. At her formal reception into England, and at her marriage, six weeks later, in St. Paul's, she was led by the hand of her little brother-in-law, Prince Henry, then ten years old. Against the advice of his council, Henry VII sent the youthful bride and bridegroom to live as man and wife at Ludlow Castle, and there, five and a half months later, their married life came to a sudden end. Prince Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502, and was buried in princely state in Worcester Cathedral.