THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY
BIOHISTORY
|
|
THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY BIOHISTORY |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
HENRY VIII BY
A.F. POLLARD
II.Prince Henry and His Environment
III.The Apprenticeship of Henry VIII.
XII."The Prevailing of the Gates of Hell"
PREFACE.
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. Courts of law are still debating the
intention of statutes, the tenor of which he dictated; and the moral,
political, and religious, are as much in dispute as the legal, results of his
reign. He is still the Great Erastian, the
protagonist of laity against clergy. His policy is inextricably interwoven with
the high and eternal dilemma of Church and State; and it is well-nigh
impossible for one who feels keenly on these questions to treat the reign of
Henry VIII in a reasonably judicial spirit. No period illustrates more vividly
the contradiction between morals and politics. In our desire to reprobate the
immorality of Henry's methods, we are led to deny their success; or, in our
appreciation of the greatness of the ends he achieved, we seek to excuse the
means he took to achieve them. As with his policy, so with his character. There
was nothing commonplace about him; his good and his bad qualities alike were
exceptional. It is easy, by suppressing the one or the other, to paint him a
hero or a villain. He lends himself readily to polemic; but to depict his
character in all its varied aspects, extenuating nothing nor setting down aught
in malice, is a task of no little difficulty. It is two centuries and a half
since Lord Herbert produced his Life and Reign of Henry VIII. The late Mr.
Brewer, in his prefaces to the first four volumes of the Letters and Papers of
the Reign of Henry VIII, published under the direction of the Master of the
Rolls, dealt adequately with the earlier portion of Henry's career. But Mr.
Brewer died when his work reached the year 1530; his successor, Dr. James Gairdner, was directed to confine his prefaces to the later
volumes within the narrowest possible limits; and students of history were deprived
of the prospect of a satisfactory account of Henry's later years from a writer
of unrivalled learning.
Henry's reign, from 1530
onwards, has been described by the late Mr. Froude in one of the most brilliant
and fascinating masterpieces of historical literature, a work which still holds
the field in popular, if not in scholarly, estimation. But Mr. Froude does not
begin until Henry's reign was half over, until his character had been
determined by influences and events which lie outside the scope of Mr. Froude's
inquiry. Moreover, since Mr. Froude wrote, a flood of light has been thrown on
the period by the publication of the above-mentioned Letters and Papers; they
already comprise a summary of between thirty and forty thousand documents in
twenty thousand closely printed pages, and, when completed, will constitute the
most magnificent body of materials for the history of any reign, ancient or
modern, English or foreign. Simultaneously there have appeared a dozen volumes
containing the State papers preserved at Simancas,
Vienna and Brussels and similar series comprising the correspondence relating
to Venice, Scotland and Ireland; while the dispatches of French ambassadors
have been published under the auspices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at
Paris. Still further information has been provided by the labors of the
Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Camden, the Royal Historical, and other
learned Societies.
These sources probably
contain at least a million definite facts relating to the reign of Henry VIII;
and it is obvious that the task of selection has become heavy as well as
invidious. Mr. Froude has expressed his concurrence in the dictum that the
facts of history are like the letters of the alphabet; by selection and
arrangement they can be made to spell anything, and nothing can be arranged so
easily as facts. Experto crede. Yet
selection is inevitable, and arrangement essential. The historian has no option
if he wishes to be intelligible. He will naturally arrange his facts so that
they spell what he believes to be the truth; and he must of necessity suppress
those facts which he judges to be immaterial or inconsistent with the scale on
which he is writing. But if the superabundance of facts compels both selection
and suppression, it counsels no less a restraint of judgment. A case in a court
of law is not simplified by a cloud of witnesses; and the new wealth of
contemporary evidence does not solve the problems of Henry's reign. It
elucidates some points hitherto obscure, but it raises a host of others never
before suggested. In ancient history we often accept statements written
hundreds of years after the event, simply because we know no better; in modern
history we frequently have half a dozen witnesses giving inconsistent accounts
of what they have seen with their own eyes. Dogmatism is merely the result of
ignorance; and no honest historian will pretend to have mastered all the facts,
accurately weighed all the evidence, or pronounced a final judgment.
The present volume does not
profess to do more than roughly sketch Henry VIII's more prominent
characteristics, outline the chief features of his policy, and suggest some
reasons for the measure of success he attained. Episodes such as the divorce of
Catherine of Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the determination
of the relations between Church and State, would severally demand for adequate
treatment works of much greater bulk than the present.On the divorce valuable light has recently been thrown by Dr. Stephan Ehses in his Römische Dokumente. The dissolution of the monasteries has been
exhaustively treated from one point of view by Dr. Gasquet;
but an adequate and impartial history of what is called the Reformation still
remains to be written. Here it is possible to deal with these questions only in
the briefest outline, and in so far as they were affected by Henry's personal
action. For my facts I have relied entirely on contemporary records, and my
deductions from these facts are my own. I have depended as little as possible
even on contemporary historians, and scarcely at all on later writers. I have,
however, made frequent use of Dr. Gairdner's articles
in the Dictionary of National Biography, particularly of that on Henry VIII,
the best summary extant of his career; and I owe not a little to Bishop
Stubbs's two lectures on Henry VIII, which contain some fruitful suggestions as
to his character.
A.F.
POLLARD.
Putney,
11th January, 1905.
|
|||
|
|
||