In a country also the boast of which was its open-handed hospitality, it was necessary to take care that hospitality was not brought to discredit by abuse; and when every door was freely opened to a request for a meal or a night's lodging, there was an imperative duty to keep a strict eye on whatever persons were on the move. We shall therefore be prepared to find "sturdy and valiant beggars" treated with summary justice as criminals of a high order; the right of a government so to treat them being proportioned to the facilities with which the honestly disposed can maintain themselves.
It might have been expected, on the other hand, that when wages were so high, and work so constant, labourers would have been left to themselves to make provision against sickness and old age. To modern ways of thinking on these subjects, there would have seemed no hardship in so leaving them; and their sufferings, if they had suffered, would have appeared but as a deserved retribution. This, however, was not the temper of earlier times. Charity has ever been the especial virtue of Catholic States, and the aged and the impotent were always held to be the legitimate objects of it. Men who had worked hard while they were able to work were treated like decayed soldiers, as the discharged pensionaries of society; they were held entitled to wear out their age (under restrictions) at the expense of others; and so readily did society acquiesce in this aspect of its obligations, that on the failure of the monasteries to do their duty, it was still sufficient to leave such persons to voluntary liberality, and legislation had to interfere only to direct such liberality into its legitimate channels. In the 23rd of Edw. III. cap. 7, a prohibition was issued against giving alms to "valiant beggars," and this proving inadequate, and charity being still given indiscriminately, in the twelfth year of Richard II. the system of licences was introduced, and a pair of stocks was erected by order in every town or village, to "justify" persons begging unpermitted. The monasteries growing more and more careless, the number of paupers continued to multiply, and this method received successive expansions, till at length, when the Reformation was concluded, it terminated, after many changes of form, in the famous Act of Elizabeth. We can thus trace our poor law in the whole course of its growth, and into two stages through which it passed I must enter with some minuteness. The 12th of the 22nd of Henry VIII., and the 25th of the 27th, are so remarkable in their tone, and so rich in their detail, as to furnish a complete exposition of English thought at that time upon the subject; while the second of these two acts, and probably the first also, has a further interest for us, as being the composition of Henry himself, and the most finished which he has left to us.77
"Whereas," says the former of these two Acts, "in all places throughout this realm of England, vagabonds and beggars have of long time increased, and daily do increase in great and excessive numbers, by the occasion of idleness, mother and root of all vices; whereby hath insurged and sprung, and daily insurgeth and springeth, continual thefts, murders, and other heinous offences and great enormities, to the high displeasure of God, the inquietation and damage of the king's people, and to the marvellous disturbance of the common weal of this realm; and whereas, strait statutes and ordinances have been before this time devised and made, as well by the king our sovereign lord, as also by divers his most noble progenitors, kings of England, for the most necessary and due reformation of the premises; yet that notwithstanding, the said number of vagabonds and beggars be not seen in any part to be diminished, but rather daily augmented and increased into great routs or companies, as evidently and manifestly it doth and may appear: Be it therefore enacted by the king our sovereign lord, and by the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons, in this present parliament assembled, that the justices of the peace of all and singular the shires of England within the limits of their commission, and all other justices of the peace, mayors, sheriffs, bailiffs, and other officers of every city, borough, or franchise, shall from time to time, as often as need shall require, make diligent search and inquiry of all aged, poor, and impotent persons, which live, or of necessity be compelled to live by alms of the charity of the people; and such search made, the said officers, every of them within the limits of their authorities, shall have power, at their discretions, to enable to beg within such limits as they shall appoint, such of the said impotent persons as they shall think convenient; and to give in commandment to every such impotent beggar (by them enabled) that none of them shall beg without the limits so appointed to them. And further, they shall deliver to every such person so enabled a letter containing the name of that person, witnessing that he is authorised to beg, and the limits within which he is appointed to beg, the same letter to be sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, wapentake, city, or borough, and subscribed with the name of one of the said justices or officers aforesaid. And if any such impotent person do beg in any other place than within such limits, then the justices of the peace, and all other the king's officers and ministers, shall by their discretions punish all such persons by imprisonment in the stocks, by the space of two days and two nights, giving them only bread and water."
Further, "If any such impotent person be found begging without a licence, at the discretion of the justices of the peace, he shall be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped within the town in which he be found, or within some other town, as it shall seem good. Or if it be not convenient so to punish him, he shall be set in the stocks by the space of three days and three nights."
Such were the restrictions under which impotency was allowed support. Though not in itself treated as an offence, and though its right to maintenance by society was not denied, it was not indulged, as we may see, with unnecessary encouragement. The Act then proceeds to deal with the genuine vagrant.
"And be it further enacted, that if any person or persons, being whole and mighty in body and able to labour, be taken in begging in any part of this realm; and if any man or woman, being whole and mighty in body, having no land, nor master, nor using any lawful merchandry, craft, or mystery whereby he might get his living, be vagrant, and can give none account how he doth lawfully get his living, then it shall, be lawful to the constables and all other king's officers, ministers, and subjects of every town, parish, and hamlet, to arrest the said vagabonds and idle persons, and bring them to any justice of the peace of the same shire or liberty, or else to the high constable of the hundred; and the justice of the peace, high constable, or other officer, shall cause such idle person so to him brought, to be had to the next market town or other place, and there to be tied to the end of a cart, naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the same town till his body be bloody by reason of such whipping; and after such punishment of whipping had, the person so punished shall be enjoined upon his oath to return forthwith without delay, in the next and straight way, to the place where he was born, or where he last dwelled before the same punishment, by the space of three years; and then put himself to labour like a true man ought to do; and after that done, every such person so punished and ordered shall have a letter, sealed with the seal of the hundred, rape, or wapentake, witnessing that he hath been punished according to this estatute, and containing the day and place of his punishment, and the place where unto he is limited to go, and by what time he is limited to come thither: for that within that time, showing the said letter, he may lawfully beg by the way, and otherwise not; and if he do not accomplish the order to him appointed by the said letter, then to be eftsoons taken and whipped; and so often as there be fault found in him, to be whipped till he has his body put to labour for his living, or otherwise truly get his living, so long as he is able to do so."
Then follow the penalties against the justices of the peace, constables, and all officers who neglect to arrest such persons; and a singularly curious catalogue is added of certain forms of "sturdy mendicancy," which, if unspecified, might have been passed over as exempt, but to which Henry had no intention of conceding further licence. It seems as if, in framing the Act, he had Simon Fish's petition before him, and was commencing at last the rough remedy of the cart's-tail, which Fish had dared to recommend for a very obdurate evil.78 The friars of the mendicant orders were tolerated for a few years longer; but many other spiritual persons may have suffered seriously under the provisions of the present statute.
"Be it further enacted," the Act continues, "that scholars of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, that go about begging, not being authorised under the seal of the said universities, by the commissary, chancellor, or vice-chancellor of the same; and that all and singular shipmen pretending losses of their ships and goods, going about the country begging without sufficient authority, shall be punished and ordered in manner and form as is above rehearsed of strong beggars; and that all proctors and pardoners, and all other idle persons going about in counties or abiding in any town, city, or borough, some of them using divers subtle, crafty, and unlawful games and plays, and some of them feigning themselves to have knowledge in physick, physnamye, and palmistry, or other crafty science, whereby they bear the people in hand that they can tell their destinies, dreams, and fortunes, and such other like fantastical imaginations, to the great deceit of the king's subjects, shall, upon examination had before two justices of the peace, if by provable witness they be found guilty of such deceits, be punished by whipping at two days together, after the manner before rehearsed. And if they eftsoons offend in the same or any like offence, to be scourged two days, and the third day to be put upon the pillory, from nine o'clock till eleven the forenoon of the same day, and to have the right ear cut off; and if they offend the third time, to have like punishment with whipping and the pillory, and to have the other ear cut off."
It would scarcely have been expected that this Act would have failed for want of severity in its penalties; yet five years later, for this and for some other reasons, it was thought desirable to expand the provisions of it, enhancing the penalties at the same time to a degree which has given a bloody name in the history of English law to the statutes of Henry VIII. Of this expanded statute79 we have positive evidence, as I said, that Henry was himself the author. The merit of it, or the guilt of it—if guilt there be—originated with him alone. The early clauses contain practical amendments of an undoubtedly salutary kind. The Act of 1531 had been defective in that no specified means had been assigned for finding vagrants in labour, which, with men of broken character, was not immediately easy. The smaller monasteries having been suppressed in the interval, and sufficient funds being thus placed at the disposal of the government, public works80 were set on foot throughout the kingdom, and this difficulty was obviated.
Another important alteration was a restriction upon private charity. Private persons were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to give money to beggars, whether deserving or undeserving. The poor of each parish might call at houses within the boundaries for broken meats; but this was the limit of personal almsgiving; and the money which men might be disposed to offer was to be collected by the churchwardens on Sundays and holidays in the churches. The parish priest was to keep an account of receipts and of expenditure, and relief was administered with some approach to modern formalities. A further excellent but severe enactment empowered the parish officers to take up all idle children above the age of five years, "and appoint them to masters of husbandry or other craft or labour to be taught;" and if any child should refuse the service to which he was appointed, or run away "without cause reasonable being shown for it," he might be publicly whipped with rods, at the discretion of the justice of the peace before whom he was brought.
So far, no complaint can be urged against these provisions: they display only that severe but true humanity, which, in offering fair and liberal maintenance for all who will consent to be honest, insists, not unjustly, that its offer shall be accepted, and that the resources of charity shall not be trifled away. On the clause, however, which gave to the Act its especial and distinguishing character, there will be large difference of opinion. "The sturdy vagabond," who by the earlier statute was condemned on his second offence to lose the whole or a part of his right ear, was condemned by the amended Act, if found a third time offending, with the mark upon him of his mutilation, "to suffer pains and execution of death, as a felon and as an enemy of the commonwealth." So the letter stands. For an able-bodied man to be caught a third time begging was held a crime deserving death, and the sentence was intended, on fit occasions, to be executed. The poor man's advantages, which I have estimated at so high a rate, were not purchased without drawbacks. He might not change his master at his will, or wander from place to place. He might not keep his children at his home unless he could answer for their time. If out of employment, preferring to be idle, he might be demanded for work by any master of the "craft" to which he belonged, and compelled to work whether he would or no. If caught begging once, being neither aged nor infirm, he was whipped at the cart's tail. If caught a second time, his ear was slit, or bored through with a hot iron. If caught a third time, being thereby proved to be of no use upon this earth, but to live upon it only to his own hurt and to that of others, he suffered death as a felon. So the law of England remained for sixty years. First drawn by Henry, it continued unrepealed through the reigns of Edward and of Mary, subsisting, therefore, with the deliberate approval of both the great parties between whom the country was divided. Reconsidered under Elizabeth, the same law was again formally passed; and it was, therefore, the expressed conviction of the English nation, that it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless and worthless life. The vagabond was a sore spot upon the commonwealth, to be healed by wholesome discipline if the gangrene was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.81
A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy. The state of the country was critical; and the danger from questionable persons traversing it unexamined and uncontrolled was greater than at ordinary times. But in point of justice, as well as of prudence, it harmonised with the iron temper of the age, and it answered well for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in whose hearts lay an intense hatred of rascality, and among whom no one need have lapsed into evil courses except by deliberate preference for them. The moral substance of the English must have been strong indeed when it admitted of such hardy treatment; but on the whole, the people were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if wisdom may be tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes.
The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael Angelo; the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez; the Germans who shook off the pope at the call of Luther; and the splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met them as the English met them. The English alone never lost their self-possession; and if they owed something to fortune in their escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady purpose of their rulers.
To conclude this chapter then.
In the brief review of the system under which England was governed, we have seen a state of things in which the principles of political economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an attempt, more or less successful, was made to bring the production and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right and wrong; and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to regard as immutable ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has become too large, employment has become too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of external control; while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the one motive principle is certain to ensue, and when it ensues is absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called ordinances of nature in time of war consent to be suspended, and duty to his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of action than the advantages which he may gain in an enemy's market; so it is not uncheering to look back upon a time when the nation was in a normal condition of militancy against social injustice; when the government was enabled by happy circumstances to pursue into detail a single and serious aim at the well-being—well-being in its widest sense—of all members of the commonwealth. The world, indeed, was not made particularly pleasant. Of liberty, in the modern sense of the word, of the supposed right of every man "to do what he will with his own" or with himself, there was no idea. To the question, if ever it was asked, May I not do what I will with my own? there was the brief answer, No man may do what is wrong, either with that which is his own or with that which is another's. Workmen were not allowed to take advantage of the scantiness of the labour market to exact extravagant wages. Capitalists were not allowed to drive the labourers from their holdings, and destroy their healthy independence. The antagonism of interests was absorbed into a relation of which equity was something more than the theoretic principle, and employers and employed were alike amenable to a law which both were compelled to obey. The working man of modern times has bought the extension of his liberty at the price of his material comfort. The higher classes have gained in luxury what they have lost in power. It is not for the historian to balance advantages. His duty is with the facts.
Times were changed in England since the second Henry walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, and knelt while the monks flogged him on the pavement in the Chapter-house, doing penance for Becket's murder. The clergy had won the battle in the twelfth century because they deserved to win it. They were not free from fault and weakness, but they felt the meaning of their profession. Their hearts were in their vows, their authority was exercised more justly, more nobly, than the authority of the crown; and therefore, with inevitable justice, the crown was compelled to stoop before them. The victory was great; but, like many victories, it was fatal to the conquerors. It filled them full with the vanity of power; they forgot their duties in their privileges; and when, a century later, the conflict recommenced, the altering issue proved the altering nature of the conditions under which it was fought. The laity were sustained in vigour by the practical obligations of life; the clergy sunk under the influence of a waning religion, the administration of the forms of which had become their sole occupation; and as character forsook them, the Mortmain Act,82 the Acts of Premunire, and the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors mark the successive defeats that drove them back from the high post of command which character alone had earned for them. If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve. Its worst abuses would have then terminated, and the reformation of doctrine in the sixteenth century would have been left to fight its independent way unsupported by the moral corruption of the church from which it received its most powerful impetus. The nation was ready for sweeping remedies. The people felt little loyalty to the pope, as the language of the Statutes of Provisors83 conclusively proves, and they were prepared to risk the sacrilege of confiscating the estates of the religious houses—a complete measure of secularisation being then, as I have already said,84 the expressed desire of the House of Commons.85 With an Edward III. on the throne such a measure would very likely have been executed, and the course of English history would have been changed. It was ordered otherwise, and doubtless wisely. The church was allowed a hundred and fifty more years to fill full the measure of her offences, that she might fall only when time had laid bare the root of her degeneracy, and that faith and manners might be changed together.
The history of the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion. It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution effected by Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church's favour; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the church, determined to conciliate it. He confirmed the Statutes of Provisors,86 but he allowed them to sink into disuse. He forbade the further mooting of the confiscation project; and to him is due the first permission of the bishops to send heretics to the stake.87 If English tradition is to be trusted, the clergy still felt insecure; and the French wars of Henry V. are said to have been undertaken, as we all know from Shakspeare, at the persuasion of Archbishop Chichele, who desired to distract his attention from reverting to dangerous subjects. Whether this be true or not, no prince of the house of Lancaster betrayed a wish to renew the quarrel with the church. The battle of Agincourt, the conquest and re-conquest of France, called off the attention of the people; while the rise of the Lollards, and the intrusion of speculative questions, the agitation of which has ever been the chief aversion of English statesmen, contributed to change the current; and the reforming spirit must have lulled before the outbreak of the wars of the Roses, or one of the two parties in so desperate a struggle would have scarcely failed to have availed themselves of it. Edward IV. is said to have been lenient towards heresy; but his toleration, if it was more than imaginary, was tacit only; he never ventured to avow it. It is more likely that in the inveterate frenzy of those years men had no leisure to remember that heresy existed.
The clergy were thus left undisturbed to go their own course to its natural end. The storm had passed over them without breaking; and they did not dream that it would again gather. The immunity which they enjoyed from the general sufferings of the civil war contributed to deceive them; and without anxiety for the consequences, and forgetting the significant warning which they had received, they sank steadily into that condition which is inevitable from the constitution of human nature, among men without faith, wealthy, powerful, and luxuriously fed, yet condemned to celibacy, and cut off from the common duties and common pleasures of ordinary life. On the return of a settled government, they were startled for a moment in their security; the conduct of some among them had become so unbearable, that even Henry VII., who inherited the Lancastrian sympathies, was compelled to notice it; and the following brief act was passed by his first parliament, proving by the very terms in which it is couched the existing nature of church discipline. "For the more sure and likely reformation," it runs, "of priests, clerks, and religious men, culpable, or by their demerits openly noised of incontinent living in their bodies, contrary to their order, be it enacted, ordained, and established, that it be lawful to all archbishops and bishops, and other ordinaries having episcopal jurisdiction, to punish and chastise such religious men, being within the bounds of their jurisdiction, as shall be convict before them, by lawful proof, of adultery, fornication, incest, or other fleshly incontinency, by committing them to ward and prison, there to remain for such time as shall be thought convenient for the quality of their trespasses."88
Previous to the passing of this act, therefore, the bishops, who had power to arrest laymen on suspicion of heresy, and detain them in prison untried,89 had no power to imprison priests, even though convicted of adultery or incest. The legislature were supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cardinal Morton procured authority from the pope to visit the religious houses, the abominations of which had become notorious;90 and in a provincial synod held on the 24th of February, 1486, he laid the condition of the secular clergy before the assembled prelates. Many priests, it was stated, spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging at taverns, in the dissolute enjoyment of the world. They wore their hair long like laymen; they were to be seen lounging in the streets with cloak and doublet, sword and dagger. By the scandal of their lives they imperilled the stability of their order.91 A number of the worst offenders, in London especially, were summoned before the synod and admonished;92 certain of the more zealous among the learned (complures docti) who had preached against clerical abuses were advised to be more cautious, for the avoiding of scandal;93 but the archbishop, taking the duty upon himself, sent round a circular among the clergy of his province, exhorting them to general amendment.94
Yet this little cloud again disappeared. Henry VII. sat too insecurely on his throne to venture on a resolute reform, even if his feelings had inclined him towards it, which they did not. Morton durst not resolutely grapple with the evil. He rebuked and remonstrated; but punishment would have caused a public scandal. He would not invite the inspection of the laity into a disease which, without their assistance, he had not the strength to encounter; and his incipient reformation died away ineffectually in words. The church, to outward appearance, stood more securely than ever. The obnoxious statutes of the Plantagenets were in abeyance, their very existence, as it seemed, was forgotten; and Thomas à Becket never desired more absolute independence for the ecclesiastical order than Archbishop Warham found established when he succeeded to the primacy. He, too, ventured to repeat the experiment of his predecessor. In 1511 he attempted a second visitation of the monasteries, and again exhorted a reform; but his efforts were even slighter than Morton's, and in their results equally without fruit. The maintenance of his order in its political supremacy was of greater moment to him than its moral purity: a decent veil was cast over the clerical infirmities, and their vices were forgotten as soon as they ceased to be proclaimed.95 Henry VIII., a mere boy on his accession, was borne away with the prevailing stream; and trained from his childhood by theologians, he entered upon his reign saturated with theological prepossessions. The intensity of his nature recognising no half measures, he was prepared to make them the law of his life; and so zealous was he, that it seemed as if the church had found in him a new Alfred or a Charlemagne. Unfortunately for the church, institutions may be restored in theory; but theory, be it never so perfect, will not give them back their life; and Henry discovered, at length, that the church of the sixteenth century as little resembled the church of the eleventh, as Leo X. resembled Hildebrand, or Warham resembled St. Anselm.
If, however, there were no longer saints among the clergy, there could still arise among them a remarkable man; and in Cardinal Wolsey the king found an adviser who was able to retain him longer than would otherwise have been possible in the course which he had entered upon; who, holding a middle place between an English statesman and a catholic of the old order, was essentially a transition minister; and who was qualified, above all men then living, by a combination of talent, honesty, and arrogance, to open questions which could not again be closed when they had escaped the grasp of their originator. Under Wolsey's influence Henry made war with Louis of France, in the pope's quarrel, entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English protestants. But Wolsey could not blind himself to the true condition of the church. He was too wise to be deceived with outward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, in Europe and at home, the alternative of ruin or amendment; and therefore he familiarised Henry with the sense that a reformation was inevitable, and dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the church itself inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay.
His intended measures were approaching maturity, when all Europe was startled by the news that Rome had been stormed by the Imperial army, that the pope was imprisoned, the churches pillaged, the cardinals insulted, and all holiest things polluted and profaned. A spectator, judging only by outward symptoms, would have seen at that strange crisis in Charles V. the worst patron of heresy, and the most dangerous enemy of the Holy See; while the indignation with which the news of these outrages was received at the English court, would have taught him to look on Henry as the one sovereign in Europe on whom that See might calculate most surely for support in its hour of danger. If he could have pierced below the surface, he would have found that the pope's best friend was the prince who held him prisoner; that Henry was but doubtfully acquiescing in the policy of an unpopular minister; and that the English nation would have looked on with stoical resignation if pope and papacy had been wrecked together. They were not inclined to heresy; but the ecclesiastical system was not the catholic faith; and this system, ruined by prosperity, was fast pressing its excesses to the extreme limit, beyond which it could not be endured. Wolsey talked of reformation, but delayed its coming; and in the mean time, the persons to be reformed showed no fear that it would come at all. The monasteries grew worse and worse. The people were taught only what they could teach themselves. The consistory courts became more oppressive. Pluralities multiplied, and non-residence and profligacy. Favoured parish clergy held as many as eight benefices.96 Bishops accumulated sees, and, unable to attend to all, attended to none. Wolsey himself, the church reformer (so little did he really know what a reformation meant), was at once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, of Bath, and of Durham, and Abbot of St. Alban's. In Latimer's opinion, even twenty years later, and after no little reform in such matters, there was but one bishop in all England who was ever at his work and ever in his diocese. "I would ask a strange question," he said, in an audacious sermon at Paul's Cross, "Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing of his office?97 I can tell, for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the others, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. Among all the pack of them that have cure, the devil shall go for my money, for he applieth his business. Therefore, ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil to be diligent in your office. If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil."98
Under such circumstances, we need not be surprised to find the clergy sunk low in the respect of the English people. Sternly intolerant of each other's faults, the laity were not likely to be indulgent to the vices of men who ought to have set an example of purity; and from time to time, during the first quarter of the century, there were explosions of temper which might have served as a warning if any sense or judgment had been left to profit by it.
In 1514 a London merchant was committed to the Lollards' Tower for refusing to submit to an unjust exaction of mortuary;99 and a few days after was found dead in his cell. An inquest was held upon the body, when a verdict of wilful murder was returned against the chancellor of the Bishop of London; and so intense was the feeling of the city, that the bishop applied to Wolsey for a special jury to be chosen on the trial. "For assured I am," he said, "that if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favorem hæreticæ pravitatis, that they will cast and condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel."100 Fish's famous pamphlet also shows the spirit which was seething; and though we may make some allowance for angry rhetoric, his words have the clear ring of honesty in them; and he spoke of what he had seen and knew. The monks, he tells the king, "be they that have made a hundred thousand idle dissolute women in your realm, who would have gotten their living honestly in the sweat of their faces had not their superfluous riches allured them to lust and idleness. These be they that when they have drawn men's wives to such incontinency, spend away their husbands' goods, make the women to run away from their husbands, bringing both man, wife, and children to idleness, theft, and beggary. Yea, who is able to number the great broad bottomless ocean sea full of evils that this mischievous generation may bring upon us if unpunished?"101
Copies of this book were strewed about the London streets; Wolsey issued a prohibition against it, with the effect which such prohibitions usually have. Means were found to bring it under the eyes of Henry himself; and the manner in which it was received by him is full of significance, and betrays that the facts of the age were already telling on his understanding. He was always easy of access and easy of manner; and the story, although it rests on Foxe's authority, has internal marks of authenticity.
"One Master Edmund Moddis, being with the king in talk of religion, and of the new books that were come from beyond the seas, said that if it might please his Highness to pardon him, and such as he would bring to his Grace, he should see such a book as it was a marvel to hear of. The king demanded who they were? He said 'Two of your merchants—George Elliot and George Robinson.' The king appointed a time to speak with them. When they came before his presence in a privy closet, he demanded what they had to say or to shew him. One of them said that there was a book come to their hands which they had there to shew his Grace. When he saw it he demanded if any of them could read it. 'Yea,' said George Elliot, 'if it please your Grace to hear it.' 'I thought so,' said the king; 'if need were, thou couldst say it without book.'
"The whole book being read out, the king made a long pause, and then said, 'If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and should begin at the lower part, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon his head.' Then he took the book, and put it in his desk, and commanded them, on their allegiance, that they should not tell any man that he had seen it."102
Symptoms such as these boded ill for a self-reform of the church, and it was further imperilled by the difficulty which it is not easy to believe that Wolsey had forgotten. No measures would be of efficacy which spared the religious houses, and they would be equally useless unless the bishops, as well as the inferior clergy, were comprehended in the scheme of amendment. But neither with monks nor bishops could Wolsey interfere except by a commission from the pope, and the laws were unrepealed which forbade English subjects, under the severest penalties, to accept or exercise within the realm an authority which they had received from the Holy See. Morton had gone beyond the limits of the statute of provisors in receiving powers from Pope Innocent to visit the monasteries. But Morton had stopped short with inquiry and admonition. Wolsey, who was in earnest with the work, had desired and obtained a full commission as legate, but he could only make use of it at his peril. The statute slumbered, but it still existed.103 He was exposing not himself only, but all persons, lay and clerical, who might recognise his legacy to a Premunire; and he knew well that Henry's connivance, or even expressed permission, could not avail him if his conduct was challenged. He could not venture to appeal to parliament. Parliament was the last authority whose jurisdiction a churchman would acknowledge in the concerns of the clergy; and his project must sooner or later have sunk, like those of his two predecessors, under its own internal difficulties, even if the accident had not arisen which brought the dispute to a special issue in its most vital point, and which, fostered by Wolsey for his own purposes, precipitated his ruin.
It is never more difficult to judge equitably the actions of public men than when private as well as general motives have been allowed to influence them, or when their actions may admit of being represented as resulting from personal inclination, as well as from national policy. In life, as we actually experience it, motives slide one into the other, and the most careful analysis will fail adequately to sift them. In history, from the effort to make our conceptions distinct, we pronounce upon these intricate matters with unhesitating certainty, and we lose sight of truth in the desire to make it truer than itself. The difficulty is further complicated by the different points of view which are chosen by contemporaries and by posterity. Where motives are mixed, men all naturally dwell most on those which approach nearest to themselves: contemporaries whose interests are at stake overlook what is personal in consideration of what is to them of broader moment; posterity, unable to realise political embarrassments which have ceased to concern them, concentrate their attention on such features of the story as touch their own sympathies, and attend exclusively to the private and personal passions of the men and women whose character they are considering.
These natural, and to some extent inevitable tendencies, explain the difference with which the divorce between Henry VIII. and Catherine of Arragon has been regarded by the English nation in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. In the former, not only did the parliament profess to desire it, urge it, and further it, but we are told by a contemporary104 that "all indifferent and discreet persons" judged that it was right and necessary. In the latter, perhaps, there is not one of ourselves who has not been taught to look upon it as an act of enormous wickedness. In the sixteenth century, Queen Catherine was an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom, an incentive to treasonable hopes. In the nineteenth, she is an outraged and injured wife, the victim of a false husband's fickle appetite. The story is a long and painful one, and on its personal side need not concern us here further than as it illustrates the private character of Henry. Into the public bearing of it I must enter at some length, in order to explain the interest with which the nation threw itself into the question, and to remove the scandal with which, had nothing been at stake beyond the inclinations of a profligate monarch, weary of his queen, the complaisance on such a subject of the lords and commons of England would have coloured the entire complexion of the Reformation.
The succession to the throne, although determined in theory by the ordinary law of primogeniture, was nevertheless, subject to repeated arbitrary changes. The uncertainty of the rule was acknowledged and deplored by the parliament,105 and there was no order of which the nation, with any unity of sentiment, compelled the observance. An opinion prevailed—not, I believe, traceable to statute, but admitted by custom, and having the force of statute in the prejudices of the nation—that no stranger born out of the realm could inherit.106 Although the descent in the female line was not formally denied, no female sovereign had ever, in fact, sat upon the throne.107 Even Henry VII. refused to strengthen his title by advancing the claims of his wife: and the uncertainty of the laws of marriage, and the innumerable refinements of the Romish canon law, which affected the legitimacy of children,108 furnished, in connection with the further ambiguities of clerical dispensations, perpetual pretexts, whenever pretexts were needed, for a breach of allegiance. So long, indeed, as the character of the nation remained essentially military, it could as little tolerate an incapable king as an army in a dangerous campaign can bear with an inefficient commander; and whatever might be the theory of the title, when the sceptre was held by the infirm hand of an Edward II., a Richard II., or a Henry VI., the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a statute,109 as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.110 So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced its character in blood in the private records of every English family, having been the long struggle of the preceding century, from which the nation was still suffering, and had but recovered sufficiently to be conscious of what it had endured. It had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle and led to no result, and perhaps the history of the world may be searched in vain for any parallel to a quarrel at once so desperate and so unmeaning.
This very unmeaning character of the dispute increased the difficulty of ending it. In wars of conquest or of principle, when something definite is at stake, the victory is either won, or it is lost; the conduct of individual men, at all events, is overruled by considerations external to themselves which admit of being weighed and calculated. In a war of succession, where the great families were divided in their allegiance, and supported the rival claimants in evenly balanced numbers, the inveteracy of the conflict increased with its duration, and propagated itself from generation to generation. Every family was in blood feud with its neighbour; and children, as they grew to manhood, inherited the duty of revenging their fathers' deaths.
No effort of imagination can reproduce to us the state of this country in the fatal years which intervened between the first rising of the Duke of York and the battle of Bosworth; and experience too truly convinced Henry VII. that the war had ceased only from general exhaustion, and not because there was no will to continue it. The first Tudor breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection, and only when we remember the probable effect upon his mind of the constant dread of an explosion, can we excuse or understand, in a prince not generally cruel, the execution of the Earl of Warwick. The danger of a bloody revolution may present an act of arbitrary or cowardly tyranny in the light of a public duty.
Fifty years of settled government, however, had not been without their effects. The country had collected itself; the feuds of the families had been chastened, if they had not been subdued; while the increase of wealth and material prosperity had brought out into obvious prominence those advantages of peace which a hot-spirited people, antecedent to experience, had not anticipated, and had not been able to appreciate. They were better fed, better cared for, more justly governed than they had ever been before; and though abundance of unruly tempers remained, yet the wiser portion of the nation, looking back from their new vantage-ground, were able to recognise the past in its true hatefulness. Thenceforward a war of succession was the predominating terror with English statesmen, and the safe establishment of the reigning family bore a degree of importance which it is possible that their fears exaggerated, yet which in fact was the determining principle of their action.
It was therefore with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth, as if his family were under a blight. When the queen had advanced to an age which precluded hope of further offspring, and the heir presumptive was an infirm girl, the unpromising prospect became yet more alarming. The life of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood. If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to insurrection; if she did not live, and the king had no other children, a civil war was inevitable. At present such a difficulty would be disposed of by an immediate and simple reference to the collateral branches of the royal family; the crown would descend with even more facility than the property of an intestate to the next of kin. At that time, if the rule had been recognised, it would only have increased the difficulty, for the next heir in blood was James of Scotland; and, gravely as statesmen desired the union of the two countries, in the existing mood of the people, the very stones in London streets, it was said,111 would rise up against a king of Scotland who claimed to enter England as sovereign. Even the parliament itself declared in formal language that they would resist any attempt on the part of the Scottish king "to the uttermost of their power."112
As little, however, as the English would have admitted James's claims, would James himself have acknowledged their right to reject them. He would have pleaded the sacred right of inheritance, refusing utterly the imaginary law which disentitled him: he would have pressed his title with all Scotland to back him, and probably with the open support of France. Centuries of humiliation remained unrevenged, which both France and Scotland had endured at English hands. It was not likely that they would waste an opportunity thrust upon them by Providence. The country might, it is true, have encountered this danger, serious as it would have been, if there had been hope that it would itself have agreed to any other choice. England had many times fought successfully against the same odds, and would have cared little for a renewal of the struggle, if united in itself: but the prospect on this side, also, was fatally discouraging. The elements of the old factions were dormant, but still smouldering. Throughout Henry's reign a White Rose agitation had been secretly fermenting; without open success, and without chance of success so long as Henry lived, but formidable in a high degree if opportunity to strike should offer itself. Richard de la Pole, the representative of this party, had been killed at Pavia, but his loss had rather strengthened their cause than weakened it, for by his long exile he was unknown in England; his personal character was without energy; while he made place for the leadership of a far more powerful spirit in the sister of the murdered Earl of Warwick, the Countess of Salisbury, mother of Reginald Pole. This lady had inherited, in no common degree, the fierce nature of the Plantagenets; born to command, she had rallied round her the Courtenays, the Nevilles, and all the powerful kindred of Richard the King Maker, her grandfather. Her Plantagenet descent was purer than the king's; and if Mary died and Henry left no other issue, half England was likely to declare either for one of her sons, or for the Marquis of Exeter, the grandson of Edward IV.
In 1515, when Giustiniani,113 the Venetian ambassador, was at the court, the Dukes of Buckingham, of Suffolk, and of Norfolk, were also mentioned to him as having each of them hopes of the crown. Buckingham, meddling prematurely in the dangerous game, had lost his life for it; but in his death he had strengthened the chance of Norfolk, who had married his daughter. Suffolk was Henry's brother-in-law;114 chivalrous, popular, and the ablest soldier of his day; and Lady Margaret Lennox, also, daughter of the Queen of Scotland by her second marriage, would not have wanted supporters, and early became an object of intrigue. Indeed, as she had been born in England, it was held in parliament that she stood next in order to the Princess Mary.115
Many of these claims were likely to be advanced if Henry died leaving a daughter to succeed him. They would all inevitably be advanced if he died childless; and no great political sagacity was required to foresee the probable fate of the country if such a moment was chosen for a French and Scottish invasion. The very worst disasters might be too surely looked for, and the hope of escape, precarious at the best, hung upon the frail thread of a single life. We may therefore imagine the dismay with which the nation saw this last hope failing them—and failing them even in a manner more dangerous than if it had failed by death; for it did but add another doubt, when already there were too many. In order to detach France from Scotland, and secure, if possible, its support for the claims of the princess, it had been proposed to marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king. The negotiations were conducted through the Bishop of Tarbês,116 and at the first conference the Bishop raised a question in the name of his government, on the validity of the papal dispensation granted by Julius the Second, to legalise the marriage from which she was sprung. The abortive marriage Scheme perished in its birth, but the doubt which had been raised could not perish with it. Doubt on such a subject once mooted might not be left unresolved, even if the raising it thus publicly had not itself destroyed the frail chance of an undisputed succession. If the relations of Henry with Queen Catherine had been of a cordial kind, it is possible that he would have been contented with resentment; that he would have refused to reconsider a question which touched his honour and his conscience; and, united with parliament, would have endeavoured to bear down all difficulties with a high hand. This at least he might have himself attempted. Whether the parliament, with so precarious a future before them, would have consented, is less easy to say. Fortunately or unfortunately, the interests of the nation pointed out another road, which Henry had no unwillingness to enter.
On the death of Prince Arthur, five months after his marriage, Henry VII. and the father of the Princess alike desired that the bond between their families thus broken should be re-united; and, as soon as it became clear that Catherine had not been left pregnant (a point which, tacitly at least, she allowed to be considered uncertain at the time of her husband's decease), it was proposed that she should be transferred, with the inheritance of the crown, to the new heir. A dispensation was reluctantly granted by the pope,117 and reluctantly accepted by the English ministry. The Prince of Wales, who was no more than twelve years old at the time, was under the age at which he could legally sue for such an object; and a portion of the English council, the Archbishop of Canterbury among them, were unsatisfied,118 both with the marriage itself, and with the adequacy of the forms observed in a matter of so dubious an import. The betrothal took place at the urgency of Ferdinand. In the year following Henry VII. became suddenly ill; Queen Elizabeth died; and superstition working on the previous hesitation, misfortune was construed into an indication of the displeasure of Heaven. The intention was renounced, and the prince, as soon as he had completed his fourteenth year, was invited and required to disown, by a formal act, the obligations contracted in his name.119 Again there was a change. The king lived on, the alarm yielded to the temptations of covetousness. Had he restored Catherine to her father he must have restored with her the portion of her dowry which had been already received; he must have relinquished the prospect of the moiety which had yet to be received. The negotiation was renewed. Henry VII. lived to sign the receipts for the first instalment of the second payment;120 and on his death, notwithstanding much general murmuring,121 the young Henry, then a boy of eighteen, proceeded to carry out his father's ultimate intentions. The princess-dowager, notwithstanding what had passed, was still on her side willing;—and the difference of age (she was six years older than Henry) seeming of little moment when both were comparatively young, they were married. For many years all went well; opposition was silenced by the success which seemed to have followed, and the original scruples were forgotten. Though the marriage was dictated by political convenience, Henry was faithful, with but one exception, to his wife's bed—no slight honour to him, if he is measured by the average royal standard in such matters; and, if his sons had lived to grow up around his throne, there is no reason to believe that the peace of his married life would have been interrupted, or that, whatever might have been his private feelings, he would have appeared in the world's eye other than acquiescent in his condition.