The explanation of the queen's conduct lies probably in regions into which it is neither easy nor well to penetrate; in regions of outraged delicacy and wounded pride, in a vast drama of passion which had been enacted behind the scenes. From the significant hints which are let fall of the original cause of the estrangement, it was of a kind more difficult to endure than the ordinary trial of married women, the transfer of a husband's affection to some fairer face; and a wife whom so painful a misfortune had failed to crush would be likely to have been moved by it to a deeper and more bitter indignation even, because while she could not blame herself, she knew not whom she might rightly allow herself to blame. And if this were so, the king is not likely to have allayed the storm when at length, putting faith in Wolsey's promises, he allowed himself openly to regard another person as his future wife, establishing her in the palace at Greenwich under the same roof with the queen, with reception rooms, and royal state, and a position openly acknowledged,¹⁵⁹ the gay court and courtiers forsaking the gloomy dignity of the actual wife for the gaudy splendour of her brilliant rival. Tamer blood than that which flowed in the veins of a princess of Castile would have boiled under these indignities; and we have little reason to be surprised if policy and prudence were alike forgotten by Catherine in the bitterness of the draught which was forced upon her, and if her own personal wrongs outweighed the interests of the world. Henry had proceeded to the last unjustifiable extremity as soon as the character of Campeggio's mission had been made clear to him, as if to demonstrate to all the world that he was determined to persevere at all costs and hazards.¹⁶⁰ Taking the management of the negotiation into his own keeping, he sent Sir Francis Bryan, the cousin of Anne Boleyn, to the pope, to announce that what he required must be done, and to declare peremptorily, no more with covert hints, but with open menace, that in default of help from Rome, he would lay the matter before parliament, to be settled at home by the laws of his own country.

Meanwhile, the emperor, who had hitherto conducted himself with the greatest address, had fallen into his first error. He had retreated skilfully out of the embarrassment in which the pope's imprisonment involved him, and mingling authority and dictation with kindness and deference, he had won over the Holy See to his devotion, and neutralised the danger to which the alliance of France and England threatened to expose him. His correspondence with the latter country assured him of the unpopularity of the course which had been pursued by the cardinal; he was aware of the obstruction of trade which it had caused, and of the general displeasure felt by the people at the breach of an old friendship; while the league with France in behalf of the Roman church had been barren of results, and was made ridiculous by the obvious preference of the pope for the enemy from whom it was formed to deliver him. If Charles had understood the English temper, therefore, and had known how to avail himself of the opportunity, events might have run in a very different channel. But he was not aware of the earnestness with which the people were bent upon securing the succession, nor of their loyal attachment to Henry. He supposed that disapproval of the course followed by Wolsey to obtain the divorce implied an aversion to it altogether; and trusting to his interest in the privy council, and to his commercial connection with the city, he had attempted to meet menace with menace; he had replied to the language addressed by Henry to the pope with an attempt to feel the pulse of English disaffection, and he opened a correspondence with the Earl of Desmond for an Irish revolt.¹⁶¹

The opportunity for a movement of this kind had not yet arrived. There was, in England at least, as yet no wide disaffection; but there was a chance of serious outbreaks; and Henry instantly threw himself upon the nation. He summoned the peers by circular to London, and calling a general meeting, composed of the nobility, the privy council, the lord mayor, and the great merchants of the city, he laid before them a specific detail of his objects in desiring the divorce;¹⁶² and informed them of the nature of the measures which had been taken.¹⁶³ This, the French ambassador informs us, gave wide satisfaction and served much to allay the disquiet; but so great was the indignation against Wolsey, that disturbances in London were every day anticipated; and at one time the danger appeared so threatening, that an order of council was issued, commanding all strangers to leave the city, and a general search was instituted for arms.¹⁶⁴ The strangers aimed at were the Flemings, whose numbers made them formidable, and who were, perhaps, supposed to be ready to act under instruction from abroad. The cloud, however, cleared away; the order was not enforced; and the propitious moment for treason had not yet arrived. The emperor had felt so confident that, in the autumn of 1528, he had boasted that, "before the winter was over, he would fling Henry from his throne by the hands of his own Subjects." The words had been repeated to Wolsey, who mentioned them openly at his table before more than a hundred gentlemen. A person present exclaimed, "That speech has lost the emperor more than a hundred thousand hearts among us;"¹⁶⁵ an expression which reveals at once the strength and the weakness of the imperial party. England might have its own opinions of the policy of the government, but it was in no humour to tolerate treason, and the first hint of revolt was followed by an instant recoil. The discovery of more successful intrigues in Scotland and Ireland completed the destruction of Charles's influence;¹⁶⁶ and the result of these ill-judged and premature efforts was merely to unite the nation in their determination to prosecute the divorce.

Thus were the various parties in the vast struggle which was about to commence gravitating into their places; and mistake combined with policy to place them in their true positions. Wolsey, in submitting "the king's matter" to the pope, had brought to issue the question whether the papal authority should be any longer recognised in England; and he had secured the ruin of that authority by the steps through which he hoped to establish it; while Charles, by his unwise endeavours to foment a rebellion, severed with his own hand the links of a friendship which would have been seriously embarrassing if it had continued. By him, also, was dealt the concluding stroke in this first act of the drama; and though we may grant him credit for the ingenuity of his contrivance, he can claim it only at the expense of his probity. The pope, when the commission was appointed for the trial of the cause in England, had given a promise in writing that the commission should not be revoked. It seemed, therefore, that the legates would be compelled, in spite of themselves, to pronounce sentence; and that the settlement of the question, in one form or other, could not long be delayed. At the pressure of the crisis in the winter of 1528-9, a document was produced alleged to have been found in Spain, which furnished a pretext for a recall of the engagement, and opening now questions, indefinite and inexhaustible, rendered the passing of a sentence in England impossible. Unhappily, the weight of the king's claim (however it had been rested on its true merits in conversation and in letters) had, by the perverse ingenuity of the lawyers, been laid on certain informalities and defects in the original bull of dispensation, which had been granted by Julius II. for the marriage of Henry and Catherine. At the moment when the legates' court was about to be opened, a copy of a brief was brought forward, bearing the same date as the bull, exactly meeting the objection. The authenticity of this brief was open, on its own merits, to grave doubt; and suspicion becomes certainty when we find it was dropped out of the controversy so soon as the immediate object was gained for which it was produced. But the legates' hands were instantly tied by it. The "previous question" of authenticity had necessarily to be tried before they could take another step; and the "original" of the brief being in the hands of the emperor, who refused to send it into England, but offered to send it to Rome, the cause was virtually transferred to Rome, where Henry, as he knew, was unlikely to consent to plead, or where he could himself rule the decision. He had made a stroke of political finesse, which answered not only the purpose that he immediately intended, but answered, also, the purpose that he did not intend—of dealing the hardest blow which it had yet received to the supremacy of the Holy See.

The spring of 1529 was wasted in fruitless efforts to obtain the brief. At length, in May, the proceedings were commenced; but they were commenced only in form, and were never more than an illusion. Catherine had been instructed in the course which she was to pursue. She appealed from the judgment of the legates to that of the pope; and the pope, with the plea of the new feature which had arisen in the case, declared that he could not refuse to revoke his promise. Having consented to the production of the brief, he had in fact no alternative; nor does it appear what he could have urged in excuse of himself. He may have suspected the forgery; nay, it is certain that in England he was believed to be privy to it; but he could not ignore an important feature of necessary evidence, especially when pressed upon him by the emperor; and it was in fact no more than an absurdity to admit the authority of a papal commission, and to refuse to permit an appeal from it to the pope in person. We may thank Clement for dispelling a chimera by a simple act of consistency. The power of the See of Rome in England was a constitutional fiction, acknowledged only on condition that it would consent to be inert. So long as a legate's court sat in London, men were able to conceal from themselves the fact of a foreign jurisdiction, and to feel that, substantially, their national independence was respected; when the fiction aspired to become a reality, but one consequence was possible. If Henry himself would have stooped to plead at a foreign tribunal, the spirit of the nation would not have permitted him to inflict so great a dishonour on the free majesty of England.

So fell Wolsey's great scheme, and with it fell the last real chance of maintaining the pope's authority in England under any form. The people were smarting under the long humiliation of the delay, and ill-endured to see the interests of England submitted, as they virtually were, to the arbitration of a foreign prince. The emperor, not the pope, was the true judge who sat to decide the quarrel; and their angry jealousy refused to tolerate longer a national dishonour.

"The great men of the realm," wrote the legates, "are storming in bitter wrath at our procrastination. Lords and commons alike complain that they are made to expect at the hands of strangers things of vital moment to themselves and their fortunes. And many persons here who would desire to see the pope's authority in this country diminished or annulled, are speaking in language which we cannot repeat without horror."¹⁶⁷

And when, being in such a mood, they were mocked, after two weary years of negotiation, by the opening of a fresh vista of difficulties, when they were informed that the further hearing of the cause was transferred to Italy, even Wolsey, with certain ruin before him, rose in protest before such a dream of shame. He was no more the Roman legate, but the English minister.

"If the advocation be passed," he wrote to Cassalis,¹⁶⁸ "or shall now at any time hereafter pass, with citation of the king in person, or by proctor, to the court of Rome, or with any clause of interdiction or excommunication, vel cum invocatione brachii sæcularis, whereby the king should be precluded from taking his advantage otherwise, the dignity and prerogative royal of the king's crown, whereunto all the nobles and subjects of this realm will adhere and stick unto the death, may not tolerate nor suffer that the same be obeyed. And to say the truth, in so doing the pope should not only show himself the king's enemy, but also as much as in him is, provoke all other princes and people to be the semblable. Nor shall it ever be seen that the king's cause shall be ventilated or decided in any place out of his own realm; but that if his Grace should come at any time to the Court of Rome, he would do the same with such a main and army royal as should be formidable to the pope and all Italy."¹⁶⁹

Wolsey, however, failed in his protest; the advocation was passed, Campeggio left England, and he was lost. A crisis had arrived, and a revolution of policy was inevitable. From the accession of Henry VII., the country had been governed by a succession of ecclesiastical ministers, who being priests as well as statesmen, were essentially conservative; and whose efforts in a position of constantly increasing difficulty had been directed towards resisting the changing tendencies of the age, and either evading a reformation of the church while they admitted its necessity, or retaining the conduct of it in their own hands, while they were giving evidence of their inability to accomplish the work. It was now over; the ablest representative of this party, in a last desperate effort to retain power, had decisively failed. Writs were issued for a parliament when the legate's departure was determined, and the consequences were inevitable. Wolsey had known too well the unpopularity of his foreign policy, to venture on calling a parliament himself. He relied on success as an ultimate justification; and inasmuch as success had not followed, he was obliged to bear the necessary fate of a minister who, in a free country, had thwarted the popular will and whom fortune deserted in the struggle. The barriers which his single hand had upheld suddenly gave way, the torrent had free course, and he himself was the first to be swept away. In modern language, we should describe what took place as a change of ministry, the government being transferred to an opposition, who had been irritated by long depression under the hands of men whom they despised, and who were borne into power by an irresistible force in a moment of excitement and danger. The king, who had been persuaded against his better judgment to accept Wolsey's schemes, admitted the rising spirit without reluctance, contented to moderate its action, but no longer obstructing or permitting it to be obstructed. Like all great English statesmen, he was constitutionally conservative, but he had the tact to perceive the conditions under which, in critical times, conservatism is possible; and although he continued to endure for himself the trifling of the papacy, he would not, for the sake of the pope's interest, delay further the investigation of the complaints of the people against the church; while in the future prosecution of his own cause, he resolved to take no steps except with the consent of the legislature, and in a question of national moment, to consult only the nation's wishes.

The new ministry held a middle place between the moving party in the commons and the expelled ecclesiastics, the principal members of it being the chief representatives of the old aristocracy, who had been Wolsey's fiercest opponents, but who were disinclined by constitution and sympathy from sweeping measures. An attempt was made, indeed, to conciliate the more old-fashioned of the churchmen, by an offer of the seals to Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, probably because he originally opposed the marriage between the king and his sister-in-law, and because it was hoped that his objections remained unaltered. Warham, however, as we shall see, had changed his mind: he declined, on the plea of age, and the office of chancellor was given to Sir Thomas More, perhaps the person least disaffected to the clergy who could have been found among the leading laymen. The substance of power was vested in the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the great soldier-nobles of the age, and Sir William Fitz-William, lord admiral; to all of whom the ecclesiastical domination had been most intolerable, while they had each of them brilliantly distinguished themselves in the wars with France and Scotland. According to the French ambassador, we must add one more minister, supreme, if we may trust him, above them all. "The Duke of Norfolk," he writes, "is made president of the council, the Duke of Suffolk vice-president, and above them both is Mistress Anne;"¹⁷⁰ this last addition to the council being one which boded little good to the interests of the See that had so long detained her in expectation. So confident were the destructive party of the temper of the approaching parliament, and of the irresistible pressure of the times, that the general burden of conversation of the dinner-tables in the great houses in London was an exulting expectation of a dissolution of the church establishment, and a confiscation of ecclesiastical property; the king himself being the only obstacle which was feared by them. "These noble lords imagine," continues the same writer, "that the cardinal once dead of ruined, they will incontinently plunder the church, and strip it of all its wealth," adding that there was no occasion for him to write this in cipher, for it was everywhere openly spoken of.¹⁷¹

Movements, nevertheless, which are pregnant with vital change, are slow in assuming their essential direction, even after the stir has commenced. Circumstances do not immediately open themselves; the point of vision alters gradually; and fragments of old opinions, and prepossessions, and prejudices remain interfused with the new, even in the clearest minds, and cannot at a moment be shaken off. Only the unwise change suddenly; and we can never too often remind ourselves, when we see men stepping forward with uncertainty and hesitation over a road, where to us, we know the actual future, all seems so plain, that the road looked different to the actors themselves, who were beset with imaginations of the past, and to whom the gloom of the future appeared thronged with phantoms of possible contingencies. The hasty expectations of the noble lords were checked by Henry's prudence; and though parties were rapidly arranging themselves, there was still confusion. The city, though disinclined to the pope and the church, continued to retain an inclination for the emperor; and the pope had friends among Wolsey's enemies, who, by his overthrow, were pressed forward into prominence, and divided the victory with the reformers. The presence of Sir Thomas More in the council was a guarantee that no exaggerated measures against the church would be permitted so long as he held the seals; and Henry, perhaps, was anxious to leave room for conciliation, which he hoped that the pope would desire as much as himself, so soon as the meeting of parliament had convinced him that the mutinous disposition of the nation had not been overstated by his own and Wolsey's letters.

The impression conceived two years before of the hostile relations between the pope and Charles had not yet been wholly effaced; and even as late as September, 1529, after the closing of the legates' court, in the very heat of the public irritation, there were persons who believed that when Clement met his imperial captor face to face, and the interview had taken place which had been arranged for the ensuing January, his eyes would be opened, and that he would fall back upon England.¹⁷² At the same time, the incongruities in the constitution of the council became so early apparent, that their agreement was thought impossible, and Wolsey's return to power was discussed openly as a probability¹⁷³—a result which Anne Boleyn, who, better than any other person, knew the king's feelings, never ceased to fear, till, a year after his disgrace, the welcome news were brought to her that he had sunk into his long rest, where the sick load of office and of obloquy would gall his back no more.

There was a third party in the country, unconsidered as yet, who had a part to play in the historical drama: a party which, indeed, if any one had known it, was the most important of all; the only one which, in a true, high sense, was of importance at all; and for the sake of which, little as it then appeared to be so, the whole work was to be done—composed at that time merely of poor men, poor cobblers, weavers, carpenters, trade apprentices, and humble artisans, men of low birth and low estate, who might be seen at night stealing along the lanes and alleys of London, carrying with them some precious load of books which it was death to possess; and giving their lives gladly, if it must be so, for the brief tenure of so dear a treasure. These men, for the present, were likely to fare ill from the new ministry. They were the disturbers of order, the anarchists, the men disfigured pravitate hereticâ, by monstrous doctrines, and consequently by monstrous lives—who railed at authorities, and dared to read New Testaments with their own eyes—who, consequently, by their excesses and extravagances, brought discredit upon liberal opinions, and whom moderate liberals (as they always have done, and always will do while human nature remains itself) held it necessary for their credit's sake to persecute, that a censorious world might learn to make no confusion between true wisdom and the folly which seemed to resemble it. The Protestants had not loved Wolsey, and they had no reason to love him; but it was better to bear a fagot of dry sticks in a procession when the punishment was symbolic, than, lashed fast to a stake in Smithfield, amidst piles of the same fagots kindled into actual flames, to sink into a heap of blackened dust and ashes; and before a year had passed, they would gladly have accepted again the hated cardinal, to escape from the philosophic mercies of Sir Thomas More. The number of English Protestants at this time it is difficult to conjecture. The importance of such men is not to be measured by counting heads. In 1526, they were organised into a society, calling themselves "the Christian brotherhood,"¹⁷⁴ with a central committee sitting in London; with subscribed funds, regularly audited, for the purchase of Testaments and tracts; and with paid agents, who travelled up and down the country to distribute them. Some of the poorer clergy belonged to the society;¹⁷⁵ and among the city merchants there were many well inclined to it, and who, perhaps, attended its meetings "by night, secretly, for fear of the Jews." But, as a rule, "property and influence" continued to hold aloof in the usual haughty style, and the pioneers of the new opinions had yet to win their way along a scorched and blackened path of suffering, before the State would consent to acknowledge them. We think bitterly of these things, and yet we are but quarrelling with what is inevitable from the constitution of the world. New doctrines ever gain readiest hearing among the common people; not only because the interests of the higher classes are usually in some degree connected with the maintenance of existing institutions; but because ignorance is itself a protection against the many considerations which embarrass the judgment of the educated. The value of a doctrine cannot be determined on its own apparent merits by men whose habits of mind are settled in other forms; while men of experience know well that out of the thousands of theories which rise in the fertile soil below them, it is but one here and one there which grows to maturity; and the precarious chances of possible vitality, where the opposite probabilities are so enormous, oblige them to discourage and repress opinions which threaten to disturb established order, or which, by the rules of existing beliefs, imperil the souls of those who entertain them. Persecution has ceased among ourselves, because we do not any more believe that want of theoretic orthodoxy in matters of faith is necessarily fraught with the tremendous consequences which once were supposed to be attached to it. If, however, a school of Thugs were to rise among us, making murder a religious service; if they gained proselytes, and the proselytes put their teaching in execution, we should speedily begin again to persecute opinion. What teachers of Thuggism would appear to ourselves, the teachers of heresy actually appeared to Sir Thomas More, only being as much more hateful as the eternal death of the soul is more terrible than the single and momentary separation of it from the body. There is, I think, no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution, except only this: that as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws, so among those who believed them to be just, there were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws; while others of harder nature and more narrow sympathies enforced them without reluctance, and even with exultation. The heart, when it is rightly constituted, corrects the folly of the head; and wise good men, even though they entertain no conscious misgiving as to the soundness of their theories, may be delivered from the worst consequences of those theories, by trusting their more genial instincts. And thus, and thus only, are we justified in censuring those whose names figure largely in the persecuting lists. Their defence is impregnable to logic. We blame them for the absence of that humanity which is deeper than logic, and which should have taught them to refuse the conclusions of their speculative creed.

Such, then, was the state of parties in the autumn of 1529. The old conservatives, the political ecclesiastics, had ceased to exist, and the clergy as a body were paralysed by corruption. There remained—

The English party who had succeeded to power, and who were bent upon a secular revolt.

The papal party, composed of theoretic theologians, like Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and represented on the council by Sir Thomas More.

And both of these were united in their aversion to the third party, that of the doctrinal Protestants, who were still called heretics.

These three substantially divided what was sound in England; the first composed of the mass of the people, representing the principles of prudence, justice, good sense, and the working faculties of social life: the two last sharing between them the higher qualities of nobleness, enthusiasm, self-devotion; but in their faith being without discretion, and in their piety without understanding. The problem of the Reformation was to reunite virtues which could be separated only to their mutual confusion; and to work out among them such inadequate reconciliation as the wilfulness of human nature would allow.

Before I close this chapter, which is intended as a general introduction, I have to say something of two prominent persons whose character antecedent to the actions in which we are to find them engaged it is desirable that we should understand; I mean Henry VIII. himself, and the lady whom he had selected to fill the place from which Catherine of Arragon was to be deposed.

If Henry VIII. had died previous to the first agitation of the divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest misfortunes which had ever befallen the country; and he would have left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side of that of the Black Prince or of the conqueror of Agincourt. Left at the most trying age, with his character unformed, with the means at his disposal of gratifying every inclination, and married by his ministers when a boy to an unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an upright and virtuous king. Nature had been prodigal to him of her rarest gifts. In person he is said to have resembled his grandfather, Edward IV., who was the handsomest man in Europe. His form and bearing were princely; and amidst the easy freedom of his address, his manner remained majestic. No knight in England could match him in the tournament except the Duke of Suffolk: he drew with ease as strong a bow as was borne by any yeoman of his guard; and these powers were sustained in unfailing vigour by a temperate habit and by constant exercise. Of his intellectual ability we are not left to judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries. His state papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing in the comparison. Though they are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the expression equally powerful, and they breathe throughout an irresistible vigour of purpose. In addition to this he had a fine musical taste, carefully cultivated; he spoke and wrote in four languages; and his knowledge of a multitude of other subjects, with which his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the reputation of any ordinary man. He was among the best physicians of his age; he was his own engineer, inventing improvements in artillery, and new constructions in ship-building; and this not with the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough workmanlike understanding. His reading was vast, especially in theology, which has been ridiculously ascribed by Lord Herbert to his father's intention of educating him for the Archbishopric of Canterbury; as if the scientific mastery of such a subject could have been acquired by a boy of twelve years of age, for he was no more when he became Prince of Wales. He must have studied theology with the full maturity of his intellect; and he had a fixed and perhaps unfortunate interest in the subject itself.¹⁷⁶

In all directions of human activity Henry displayed natural powers of the highest order, at the highest stretch of industrious culture. He was "attentive," as it is called, "to his religious duties," being present at the services in chapel two or three times a day with unfailing regularity, and showing to outward appearance a real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his life. In private he was good-humoured and good-natured. His letters to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and unrestrained; and the letters written by them to him are similarly plain and businesslike, as if the writers knew that the person whom they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as a man. Again, from their correspondence with one another, when they describe interviews with him, we gather the same pleasant impression. He seems to have been always kind, always considerate; inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and winning, as a consequence, their warm and unaffected attachment.

As a ruler he had been eminently popular. All his wars had been successful. He had the splendid tastes in which the English people most delighted, and he had substantially acted out his own theory of his duty which was expressed in the following words:—

"Scripture taketh princes to be, as it were, fathers and nurses to their subjects, and by Scripture it appeareth that it appertaineth unto the office of princes to see that right religion and true doctrine be maintained and taught, and that their subjects may be well ruled and governed by good and just laws; and to provide and care for them that all things necessary for them may be plenteous; and that the people and commonweal may increase; and to defend them from oppression and invasion, as well within the realm as without; and to see that justice be administered unto them indifferently; and to hear benignly all their complaints; and to show towards them, although they offend, fatherly pity. And, finally, so to correct them that be evil, that they had yet rather save them than lose them if it were not for respect of justice, and maintenance of peace and good order in the commonweal."¹⁷⁷

These principles do really appear to have determined Henry's conduct in his earlier years. His social administration we have partially seen in the previous chapter. He had more than once been tried with insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, and extinguished in forgiveness; and London long recollected the great scene which followed "evil May-day," 1517, when the apprentices were brought down to Westminster Hall to receive their pardons. There had been a dangerous riot in the streets, which might have provoked a mild government to severity; but the king contented himself with punishing the five ringleaders, and four hundred other prisoners, after being paraded down the streets in white shirts with halters round their necks, were dismissed with an admonition, Wolsey weeping as he pronounced it.¹⁷⁸

It is certain that if, as I said, he had died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like that Roman Emperor said by Tacitus to have been consensu omnium dignus imperii nisi imperasset, would have been considered by posterity as formed by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would have been deplored as a perpetual calamity. We must allow him, therefore, the benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it, when interpreting his later actions. Not many men would have borne themselves through the same trials with the same integrity; but the circumstances of those trials had not tested the true defects in his moral constitution. Like all princes of the Plantagenet blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will. His impulses, in general nobly directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life, when his character was formed, he was forced into collision with difficulties with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to contend. Education had done much for him, but his nature required more correction than his position had permitted, whilst unbroken prosperity and early independence of control had been his most serious misfortune. He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greatest of men. With all his faults about him, he was still perhaps the greatest of his contemporaries; and the man best able of all living Englishmen to govern England, had been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.

The other person whose previous history we have to ascertain is one, the tragedy of whose fate has blotted the remembrance of her sins—if her sins were, indeed, and in reality, more than imaginary. Forgetting all else in shame and sorrow, posterity has made piteous reparation for her death in the tenderness with which it has touched her reputation; and with the general instincts of justice, we have refused to qualify our indignation at the wrong which she experienced, by admitting either stain or shadow on her fame. It has been with Anne Boleyn as it has been with Catherine of Arragon—both are regarded as the victims of a tyranny which catholics and protestants unite to remember with horror; and each has taken the place of a martyred saint in the hagiology of the respective creeds. Catholic writers have, indeed, ill repaid, in their treatment of Anne, the admiration with which the mother of Queen Mary has been remembered in the Church of England; but the invectives which they have heaped upon her have defeated their object by their extravagance. It has been believed that matter failed them to sustain a just accusation, when they condescended to outrageous slander. Inasmuch, however, as some natural explanation can usually be given of the actions of human beings in this world without supposing them to have been possessed by extraordinary wickedness, and if we are to hold Anne Boleyn entirely free from fault, we place not the king only, but the privy council, the judges, the Lords and Commons, and the two Houses of Convocation, in a position fatal to their honour and degrading to ordinary humanity; we cannot without inquiry acquiesce in so painful a conclusion. The English nation also, as well as she, deserves justice at our hands; and it must not be thought uncharitable if we look with some scrutiny at the career of a person who, except for the catastrophe with which it was closed, would not so readily have obtained forgiveness for having admitted the addresses of the king, or for having received the homage of the court as its future sovereign, while the king's wife, her mistress, as yet resided under the same roof, with the title and the position of queen, and while the question was still undecided of the validity of the first marriage. If in that alone she was to blame, her fault was, indeed, revenged a thousandfold,—and yet no lady of true delicacy would have accepted such a position; and feeling for Queen Catherine should have restrained her, if she was careless of respect for herself. It must, therefore, be permitted me, out of such few hints and scattered notices as remain, to collect such information as may be trusted respecting her early life before her appearance upon the great stage. These hints are but slight, since I shall not even mention the scandals of Sanders, any more than I shall mention the panegyrics of Foxe; stories which, as far as I can learn, have no support in evidence, and rest on no stronger foundation than the credulity of passion.

Anne Boleyn was the second daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a gentleman of noble family, though moderate fortune;¹⁷⁹ who, by a marriage with the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, was brought into connection with the highest blood in the realm. The year of her birth has not been certainly ascertained, but she is supposed to have been seven years old¹⁸⁰ in 1514, when she accompanied the Princess Mary into France, on the marriage of that lady with Louis XII. Louis dying a few months subsequently, the princess married Sir Charles Brandon, afterwards created Duke of Suffolk, and returned to England. Anne Boleyn did not return with her; she remained in Paris to become accomplished with the graces and elegancies, if she was not contaminated by the vices, of that court, which, even in those days of loyal licentiousness, enjoyed an undesirable pre-eminence in profligacy. In the French capital she could not have failed to see, to hear, and to become familiar with occurrences with which no young girl can be brought in contact with impunity, and this poisonous atmosphere she continued to breathe for nine years. She came back to England in 1525, to be maid of honour to Queen Catherine, and to be distinguished at the court, by general consent, for her talents, her accomplishments, and her beauty. Her portraits, though all professedly by Holbein, or copied from pictures by him, are singularly unlike each other. The profile in the picture which is best known is pretty, innocent, and piquant, though rather insignificant: there are other pictures, however, in which we see a face more powerful, though less prepossessing. In these the features are full and languid. The eyes are large; but the expression, though remarkable, is not pleasing, and indicates cunning more than thought, passion more than feeling; while the heavy lips and massive chin wear a look of sensuality which is not to be mistaken. Possibly all are like the original, but represented her under different circumstances, or at different periods of her life. Previous to her engagement with the king, she was the object of fleeting attentions from the young noblemen about the court. Lord Percy, eldest son of Lord Northumberland, as we all know, was said to have been engaged to her. He was in the household of Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him there, tells a long romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be true, was ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself. The story is not without its difficulties, since Lord Percy had been contracted, several years previously, to a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury,¹⁸¹ whom he afterwards married, and by the law he could not have formed a second engagement so long as the first was undissolved. And again, he himself, when subsequently examined before the privy council, denied solemnly on his oath that any contract of the kind had existed.¹⁸² At the same time, we cannot suppose Cavendish to have invented so circumstantial a narrative, and Percy would not have been examined if there had been no reason for suspicion. Something, therefore, probably had passed between him and the young maid of honour, though we cannot now conjecture of what nature; and we can infer only that it was not openly to her discredit, or she would not have obtained the position which cost her so dear. She herself confessed subsequently, before Archbishop Cranmer, to a connection of some kind into which she had entered before her acquaintance with Henry. No evidence survives which will explain to what she referred, for the act of parliament which mentions the fact furnishes no details.¹⁸³ But it was of a kind which made her marriage with the king illegal, and illegitimatised the offspring of it; and it has been supposed, therefore, that, in spite of Lord Percy's denial, he had really engaged himself to her, and was afraid to acknowledge it.¹⁸⁴ This supposition, however, is not easy to reconcile with the language of the act, which speaks of the circumstance, whatever it was, as only "recently known;" nor could a contract with Percy have invalidated her marriage with the king, when Percy having been pre-contracted to another person, it would have been itself invalid. A light is thrown upon the subject by a letter found among Cromwell's papers, addressed by some unknown person to a Mr. Melton, also unknown, but written obviously when "Mistress Anne" was a young lady about the court, and before she had been the object of any open attention from Henry.

"MR. MELTON.—This shall be to advertise you that Mistress Anne is changed from that she was at when we three were last together. Wherefore I pray you that ye be no devil's sakke, but according to the truth ever justify, as ye shall make answer before God; and do not suffer her in my absence to be married to any other man. I must go to my master, wheresoever he be, for the Lord Privy Seal desireth much to speak with me, whom if I should speak with in my master's absence, it would cause me to lose my head; and yet I know myself as true a man to my prince as liveth, whom (as my friend informeth me) I have offended grievously in my words. No more to you, but to have me commended unto Mistress Anne, and bid her remember her promise, which none can loose, but God only, to whom I shall daily during my life commend her."¹⁸⁵

The letter must furnish its own interpretation; for it receives little from any other quarter. Being in the possession of Cromwell, however, it had perhaps been forwarded to him at the time of Queen Anne's trial, and may have thus occasioned the investigation which led to the annulling of her marriage.

From the account which was written of her by the grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, we still gather the impression (in spite of the admiring sympathy with which Wyatt writes) of a person with whom young men took liberties,¹⁸⁶ however she might seem to forbid them. In her diet she was an epicure, fond of dainty and delicate eating, and not always contented if she did not obtain what she desired. When the king's attentions towards her became first marked, Thomas Heneage, afterwards lord chamberlain, wrote to Wolsey, that he had one night been "commanded down with a dish for Mistress Anne for supper"; adding that she caused him "to sup with her, and she wished she had some of Wolsey's good meat, as carps, shrimps, and others."¹⁸⁷ And this was not said in jest, since Heneage related it as a hint to Wolsey, that he might know what to do, if he wished to please her. In the same letter he suggested to the cardinal that she was a little displeased at not having received a token or present from him; she was afraid she was forgotten, he said, and "the lady, her mother, desired him to send unto his Grace, and desire his Grace to bestow a morsel of tunny upon her." Wolsey made her presents also at times of a more valuable character, as we find her acknowledging in language of exaggerated gratitude;¹⁸⁸ and, perhaps the most painful feature in all her earlier history lies in the contrast between the servility with which she addressed the cardinal so long as he was in power, and the bitterness with which the Bishop of Bayonne (and, in fact, all contemporary witnesses) tells us, that she pressed upon his decline. Wolsey himself spoke of her under the title of "the night-crow,"¹⁸⁹ as the person to whom he owed all which was most cruel in his treatment; as "the enemy that never slept, but studied and continually imagined, both sleeping and waking, his utter destruction."¹⁹⁰

Taking these things together, and there is nothing to be placed beside them of a definitely pleasing kind, except beauty and accomplishments, we form, with the assistance of her pictures, a tolerable conception of this lady; a conception of her as a woman not indeed questionable, but as one whose antecedents might lead consistently to a future either of evil or of good; and whose character removes the surprise which we might be inclined to feel at the position with respect to Queen Catherine in which she consented to be placed. A harsh critic would describe her, on this evidence, as a self-indulgent coquette, indifferent to the obligations of gratitude, and something careless of the truth. From the letter referring to her, preserved by Cromwell, it appears that she had broken a definite promise at a time when such promises were legally binding, and that she had really done so was confirmed by her subsequent confession. The breach of such promises by a woman who could not be expected to understand the grounds on which the law held them to be sacred, implies no more than levity, and levity of this kind has been found compatible with many high qualities. Levity, however, it does undoubtedly imply, and the symptom, if a light one, must be allowed the weight which is due to it.

It is a miserable duty to be compelled to search for these indications of human infirmities; above all when they are the infirmities of a lady whose faults, let them have been what they would, were so fearfully and terribly expiated; and, if there were nothing else at issue but poor questions of petty scandal, it were better far that they perished in forgetfulness, and passed away out of mind and memory for ever. The fortunes of Anne Boleyn were unhappily linked with those of men to whom the greatest work ever yet accomplished in this country was committed; and the characters of a king of England, and of the three estates of the realm, are compromised in the treatment which she received from them.

CHAPTER III

THE PARLIAMENT OF 1529

No Englishman can look back uninterested on the meeting of the parliament of 1529. The era at which it assembled is the most memorable in the history of this country, and the work which it accomplished before its dissolution was of larger moment politically and spiritually than the achievements of the Long Parliament itself. For nearly seven years it continued surrounded by intrigue, confusion, and at length conspiracy, presiding over a people from whom the forms and habits by which they had moved for centuries were falling like the shell of a chrysalis. While beset with enemies within the realm and without, it effected a revolution which severed England from the papacy, yet it preserved peace unbroken and prevented anarchy from breaking bounds; and although its hands are not pure from spot, and red stains rest on them which posterity have bitterly and long remembered; yet if we consider the changes which it carried through, and if we think of the price which was paid by other nations for victory in the same struggle, we shall acknowledge that the records of the world contain no instance of such a triumph, bought at a cost so slight and tarnished by blemishes so trifling.

The letters of the French Ambassador¹⁹¹ describe to us the gathering of the members into London, and the hum of expectation sounding louder and louder as the day of the opening approached. In order that we may see distinctly what London felt on this occasion, that we may understand in detail the nature of those questions with which parliament was immediately to deal, we will glance at some of the proceedings which had taken place in the Bishops' Consistory Courts during the few preceding years. The duties of the officials of these courts resembled in theory the duties of the censors under the Roman Republic. In the middle ages, a lofty effort had been made to overpass the common limitations of government, to introduce punishment for sins as well as crimes, and to visit with temporal penalties the breach of the moral law. The punishment best adapted for such offences was some outward expression of the disapproval with which good men regard acts of sin; some open disgrace; some spiritual censure; some suspension of communion with the church, accompanied by other consequences practically inconvenient, to be continued until the offender had made reparation, or had openly repented, or had given confirmed proof of amendment. The administration of such a discipline fell, as a matter of course, to the clergy. The clergy were the guardians of morality; their characters were a claim to confidence, their duties gave them opportunities of observation which no other men could possess; while their priestly office gave solemn weight to their sentences. Thus arose throughout Europe a system of spiritual surveillance over the habits and conduct of every man, extending from the cottage to the castle, taking note of all wrong dealing, of all oppression of man by man, of all licentiousness and profligacy, and representing upon earth, in the principles by which it was guided, the laws of the great tribunal of Almighty God.

Such was the origin of the church courts, perhaps the greatest institutions ever yet devised by man. But to aim at these high ideals is as perilous as it is noble; and weapons which may be safely trusted in the hands of saints become fatal implements of mischief when saints have ceased to wield them. For a time, we need not doubt, the practice corresponded to the intention. Had it not been so, the conception would have taken no root, and would have been extinguished at its birth. But a system which has once established itself in the respect of mankind will be tolerated long after it has forfeited its claim to endurance, as the name of a great man remains honoured though borne by worthless descendants; and the Consistory courts had continued into the sixteenth century with unrestricted jurisdiction, although they had been for generations merely perennially flowing fountains, feeding the ecclesiastical exchequer. The moral conduct of every English man and woman remained subject to them. Each private person was liable to be called in question for every action of his life; and an elaborate network of canon law perpetually growing, enveloped the whole surface of society. But between the original design and the degenerate counterfeit there was this vital difference,—that the censures were no longer spiritual. They were commuted in various gradations for pecuniary fines, and each offence against morality was rated at its specific money value in the episcopal tables. Suspension and excommunication remained as ultimate penalties; but they were resorted to only to compel unwilling culprits to accept the alternative.

The misdemeanours of which the courts took cognisance¹⁹² were "offences against chastity," "heresy," or "matter sounding thereunto," "witchcraft," "drunkenness," "scandal," "defamation," "impatient words," "broken promises," "untruth," "absence from church," "speaking evil of saints," "non-payment of offerings," and other delinquencies incapable of legal definition; matters, all of them, on which it was well, if possible, to keep men from going wrong; but offering wide opportunities for injustice; while all charges, whether well founded or ill, met with ready acceptance in courts where innocence and guilt alike contributed to the revenue.¹⁹³ "Mortuary claims" were another fertile matter for prosecution; and probate duties and legacy duties; and a further lucrative occupation was the punishment of persons who complained against the constitutions of the courts themselves; to complain against the justice of the courts being to complain against the church, and to complain against the church being heresy. To answer accusations on such subjects as these, men were liable to be summoned, at the will of the officials, to the metropolitan courts of the archbishops, hundreds of miles from their homes.¹⁹⁴ No expenses were allowed; and if the charges were without foundation, it was rare that costs could be recovered. Innocent or guilty, the accused parties were equally bound to appear.¹⁹⁵ If they failed, they were suspended for contempt. If after receiving notice of their suspension, they did not appear, they were excommunicated; and no proof of the groundlessness of the original charge availed to relieve them from their sentence, till they had paid for their deliverance.

Well did the church lawyers understand how to make their work productive. Excommunication seems but a light thing when there are many communions. It was no light thing when it was equivalent to outlawry; when the person excommunicated might be seized and imprisoned at the will of the ordinary; when he was cut off from all holy offices; when no one might speak to him, trade with him, or show him the most trivial courtesy; and when his friends, if they dared to assist him, were subject to the same penalties. In the Register of the Bishop of London¹⁹⁶ there is more than one instance to be found of suspension and excommunication for the simple crime of offering shelter to an excommunicated neighbour; and thus offence begot offence, guilt spread like a contagion through the influence of natural humanity, and a single refusal of obedience to a frivolous citation might involve entire families in misery and ruin.

The people might have endured better to submit to so enormous a tyranny, if the conduct of the clergy themselves had given them a title to respect, or if equal justice had been distributed to lay and spiritual offenders. "Benefit of clergy," unhappily, as at this time interpreted, was little else than a privilege to commit sins with impunity. The grossest moral profligacy in a priest was passed over with indifference; and so far from exacting obedience in her ministers to a higher standard than she required of ordinary persons, the church extended her limits under fictitious pretexts as a sanctuary for lettered villany. Every person who could read was claimed by prescriptive usage as a clerk, and shielded under her protecting mantle; nor was any clerk amenable for the worst crimes to the secular jurisdiction, until he had been first tried and degraded by the ecclesiastical judges. So far was this preposterous exemption carried, that previous to the passing of the first of the 23rd of Henry the Eighth,¹⁹⁷ those who were within the degrees might commit murder with impunity, the forms which it was necessary to observe in degrading a priest or deacon being so complicated as to amount to absolute protection.¹⁹⁸

Among the clergy, properly so called, however, the prevailing offence was not crime, but licentiousness. A doubt has recently crept in among our historians as to the credibility of the extreme language in which the contemporary writers spoke upon this painful topic. It will scarcely be supposed that the picture has been overdrawn in the act books of the Consistory courts; and as we see it there it is almost too deplorable for belief, as well in its own intrinsic hideousness as in the unconscious connivance of the authorities. Brothels were kept in London for the especial use of priests;¹⁹⁹ the "confessional" was abused in the most open and abominable manner.²⁰⁰ Cases occurred of the same frightful profanity in the service of the mass, which at Rome startled Luther into Protestantism;²⁰¹ and acts of incest between nuns and monks were too frequently exposed to allow us to regard the detected instances as exceptions.²⁰² It may be said that the proceedings upon these charges prove at least that efforts were made to repress them. The bishops must have the benefit of the plea, and the two following instances will show how far it will avail their cause. In the Records of the London Court I find a certain Thomas Wyseman, priest, summoned for fornication and incontinency. He was enjoined for penance, that on the succeeding Sunday, while high mass was singing, he should offer at each of the altars in the Church of St. Bartholomew a candle of wax, value one penny, saying therewith five Paternosters, five Ave Marys, and five Credos. On the following Friday he was to offer a candle of the same price before the crucifix, standing barefooted, and one before the image of cur Lady of Grace. This penance accomplished he appeared again at the court and compounded for absolution, paying six shillings and eightpence.²⁰³

An exposure too common to attract notice, and a fine of six and eightpence was held sufficient penalty for a mortal sin.

Even this, however, was a severe sentence compared with the sentence passed upon another priest who confessed to incest with the prioress of Kilbourn. The offender was condemned to bear a cross in a procession in his parish church, and was excused his remaining guilt for three shillings and fourpence.²⁰⁴

I might multiply such instances indefinitely; but there is no occasion for me to stain my pages with them.²⁰⁵

An inactive imagination may readily picture to itself the indignation likely to have been felt by a high-minded people, when they were forced to submit their lives, their habits, their most intimate conversations and opinions to a censorship conducted by clergy of such a character; when the offences of these clergy themselves were passed over with such indifferent carelessness. Men began to ask themselves who and what these persons were who retained the privileges of saints,²⁰⁶ and were incapable of the most ordinary duties; and for many years before the burst of the Reformation the coming storm was gathering. Priests were hooted, or "knocked down into the kennel,"²⁰⁷ as they walked along the streets—women refused to receive the holy bread from hands which they thought polluted,²⁰⁸ and the appearance of an apparitor of the courts to serve a process or a citation in a private house was a signal for instant explosion. Violent words were the least which these officials had to fear, and they were fortunate if they escaped so lightly. A stranger had died in a house in St. Dunstan's belonging to a certain John Fleming, and an apparitor had been sent "to seal his chamber and his goods" that the church might not lose her dues. John Fleming drove him out, saying loudly unto him, "Thou shalt seale no door here; go thy way, thou stynkyng knave, ye are but knaves and brybours everych one of you."²⁰⁹ Thomas Banister, of St. Mary Wolechurch, when a process was served upon him, "did threaten to slay the apparitor." "Thou horson knave," he said to him, "without thou tell me who set thee awork to summon me to the court, by Goddis woundes, and by this gold, I shall brake thy head."²¹⁰ A "waiter, at the sign of the Cock," fell in trouble for saying that "the sight of a priest did make him sick," also, "that he would go sixty miles to indict a priest," saying also in the presence of many—"horsyn priests, they shall be indicted as many as come to my handling."²¹¹ Often the officers found threats convert themselves into acts. The apparitor of the Bishop of London went with a citation into the shop of a mercer of St. Bride's, Henry Clitheroe by name. "Who does cite me?" asked the mercer. "Marry, that do I," answered the apparitor, "if thou wilt anything with it;" whereupon, as the apparitor deposeth, the said Henry Clitheroe did hurl at him from off his finger that instrument of his art called the "thymmelle," and he, the apparitor, drawing his sword, "the said Henry did snatch up his virga, Anglice, his yard, and did pursue the apparitor into the public streets, and after multiplying of many blows did break the head of the said apparitor."²¹² These are light matters, but they were straws upon the stream; and such a scene as this which follows reveals the principles on which the courts awarded their judgment. One Richard Hunt was summoned for certain articles implying contempt, and for vilipending his lordship's jurisdiction. Being examined, he confessed to the words following: "That all false matters were bolstered and clokyd in this court of Paul's Cheyne; moreover he called the apparitor, William Middleton, false knave in the full court, and his father's dettes, said he, by means of his mother-in-law and master commissary, were not payd; and this he would abide by, that he had now in this place said no more but truth." Being called on to answer further, he said he would not, and his lordship did therefore excommunicate him.²¹³ From so brief an entry we cannot tell on which side the justice lay; but at least we can measure the equity of a tribunal which punished complaints against itself with excommunication, and dismissed the confessed incest of a priest with a fine of a few shillings.

Such then were the English consistory courts. I have selected but a few instances from the proceedings of a single one of them. If we are to understand the weight with which the system pressed upon the people, we must multiply the proceedings at St. Paul's by the number of the English dioceses; the number of dioceses by the number of archdeaconries; we must remember that in proportion to the distance from London the abuse must have increased indefinitely from the absence of even partial surveillance; we must remember that appeals were permitted only from one ecclesiastical court to another; from the archdeacon's court to that of the bishop of the diocese, from that of the bishop to the Court of Arches; that any language of impatience or resistance furnished suspicion of heresy, and that the only security therefore was submission. We can then imagine what England must have been with an archdeacon's commissary sitting constantly in every town; exercising an undefined jurisdiction over general morality; and every court swarming with petty lawyers who lived upon the fees which they could extract. Such a system for the administration of justice was perhaps never tolerated before in any country.

But the time of reckoning at length was arrived; slowly the hand had crawled along the dial plate; slowly as if the event would never come: and wrong was heaped on wrong; and oppression cried, and it seemed as if no ear had heard its voice; till the measure of the circle was at length fulfilled, the finger touched the hour, and as the strokes of the great hammer rang out above the nation, in an instant the mighty fabric of iniquity was shivered into ruins. Wolsey had dreamed that it might still stand, self-reformed as he hoped to see it; but in his dread lest any hands but those of friends should touch the work, he had "prolonged its sickly days," waiting for the convenient season which was not to be; he had put off the meeting of parliament, knowing that if parliament were once assembled, he would be unable to resist the pressure which would be brought to bear upon him; and in the impatient minds of the people he had identified himself with the evils which he alone for the few last years had hindered from falling. At length he had fallen himself, and his disgrace was celebrated in London with enthusiastic rejoicing as the inauguration of the new era. On the eighteenth of October, 1529, Wolsey delivered up the seals. He was ordered to retire to Esher; and, "at the taking of his barge," Cavendish saw no less than a thousand boats full of men and women of the city of London, "waffeting up and down in Thames," to see him sent, as they expected, to the Tower.²¹⁴ A fortnight later the same crowd was perhaps again assembled on a wiser occasion, and with truer reason for exultation, to see the king coming up in his barge from Greenwich to open parliament.