CHAPTER XXV
Henry VIII and the Monasteries
1535–47

I. THE TECHNIQUE OF DISSOLUTION

IN 1535 Henry, too busy with love and war to play pope in retail as well as gross, appointed the agnostic¹ Cromwell “viceregent of the King in all his ecclesiastical jurisdiction.” Cromwell now guided foreign policy, domestic legislation, the higher judiciary, the Privy Council, the intelligence service, the Star Chamber, and the Church of England; Wolsey at apogee had never had so many long and grasping fingers in so many juicy pies. He kept an eye, too, on all printing and publication; he persuaded the King to forbid the printing, sale, or importation of books except after approval by agents of the Crown; and he had anti-papal literature published at the government’s expense. Cromwell’s innumerable spies kept him informed on all movements or expressions of opposition to Henry or himself. A remark of pity for Fisher or More, a jest about the King, could bring a secret trial and long imprisonment;² and to predict the date of the King’s death was to incur one’s own.³ In special cases, to make conclusions certain, Cromwell acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge. Nearly everyone in England feared and hated him.

His chief difficulty was that Henry, though omnipotent, was bankrupt. The King was anxious to enlarge the navy, to increase or improve his harbors and ports; his court and personal expenses were extravagant; and Cromwell’s system of government required a broad stream of funds. How to raise money? Taxes were already high to the point where resistance made further collection more costly than lucrative; the bishops had drained their parishes to appease the King; and no gold poured in from America such as daily succored England’s enemy, the Emperor. Yet one institution in England was wealthy, suspect, decrepit, and defenseless: the monasteries. They were suspect because their ultimate allegiance was to the pope, and their subscription to the Act of Supremacy was considered insincere and incomplete; they were, in the eyes of the government, a foreign body in the nation, bound to support any Catholic movement against the King. They were decrepit because they had in many cases ceased to perform their traditional functions of education, hospitality, and charity. They were defenseless because the bishops resented their exemption from episcopal control; because the nobility, impoverished by civil war, coveted their wealth; because the business classes looked upon monks and friars as idling wasters of natural resources; and because a large section of the commonalty, including many good Catholics, no longer believed in the efficacy of the relics that the monks displayed, or in the Masses that the monks, if paid, offered for the dead. And there were excellent precedents for closing monasteries; Zwingli had done it in Zurich, the Lutheran princes in Germany, Wolsey in England. Parliament had already (1533) voted authority to the government to visit the monasteries and compel their reform.

In the summer of 1535 Cromwell sent out a trio of “visitors,” each with a numerous staff, to examine and report on the physical, moral, and financial condition of the monasteries and nunneries of England, and, for good measure, the universities and episcopal sees as well. These “visitors” were “young, impetuous men, likely to execute their work rather thoroughly than delicately”; ⁴ they were not immune to “presents”;⁵ “the object of their mission was to get up a case for the Crown, and they probably used every means in their power to induce the monks and the nuns to incriminate themselves.” ⁶ It was not difficult to find, among the 600 monasteries of England, an impressive number that showed sexual—sometimes homosexual—deviations,⁷ loose discipline, acquisitive exploitation of false relics, sale of sacred vessels or jewelry to add to monastic wealth and comforts,⁸ neglect of ritual, hospitality, or charity.⁹ But the reports usually failed to state the proportion of offending to meritorious monks, and to discriminate clearly between gossip and evidence.¹⁰

To the Parliament that met on February 4, 1536, Cromwell submitted a “Black Book,” now lost, revealing the faults of the monasteries, and recommending, with strategic moderation, that monasteries and convents having an income of £ 200 ($20,000?) or less per year should be closed. The Parliament, whose members had been largely chosen by Cromwell’s aides,¹¹ consented. A Court of Augmentations was appointed by the King to receive for the royal treasury the property and revenues of these 376 “lesser monasteries.” Two thousand monks were released to other houses or to the world—in the latter case with a small sum or pension to tide them over till they found work. Of the 130 nunneries only eighteen had an income over £200, but only half were now closed.

The drama of dissolution was interrupted by a triple rebellion in the north. Just as Christianity had been born in the cities and had reached the villager? —pagani—last, so, in Switzerland, Germany, and England the Reformation rose in the towns and was long resisted in the countryside. Protestantism in England and Scotland decreased as distance from London or Edinburgh increased; it reached Wales and northern England tardily, and found scant welcome in Ireland. In the northern shires of England the spoliation of the lesser monasteries kindled a fire of resentment that had long been prepared by mounting taxation, the royal dictatorship over the clergy, and clandestine priestly exhortations. Dispossessed monks who found it hard to collect their pensions or to get work joined the already numerous and plaintive unemployed; dispossessed nuns, wandering from shelter to shelter, stirred public anger against the government; and the aides of Cromwell’s visitors fed the fury by decking themselves in the spoils of the monastic chapels, making copes into doublets, priestly tunics into saddlecloths, and relic cases into dagger sheaths.¹²

On October 2,1536, a visitor who had just closed a convent in Legbourne was attacked by a crowd in neighboring Louth; his records and credentials were seized and burned, and, with a sword at his breast, he was compelled to swear loyalty to the commons. All in the crowd took an oath to be faithful to the King and the Roman Catholic Church. On the morrow a rebel army gathered at Caistor, a few miles away; priests and homeless monks exhorted them; the local gentry were forced-some were willing—to join. On the same day a larger muster of villagers took place at Horncastle, another town in Lincolnshire. The chancellor of the bishop of Lincoln was accused of being an agent of Cromwell; he was taken from his bed and beaten to death with staves. The rebels designed a banner picturing a plow, a chalice, a horn, and the five “last words” of Christ, and they drew up demands which were dispatched to the King: the monasteries should be restored, taxes should be remitted or eased, the clergy should no more pay tithes or annates to the Crown, “villein blood” (namely, Cromwell) should be removed from the Privy Council, and heretic bishops—chiefly Cranmer and Latimer—should be deposed and punished. Recruits for the rebellion came in from the northern and eastern counties. Some 60,000 men assembled at Lincoln, and awaited the answer of the King.

His answer was furious and uncompromising. He charged the rebels with ingratitude to a gracious ruler; insisted that the closing of the lesser monasteries was the will of the nation expressed through Parliament; and bade the insurgents surrender their leaders and disperse to their homes on pain of death and confiscation of goods. At the same time Henry ordered his military aides to collect their forces and march under the Earl of Suffolk to the assistance of Lord Shrewsbury, who had already organized his retainers to withstand attack; and he wrote privately to the few nobles who had joined the revolt. These, now perceiving that the King could not be awed, and that the poorly armed insurgents would soon be overwhelmed, persuaded so many of them to return to their villages that the rebel army, over the protests of the priests, rapidly melted away. Louth gave up fifteen leaders; a hundred more were captured, and a royal pardon was declared for the rest. The captives were taken to London and the Tower; thirty-three, including seven priests and fourteen monks, were hanged; the rest were leisurely freed.¹³

Meanwhile a still more serious uprising had developed in Yorkshire. A young barrister, Richard Aske, found himself caught, physically and emotionally, in the movement; another lawyer, William Stapleton, was frightened into the captaincy of a rebel division at Beverley; Lord Darcy of Templehurst, an ardent Catholic, lent the revolt his secret support; two Percys joined, and most of the northern nobility followed suit. On October 15, 1536, the main army of some 9,000 men, under Aske, laid siege to York. The citizens of the city compelled the mayor to open the gates. Aske kept his men from pillage, and in general maintained remarkable order in his untrained host. He proclaimed the reopening of the monasteries; the monks joyfully returned to them, and gladdened the hearts of the pious with the new ardor of their chants. Aske advanced and captured Pomfret, and Stapleton took Hull, without shedding blood. To the demands presented by the Lincolnshire men others were added and sent to the King: to suppress all heretics and their literature, to resume ecclesiastical ties with Rome, to legitimize Mary, to dismiss and punish Cromwell’s visitors, and to annul all enclosures of common lands since 1489.

This was the most critical point in Henry’s reign. Half the country was in arms against his policies; Ireland was in revolt; and Paul III and Cardinal Pole were urging Francis I and Charles V to invade England and depose the King. With a last burst of his declining energy, he sent out orders in all directions for the mustering of loyal troops, and meanwhile instructed the Duke of Norfolk to bemuse the rebellious leaders with negotiations. The Duke arranged a conference with Aske and several nobles, and won them over by a promise of pardon to all. Henry invited Aske to a personal conference, and gave him a safe-conduct. He came to the King, was charmed by the aura of royalty, and returned meek and unharmed to Yorkshire (January 1537); there, however, he was arrested, and was sent to London as a prisoner. Shorn of its captains, the insurgent host fell into angry divisions and wild disorder; defections multiplied; and as the united levies of the King approached, the rebel army disappeared like a vanishing mirage (February 1537).

When Henry was assured that the revolt and invasion had both collapsed, he repudiated Norfolk’s promise of a general pardon, ordered the arrest of such disaffected leaders as could be found, and had several of them, including Aske, put to death. To the Duke he wrote:

With the opposition so sternly terrified, Cromwell proceeded to close the remaining religious houses in England. All the monasteries and nunneries that had joined the revolt were dissolved forthwith, and their property was confiscated to the state. Visitations were extended, and yielded reports of indiscipline, immorality, treason, and decay. Many monks, anticipating closure, sold relics and valuables from their houses to the highest bidder; a finger of St. Andrew fetched £40.¹⁵ The monks at Walsingham were convicted of faking miracles, and their lucrative image of the Virgin was cast into the fire. The historic tomb of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury was demolished; Henry VIII proclaimed the victor over Henry II to have been no real saint; the relics that had offended Colet and amused Erasmus were burned; the precious objects donated by the piety of pilgrims during 250 years were carted away to the royal treasury (1538); and thereafter Henry wore on his thumb a great ruby taken from the shrine. Some monasteries sought to fool fate by sending Cromwell money or gifts; Cromwell accepted everything and closed all. By 1540 all monasteries, and all monastic property except cathedral abbey churches, had passed to the King.

All in all 578 monasteries were closed, some 130 convents; 6,521 monks or friars were dispersed, 1,560 nuns. Among these some fifty monks and two nuns willingly abandoned the religious habit; but many more pleaded to be allowed to continue somewhere their conventual life.¹⁶ Some 12,000 persons formerly employed by, or dependent upon, the religious houses lost their places or alms. The confiscated lands and buildings had enjoyed an annual revenue of some £200,000 ($20,000,000?), but quick sales reduced the annual income of the properties after nationalization to some £37,000. To this should be added £85,000 in confiscated precious metal, so that the total spoils in goods and income accruing to Henry during his life may have been some £1,423,500.¹⁷

The King was generous with these spoils. Some of the properties he gave—most of them he sold at bargain prices—to minor nobles or major burgesses—merchants or lawyers—who had supported or administered his policies. Cromwell received or bought six abbeys, with an annual revenue of £2,293; his nephew Sir Richard Cromwell received seven, with an income of £2,552 ;¹⁸ this was the origin of the fortune that made Richard’s great-grandson Oliver a man of substance and influence in the next century. Some of the spoils went to build ships, forts, and ports; some helped to finance war; some went into the royal palaces at Westminster, Chelsea, and Hampton Court; some the King lost at dice.¹⁹ Six monasteries were returned to the Anglican Church as episcopal sees; and a small sum was assigned to continue the most urgent of the charities formerly provided by the monks and nuns. The new aristocracy created by Henry’s gifts and sales became a powerful support to the Tudor throne, and a bulwark of economic interest against any Catholic restoration. The old feudal aristocracy had decimated itself; the new one, rooted in commerce and industry, changed the nature of the English nobility from static conservatism to dynamic enterprise, and poured fresh blood and energy into the upper classes of England. This—and the spoilsmay have been one source of the Elizabethan exuberance.

The effects of the dissolution were complex and interminable. The liberated monks may have shared modestly or not in the increase of England’s population from about 2,500,000 in 1485 to some 4,000,000 in 1547.²⁰ A temporary increase in the unemployed helped to depress the earnings of the lower classes for a generation, and the new landlords proved more grasping than the old.²¹ Politically the effect was to augment still further the power of the monarchy; the Church lost the last stronghold of resistance. Morally the results were a growth of crime, pauperism, and beggary, and a diminished provision of charity.²² Over a hundred monastic hospitals were closed; a few were rehabilitated by municipal authorities. The sums that fearful or reverent souls had bequeathed to priests as insurance against infernal or purgatorial fire were confiscated in expectation that no harm would come to the dead; 2,374 chantries, with their endowments for Masses, were appropriated by the King.²³ The severest effects were in education. The convents had provided schools for girls, the monasteries and the chantry priests had maintained schools and ninety colleges for boys; all these institutions were dissolved.

Having stated the facts as impartially as unconscious prejudice allowed, the historian may be permitted to add a confessedly hypothetical comment. Henry’s greed and Cromwell’s ruthlessness merely advanced by a generation an inevitable lessening in the number and influence of English monasteries. These had once done admirable work in education, charity, and hospital care, but the secularization of such functions was proceeding throughout Western Europe, even where Catholicism prevailed. The decline in religious fervor and other-worldliness was rapidly narrowing the flow of novices into conventual establishments; and many of these were reduced to so small a number as seemed out of proportion to the splendor of their buildings and the income of their lands. It is a pity that the situation was met by the brusque haste of Cromwell rather than by Wolsey’s humane and sounder plan of transforming more and more monasteries into colleges. Henry’s procedure here, as in his quest for a son, was worse than his aim. It was good that an end should be put, in some measure, to the exploitation of simple piety by pious fraud. Our chief regrets go to the nuns who for the most part labored dutifully in prayer, schooling, and benevolence; and even one who cannot share their trustful faith must be grateful that their like again minister, with lifelong devotion, to the needs of the sick and the poor.

II. THE OBSTINATE IRISH: 1300–1558

The English kings justified their domination of Ireland on the ground that a hostile Continental power might at any moment use that verdant island for a flank attack upon England; and this consideration, seconding the love of power, became more active when Protestant England failed to win Ireland from the Roman Church. The Irish people, heroic and anarchic, virile and violent, poetically gifted and politically immature, resisted, every day, their subjection to an alien blood and speech.

The evils of the English occupation mounted. Under Edward III many Anglo-Irish landowners returned to England to live there in ease on Irish rents; and though the English Parliament repeatedly denounced this practice, “absentee landlordism” rose through three centuries to be a leading spur to Irish revolts. Englishmen who remained in Ireland tended to marry Irish girls, and were gradually absorbed into Irish blood and ways. Anxious to dam this racial drain, the Irish Parliament, dominated by English residents and influence, passed the famous Statute of Kilkenny (1366), which, along with some wise and generous provisions, forbade intermarriage, fosterage, or other intimate relations between the English and the Irish in Ireland, and any use, by the English, of Irish speech, customs, or dress, on pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of property. No Irishman was henceforth to be received into any English religious organization; and no Irish bards or storytellers were to enter English homes.²⁴ These prohibitions failed; the roses in Irish cheeks outshone the majesty of the law, and racial fusion went on in that narrow March, Border, or Pale where alone the English in Ireland dared to dwell.*

During the Wars of the Roses Ireland might have expelled the English had the Irish chiefs united, but they preferred fraternal strife, sometimes encouraged thereto by English gold. Henry VII re-established English authority in the Pale, and his lord deputy, Sir Edward Poynings, pushed through the Irish Parliament the humiliating “Poynings’ Law” (1494)—that in future no Irish Parliament should be convened until all bills to be presented to it had been approved by the king and privy council of England. So emasculated, the English government in Ireland became the most incompetent, ruthless, and corrupt in Christendom. Its favorite device was to appoint one of the sixty Irish chieftains as deputy to the viceroy, and commission him to buy or subdue the rest. Gerald, eighth Earl of Kildare, so appointed, made some progress in this direction, and mitigated the intertribal lawlessness that helped English exactions to keep Ireland weak and poor. On his death (1513) his son Gerald Fitzgerald was named to succeed him as deputy. This ninth Earl of Kildare had a career typical of the Irish lords. Accused of conspiring with the Earl of Desmond to let a French force land in Ireland, he was summoned to England and committed to the Tower. On his promise faithfully to aid the English cause, Henry VIII released him and reappointed him deputy. Soon he was charged with maladministration. He was again brought to England, and again sent to the Tower, where he died within the year (1534). His devoted son, “Silken Thomas” Fitzgerald, at once declared war on the English; he fought bravely and recklessly for fourteen months, was overcome, and was hanged (1537).

By this time Henry VIII had completed his divorce from the Roman Church. With characteristic audacity he bade the Irish Parliament acknowledge him head of the Church in Ireland as well as in England. It did. An oath accepting his ecclesiastical supremacy was required of all governmental officials in Ireland, and all church tithes were henceforth to be paid to the King. Reformers entered the churches in the Pale, and demolished religious relics and images. All monasteries but a remote few were closed, their property was taken by the government, their monks were dismissed with pensions if they made no fuss. Some of the spoils were distributed among the Irish chieftains; so oiled, most of them accepted titles of nobility from the English King, acknowledged his religious supremacy, and abjured the pope (1539).²⁵ The clan system was abolished, and Ireland was declared a kingdom, with Henry as king (1541).

Henry was victorious, but mortal; he died within five years of his triumph. Catholicism in Ireland survived. The chieftains took their apostasy as a passing incident in politics; they continued to be Catholics (as Henry did) except for ignoring the pope; and the priests whose ministrations they supported and received remained quietly orthodox. The faith of the people underwent no change; or rather it took on new vigor because it maintained the pride of nationality against a schismatic king and, later, a Protestant queen. The struggle for freedom became more intense than before, since now it spoke for body and soul

III. EVERY OUNCE A KING

Henry in 1540 was the most absolute monarch that England had ever known. The old Norman nobility, whose ancestors had checked even William the Conqueror, were now timidly obedient, and almost forgot the Magna Charta of their prerogatives. The new nobility, enriched by commerce and endowed by the King, served as a barrier to aristocratic or religious revolts. The House of Commons, once the jealous protector of English liberties but now hand-picked by agents of the King, yielded to him almost unprecedented powers: the right to confiscate property, to name anyone his successor, to determine orthodoxy and heresy, to send men to death after only a mock trial, and to issue proclamations that were to have the authority of acts of Parliament. “In Henry’s reign the English spirit of independence burned low in its socket, and love of freedom grew cold.” ²⁶ The English people accepted this absolutism partly through fear, partly because it seemed the alternative to another War of the Roses. Order was more important than liberty.

The same alternatives persuaded Englishmen to suffer Henry’s ecclesiastical supremacy. With Catholics and Protestants ready to fly at each other’s throats, with Catholic citizens, ambassadors, and potentates conspiring against him almost to invasion, Henry believed that order could be secured in the religious life of England only by royal determination of faith and ritual; implicitly he accepted the case that the Church had made for authority in religion. He tried to dictate who should read the Bible. When the bishops suppressed Tyndale’s translation he bade them prepare a better one; when they dallied too long he allowed Cromwell to commission a new translation by Miles Coverdale. This first complete British version appeared in Zurich in 1535. In 1539a revised edition was printed, and Cromwell ordered this “Great Bible” placed in every English church. Henry, “of the royal liberality and goodness,” granted the citizens the privilege of reading the Bible in their homes; and soon it became a daily influence in nearly every English family. But it was a fountain of discord as well as of inspiration; every village sprouted amateur exegetes who proved anything or its opposite by Scripture; fanatics wrangled over it in churches, and came to blows over it in taverns.²⁷ Some ambitious men gave their wives writs of divorce, or kept two wives at once, on the plea that this was sound Biblical practice.²⁸ The King regretted the liberty of reading that he had allowed, and reverted to the Catholic stand. In 1543 he induced Parliament to rule that only nobles and property owners might legally possess the Bible, and only priests might preach on it, or discuss it publicly.²⁹

It was difficult for the people—even for the King—to know the King’s mind. Catholics continued to go to the stake or the block for denying his ecclesiastical supremacy, Protestants for questioning Catholic theology. Prior Forest of the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich, who refused to disown the pope, was suspended in chains over a fire, and was slowly roasted to death (May 31, 1537).³⁰ John Lambert, a Protestant, was arrested for denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist; he was tried by Henry himself, was by Henry condemned to die, and was burned at Smithfield (November 16, 1538). Under the growing influence of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, Henry veered more and more toward orthodoxy. In 1539 King, Parliament, and Convocation, by the “Act of the Six Articles,” proclaimed the Roman Catholic position on the Real Presence, clerical celibacy, monastic vows, Masses for the dead, the necessity of auricular confession to a priest, and the sufficiency of communion in one kind. Whoever, by spoken or written word, denied the Real Presence should suffer death by burning, without opportunity to abjure, confess, and be absolved; whoever denied any of the other articles should for the first offense forfeit his property, for the second his life. All marriages hitherto contracted by priests were declared void, and for a priest thereafter to retain his wife was to be a felony.³¹ The people, still orthodox, generally approved these Articles, but Cromwell did his best to moderate them in practice; and in 1540 the King, tacking again, ordered prosecution under the Act to cease. Nevertheless Bishops Latimer and Shaxton, who disapproved of the Articles, were deposed and jailed. On July 30, 1540, three Protestants and three Catholic priests suffered death at Smithfield in unwilling unison, the Protestants for questioning some Catholic doctrines, the Catholics for rejecting the ecclesiastical sovereignty of the King.³²

Henry was as forceful in administration as in theology. Though he maintained an extravagant court, and spent much time in eating, he toiled heavily in the tasks of government. He chose competent aides as ruthless as himself. He reorganized the army, equipped it with new weapons, and studied the latest fashions in tactics and strategy. He built the first permanent royal navy, which cleared the coasts and Channel of pirates and prepared for the naval victories of Elizabeth. But he taxed his people to the limit of tolerance, repeatedly debased the currency, confiscated private property on flimsy pretexts, demanded “contributions,” repudiated his debts, borrowed from the Fuggers, and promoted the English economy in the hope that it would yield him added revenue.

Agriculture was in depression. Serfdom was still widespread. Enclosures for sheep pasturage continued; and the new landlords, unhindered by feudal traditions, doubled or quadrupled the rents of their tenants on the ground of rising prices, and refused to renew expiring leases. “Thousands of dispossessed tenants made their way to London, and clamored at the doors of the courts of law for redress which they could not obtain.” ³³ Catholic More drew a pitiful picture of the beggared peasantry,³⁴ and Protestant Latimer denounced the “rent-raiser steplords,” and, like Luther, idealized a Catholic past when “men were full of pity and compassion.” ³⁵ Parliament laid ferocious penalties upon vagabondage and beggary. By an act of 1530–31 any able-bodied mendicant, whether man or woman, was to be “tied to the end of a cart naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the town till his body be bloody”; for a second offense an ear was to be cut off; for a third, another ear; in 1536, however, the third offense incurred death.³⁶ Gradually the displaced peasants found work in the cities, and poor relief mildly mitigated pauperism. In the end the productivity of the land was raised by large-scale farming, but the inability of the government to ease the transition was a criminal and heartless failure of statesmanship.

The same government protected industry with tariffs, and manufacturers profited from the cheap labor made available by the migration of peasants to the towns. Capitalistic methods reorganized the textile industry, and raised a new class of wealthy men to stand beside the merchants in support of the King; cloth now replaced wool as England’s chief export. Most exports were of necessaries produced by the lower classes; most imports were of luxuries available only to the rich.³⁷ Commerce and industry were benefited by a law of 1536 legalizing interest rates of 10 per cent; and the rapid rise of prices favored enterprise while it penalized workers, peasants, and old-style feudal lords. Rents rose 1,000 per cent between 1500 and 1576; ³⁸ food prices rose 250 to 300 per cent; wages rose 150 per cent.³⁹ “Such poverty reigneth now,” wrote Thomas Starkey about 1537, “that in no case may stand with a very true and flourishing common weal.” ⁴⁰ Guild members found some relief in the insurance and mutual aid provided them against poverty and fire; but in 1545 Henry confiscated the property of the guilds.⁴¹

IV. THE DRAGON RETIRES

What sort of a man was this ogre of a king? Holbein the Younger, coming to England about 1536, painted portraits of Henry and Jane Seymour. The gorgeous costume almost conceals the royal corpulence; the gems and ermine, the hand on the jeweled sword, reveal the pride of authority, the vanity of the uncontradicted male; the broad fat face bespeaks a hearty sensualism; the nose is a pillar of strength; the tight lips and stern eyes warn of a despot quick to anger and cold to cruelty. Henry was now forty-six, at the top of his political curve, but entering physical decline. He was destined to marry thrice again, and yet to have no further progeny. From all his six wives he had but three children who outlived infancy. One of these three-Edward VI—was sickly and died at fifteen; Mary remained desolately barren in marriage; Elizabeth never dared marry, probably through consciousness of some physical impediment. The curse of semi-sterility or bodily defect lay upon the proudest dynasty in English history.

Henry’s mind was keen, his judgment of men was penetrating, his courage and will power were immense. His manners were coarse, and his scruples disappeared with his youth. To his friends, however, he remained kind and generous, jovially amiable, and capable of winning affection and devotion. Born to royalty, he was surrounded from birth with obeisance and flattery; only a few men dared withstand him, and they were buried without their heads. “Surely,” wrote More from the Tower, “it is a great pity that any Christian prince should by a flexible [knee-bending] council ready to follow his affections [desires], and by a weak clergy... be with flattery so shamefully abused.”⁴² This was the external source of Henry’s retrogression in character—that the absence of resistance to his will, after the death of More, made him as flabby in moral sense as in physique. He was not more lax in sex than Francis I, and after the passing of Anne Boleyn he seems to have been more monogamous, seriatim, than Charles V; sexual looseness was not his worst failing. He was greedy for money as well as for power, and seldom allowed considerations of humanity to halt his appropriations. His ungrateful readiness to kill women whom he had loved, or men who, like More and Cromwell, had served him loyally for many years, is despicable; yet in result he was not one tenth as murderous as the well-meaning Charles IX sanctioning the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or Charles V condoning the sack of Rome, or German princes fighting through thirty years for their right to determine the religious beliefs of their subjects.

The inner source of his deterioration was the repeated frustration of his will in love and parentage. Long disappointed in his hope for a son, dishonestly checked in his reasonable request for an annulment of his first marriage, deceived (he believed) by the wife for whom he had risked his throne, bereaved so soon of the only wife who gave him an heir, tricked into marriage by a woman utterly alien to him in language and temperament, cuckolded (he thought) by the wife who seemed to promise him at last the happiness of a home—here was a king possessing all England but denied the domestic joys of the simplest husband in his realm. Suffering intermittent agony from an ulcer in his leg, buffeted with revolts and crises throughout his reign, forced at almost every moment to arm against invasion, betrayal, and assassination—how could such a man develop normally, or avoid degeneration into suspicion, craft, and cruelty? And how shall we, who fret at the pinpricks of private tribulation, understand a man who bore in his mind and person the storm and stress of the English Reformation, weaned his people by perilous steps from a deeply rooted loyalty, and yet must have felt in his divided soul an erosive wonder—had he freed a nation or shattered Christendom?

Danger, as well as power, was the medium in which he lived. He could never tell how far his enemies would go, or when they would succeed. In 1538 he ordered the arrest of Sir Geoffrey Pole, brother to Reginald. Fearing torture, Geoffrey confessed that he, another brother, Lord Montague, Sir Edward Neville, and the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter had had treasonable correspondence with the Cardinal. Geoffrey was pardoned; Exeter, Montague, and several others were hanged and quartered (1538–39); Lady Exeter was imprisoned; and the Countess of Salisbury, mother of the Poles, was placed under guard. When the Cardinal visited Charles V in Toledo (1539), bearing a futile request from Paul III that the Emperor would join with Francis in outlawing all commerce with England,⁴³ Henry retaliated by arresting the Countess, who was now seventy years old; perhaps he hoped that by keeping her in the Tower he could check the Cardinal’s enthusiasm for invasion. All was fair in the game of life and death.

Having remained for two years unmarried, Henry bade Cromwell seek for him a marital alliance that would strengthen his hand against Charles. Cromwell recommended Anne, sister-in-law of the Elector of Saxony, and sister of the Duke of Cleves, who was then at odds with the Emperor. Cromwell set his heart on the marriage, by which he hoped ultimately to form a league of Protestant states, and thereby compel Henry to repeal the anti-Lutheran Six Articles. Henry dispatched Holbein to paint a likeness of the lady; possibly Cromwell added some instructions to the artist; the picture came, and Henry judged the Princess bearable. She looks discouragingly sad in the Holbein portrait that hangs in the Louvre, but not less plain of feature than the Jane Seymour who had for a moment softened the heart of the King. When Anne came in body, and Henry laid eyes on her (January 1, 1540), love died at first sight. He shut his eyes, married her, and prayed again for a son to strengthen the Tudor succession now that Prince Edward was revealing his physical frailty. But he never forgave Cromwell.

Four months later, alleging malfeasance and corruption, he ordered the arrest of his most profitable minister. Hardly anyone objected; Cromwell was the most unpopular subject in England—for his origin, his methods, his venality, his wealth. In the Tower he was required to sign statements impugning the validity of the new marriage. Henry announced that he had not given his “inward consent” to the union, and had never consummated it. Anne, confessing that she was still a maid, agreed to an annulment in return for a comfortable pension. Loath to face her brother, she chose a lonely life in England; and it was small comfort to her that when she died (1557) she was buried in Westminster Abbey. Cromwell was beheaded on July 28, 1540.

On the same day Henry married Catherine Howard, twenty years old, of a strictly Catholic house; the Catholic party was gaining. The King ceased to flirt with Continental Protestants, and made his peace with the Emperor. Feeling himself at last safe in that quarter, he turned his fancy northward in the hope of annexing Scotland and thereby rounding out the geographical boundaries and security of Britain. He was distracted by another rebellion in the north of England. Before leaving to suppress it, and to discourage conspiracy at his back, he ordered all the political prisoners in the Tower, including the Countess of Salisbury, to be put to death (1541). The rebellion collapsed, and Henry, distraught with cares, returned to Hampton Court to seek solace from his new Queen.

The second Catherine was the fairest of his mates. More dependent than before on wifely ministrations, the King learned almost to love her, and he gave thanks to God for “the good life he was leading and hoped to lead” under her supervision. But on the day after this Te Deum (November 2, 1541), Archbishop Cranmer handed him documents indicating that Catherine had had premarital relations with three successive suitors. Two of these confessed; so did the Queen. Henry “took such grief,” the French ambassador reported, “that it was thought he had gone mad”; ⁴⁴ the fear haunted him that God had cursed all his marriages. He was inclined to pardon Catherine, but evidence was given him that she had, since her royal marriage, committed adultery with her cousin. She admitted having received her cousin in her private apartment late at night, but only in the presence of Lady Rochford; she denied any misdeed then or at any time since her marriage; and Lady Rochford testified to the truth of these statements so far as her own knowledge went.⁴⁵ But the royal court pronounced the Queen guilty; and on February 13, 1542, she was beheaded on the same spot where Anne Boleyn’s head had fallen six years before. Her paramours were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The King was now a broken man. His ulcer baffled the medical science of his time, and syphilis, never quite cured, was spreading its ravages through his frame.⁴⁶ Losing the zest of life, he had allowed himself to become an un-wieldly mass of flesh, his cheeks overlapping his jaws, his narrowed eyes half lost in the convolutions of his face. He could not walk from one room to another without support. Realizing that he had not many years to live, he issued (1543) a new decree fixing the succession to his throne: first on Edward, then on Mary, then on Elizabeth; he went no further, for next in line was Mary Stuart of Scotland. In a final effort to beget a healthy son, and after repeated urging from his Council, he married a sixth wife (July 12, 1543). Catherine Parr had survived two previous husbands, but the King no longer insisted on virgins. She was a woman of culture and tact; she nursed her royal invalid patiently, reconciled him with his long-neglected daughter Elizabeth, and tried to soften his theology and his persecuting zeal.

Theological bonfires continued to the end of the reign: twenty-six persons were burned for heresy in its final eight years. In 1543 spies reported to Bishop Gardiner that Henry Filmer had said, “If God is really present [in the consecrated Host], then in my lifetime I have eaten twenty gods”; that Robert Testwood, at the elevation of the Host, had jocularly warned the priest not to let God fall; and that Anthony Pierson had called any priest a thief who preached anything but “the Word of God”—i.e., the Scriptures. All these men, by the Anglican Bishop’s orders, were burned in a meadow before the royal palace at Windsor. The King was disturbed to find that the evidence given by a witness in these cases was perjury; the culprit was sent to the Tower.⁴⁷ In 1546 Gardiner condemned four more to the stake for denying the Real Presence. One was a young woman, Anne Askew, who kept to her heresy through five hours of questioning. “That which you call your God,” she said at her trial, “is a piece of bread; for proof thereof let it lie in a box three months, and it will be moldy.” She was tortured till nearly dead to elicit from her the names of other heretics; she remained silent in her agony, and went to her death, she said, “as merry as one that is bound toward heaven.” ⁴⁸ The King was not active in these persecutions, but the victims appealed to him without result.

In 1543 he fell into war with Scotland and his “beloved brother” Francis I, and soon found himself allied with his old enemy Charles V. To finance his campaigns he demanded new “loans” from his subjects, repudiated payment on the loans of 1542, and confiscated the endowments of the universities.⁴⁹ He was carried to the war in person, and supervised the siege and capture of Boulogne. His armies invaded Scotland and wrecked the abbeys of Melrose and Dryburgh, and five other monasteries, but were routed at Ancrum Moor (1545). A profitable accord was signed with France (1546), and the King could die in peace.

He was now so weak that noble families openly contended as to which should have the regency for young Edward. A poet, the Earl of Surrey, was so confident that his father, the Duke of York, would be regent that he adopted a coat of arms suitable only to an heir-apparent to the throne. Henry arrested both; they confessed their guilt; the poet was beheaded on January 9, 1547, and the Duke was scheduled for execution soon after the twenty-seventh. But on the twenty-eighth the King died. He was fifty-five years old, but he had lived a dozen lives in one. He left a large sum to pay for Masses for the repose of his soul.

The thirty-seven years of his reign transformed England more deeply than perhaps he imagined or desired. He thought to replace the pope while leaving unchanged the old faith that had habituated the people to moral restraints and obedience to law; but his successful defiance of the papacy, his swift dispersal of monks and relics, his repeated humiliation of the clergy, his appropriation of Church property, and his secularization of the government so weakened ecclesiastical prestige and authority as to invite the theological changes that followed in the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth. The English Reformation was less doctrinal than the German, but one outstanding result was the same—the victory of the state over the Church. The people escaped from an infallible pope into the arms of an absolute king.

In a material sense they had not benefited. They paid church tithes as before, but the net surplus went to the government. Many peasants now tilled their tenancies for “steplords” more ruthless than the abbots whom Carlyle was to idealize in Past and Present. William Cobbett thought that “viewed merely in its social aspect, the English Reformation was in reality the rising of the rich against the poor.” ⁵⁰ Records of prices and wages indicate that the agricultural and town workers were better off at Henry’s accession than at his death.⁵¹

The moral aspects of the reign were bad. The King gave the nation a demoralizing example in his sexual indulgence, his callous passing in a few days from the execution of one wife to the bed of the next, his calm cruelty, fiscal dishonesty, and material greed. The upper classes disordered the court and government with corrupt intrigues; the gentry emulated Henry in grasping at the wealth of the Church; the industrialists mulcted their workers and were mulcted by the King. The decay of charity did not complete the picture, for there remained the debasing subserviency of a terrified people to a selfish autocrat. Only the courage of the Protestant and Catholic martyrs redeemed the scene, and Fisher and More, the noblest of them, had persecuted in their turn.

In a large perspective even those bitter years bore some good fruit. The Reformation had to be; we must repeatedly remind ourselves of this while we record the deviltry of the century that gave it birth. The break with the past was violent and painful, but only a brutal blow could shake its grip on the minds of men. When that incubus was removed, the spirit of nationalism, which at first permitted despotism, became a popular enthusiasm and a creative force. The elimination of the papacy from English affairs left the people for a time at the mercy of the state; but in the long run it compelled them to rely on themselves in checking their rulers and claiming, decade after decade, a measure of freedom commensurate with their intelligence. The government would not always be as powerful as under Henry the Terrible; it would be weak under a sickly son and an embittered daughter; then, under a vacillating but triumphant queen, the nation would rise in a burst of liberated energy, and lift itself to the leadership of the European mind. Perhaps Elizabeth and Shakespeare could not have been had not England been set free by her worst and strongest king.