Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/130

116 In the midst of his grasping, his hoarding, and his scheming, his end was drawing on, though he was far from an old man. The gout had long visited him with its periodical attacks. He was liable, during the cold and variable weather of spring, to complaints of the chest, which assumed the appearance of consumption, and occasionally reduced him very low. As these seizures became progressively severe, the warning voice of conscience startled him from his repose, and he began to look with terror towards that tribunal where kings stand alone without their flatterers, and where the cries of the oppressed cannot be stifled by rude soldiers, or eluded by legal quibbles. The blood of Sir William Stanley and of the innocent Earl of Warwick, lay heavy on his soul, and the disregarded prayers of his people, fleeced and tortured by his emissaries, Dudley and Empson, disturbed his midnight hours. His flatterers endeavoured to console him by declaring that he had been so good a prince that his soul would mount direct to heaven as it left the body; but he did not himself appear quite so confident about that. On the contrary, he had a very lively dread of going in a different direction, and resorted to the usual refuge of bad kings—the aid of the priests, from whom he hoped to purchase exemption from deserved punishment. He had founded three priories; but this did not appear to his guilty conscience enough. He therefore bargained for an infinite number of masses, and established in his magnificent chapel at Westminster a fund for a perpetual offering of them for his soul. He had great faith in the power of money, of which he had hoarded up £1,800,000, equal to £18,000,000 of our present money, which he kept carefully locked up in chests at his palace near Richmond, besides a vast amount in jewels. Being very ill in the spring of 1507, he distributed alms to the poor, and discharged all the prisoners in London who were confined for fees or debts of less than forty shillings.

But nothing shows more curiously how such long-practised criminals juggle with their own souls than his behaviour regarding Dudley and Empson, the instruments of his perpetual robberies of the people. When the sickness was strong upon him he ordered them to cease their villanies; as he got worse he commanded them even to make restitution to those they had pillaged and imprisoned; but as he grew better again, he instructed them that it was only necessary to recompense such as had not been dealt with according to the regular forms of law—so that, as these vultures generally tore their victims in a legal fashion, and as they themselves were made the judges of the necessary restitution, very little was done. The terrors of death, however, drew nearer; and the struggles of the wretched man clinging to the earth and to his useless gold, and recoiling from the pains of purgatory, if not of something worse, appear in a vivid manner in his will.

This singular document was signed at Richmond on the last day of March, 1509, just three weeks before his death. In this he directs his executors to cause 2,000 masses to be said for his soul within a month after his decease, at the rate of sixpence a piece. He orders them, also, to distribute £2,000 to prisoners and poor people, on condition that they also pray for his soul by name—for even in death Henry Tudor must have his quid pro quo. "And in this partie," he says, "we hertily desire our executores to thinke and considere how necessarie, behoofful, and how profitable it is to dede folks to be praied for." He had some time before made formal contracts with the clergy of all the cathedrals, conventual and collegiate churches in the kingdom, to say a certain number of masses and prayers, for certain sums of money, and he now granted them by his will fresh sums to engage them to say their masses with increased fervency, and their prayers with greater zeal. Such are the confessions which Death, the great master, forces even from the bosoms of kings, which have been wrapt in the splendour of gold and the softness of ermine, and have looked to the simple spectator so noble and so serene.

Henry VII. died at his palace of Richmond on the 21st of April, 1509, in the fifty-fourth year of his age and the twenty-fourth of his reign. With all the vices of his character he was fortunate as a monarch, and by his very mean and parsimonious nature benefited the nation. In passing judgment upon him it is necessary to separate our estimate of the monarch from that of the man. As a man he was essentially a mean one; as a monarch he had nothing great and magnanimous about him; but he appeared in times when repose was essentially necessary to the nation, and he gave it that, because he could not find it in his heart to spend his money in war. Thus his sordid nature, which was otherwise contemptible, became almost virtuous, as it secured the realm from foreign expenses, which would further have exhausted it. He plundered his subjects by his commissioners, but they were not dragged so often to the battle-field, nor had their harvests trodden down and their houses burnt by contending parties. The peace which he gave them was salutary, though it might be ignominious; and Henry had this virtue for a monarch—he was a man of business. He attended to his own affairs; and while he locked his motives and his plans inviolably in his own breast, he set his ministers and subordinates their work, and he saw that it was done. Though he was not wide in his mental horizon, and was utterly incapable of a truly great design, he pondered well what he meant to do, and did it so completely, that that grovelling cunning of his was lauded by his contemporaries as profound wisdom, and they called him the Solomon of the age. But then it was an age unexampled in a race of unprincipled and perfidious princes. Louis of France, Ferdinand of Spain, the Pope Alexander VI., his detestable son, Cæsar Borgia, and our Henry, have been well said "to have acted in blood and treachery all that Machiavelli afterwards wrote."

There is one measure for which Henry has received a degree of admiration which is not his due; that is, for putting down the power of the great baron were extinguished by a process which might be called the suicide of almost an entire class—they exterminated each other in the civil wars. But Henry having them down, had the just merit of keeping them there. He had not the fatal vanity of surrounding his throne with a fresh creation of the dangerous caste, and though he seemed thereby to unduly strengthen the crown, he eventually strengthened the people, for, unharassed by the perpetual squabbles and demands of the feudal barons,