Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/697

Rh OF ENGLAND.] HENRY VIII provided means for the popularity of his successor ; and to Henry VIII. fell the easy and generous role of squandering the treasure which his father had amassed. Nor was this the only respect in which the young Henry entered on the fruit of other men s labours. In the Wars of the Roses, and by the policy of Edward IV. and Henry VII., the old feudal nobility had been brought very low. When nothing more was to be feared from that quarter, it was Henry VIII. s easy task to gather round him the broken remnants, to attach them to his person, and to make them the ready instruments of his will, in short, to convert the representa tives of a haughty feudal baronage into submissive courtiers. In character the young Henry was a king according to the people s heart ; even in his faults he was exceptionally fortunate. He was handsome, frank, extravagant, of vast muscular strength, accomplished in all the manly exercises of the time and in the new learning; he was vain, thirsting for popularity, eager to retrieve the old renown of England, the enemy of France, and dreamt alwaj s of renewing the conquests of the Henrys and Edwards. It is not surprising that Henry excited the highest expectations in all classes of his subjects, for his varied character offered an attractive side to all of them. The men of the new learning were charmed by his love of letters. Ecclesiastics saw with pleasure his punctual performance of the duties of religion. All good men were delighted with the excel lence and purity of his private life. Statesmen were struck by his capacity for business; his gaiety and frankness captivated the courtiers ; the prospect of French conquest inspired the warlike and the ambitious. From the descrip tion of Henry by the Venetian ambassador, Giustiniani, in 1519, we can easily perceive what impression lie must have made on England at his accession : &quot; His Majesty is twenty-nine years old, and extremely handsome. Nature could not have done more for him. He is much handsomer than any other sovereign of Christendom, a good deal handsomer than the king of France, very fair, and his whole frame admirably proportioned. On hearing that Francis I. wore a red beard, he allowed his own to grow ; and as it is reddish, he has now got a beard that looks like gold. He is very accomplished, a good musician, com poses well, is a most capital horseman, a fine jouster, speaks good French, Latin, and Spanish, is very religious, hears three masses daily when he hunts, and sometimes five on other days. He hears the office every day in the queen s chamber, that is to say, vesper and compline. He is very fond of hunting, and never takes his diversion without tiring eight or ten horses, which he causes to be stationed before hand along the line of country he means to take ; and when one is tired he mounts another, and before he gets home they are all exhausted. He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.&quot; When we take all these facts into consideration, when we remember also that erelong he had raised England from a third-rate position to a level with the greatest powers of Europe, and that for twenty years nothing serious occurred to break the harmony of his reign, we cannot be^surprised that Henry was a most popular king. The reign of Henry falls naturally into two periods, separated by the question of the divorce. During the first period Henry is the splendid and jovial king at home, abroad a figure of the first magnitude in the wars and international diplomacies of the time. Both in home and foreign affairs, but particularly the latter, Wolsey was the right hand man of the king, ready, as occasion served, either to transact the whole business of the government, or to be the humble instrument of the king, when the royal hand did actively interfere. In point of fact Henry always was master, and took a keen interest in business. The events of the first period were concerned chiefly with the foreign wars. At home, with the exception of the execution of Empson and Dudley, the instruments of his father s extor tion, who suffered, however, on a trumped-up charge of treason, nothing important occurred. There were Christ mas revels, May festivals, tilting matches, in which Henry always shone victorious, and in which he squandered the treasures of his father. But the serious endeavours of the time were directed abroad ; Henry joined his relatives j Ferdinand and Maximilian in a league against France. I Though Henry took a personal share in the campaign in France of 1513, and won the easy Battle of Spurs, and though Surrey, his general, gained the great victory of Flodden, no substantial result was attained by the war. Henry was duped and then abandoned by his allies. When he was undeceived, he made peace (1514) with France, which was cemented by the marriage of his youthful sister Mary to the old and worn-out Louis XII. Soon after, when Louis was succeeded by Francis I. (1515), and Charles V. entered on the government of his hereditary dominions (151G), the three monarchs who figure so conspicuously as the contemporaries of the Reformation, and whose doings constitute so much of the history of the 16th century, found themselves face to face. With these two and with the suc cessive popes Henry had to do daring the rest of his life. Their relations at first were chivalrous and even friendly. Henry never had any chance of success in his canvass for the imperial crown. When it fell to Charles, it made him beyond a doubt the first monarch of the age ; his success placed him in open rivalry to France ; but to Henry, fortunate again, it gave the desirable prospect of being courted by the two rivals, and even of acting as arbiter in their disputes. Henry, however, descended from this lofty position to engage in quarrels which had no concern with the true interests of England. The chimera of French conquest again fascinated him and his people, so that when the false chivalry of the Cloth of Gold had degenerated into war, Henry took the side of Charles. In the campaign of 1523 the English forces advanced to within eleven leagues of Paris, but the war led to no durable and satisfactory result as far as Henry was concerned. The people grew sick of the heavy contributions they were called upon to make, and threatened revolt. After the battle of Pavia (1525), where the French were completely overthrown and their king made prisoner by the armies of Charles, the policy of Henry was completely disturbed. Till that event it had been clear enough. The commercial interests of the country, which were bound up with the Flemish dominions of Charles ; the I ambition of Wolsey, who founded his hope of the papal ! crown on the good-will of the emperor ; the hereditary enmities and warlike instincts of the people, as well as the inclination of the king, coincided conveniently in requiring j the imperial alliance. But now France was down, and the j balance of power, already a working conception in politics, j was destroyed, while Charles in his triumph ignored the claims of Henry, and had more than once disappointed the ambition of Wolsey. Under these circumstances English policy was forced out of its old groove, and an alliance was made with France. In a short time, moreover, interests and passions of a far more momentous nature emerged. The dilettante politics of Henry s early career were to Le superseded by occupations of a tragically earnest nature. Adventurous enterprises abroad were to give place to real interests at home, and the jovial young king was to be transformed into the stein, self-willed, and often cruel revolutionary. The serious and important part of Henry s life therefore is still to come : but before leaving the earlier period it is well to remark that it lasted twenty years, or more than half of his reign ; that during these years Henry was popular in the highest degree ; and especially that he