Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/352

Rh 332 ENGLAND [HISTORY. III. Again in 1522 and 1523 Scotland and France were both successfully invaded. Eighteen years later, in 1541, the Scottish wars began again; two years later England and the empire were again allied against France and Scotland. In 1544 England was again successful over both enemies : while the king in person took Boulogne, his brother-in-law burned Edinburgh and laid waste Scotland, as far as came under his power, with a barbarity which can certainly not be laid to the charge of Edward I. It is certain that England in the end g lined nothing by either the negotiations or the warfare of the reign of Henry. But they are enough to account for the fact, which to us seems so strange, that Henry was, on the whole, popular during his life, and that his memory was cherished after his death. He was the last native king who in his own person waged war, and that successful war, on the mainland. His victories were useless; but they were victories; and, as such, they fed the national imagination. After the dreary time of the civil wars, England again stood forth as a great power, a conquering power, a power iu some sort greater than it had ever been before. To the conqueror much was forgiven in the way of wrong doing at home. More still was forgiven to the king who at last accomplished the work which Henry II. had begun but was not able to finish. Charac- The traditions of arbitrary power and unscrupulous ter of .shedding of blood had been handed on to Henry by his Henry s predecessors, as far back as his Yorkist grandfather. It was the peculiar direction which was given to despotism aud slaughter iu the latter part of his reign which was wholly his own. The darkest side of Henry s character came more and more into prominence in his later years; but his rule was arbitrary, and on occasion bloody, from the beginning. He could from the beginning put men to death, either to gratify a popular cry or to shield himself from purely imaginary dangers. Empson and Dudley, the ministers of his father, had fully deserved the hatred of the people; but their execution, almost the first act of Henry s reign, could be justified on no possible ground of law. In the midst of Henry s French wars, in 1521, Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, was put to death, rather be cause his royal descent was deemed to make him dangerous than on account of any proved crime. But, in these and in all Henry s acts, we see that attention to formal legality which is the special characteristic of his reign. At no time, unless during the first years of the Conquest, was so much Avrong done under legal form, and the Conqueror at least did not send those whom he despoiled to the scaffold. It would be going a great deal too far to say that all Henry s acts could be justified by the letter of the law of England; but it may be fairly said that he could always plead either law or precedent. For his worst acts he was always able to show at least some pretence of legal sanction; his tyranny never became a reign of mere violence. In his days law emphatically became unlaw. Parliaments legis lated as he thought good; judges and juries gave such judg ments and verdicts as he thought good; and, when their action was too slow, parliament was ready to attaint, even without a hearing, any one whom the king wished to de stroy. When Henry s mind turned to ecclesiastical change, parliaments and convocations alike were ready to shape the creed of the nation according to the caprice of its ruler. That such a tyranny could in this way be carried out, never by mere force, often under strict&quot; y legal forms, makes the character both of the man and of the time a study of special interest. It is a time which specially deserves and needs an historian. 1 Here nothing more can be done than to trace its most general features. 1 The historian has been found- though the history is not generally accessible, and is not complete in Mr Brewer, who has traced the story of a large part 01 Henry s reign in the Prefaces to the Calendars The ecclesiastical work of Henry s reign was not religious Henry reformation in the sense in which those words would have not a re been understood by Wickliffe or Luther. Henry now and then, in the endless shiftings of his course, looked in the refome direction of the German Reformers, but it was rather for political than for religious ends. One or two of his theolo gical productions at one stage do indeed show a slight Pro testant tendency on one or two points. 2 But this was only for a moment; Henry s later legislation went towards the establishment of the most rigid orthodoxy, according to the Pioman type, in all matters of dogma. To the end of his days Henry and his prelates, Cranmer conspicuously among them, took care to send to the flames any who swerved in the least degree from the received doctrine of transubstantia- tion. Henry s scheme was to carry out in its fulness that He car- after which earlier kings had so often striven, the complete ries out emancipation of England from the power of the Roman see, the and the transfer of the highest ecclesiastical jurisdiction to e -!&quot;*, the crowb In this he did little more than put into a more distinct shape the authority which the Conqueror had ex-. ercised, and which Henry II. had striven to win back. The ancient kings had allowed the authority of the pope to be exercised only so far as they thought good; Henry threw it off altogether. The acts of 1534, which swept away the Roman supremacy, were the climax of the legislation which had been begun in the Constitutions of Clarendon, and which had been carried on in the statutes of Provisors and of prcv- munire. A few special points of Henry s legislation which were likely to give special offence lasted only during his own reign and that of his son. Such were the title of, Head of the Church, and that personal iurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters which Henry claimed to exercise either by himself or though his vicar-general. Such again were the com missions from the crown which were taken out by bishops under Henry and Edward. These things formed no essen tial part of the royal supremacy. They were abolished under Mary, and they were not re-established under Elizabeth. The essence of the change which Henry wrought was the abolition of all foreign jurisdiction within the island realm. Aboliti And it must not be forgotten that, though the Roman bishop and de- was chiefly aimed at, the Roman emperor was aimed at also, nialofd It was not without reason that the ancient imperial style of ^^ England now reappears. Since the Conquest the use of t ion. that style had been rare, and the instances of its use always mark some special need of the time. Its increased fre quency under Henry marks a special need of his time. When the imperial power was in the hands of Charles V., and when Charles V. was an enemy, it was not without reason that it was declared that the kingdom of England was an empire, and that its crown was au imperial crown. Separation from the see of Rome was not meant to carry with it any change of doctrine, or to imply any breach of communion with the Churches svhich remained in the Roman obedience. It was strictly a scheme .of ecclesiastical inde pendence, and no more. But the acts of Henry put on a peculiar character from the circumstances which led to his ecclesiastical changes, and from the way in which many of them were carried out. And, when ecclesiastical change had once begun, it could not fail to ally itself with other influences, however little such alliance formed any part of the scheme of Henry himself. In strictness of speech, the English Reformation, if by The Re those words we understand changes in doctrine and ritual, forma- is quite distinct from Henry s assertion of the^cclesiastical of State Papers. The general character of Henry is well sketched by Hallam, who prophesies beforehand against some modern delusions. 2 As for instance, in the &quot; Book of Articles,&quot; and the &quot;Godly and Pious Institution of a Christian Man,&quot; put forth in 1536. Here is a certain amount of wavering as to the number of sacraments. That is about the whole advance in a Protestant direction; the six articles of 1541 enforce the Roman theology on pain of death.