Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/920

HEN that occasion should be taken to refer the final decision of the matter back to Rome. Henry grew indignant and angry. A pope capable of such vacillation and trickery was not fit to be the spiritual chief of England, where now the doctrines of the Reformation were making rapid progress. The cause of the pope and the old ecclesiastical system was associated with Catherine, whom the pope protected, while the favourers of the divorce and of the king's marriage with Anne Boleyn were identified to a great extent with the reformers of the church. Thus a mighty revolution began in England, and roused into action elements of strife, which it taxed all Henry's extraordinary powers to control. His own character underwent a fearful transformation. The frank, bluff King Harry became suspicious, inflexible, despotic. Surrounded by intriguers, he was unflinchingly cruel in the punishment of anything like treason, if Henry's reason for reform was a bad and selfish one, the national desire to shake off the papal jurisdiction came in powerful aid of his purpose. The overthrow of Catholicism was not contemplated, but merely an improvement of the ecclesiastical system. Every member of the famous parliament of 1529 was a sincere Roman catholic, and little thought that, by his votes in that remarkable session, he was contributing to the establishment of protestantism in England. Mr. Fronde, in his able history of this reign, has divided the English nation at this crisis into three parties—the English, the papal, and the protestant parties. Henry skilfully balanced the forces of these three parties, directing them against each other, as it suited his purpose. The national party was for the divorce, but violently opposed to Wolsey. Henry abandoned Wolsey to them, and urged on his measures for the divorce. The king indeed saw his duty through his wishes. His love letters to Anne Boleyn are among the most curious possessions of English literature. To modern notions there was great indelicacy in the intercourse of these lovers in the palace inhabited by the yet undivorced queen. Anne was installed there as the object of the king's highest regard in the autumn of 1529. Catherine was not finally abandoned till 1531. During an epidemic Anne was sent to her father in the country, and Henry performed his devotions in company with the queen. The sickness disappeared, and the king's doubts returned; Catherine was deserted, and Anne came back to court. It was not till the 23rd of May, 1533, that Cranmer pronounced the sentence of divorce. In the previous November, however, Anne had been privately married to the king, with little regard to common decorum. Five days after the sentence of divorce Cranmer confirmed the marriage between Henry and Lady Anne. The injury done to Catherine by the Dunstable divorce, as it was called, was deeply felt and resented both at home and abroad. She became the nucleus of a powerful political party that troubled the repose of England for a period of sixty years, and more than once brought the nation to the verge of civil war. Charles V. was naturally indignant, and provoked Scotland to make war on England, while he roused Ireland to insurrection. The pope issued his strongest ecclesiastical censures, and formed a catholic league against England. Francis I. was disgusted with his ancient ally. King Henry, however, was a man not easily daunted, and but ill-disposed for half measures. For several years his parliament had been passing a series of statutes to restore the sound discipline of the church. The king now cast off the pope's spiritual authority, and declared himself head of the English church. With ruthless severity he enforced every penalty enacted by the new statutes. Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More were sent to the scaffold, chiefly doubtless because of their position in the Romanist party, but ostensibly for refusing to acknowledge the king's supremacy in the church. Heretics and suspected traitors were put to death with an unflinching rigour that amounted to atrocity. The trial and death of More and Fisher brought down on the king's head the bull of deposition, at which he could afford to smile. The year 1536 witnessed the first suppression of the monasteries and the confiscation of church property. In the same year was dissolved the reformation parliament which had done so much for the king and the country. This year, too, on the 6th of January, died the late Queen Catherine at Kimbolton castle. Shortly before her death she wrote a touching letter to the king, forgiving him for all the pain he had ever caused her, and requesting his favour and protection for their daughter, the princess Mary. Henry was affected with real regret for her pitiable position, and grieved that his reply arrived too late for her to read. How far this circumstance influenced his relations with his gay Queen Anne is not known; but the levity with which she is said to have received the news of Catherine's death may have strengthened the growing coolness of the king for his too lively partner. Certain it is that estrangements had occurred between them before the tilting match held at Greenwich on the 1st of May, 1536, when Henry publicly showed that he was offended by a trifling act of gallantry on the part of Sir Henry Norris, who was tilting with Anne's brother. Lord Rochford. The unfortunate queen's fate was precipitated with frightful rapidity. On the 2nd of May she was committed to the Tower, on the 10th tried and condemned to death, on the 17th her supposed accomplices, the combatants at the tournament were executed, and on the 19th at noon she was beheaded on the Tower green. Henry, who was ostentatiously dressed in white all that day, married Jane Seymour the next day. His marriage with Anne Boleyn had been declared by Cranmer null and void, "in consequence of certain lawful impediments" confessed by her to the archbishop. Allusion is here made to a pre-contract the young beauty had made with Lord Percy or some other person, before she could have dreamed of winning Henry's love. The events just recorded may have arisen from a strong reaction in the king's mind against the Reformation and its supporters; since it appears that at this time he might have been brought back to the papal fold had it not been for the intemperate language of Cardinal Pole, which determined him to keep in the way of reform. In like manner, the double dealing of Charles V. and Francis I. preserved England in the policy of isolation, which Henry in 1536 seemed disposed to quit. The spirit of reaction was not, however, without its consequences at home. In Lincolnshire sixty thousand people assembled in arms to prevent the destruction of the monasteries. This insurrection was quelled by the duke of Suffolk; but its spirit spread through the northern counties, where occurred the formidable rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, being an enterprise of a spiritual nature led by Robert Aske, with a view to "suppress all heretics and their opinions." Great severities were practised in crushing this rebellion which extended into 1537, a year made memorable to the king by the birth of his son Edward and the death of Jane Seymour. The king's dislike to protestantism was now exhibited in the Law of Six Articles, maintaining transubstantiation, celibacy of priests, &c., which, with the aid of the Romanist party, he had passed through both houses. Cromwell, who was an object of detestation to all the old nobility, hierarchy, and conservative gentry of the kingdom, thought to strengthen the reforming interest by uniting the king with a protestant family of Germany; but the unfortunate match with Anne of Cleves proved fatal to Cromwell. Henry was married to the princess by proxy, and before he had seen her; and divorced from her by act of parliament as soon as possible, after he had seen her, because his "heart was not in the marriage." Cromwell's enemies seized the opportunity to have him accused of high treason, for which this great minister was condemned and executed on the 28th July, 1540. Henry's abandonment of Wolsey and Cromwell exhibits strikingly the cold selfishness of the politic monarch. The depression of the party to which Cromwell belonged was not mitigated by the marriage of the king to Catherine Howard, cousin to Anne Boleyn, and niece of the duke of Norfolk. She was in her nineteenth year, a graceful but diminutive beauty, whose fascinations availed to keep her on the throne little more than sixteen months, being declared queen in August, 1540, and beheaded in February, 1541-42. The crimes for which she suffered were of a date antecedent to her marriage, and the fruit of a miserably-neglected infancy. Henry's sixth and last wife was Katherine Parr, a lady who had been twice a widow, and recommended as much by her learning and discretion as by her beauty. She was the first protestant queen of England, and narrowly escaped impeachment and the block through venturing to argue theological points with her husband. Meanwhile, Henry had quarrelled with his nephew, James V. of Scotland, and routed his army at the Solway. To avenge French interference in the affairs of Scotland, Henry, in July, 1544, made an imposing but futile expedition into France. This was followed by Lord Hertford's invasion of Scotland and the sack of Edinburgh. Scotland, however, was included in the peace made between Henry and Francis in June, 1546. That the king was still a bigoted catholic was proved this year by the cruel martyrdom of Anne Askew. Yet the contest between the factions of the Somersets and Howards, began to show a decline