Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/257

 and in turn, but Cranmer kept his place by abstention from politics and by the facility with which Henry could use him when he wanted; whilst Gardiner, on the other hand, sank the ecclesiastic in the politician until his time came.

So, for all the critical years of the reign, Henry's strong will threw the advice or agency of any subordinate politician into the shade. Henry was every inch a king; the king, the whole king, and nothing but the king. Another of our kings, George IV, I think, who also had matrimonial troubles, in writing to his ministers used to employ an expressive phrase to describe a contingency which it was useless to contemplate. 'If I were an individual,' he writes, 'I might, should, or would do so and so.' Now Henry VIII in that sense was never an individual: he was always a king, looking on himself as a thing apart from mankind, on kingship as an end in itself, on kingly volition as the only and ample reason for anything whatever; on his dignity as such a complete vice-Deity that, under his fiat, municipal law rose, without any further sanction, to the level of divine revelation. His marriages are royal marriages, his murders royal murders, his diseases royal diseases. There is nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Bessie Blount is as much a fact as Anne Boleyn, and Anne Boleyn as Katharine of Aragon. If they are to his taste they are honoured and worshipped with him; if he is tired of them the country is tired of them too; they are abominable; they confess themselves guilty of impossible sins; send them by parliamentary petition to the block.

What is strange in all this is not the idea itself, which George IV may have had as strongly as Henry VIII: it is the force of character that makes the idea tolerable to other men; that makes More, Warham, Cranmer, Gardiner, Cromwell, faithful administrators of the idea; and that forces, against their will evidently, but still effectively forces. Parliament and Convocation, Lords, Clergy and Commons, to register simply the peremptory orders of the king as their own wishes. There were cliques and parties at Henry's court during the whole of his reign, there was a strong party against Wolsey, there was a protestant and a catholic party, and a Norfolk and