Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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The severest effects were in education. The convents had provided
schools for girls, the monasteries and the chantry priests had
maintained schools and ninety colleges for boys; all these
institutions were dissolved.
Having stated the facts as impartially as unconscious prejudice
allowed, the historian may be permitted to add a confessedly
hypothetical comment, Henry's greed and Cromwell's ruthlessness merely
advanced by a generation an inevitable lessening in the number and
influence of English monasteries. These had once done admirable work
in education, charity, and hospital care, but the secularization of
such functions was proceeding throughout Western Europe, even where
Catholicism prevailed. The decline in religious fervor and
other-worldliness was rapidly narrowing the flow of novices into
conventual establishments; and many of these were reduced to so
small a number as seemed out of proportion to the splendor of their
buildings and the income of their lands. It is a pity that the
situation was met by the brusque haste of Cromwell rather than by
Wolsey's humane and sounder plan of transforming more and more
monasteries into colleges. Henry's procedure here, as in his quest for
a son, was worse than his aim. It was good that an end should be
put, in some measure, to the exploitation of simple piety by pious
fraud. Our chief regrets go to the nuns who for the most part
labored dutifully in prayer, schooling, and benevolence; and even
one who cannot share their trustful faith must be grateful that
their like again minister, with lifelong devotion, to the needs of the
sick and the poor.
II. THE OBSTINATE IRISH: 1300-1558
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The English kings justified their domination of Ireland on the
ground that a hostile Continental power might at any moment use that
verdant island for a flank attack upon England; and this
consideration, seconding the love of power, became more active when
Protestant England failed to win Ireland from the Roman Church. The
Irish people, heroic and anarchic, virile and violent, poetically
gifted and politically immature, resisted, every day, their subjection
to an alien blood and speech.
The evils of the English occupation mounted. Under Edward III many
Anglo-Irish landowners returned to England to live there in ease on
Irish rents; and though the English Parliament repeatedly denounced
this practice, "absentee landlordism" rose through three centuries
to be a leading spur to Irish revolts. Englishmen who remained in
Ireland tended to marry Irish girls, and were gradually absorbed
into Irish blood and ways. Anxious to dam this racial drain, the Irish
Parliament, dominated by English residents and influence, passed the
famous Statute of Kilkenny (1366), which, along with some wise and
generous provisions, forbade intermarriage, fosterage, or other
intimate relations between the English and the Irish in Ireland, and
any use, by the English, of Irish speech, customs, or dress, on pain
of imprisonment and forfeiture of property. No Irishman was henceforth
to be received into any English religious organization; and no Irish
bards or storytellers were to enter English homes. `062524 These
prohibitions failed; the roses in Irish cheeks outshone the majesty of
the law, and racial fusion went on in that narrow March, Border, or
Pale where alone the English in Ireland dared to dwell. *06055
During the Wars of the Roses Ireland might have expelled the English
had the Irish chiefs united, but they preferred fraternal strife,
sometimes encouraged thereto by English gold. Henry VII re-established
English authority in the Pale, and his lord deputy, Sir Edward
Poynings, pushed through the Irish Parliament the humiliating
"Poynings' Law" (1494)- that in future no Irish Parliament should be
convened until all bills to be presented to it had been approved by
the king and privy council of England. So emasculated, the English
government in Ireland became the most incompetent, ruthless, and
corrupt in Christendom. Its favorite device was to appoint one of
the sixty Irish chieftains as deputy to the viceroy, and commission
him to buy or subdue the rest. Gerald, eighth Earl of Kildare, so
appointed, made some progress in this direction, and mitigated the
intertribal lawlessness that helped English exactions to keep
Ireland weak and poor. On his death (1513) his son Gerald Fitzgerald
was named to succeed him as deputy. This ninth Earl of Kildare had a
career typical of the Irish lords. Accused of conspiring with the Earl
of Desmond to let a French force land in Ireland, he was summoned to
England and committed to the Tower. On his promise faithfully to aid
the English cause, Henry VIII released him and reappointed him deputy.
Soon he was charged with maladministration. He was again brought to
England, and again sent to the Tower, where he died within the year
(1534). His devoted son, "Silken Thomas" Fitzgerald, at once
declared war on the English; he fought bravely and recklessly for
fourteen months, was overcome, and was hanged (1537).
By this time Henry VIII had completed his divorce from the Roman
Church. With characteristic audacity he bade the Irish Parliament
acknowledge him head of the Church in Ireland as well as in England.
It did. An oath accepting his ecclesiastical supremacy was required of
all governmental officials in Ireland, and all church tithes were
henceforth to be paid to the King. Reformers entered the churches in
the Pale, and demolished religious relics and images. All
monasteries but a remote few were closed, their property was taken
by the government, their monks were dismissed with pensions if they
made no fuss. Some of the spoils were distributed among the Irish
chieftains; so oiled, most of them accepted titles of nobility from
the English King, acknowledged his religious supremacy, and abjured
the pope (1539). `062525 The clan system was abolished, and Ireland
was declared a kingdom, with Henry as king (1541).
Henry was victorious, but mortal; he died within five years of his
triumph. Catholicism in Ireland survived. The chieftains took their
apostasy as a passing incident in politics; they continued to be
Catholics (as Henry did) except for ignoring the pope; and the priests
whose ministrations they supported and received remained quietly
orthodox. The faith of the people underwent no change; or rather it
took on new vigor because it maintained the pride of nationality
against a schismatic king and, later, a Protestant queen. The struggle
for freedom became more intense than before, since now it spoke for
body and soul.
III. EVERY OUNCE A KING
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Henry in 1540 was the most absolute monarch that England had ever
known. The old Norman nobility, whose ancestors had checked even
William the Conqueror, were now timidly obedient, and almost forgot
the Magna Charta of their prerogatives. The new nobility, enriched
by commerce and endowed by the King, served as a barrier to
aristocratic or religious revolts. The House of Commons, once the
jealous protector of English liberties but now hand-picked by agents
of the King, yielded to him almost unprecedented powers: the right
to confiscate property, to name anyone his successor, to determine
orthodoxy and heresy, to send men to death after only a mock trial,
and to issue proclamations that were to have the authority of acts
of Parliament. "In Henry's reign the English spirit of independence
burned low in its socket, and love of freedom grew cold." `062526
The English people accepted this absolutism partly through fear,
partly because it seemed the alternative to another War of the
Roses. Order was more important than liberty.
The same alternatives persuaded Englishmen to suffer Henry's
ecclesiastical supremacy. With Catholics and Protestants ready to
fly at each other's throats, with Catholic citizens, ambassadors,
and potentates conspiring against him almost to invasion, Henry
believed that order could be secured in the religious life of
England only by royal determination of faith and ritual; implicitly he
accepted the case that the Church had made for authority in
religion. He tried to dictate who should read the Bible. When the
bishops suppressed Tyndale's translation he bade them prepare a better
one; when they dallied too long he allowed Cromwell to commission a
new translation by Miles Coverdale. This first complete British
version appeared in Zurich in 1535. In 1539 a revised edition was
printed, and Cromwell ordered this "Great Bible" placed in every
English church. Henry, "of the royal liberality and goodness," granted
the citizens the privilege of reading the Bible in their homes; and
soon it became a daily influence in nearly every English family. But
it was a fountain of discord as well as of inspiration; every
village sprouted amateur exegetes who proved anything or its
opposite by Scripture; fanatics wrangled over it in churches, and came
to blows over it in taverns. `062527 Some ambitious men gave their
wives writs of divorce, or kept two wives at once, on the plea that
this was sound Biblical practice. `062528 The King regretted the
liberty of reading that he had allowed, and reverted to the Catholic
stand. In 1543 he induced Parliament to rule that only nobles and
property owners might legally possess the Bible, and only priests
might preach on it, or discuss it publicly. `062529
It was difficult for the people- even for the King- to know the
King's mind. Catholics continued to go to the stake or the block for
denying his ecclesiastical supremacy, Protestants for questioning
Catholic theology. Prior Forest of the Observant Franciscans at
Greenwich, who refused to disown the pope, was suspended in chains
over a fire, and was slowly roasted to death (May 31, 1537). `062530
John Lambert, a Protestant, was arrested for denying the Real Presence
of Christ in the Eucharist; he was tried by Henry himself, was by
Henry condemned to die, and was burned at Smithfield (November 16,
1538). Under the growing influence of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of
Winchester, Henry veered more and more toward orthodoxy. In 1539 King,
Parliament, and Convocation, by the "Act of the Six Articles,"
proclaimed the Roman Catholic position on the Real Presence,
clerical celibacy, monastic vows, Masses for the dead, the necessity
of auricular confession to a priest, and the sufficiency of
communion in one kind. Whoever, by spoken or written word, denied
the Real Presence should suffer death by burning, without
opportunity to abjure, confess, and be absolved; whoever denied any of
the other articles should for the first offense forfeit his
property, for the second his life. All marriages hitherto contracted
by priests were declared void, and for a priest thereafter to retain
his wife was to be a felony. `062531 The people, still orthodox,
generally approved these Articles, but Cromwell did his best to
moderate them in practice; and in 1540 the King, tacking again,
ordered prosecution under the Act to cease. Nevertheless Bishops
Latimer and Shaxton, who disapproved of the Articles, were deposed and
jailed. On July 30, 1540, three Protestants and three Catholic priests
suffered death at Smithfield in unwilling unison, the Protestants
for questioning some Catholic doctrines, the Catholics for rejecting
the ecclesiastical sovereignty of the King. `062532
Henry was as forceful in administration as in theology. Though he
maintained an extravagant court, and spent much time in eating, he
toiled heavily in the tasks of government. He chose competent aides as
ruthless as himself. He reorganized the army, equipped it with new
weapons, and studied the latest fashions in tactics and strategy. He
built the first permanent royal navy, which cleared the coasts and
Channel of pirates and prepared for the naval victories of
Elizabeth. But he taxed his people to the limit of tolerance,
repeatedly debased the currency, confiscated private property on
flimsy pretexts, demanded "contributions," repudiated his debts,
borrowed from the Fuggers, and promoted the English economy in the
hope that it would yield him added revenue.
Agriculture was in depression. Serfdom was still widespread.
Enclosures for sheep pasturage continued; and the new landlords,
unhindered by feudal traditions, doubled or quadrupled the rents of
their tenants on the ground of rising prices, and refused to renew
expiring leases. "Thousands of dispossessed tenants made their way
to London, and clamored at the doors of the courts of law for
redress which they could not obtain." `062533 Catholic More drew a
pitiful picture of the beggared peasantry, `062534 and Protestant
Latimer denounced the "rent-raiser steplords," and, like Luther,
idealized a Catholic past when "men were full of pity and
compassion." `062535 Parliament laid ferocious penalties upon
vagabondage and beggary. By an act of 1530-31 any able-bodied
mendicant, whether man or woman, was to be "tied to the end of a
cart naked, and be beaten with whips throughout the town till his body
be bloody"; for a second offense an ear was to be cut off; for a
third, another ear; in 1536, however, the third offense incurred
death. `062536 Gradually the displaced peasants found work in the
cities, and poor relief mildly mitigated pauperism. In the end the
productivity of the land was raised by large-scale farming, but the
inability of the government to ease the transition was a criminal
and heartless failure of statesmanship.
The same government protected industry with tariffs, and
manufacturers profited from the cheap labor made available by the
migration of peasants to the towns. Capitalistic methods reorganized
the textile industry, and raised a new class of wealthy men to stand
beside the merchants in support of the King; cloth now replaced wool
as England's chief export. Most exports were of necessaries produced
by the lower classes; most imports were of luxuries available only
to the rich. `062537 Commerce and industry were benefited by a law
of 1536 legalizing interest rates of 10 per cent; and the rapid rise
of prices favored enterprise while it penalized workers, peasants, and
old-style feudal lords. Rents rose 1,000 per cent between 1500 and
1576; `062538 food prices rose 250 to 300 per cent; wages rose 150 per
cent. `062539 "Such poverty reigneth now," wrote Thomas Starkey
about 1537, "that in no case may stand with a very true and
flourishing common weal." `062540 Guild members found some relief in
the insurance and mutual aid provided them against poverty and fire;
but in 1545 Henry confiscated the property of the guilds. `062541
IV. THE DRAGON RETIRES
-
What sort of a man was this ogre of a king? Holbein the Younger,
coming to England about 1536, painted portraits of Henry and Jane
Seymour. The gorgeous costume almost conceals the royal corpulence;
the gems and ermine, the hand on the jeweled sword, reveal the pride
of authority, the vanity of the uncontradicted male; the broad fat
face bespeaks a hearty sensualism; the nose is a pillar of strength;
the tight lips and stern eyes warn of a despot quick to anger and cold
to cruelty. Henry was now forty-six, at the top of his political
curve, but entering physical decline. He was destined to marry
thrice again, and yet to have no further progeny. From all his six
wives he had but three children who outlived infancy. One of these
three- Edward VI- was sickly and died at fifteen; Mary remained
desolately barren in marriage; Elizabeth never dared marry, probably
through consciousness of some physical impediment. The curse of
semi-sterility or bodily defect lay upon the proudest dynasty in
English history.
Henry's mind was keen, his judgment of men was penetrating, his
courage and will power were immense. His manners were coarse, and
his scruples disappeared with his youth. To his friends, however, he
remained kind and generous, jovially amiable, and capable of winning
affection and devotion. Born to royalty, he was surrounded from
birth with obeisance and flattery; only a few men dared withstand him,
and they were buried without their heads. "Surely," wrote More from
the Tower, "it is a great pity that any Christian prince should by a
flexible [knee-bending] council ready to follow his affections
[desires], and by a weak clergy... be with flattery so shamefully
abused." `062542 This was the external source of Henry's retrogression
in character- that the absence of resistance to his will, after the
death of More, made him as flabby in moral sense as in physique. He
was not more lax in sex than Francis I, and after the passing of
Anne Boleyn he seems to have been more monogamous, seriatim, than
Charles V; sexual looseness was not his worst failing. He was greedy
for money as well as for power, and seldom allowed considerations of
humanity to halt his appropriations. His ungrateful readiness to
kill women whom he had loved, or men who, like More and Cromwell,
had served him loyally for many years, is despicable; yet in result he
was not one tenth as murderous as the well-meaning Charles IX
sanctioning the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or Charles V condoning
the sack of Rome, or German princes fighting through thirty years
for their right to determine the religious beliefs of their subjects.
The inner source of his deterioration was the repeated frustration
of his will in love and parentage. Long disappointed in his hope for a
son, dishonestly checked in his reasonable request for an annulment of
his first marriage, deceived (he believed) by the wife for whom he had
risked his throne, bereaved so soon of the only wife who gave him an
heir, tricked into marriage by a woman utterly alien to him in
language and temperament, cuckolded (he thought) by the wife who
seemed to promise him at last the happiness of a home- here was a king
possessing all England but denied the domestic joys of the simplest
husband in his realm. Suffering intermittent agony from an ulcer in
his leg, buffeted with revolts and crises throughout his reign, forced
at almost every moment to arm against invasion, betrayal, and
assassination- how could such a man develop normally, or avoid
degeneration into suspicion, craft, and cruelty? And how shall we, who
fret at the pinpricks of private tribulation, understand a man who
bore in his mind and person the storm and stress of the English
Reformation, weaned his people by perilous steps from a deeply
rooted loyalty, and yet must have felt in his divided soul an
erosive wonder- had he freed a nation or shattered Christendom?
Danger, as well as power, was the medium in which he lived. He could
never tell how far his enemies would go, or when they would succeed.
In 1538 he ordered the arrest of Sir Geoffrey Pole, brother to
Reginald. Fearing torture, Geoffrey confessed that he, another
brother, Lord Montague, Sir Edward Neville, and the Marquis and
Marchioness of Exeter had had treasonable correspondence with the
Cardinal. Geoffrey was pardoned; Exeter, Montague, and several
others were hanged and quartered (1538-39); Lady Exeter was
imprisoned; and the Countess of Salisbury, mother of the Poles, was
placed under guard. When the Cardinal visited Charles V in Toledo
(1539), bearing a futile request from Paul III that the Emperor
would join with Francis in outlawing all commerce with
England, `062543 Henry retaliated by arresting the Countess, who was
now seventy years old; perhaps he hoped that by keeping her in the
Tower he could check the Cardinal's enthusiasm for invasion. All was
fair in the game of life and death.
Having remained for two years unmarried, Henry bade Cromwell seek
for him a marital alliance that would strengthen his hand against
Charles. Cromwell recommended Anne, sister-in-law of the Elector of
Saxony, and sister of the Duke of Cleves, who was then at odds with
the Emperor. Cromwell set his heart on the marriage, by which he hoped
ultimately to form a league of Protestant states, and thereby compel
Henry to repeal the anti-Lutheran Six Articles. Henry dispatched
Holbein to paint a likeness of the lady; possibly Cromwell added
some instructions to the artist; the picture came, and Henry judged
the Princess bearable. She looks discouragingly sad in the Holbein
portrait that hangs in the Louvre, but not less plain of feature
than the Jane Seymour who had for a moment softened the heart of the
King. When Anne came in body, and Henry laid eyes on her (January 1,
1540), love died at first sight. He shut his eyes, married her, and
prayed again for a son to strengthen the Tudor succession now that
Prince Edward was revealing his physical frailty. But he never forgave
Cromwell.
Four months later, alleging malfeasance and corruption, he ordered
the arrest of his most profitable minister. Hardly anyone objected;
Cromwell was the most unpopular subject in England- for his origin,
his methods, his venality, his wealth. In the Tower he was required to
sign statements impugning the validity of the new marriage. Henry
announced that he had not given his "inward consent" to the union, and
had never consummated it. Anne, confessing that she was still a
maid, agreed to an annulment in return for a comfortable pension.
Loath to face her brother, she chose a lonely life in England; and
it was small comfort to her that when she died (1557) she was buried
in Westminster Abbey. Cromwell was beheaded on July 28, 1540.
On the same day Henry married Catherine Howard, twenty years old, of
a strictly Catholic house; the Catholic party was gaining. The King
ceased to flirt with Continental Protestants, and made his peace
with the Emperor. Feeling himself at last safe in that quarter, he
turned his fancy northward in the hope of annexing Scotland and
thereby rounding out the geographical boundaries and security of
Britain. He was distracted by another rebellion in the north of
England. Before leaving to suppress it, and to discourage conspiracy
at his back, he ordered all the political prisoners in the Tower,
including the Countess of Salisbury, to be put to death (1541). The
rebellion collapsed, and Henry, distraught with cares, returned to
Hampton Court to seek solace from his new Queen.
The second Catherine was the fairest of his mates. More dependent
than before on wifely ministrations, the King learned almost to love
her, and he gave thanks to God for "the good life he was leading and
hoped to lead" under her supervision. But on the day after this Te
Deum (November 2, 1541), Archbishop Cranmer handed him documents
indicating that Catherine had had premarital relations with three
successive suitors. Two of these confessed; so did the Queen. Henry
"took such grief," the French ambassador reported, "that it was
thought he had gone mad"; `062544 the fear haunted him that God had
cursed all his marriages. He was inclined to pardon Catherine, but
evidence was given him that she had, since her royal marriage,
committed adultery with her cousin. She admitted having received her
cousin in her private apartment late at night, but only in the
presence of Lady Rochford; she denied any misdeed then or at any
time since her marriage; and Lady Rochford testified to the truth of
these statements so far as her own knowledge went. `062545 But the
royal court pronounced the Queen guilty; and on February 13, 1542, she
was beheaded on the same spot where Anne Boleyn's head had fallen
six years before. Her paramours were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The King was now a broken man. His ulcer baffled the medical science
of his time, and syphilis, never quite cured, was spreading its
ravages through his frame. `062546 Losing the zest of life, he had
allowed himself to become an unwieldly mass of flesh, his cheeks