Part 7 (1/2)

[Sidenote: The Amicable Loan]

Two years before, when Parliament had been called, it had been induced to vote the money asked for. But (according to Hall) the Speaker, Sir Thomas More, had taken the opportunity to resist Wolsey's high-handed methods, to insist on parliamentary privileges, and to refuse to debate the matter in the Cardinal's presence, though he actually exerted his influence in favour of the grant. To repeat the demand now would be to risk rebellion; at the best, to court an inevitable refusal. Therefore Wolsey reverted to ancient precedents, and demanded an ”Amicable Loan,” on the ground that the King was going to lead his armies, and must therefore go fittingly equipped. The loan was to amount to about one-sixth of a man's property. Very soon however it became clear that this was more than the country would endure.

Wolsey revoked the demand and called for a ”Benevolence”. London replied that benevolences were illegal, by reason of the statute of Richard III.

Wolsey protested against appealing to the laws of a tyrant; but the Londoners remarked that the fact of Richard having been a tyrant did not annul the excellence of good laws when he made them. In Norwich the aggrieved populace a.s.sembled in force, and presented their case allegorically, but convincingly, to the Duke of Norfolk, who was sent to deal with them. The Cardinal's attempt to raise money was a failure. The King grasped the situation and remitted the demand, taking all the credit for his clemency, while his minister had the odium for the proposal. For the first time, Wolsey had failed to carry his master's wishes through, for the simple reason that the task set him was an impossible one. The soundness of his own antagonism to the French war was conclusively demonstrated, since without the funds war could not be waged: but the cost of the demonstration was the increase of his unpopularity, and an appreciable diminution of Henry's favour. He did what he could to mollify the King by presenting him with his palace of Hampton Court--a present graciously accepted.

[Sidenote 1: A diplomatic struggle]

[Sidenote 2: 1526-27 Success of Wolsey]

Now, however, a _rapprochement_ with France was again possible.

Charles and Wolsey returned to the att.i.tude of mutually desiring nothing so much as to prove their complete accord, their own anxiety to fulfil all obligations, provided only that the other would reasonably recognise his own obligations in return. Each wanted to extract what he could from Francis without regard to his ally: each wanted an excuse for evading his contract with that ally--the Emperor because he now perceived the more immediate pecuniary profit of the Portuguese marriage. In the diplomatic contest Wolsey had the advantage, that Charles, in spite of Pavia, could not bring the necessary pressure to bear on his captive, if the support of England was felt to be withdrawn. He had something to lose by an open breach: Wolsey had not--provided the responsibility for the breach could plausibly be laid on Charles. Moreover, although the French King was the Emperor's prisoner, the French Government was much less bitterly opposed to the English demand for money than to the Imperial demand for territory.

Thus by the end of the year Wolsey achieved his end--a treaty with France, involving the payment of two million crowns to England, and including Scotland in its terms. Charles being isolated made his own peace with his prisoner in the following February (1526); but Francis, before signing, declared that his promises were extorted and not binding, and after his release repudiated their validity. The Cardinal in fact had extricated England from a very awkward situation, recovered her position as arbiter, and once more made the rival European monarchs feel that they could neither of them afford to have her definitely ranged as an enemy. As the year advanced, the tendency for the French alliance to draw closer, and for the Imperial alliance to dissolve became more marked. Charles, in his desire to dominate Italy, allowed a Spanish force to enter Rome and terrorise the Pope--though he disavowed their actions. In 1527, while he was continuing this policy, and preparing for the sack of Rome and the seizure of the Pope's person in May, Wolsey was carrying through a new French alliance, by which Orleans (afterwards Henry II.) was betrothed to the Princess Mary, and France not only bound herself to make heavy payments but also surrendered Boulogne and Ardres. It seemed as though the isolation of Charles was about to be completed, his opponents becoming the champions of the papacy--while his own antagonism to the Pope had been emphasised at the Diet of Spires by the withdrawal of the anti-Lutheran decrees, and the temporary recognition of each State's right to adopt or reject the Reformer's doctrines in its own territories.

[Sidenote: 1527 A new factor]

But in 1527 Henry had developed a single purpose; he had set his mind on one object to the achievement whereof every political consideration was to be subordinated. The state-craft of the great minister was dominated by and subjected to the king-craft of a master who never brooked opposition to his will; and Wolsey, failing to carry out that will, was hurled without remorse from his high estate. The Cardinal's fall, the breach with Rome, the defining of the shape which the Reformation was to take in England, were all the outcome of Henry's resolve to be released from the wife to whom he had been wedded for eighteen years. Hitherto we have made only incidental allusion to the Reformation; it is now time to examine the development of that movement, down to the moment when Henry took into his own hands the conduct of it within his own realms.

CHAPTER VI

HENRY VIII (ii), 1509-32--BIRTH OF THE REFORMATION

[Sidenote: The Reformation in England]

Down to a comparatively recent date, the popularly accepted accounts of the Reformation in England treated it as a spontaneous outburst of the deep religious spirit pervading the ma.s.s of the people; a pa.s.sionate repudiation of the errors of Rome, born of the secret study of the Bible in defiance of persecution, and of repulsion from the iniquities of the monastic system.

Then there arose a picturesque historian, who recognised in Henry VIII. and Thomas Cromwell the men who created the Reformation; and having once imagined them as the captains of a great and righteous cause, succeeded in interpreting all their actions on the basis of postulating their single- eyed devotion to reform as their ever-dominant motive. A view so difficult to reconcile with some other stereotyped impressions has invited criticism; and it is not unusual now to be told that the changes effected by the Reformation were small, except in so far as the Church was robbed by the destruction of the monasteries.

[Sidenote: Its true character]

As a matter of fact the change which took place was very great and very far-reaching for the nation, though it is easy to exaggerate the deviations from Roman doctrine imposed by it on the clergy of the Anglican Communion.

But the movement was one in which many factors were at work. Moralists, theologians, and politicians, all had their share in it; some who were prominent promoters of it in one phase were its no less active antagonists in another; and not infrequently were guided by purely personal ambitions and interests throughout. In its essence however the Reformation was a revolt against conventions which had lost the justification of the conditions that had brought them into being, and had become fetters upon intellectual and spiritual progress instead of aids to its advancement.

Each group of reformers was ready enough to impose on the world a new set of conventions of its own manufacture, but no group succeeded in dominating the aggregate of groups; and thus in the long run toleration became the only working policy, though its practice was by no means what the Reformers had set before themselves. After long years, religious liberty was the outcome of their work; but few indeed were the martyrs whose blood was consciously shed in that great cause. The men who died rather than submit their own convictions to the dictation of others were for the most part ready, when opportunity offered, to sit in judgment on those who would not accept their own dictation.

[Sidenote: Religious decadence]

The prevailing conditions of the Church at the dawn of the Reformation were exceedingly corrupt, with the corruption of worn out inst.i.tutions; but they appeared to be part of the necessary order of things. Hitherto, occasional heretics had arisen, but (superficially at least) they had been suppressed without serious difficulty. The State, in England and elsewhere, had entered upon conflicts with the priesthood; secular monarchs had even challenged the authority of the Pope; but such quarrels had ended in compromises formal or practical. Moral reforming movements like that of St. Francis had arisen within the Church herself; they had not been antagonistic to her, and they had thriven and decayed without producing revolutionary results. Clerical abuses had been for centuries the objects of satire, but the satirists rarely had any inclination for the role of revolutionaries or martyrs. The recent revival of learning had developed a scepticism which was however habitually accompanied by a decent profession of orthodoxy. That there was prevalent unrest had long been obvious; that there was risk of disturbing developments was not unrecognised; but that these things were the prelude to a vast revolution had been realised neither by Churchmen, Statesmen, nor literati.

[Sidenote: The Scholar-Reformers]

It did not appear, then, that the revolt of Wiclif in England and of Huss in Europe was about to be renewed: though they had in fact prepared the soil to receive the new seed. Lollardry had been driven beneath the surface. Still, so far at least as it represented anti-clericalism rather than a theological system, its secret disciples were accorded a considerable measure of popular sympathy; though it numbered few professors among the cultivated cla.s.ses, it had semi-adherents even among the wealthier burgesses of London; it was active enough to cause some alarm to Convocation, and to excite reactionary bishops. But it was not in this quarter primarily that any notable movement seemed likely to arise. The demand for Reformation during the first quarter of the century was formulated by scholars who were not heretics--Dean Colet of St. Paul's; Thomas More; the cosmopolitan Erasmus, who was but a bird of pa.s.sage in this country, yet one who was warmly and generously welcomed.

To men of this school, a schism in the Church never presented itself as a desirable end. Luther had not yet burned Pope Leo's Bull when Colet died; Lutheranism changed More into a reactionary, as, centuries later, the French Revolution changed Edmund Burke; Erasmus would not range himself beside the stormy controversialists of Germany and Switzerland. To the scholars, the Roman system was not irreconcilable with truth; its defects were accidents, excrescences, curable by the application of common-sense and moral seriousness. In the eyes of Luther and Zwingli, the corruption of Rome was vital, organic, incurable. Ecclesiastical Authority was the corner-stone of the Roman system: Colet and More never attacked it; Luther attacked it because it maintained opinions which he held to be fundamentally false; but in England it is possible to doubt whether the att.i.tude of More and Colet would ever have been officially discarded, had it not been for the political and personal considerations which led Henry and Cromwell to trample ecclesiastical authority under foot. Nevertheless, by their attacks on ecclesiastical abuses, Colet and More helped intelligent people to perceive that the abuses were intolerable, and to acquiesce even in the extreme remedy of schism rather than continue to endure the burden.

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical demoralisation]

It is not disputable that the existing corruption was so serious that some kind of Reformation was absolutely necessary. Where the head is corrupt, there cannot be much general health. If the spiritual head of Christendom were unworthy of his office the ecclesiastical body was certain to suffer; nor could much spirituality be looked for therein, if it habitually acquiesced in the election of Popes in whom spirituality was the last quality recognisable. The climax was perhaps reached when a Borgia-- Alexander VI.--was raised to the papal throne; a man who revelled in the practice of every imaginable vice, and shrank from no conceivable crime.

The mere fact that such an election was possible is sufficient proof of the utter absence of religious feeling in the ruling ranks of the clergy: nor was its presence compatible with the appointment either of his free living and warlike successor Julius II. or of Leo X. who followed--a person of no little culture, a patron of art and of letters, whose morals were not exceptionally lax as compared with those of the average Italian n.o.ble, but in all essentials a pagan. With few exceptions, the princes of the Church owed their position to their connexion, by birth or otherwise, with great families; not a few of them were territorial lords of considerable dominions, for whom it was a sheer necessity to be politicians first, whether they were scholars, ministers of the Gospel, or mere pleasure- seekers afterwards. Italians completely dominated the college of cardinals, looking upon the control of the Church as a national prerogative. The characteristics of the ecclesiastical princes were shared in due degree by bishops and abbots. The fact that until recent years learning had been practically a clerical monopoly necessarily made the clergy the fittest instruments for carrying on much State business, thereby withdrawing many of the better men from the service of religion to the service of politics.

In brief, the whole system tended to entangle the able members of the ecclesiastical body in the temptations not so much of the Flesh and the Devil as of the World.