Part 13 (1/2)
[Sidenote 1: 1540 The Marriage]
[Sidenote 2: Fall of Cromwell]
Early in the year (1540) the bride came to England; bringing disillusionment. Matters had gone too far for the King to draw back, and the marriage was carried out; but his wrath was kindled against its projector. The blow fell not less suddenly than with Wolsey. The Earl of Ess.e.x--such was the t.i.tle recently bestowed on Cromwell--was without warning arrested and attainted of high treason. The instrument he himself had forged and ruthlessly wielded with such terrible effect was turned as ruthlessly against him. He had over-ridden the law. He had countenanced and protected anti-clerical law-breakers. He had spoken in arrogant terms of his own power. As it had availed Wolsey nothing that his breach of praemunire had been countenanced by the King, so it availed Cromwell nothing that the King had seemed to support him. If the King had done so, in each case, it was merely because he in his innocence had been misled by his minister, so that in fact their crime was aggravated. For the merciless minister, there was no mercy. That the process against Ess.e.x was by attainder and not by an ordinary trial is of little moment. His fate would have been the same in any case; nor was he so scrupulous in such matters that he can claim sympathy on that head. No voice but Cranmer's--in lamentation rather than protest--was raised on his behalf. The mighty minister, the most dreaded of all men who have swayed the destinies of England, found himself in a moment as utterly helpless as the feeblest of his victims had been. He was flung into the Tower; his stormy protests were unheeded by the King; on July 28th, his head fell beneath the executioner's axe.
[Sidenote: Nemesis]
Cromwell had learned his ethics and his state-craft in that school whose doctrines are formulated in ”The Prince” of Macchiavelli. He had applied those principles with remorseless logic, untinged by the fear of G.o.d or man, to the single end of making his master actually the most complete autocrat that ever sat on the throne of England. His loyalty was as unfailing as it was unscrupulous; his work had been thorough and complete--the King was placed beyond further need of him. His reward was the doom of a traitor. Unpitying he lived, unpitied he died. Regardless of justice, he had swept down each obstacle in the way of his policy: regardless of justice he was in turn struck down. By his own standards he was judged; his end was the end he had compa.s.sed for More and Fisher. History has no more perfect example of Nemesis.
CHAPTER X
HENRY VIII (vi), 1540-47--HENRY'S LAST YEARS
[Sidenote: 1540 Katherine Howard]
The complaisant and very plain lady who had been the cause of Cromwell's downfall had no objection (subject to compensation), to being discarded on technical grounds by her spouse. Before the minister was dead, the marriage had been p.r.o.nounced null: not without compensatory gifts. But her brother the Duke of Cleves was less easily pacified, and all prospect of an alliance with the Protestant League was at an end. A new bride was promptly found for the King in the person of Katharine Howard, a kinswoman of the Duke of Norfolk--a marriage which marked the renewal of the ascendancy of the old n.o.bility in alliance with the reactionary Church party.
[Sidenote: The King his own Minister]
Thirty-one years had pa.s.sed since Henry, in the first flush of a manhood exceptionally rich in promise, but untried and inexperienced, had taken his place on the throne of England as the successor of the most astute sovereign in Europe. For nearly twenty years thereafter Wolsey had served him with such lat.i.tude of action that nearly every one except the Cardinal believed that he dominated the King. After a brief interval, for nearly ten years more the same statement would have applied to Cromwell. While those two great ministers held office, each of them towered immeasurably above all his fellow-subjects: though each knew that the brilliant boy had hardened into a masterful King who could hurl him headlong with a nod. But when Cromwell had fallen, none took his place; there is no statesman who stands out conspicuous. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, brother of Jane Seymour, showed some military capacity; Paget proved himself an astute diplomatist; Cranmer and Gardiner led the rival Church parties, but neither the parties nor their leaders exercised any semblance of control over the Supreme Head. Abroad, Henry's battle with the Pope was won: at home his autocracy was established alike as temporal and spiritual head of the nation. There was no one left who needed crus.h.i.+ng. Cromwell had seen to that before he was dispensed with. After that revolutionary decade, there were no more marked changes. There were incidents in the now slowly moving course of the reformation; there was even an unimportant insurrection; but the chief interest of Henry's closing years is once more to be found mainly in foreign relations, and more especially in those with Scotland.
[Sidenote: England and the European Powers]
On the continent, the two leading Powers, France and the Empire, were in a chronic state of antagonism only occasionally veiled: while the Pope was in permanent opposition to England. This situation was complicated by the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant German Princes. When Charles was disposed to religious toleration, the League were his very good subjects, the Pope became antagonistic, and a Franco-papal alliance threatened. When Charles leaned to intolerance, the Pope grew favourable to him, and Francis turned a friendly eye on the perturbed Protestant League. Charles, Francis, and the League, would each of them have been pleased to make use of England, but none of them wished to be of service to her: and now Thomas Cromwell's great desire of bringing about a cordial relation between England and the League had been frustrated instead of furthered by the affair of Anne of Cleves. The risk of this alliance had forced Charles into a conciliatory att.i.tude towards Francis; relieved from it, he could now revert to his normal att.i.tude. At the end of 1540, the Emperor and the French King were almost within measurable distance of hostilities, while the relations between the latter and Henry were becoming seriously strained by his neglect to pay the instalments of cash due under past treaties. For the time being, however, there was no immediate likelihood of a breach of the peace.
[Sidenote: Cardinal Beton]
In Scotland, James Beton Archbishop of St. Andrews, the most consistent enemy of England, had died in 1539, and had been succeeded, both in his office and his influence, by his nephew, the still more famous Cardinal, David Beton. The Cardinal was the last of the old school of militant ecclesiastical statesmen; a foe to the English the more deadly because of Henry's anti-clerical policy, as well as on account of traditional views, and of the specific grounds of distrust for which Henry himself had been responsible during twenty years past--including the proposal to let Angus kidnap James Beton [Footnote: _Cf._ p. 81.] under a safe-conduct. He was moreover a zealous persecutor of heretics; which greatly intensified the bitterness with which all the historians of the reforming party treated not only the man himself but the whole policy which he was supposed to have instigated. In Scotland, religious reformers were almost of necessity Anglophiles, since Henry did all he could to encourage their doctrines.
North of the Tweed, English writers have relied so much on the statements of John Knox and Buchanan that the persistent hostility not only of the King and the clergy but also of the Scottish Commons to Henry's overtures is generally represented as mere frowardness. It was in fact due to a distrust sufficiently accounted for by the English King's undeniable complicity in the deliberate fostering of disorder, and more than justified by his re-a.s.sertion in public doc.u.ments of the English claim to suzerainty which had been finally and decisively repudiated at Bannockburn--a repudiation confirmed by treaty [Footnote: It is true that this had not prevented Edward III. from re-a.s.serting the claim.] in 1328.
[Sidenote: Scotland and England, 1541]
In 1541 the attempt was renewed to bring about a conference with the Scots King at York; again it failed, after James had seemed to commit himself. Henry was indignant, and recriminations pa.s.sed on the subject and on that of border raids, which culminated in the following summer in the affair of Haddon Rigg when an English party was very badly handled. It is a curious ill.u.s.tration of Henry's notions of honour that--although the two countries were nominally at peace--Wharton, one of the English Wardens of the Marches, proposed to take advantage of James's 1542 roving propensities and arrange to have him captured and brought prisoner to England; a scheme which Henry apparently approved, but fortunately for his own credit referred to his Council, whose consciences were less adaptable. In October, the English indulged in a week's invasion of Scotland, and the Scottish King would have responded in kind but that his n.o.bles thought better of it.
[Sidenote: Solway Moss (Nov.)]
The counter-invasion however was not long delayed. The popular accounts of it are mainly derived from the narrative of John Knox; according to whom the Scottish army, ill-led and disorderly, was utterly routed with immense slaughter by three or four hundred English yeomen who succeeded in gathering together and smiting them after the a.n.a.logy of Gideon. But the dispatches of Wharton [Footnote: _Hamilton Papers._ Lang, Hist.
Scot., i., 455. Froude, iv., 190 (Ed. 1864), follows Knox picturesquely.], the Warden of the Marches, show that, acting on some days' information, he had ready a force of from 2,000 to 3,000 men, with whom, having watched his opportunity, he fell upon the very badly organised Scottish levies and entangled them in the mora.s.s called Solway Moss. The completeness of the disaster has not been over-rated; but it was an intelligible operation of war, not a miracle. James was prostrated by the blow. In three weeks time (December 14th, 1542) he was dead, and his week-old daughter Mary inherited the woful burden of the Scottish crown.
[Sidenote: Intervening events]
In the meantime, there had been a futile insurrection in the North, headed by Sir John Neville, in the Spring of 1541; which led to the execution not only of Neville himself, but of the old Countess of Salisbury--niece of Edward IV., mother of the Poles, and grandchild of the ”King-maker”. Not long after this, the Norfolk interest suffered a severe shock at Henry's court from the discovery of flagrant and confessed misconduct on the part of the monarch's fifth spouse, Katharine Howard; she was attainted and beheaded, in February, 1542, and succeeded by Katharine Parr; who was fortunate enough to outlive her husband.
[Sidenote: 1543 Henry's Scottish policy]
Solway Moss inspired Henry with a fresh determination to invade and chastise Scotland; but James's death suggested a simpler method. For the moment, Beton was in the hands of his enemies. Henry proposed that the baby Mary should be betrothed to his own son Edward, that the government of Scotland should be vested in a Council which he could control, and that sundry English garrisons should be planted in the country. The Scots lords captured at Solway Moss were quite ready to promise support to his plans as the price of returning home: they were also ready to break faith with the English King when they got there; and did so. As soon as the lords were out of Henry's reach, the Scots Estates demanded modifications in the proposed treaty which would have made it nugatory from the English point of view. A Scottish Prince might have been allowed to wed an English Princess; but Scotland would not take her King from England. It was not long before the Cardinal recovered his ascendancy, and, acting in conjunction with the queen-mother, Mary of Guise, sought the aid and alliance of France.
[Sidenote: Alliance with Charles]