Volume II Part 13 (1/2)
[Sidenote: He, therefore, and the pope are as far asunder as yea and nay,]
[Sidenote: And he trusts that Francis will agree with him as to the pope's conduct.]
[Sidenote: For himself, he is satisfied that he can retract nothing which he has justly done,]
The language of Henry throughout this paper was very fine and n.o.ble. He reminded Francis that substantially the cause at issue was the cause of all princes; the pope claiming a right to summon them to plead in the courts of Rome, and refusing to admit their exemption as sovereign rulers. He had been required not only to undo his marriage, and cancel the sentence of divorce, but, as a condition of reconciliation with the Holy See, to undo also the Act of Appeals, and to restore the papal jurisdiction. He desired it to be understood, with emphasis, that these points were all equally sacred, and the repeal of the act was as little to be thought of as the annulling the marriage. ”The pope,” he said, ”did inforce us to excogitate some new thing, whereby we might be healed and relieved of that continual disease, to care for our cause at Rome, where such defence was taken from us, as by the laws of G.o.d, nature, and man, is due unto us. Hereupon depended the wealth of our realm; hereupon consisted the surety of our succession, which by no other means could be well a.s.sured.” ”And therefore,” he went on, ”you [the Duke] shall say to our good brother, that the pope persisting in the ways he hath entered, ye must needs despair in any meeting between the French king and the pope, to produce any such effect as to cause us to meet in concord with the pope; but we shall be even as far asunder as is between yea and nay.
For to the pope's enterprise to revoke or put back anything that is done here, either in marriage, statute, sentence, or proclamation[165]--of which four members is knit and conjoined the surety of our matter, nor any can be removed from the other, lest thereby the whole edifice should be destroyed--we will and shall, by all ways and means say nay, and declare our nay in such sort as the world shall hear, and the pope feel it. Wherein ye may say our firm trust, perfect hope, and a.s.sured confidence is, that our good brother will agree with us: as well for that it should be partly dishonourable for him to see decay the thing that was of his own foundation and planting; as also that it should be too much dishonourable for us--having travelled so far in this matter, and brought it to this point, that all the storms of the year pa.s.sed, it is now come to harvest, trusting to see shortly the fruit of our marriage, to the wealth, joy, and comfort of all our realm, and our own singular consolation--that anything should now be done by us to impair the same, and to put our issue either in peril of b.a.s.t.a.r.dy, or otherwise disturb that [which] is by the whole agreement of our realm established for their and our commodity, wealth, and benefit. And in this determination ye know us to be so fixed, and the contrary hereof to be so infeasible, either at our hands, or by the consent of the realm, that ye must needs despair of any order to be taken by the French king with the pope. For if any were by him taken wherein any of these four pieces should be touched--that is to say, the marriage of the queen our wife, the revocation of the Bishop of Canterbury's sentence, the statute of our realm, or our late proclamation, which be as it were one--and as walls, covering, and foundation make a house, so they knit together, establish, and make one matter--ye be well a.s.sured, and be so ascertained from us, that in no wise we will relent, but will, as we have before written, withstand the same. Whereof ye may say that ye have thought good to advertise him, to the intent he make no farther promise to the pope therein than may be performed.”
[Sidenote: And the pope must be made to understand his folly.]
The amba.s.sadors were the more emphatically to insist on the king's resolution, lest Francis, in his desire for conciliation, might hold out hopes to the pope which could not be realized. They were to say, however, that the King of England still trusted that the interview would not take place. The see of Rome was a.s.serting a jurisdiction which, if conceded, would encourage an unlimited usurpation. If princes might be cited to the papal courts in a cause of matrimony, they might be cited equally in other causes at the pope's pleasure; and the free kingdoms of Europe would be converted into dependent provinces of the see of Rome.
It concerned alike the interest and the honour of all sovereigns to resist encroachments which pointed to such an issue; and, therefore, Henry said he hoped that his good brother would use the pope as he had deserved, ”doing him to understand his folly, and [that] unless he had first made amends, he could not find in his heart to have further amity with him.”
[Sidenote: If the meeting is to go on, and the amba.s.sadors cannot induce Francis to ”break” it, they are to return home.]
If notwithstanding, the instructions concluded, ”all these persuasions cannot have place to let the said meeting, and the French king shall say it is expedient for him to have in his hands the d.u.c.h.ess,[166] under pretence of marriage for his son, which he cannot obtain but by this means, ye shall say that ye remember ye heard him say once he would never conclude that marriage but to do us good, which is now infaisible; and now in the voice of the world shall do us both more hurt in the diminution of the reputation of our amity than it should do otherwise profit. Nevertheless, [if] ye cannot let his precise determination, [ye]
can but lament and bewail your own chance to depart home in this sort; and that yet of the two inconvenients, it is to you more tolerable to return to us nothing done, than to be present at the interview and to be compelled to look patiently upon your master's enemy.”
After having entered thus their protest against the French king's conduct, the emba.s.sy was to return to England, leaving a parting intimation of the single condition under which Henry would consent to treat. If the pope would declare that ”the matrimony with the Lady Catherine was and is nought, he should do somewhat not to be refused;”
except with this preliminary, no offer whatever could be entertained.[167]
[Sidenote: The remonstrance fails.]
[Sidenote: The effect upon the world's opinion.]
[Sidenote: Intended Catholic triumvirate--the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of France.]
This communication, as Henry antic.i.p.ated, was not more effectual than the former in respect of its immediate object. At the meeting of Calais the interests of Francis had united him with England, and in pursuing the objects of Henry he was then pursuing his own. The pope and the emperor had dissolved the coalition by concessions on the least dangerous side. The interests of Francis lay now in the other direction, and there are few instances in history in which governments have adhered to obligations against their advantage from a spirit of honour, when the purposes with which they contracted those obligations have been otherwise obtained. The English emba.s.sy returned as they were ordered; the French court pursued their way to Ma.r.s.eilles; not quarrelling with England; intending to abide by the alliance, and to give all proofs of amity which did not involve inconvenient sacrifices; but producing on the world at large by their conduct the precise effect which Henry had foretold. The world at large, looking at acts rather than to words, regarded the interview as a contrivance to reconcile Francis and the emperor through the intervention of the pope, as a preliminary for a packed council, and for a holy war against the Lutherans,[168]--a combination of ominous augury to Christendom, from the consequences or which, if Germany was to be the first sufferer, England would be inevitably the second.
[Sidenote: September 6. Henry, against his will, looks towards Germany.]
[Sidenote: Unfortunate want of union among Protestants.]
[Sidenote: Mission of Stephen Vaughan to the Court of the Elector of Saxe,]
[Sidenote: Which is not welcome.]
[Sidenote: The Elector had no anxiety to compromise himself with the Emperor.]
Meanwhile, as the French alliance threatened to fail, the English government found themselves driven at last to look for a connexion among those powers from whom they had hitherto most anxiously disconnected themselves. At such a time Protestant Germany, not Catholic France, was England's natural friend. The Reformation was essentially a Teutonic movement; the Germans, English, the Scotch, the Swedes, the Hollanders, all were struggling on their various roads towards an end essentially the same. The same dangers threatened them, the same inspiration moved them; and in the eyes of the orthodox Catholics they were united in a black communion of heresy. Unhappily, though this ident.i.ty was obvious to their enemies, it was far from obvious to themselves. The odium theologic.u.m is ever hotter between sections of the same party which are divided by trifling differences, than between the open representatives of antagonist principles; and Anglicans and Lutherans, instead of joining hands across the Channel, endeavoured only to secure each a recognition of themselves at the expense of the other. The English plumed themselves on their orthodoxy. They were ”not as those publicans,” heretics, despisers of the keys disobedient to authority; they desired only the independence of their national church, and they proved their zeal for the established faith with all the warmth of persecution. To the Germans national freedom was of wholly minor moment, in comparison with the freedom of the soul; the orthodoxy of England was as distasteful to the disciples of Luther as the orthodoxy of Rome--and the interests of Europe were sacrificed on both sides to this foolish and fatal disunion. Circ.u.mstances indeed would not permit the division to remain in its first intensity, and their common danger compelled the two nations into a partial understanding. Yet the reconciliation, imperfect to the last, was at the outset all but impossible. Their relations were already embittered by many reciprocal acts of hostility.
Henry VIII. had won his spurs as a theologian by an attack on Luther.
Luther had replied by a hailstorm of invectives. The Lutheran books had been proscribed, the Lutherans themselves had been burnt by Henry's bishops. The Protestant divines in Germany had attempted to conciliate the emperor by supporting the cause of Catherine; and Luther himself had spoken loudly in condemnation of the king. The elements of disunion were so many and so powerful, that there was little hope of contending against them successfully. Nevertheless, as Henry saw, the coalition of Francis and the emperor, if the pope succeeded in cementing it, was a most serious danger, to which an opposite alliance would alone be an adequate counterpoise; and the experiment might at least be tried whether such an alliance was possible. At the beginning of August, therefore, Stephen Vaughan was sent on a tentative mission to the Elector of Saxe, John Frederick, at Weimar.[169] He was the bearer of letters containing a proposal for a resident English amba.s.sador; and if the elector gave his consent, he was to proceed with similar offers to the courts of the Landgrave of Hesse and the Duke of Lunenberg.[170]
Vaughan arrived in due time at the elector's court, was admitted to audience, and delivered his letters. The prince read them, and in the evening of the same day returned for answer a polite but wholly absolute refusal. Being but a prince elector, he said, he might not aspire to so high an honour as to be favoured with the presence of an English amba.s.sador. It was not the custom in Germany, and he feared that if he consented he should displease the emperor.[171] The meaning of such a reply delivered in a few hours was not to be mistaken, however disguised in courteous language. The English emissary saw that he was an unwelcome visitor, and that he must depart with the utmost celerity. ”The elector,” he wrote,[172] ”thirsted to have me gone from him, which I right well perceived by evident tokens which declared unto me the same.” He had no anxiety to expose to hazard the toleration which the Protestant dukedoms as yet enjoyed from the emperor, by committing himself to a connexion with a prince with whose present policy he had no sympathy, and whose conversion to the cause of the Reformation he had as yet no reason to believe sincere.[173]
The reception which Vaughan met with at Weimar satisfied him that he need go no further; neither the Landgrave nor the Duke of Lunenberg would be likely to venture on a course which the elector so obviously feared. He, therefore, gave up his mission, and returned to England.
[Sidenote: The failure a not unprofitable lesson to England.]