Part 3 (1/2)
THE APPRENTICEs.h.i.+P OF HENRY VIII.
Quietly and peacefully, without a threat from abroad or a murmur at home, the crown, which his father had won amid the storm and stress of the field of battle, devolved upon Henry VIII. With an eager profusion of zeal Ferdinand of Aragon placed at Henry's disposal his army, his fleet, his personal services.[78] There was no call for this sacrifice.
For generations there had been no such tranquil demise of the crown.
Not a ripple disturbed the surface of affairs as the old King lay sick in April, 1509, in Richmond Palace at Sheen. By his bedside stood his only surviving son; and to him the dying monarch addressed his last words of advice. He desired him to complete his marriage with Catherine, he exhorted him to defend the Church, and to make war on the infidel; he commended to him his faithful councillors, and is believed to have urged upon him the execution of De la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, the White Rose of England. On the 22nd he was dead. A fortnight later the funeral procession wended its way from Sheen to St. Paul's, where the ill.u.s.trious John Fisher, cardinal and martyr, preached the _eloge_. Thence it (p. 044) pa.s.sed down the Strand, between hedges and willows clad in the fresh green of spring, to
That acre sown indeed With the richest, royallest seed That the earth did e'er drink in.
There, in the vault beneath the chapel in Westminster Abbey, which bears his name and testifies to his magnificence in building, Henry VII. was laid to rest beside his Queen; dwelling, says Bacon, ”more richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond or any of his palaces”. For years before and after, Torrigiano, the rival of Buonarotti, wrought at its ”matchless altar,” not a stone of which survived the Puritan fury of the civil war.
[Footnote 78: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 4.]
On the day of his father's death, or the next, the new King removed from Richmond Palace to the Tower, whence, on 23rd April, was dated the first official act of his reign. He confirmed in ampler form the general pardon granted a few days before by Henry VII.; but the ampler form was no bar to the exemption of fourscore offenders from the act of grace.[79] Foremost among them were the three brothers De la Pole, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. The exclusion of Empson and Dudley from the pardon was more popular than the pardon itself. If anything could have enhanced Henry's favour with his subjects, it was the condign punishment of the tools of his father's extortion. Their death was none the less welcome for being unjust. They were not merely refused pardon and brought to the block; a more costly concession was made when their bonds for the payment of loans were cancelled.[80]
Their victims, so runs the official record, had been ”without (p. 045) any ground or matter of truth, by the undue means of certain of the council of our said late father, thereunto driven contrary to law, reason and good conscience, to the manifest charge and peril of the soul of our said late father”.
[Footnote 79: _L. and P._, i., 2, 12.]
[Footnote 80: _Cf. L. and P._, i., 1004.]
If filial piety demanded the delivery of his father's soul from peril, it counselled no less the fulfilment of his dying requests, and the arrangements for Catherine's marriage were hurried on with an almost indecent haste. The instant he heard rumours of Henry VII.'s death, Ferdinand sent warning to his envoy in England that Louis of France and others would seek by all possible means to break off the match.[81]
To further it, he would withdraw his objections to the union of Charles and Mary; and a few days later he wrote again to remove any scruples Henry might entertain about marrying his deceased brother's wife; while to Catherine herself he declared with brutal frankness that she would get no other husband than Henry.[82] All his paternal anxiety might have been spared. Long before Ferdinand's persuasions could reach Henry's ears, he had made up his mind to consummate the marriage.
He would not, he wrote to Margaret of Savoy,[83] disobey his father's commands, reinforced as they were by the dispensation of the Pope and by the friends.h.i.+p between the two families contracted by his sister Mary's betrothal to Catherine's nephew Charles. There were other reasons besides those he alleged. A council trained by Henry VII. was loth to lose the gold of Catherine's dower; it was of the utmost importance to strengthen at once the royal line; and a full-blooded youth of Henry's temperament was not likely to repel a comely (p. 046) wife ready to his hand, when the dictates of his father's policy no longer stood between them. So on 11th June, barely a month after Henry VII.'s obsequies, the marriage, big with destinies, of Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon was privately solemnised by Archbishop Warham ”in the Queen's closet” at Greenwich.[84] On the same day the commission of claims was appointed for the King's and Queen's coronation. A week then sufficed for its business, and on Sunday, 24th June, the Abbey was the scene of a second State function within three months. Its splendour and display were emblematic of the coming reign. Warham placed the crown on the King's head; the people cried, ”Yea, yea!” in a loud voice when asked if they would have Henry as King; Sir Robert Dymock performed the office of champion; and a banquet, jousts and tourneys concluded the ceremonies.
[Footnote 81: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 3.]
[Footnote 82: _Ibid._, ii., 8, 15.]
[Footnote 83: _L. and P._, i., 224.]
[Footnote 84: _L. and P._, iv., 5774.]
Though he had wedded a wife and been crowned a king, Henry was as yet little more than a boy. A powerful mind ripens slowly in a vigorous frame, and Henry's childish precocity had given way before a youthful devotion to physical sports. He was no prodigy of early development.
His intellect, will and character were of a gradual, healthier growth; they were not matured for many years after he came to the throne. He was still in his eighteenth year; and like most young Englishmen of means and muscle, his interests centred rather in the field than in the study. Youth sat on the prow and pleasure at the helm. ”Continual feasting” was the phrase in which Catherine described their early married life. In the winter evenings there were masks and comedies, romps (p. 047) and revels, in which Henry himself, Bessie Blount and other young ladies of his Court played parts.[85] In the spring and summer there were archery and tennis. Music, we are told, was practised day and night. Two months after his accession Henry wrote to Ferdinand that he diverted himself with jousts, birding, hunting, and other innocent and honest pastimes, in visiting various parts of his kingdom, but that he did not therefore neglect affairs of State.[86] Possibly he was as a.s.siduous in his duties as modern university athletes in their studies; the neglect was merely comparative. But Ferdinand's amba.s.sador remarked on Henry's aversion to business, and his councillors complained that he cared only for the pleasures of his age. Two days a week, said the Spaniard, were devoted to single combats on foot, initiated in imitation of the heroes of romance, Amadis and Lancelot;[87] and if Henry's other innocent and honest pastimes were equally exacting, his view of the requirements of State may well have been modest. From the earliest days of his reign the general outline of policy was framed in accord with his sentiments, and he was probably consulted on most questions of importance. But it was not always so; in August, 1509, Louis XII.
acknowledged a letter purporting to come from the English King with a request for friends.h.i.+p and peace. ”Who wrote this letter?” burst out Henry. ”I ask peace of the King of France, who dare not look me in the face, still less make war on me!”[88] His pride at the age of eighteen was not less than his ignorance of what pa.s.sed in his name. He had (p. 048) yet to learn the secret that painful and laborious mastery of detail is essential to him who aspires not merely to reign but to rule; and matters of detail in administration and diplomacy were still left in his ministers' hands.
[Footnote 85: _L. and P._, vol. ii., p. 1461.]
[Footnote 86: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 19.]
[Footnote 87: _Ibid._, ii., 44, 45.]
[Footnote 88: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 11.]
With the exception of Empson and Dudley, Henry made little or no change in the council his father bequeathed him. Official precedence appertained to his Chancellor, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Like most of Henry VII.'s prelates, he received his preferment in the Church as a reward for services to the State. Much of the diplomatic work of the previous reign had pa.s.sed through his hands; he helped to arrange the marriage of Arthur and Catherine, and was employed in the vain attempt to obtain Margaret of Savoy as a bride for Henry VII. As Archbishop he crowned and married Henry VIII., and as Chancellor he delivered orations at the opening of the young King's first three Parliaments.[89]
They are said to have given general satisfaction, but apart from them, Warham, for some unknown reason, took little part in political business. So far as Henry can be said at this time to have had a Prime Minister, that t.i.tle belongs to Fox, his Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Winchester. Fox had been even more active than Warham in politics, and more closely linked with the personal fortunes of the two Tudor kings.
He had shared the exile of Henry of Richmond; the treaty of etaples, the Intercursus Magnus, the marriage of Henry's elder daughter to James IV., and the betrothal of his younger to Charles, were largely the work of his hands. Malicious gossip described him as willing to consent to his own father's death to serve the turn of his king, (p. 049) and a better founded belief ascribed to his wit the invention of ”Morton's fork”.[90] He was Chancellor of Cambridge in 1500, as Warham was of Oxford, but won more enduring fame by founding the college of Corpus Christi in the university over which the Archbishop presided.
He had baptised Henry VIII. and advocated his marriage to Catherine; and to him the King extended the largest share in his confidence.