Part 16 (1/2)
[Footnote 505: _Cotton MS._, Vespasian, F, iii., fol. 34, _b_; _cf. L. and P._, ii., 4074, 4288.]
[Footnote 506: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1103.]
The child was the last born of Catherine. For some years Henry went on hoping against every probability that he might still have male issue by his Queen; and in 1519 he undertook to lead a crusade against the Turk in person if he should have an heir.[507] But physicians summoned from Spain were no more successful than their English colleagues. (p. 178) By 1525 the last ray of hope had flickered out. Catherine was then forty years old; and Henry at the age of thirty-four, in the full vigour of youthful manhood, seemed doomed by the irony of fate and by his union with Catherine to leave a disputed inheritance. Never did England's interests more imperatively demand a secure and peaceful succession. Never before had there been such mortality among the children of an English king; never before had an English king married his brother's widow. So striking a coincidence could be only explained by the relation of cause and effect. Men who saw the judgment of G.o.d in the sack of Rome, might surely discern in the fatality that attended the children of Henry VIII. a fulfilment of the doom of childlessness p.r.o.nounced in the Book of the Law against him who should marry his brother's wife. ”G.o.d,” wrote the French amba.s.sador in 1528, ”has long ago Himself pa.s.sed sentence on it;”[508] and there is no reason to doubt Henry's a.s.sertion, that he had come to regard the death of his children as a Divine judgment, and that he was impelled to question his marriage by the dictates of conscience. The ”scruples of conscience,” which Henry VII. had urged as an excuse for delaying the marriage, were merely a cloak for political reasons; but scruples of conscience are dangerous playthings, and the pretence of Henry VII.
became, through the death of his children, a terrible reality to Henry VIII.
[Footnote 507: _L. and P._, iii., 432.]
[Footnote 508: Du Bellay to Montmorenci, 1st Nov., 1528, _L. and P._, iv., 4899.]
Queen Catherine, too, had scruples of conscience about the marriage, though of a different sort. When she first heard of Henry's intention to seek a divorce, she is reported to have said that ”she had (p. 179) not offended, but it was a judgment of G.o.d, for that her former marriage was made in blood”; the price of it had been the head of the innocent Earl of Warwick, demanded by Ferdinand of Aragon.[509] Nor was she alone in this feeling. ”He had heard,” witnessed Buckingham's chancellor in 1521, ”the Duke grudge that the Earl of Warwick was put to death, and say that G.o.d would punish it, by not suffering the King's issue to prosper, as appeared by the death of his sons; and that his daughters prosper not, and that he had no issue male.”[510]
[Footnote 509: _Sp. Cal._, i., 249; _L. and P. of Richard III. and Henry VII._, vol. i., pp. x.x.xiii., 113; Hall, _Chron_., p. 491; Bacon, _Henry VII._, ed. 1870, p. 376; _Transactions of the Royal Hist.
Soc._, N.S., xviii., 187.]
[Footnote 510: _L. and P._, iii., 1284.]
Conscience, however, often moves men in directions indicated by other than conscientious motives, and, of the other motives which influenced Henry's mind, some were respectable and some the reverse. The most legitimate was his desire to provide for the succession to the throne.
It was obvious to him and his council that, if he died with no children but Mary, England ran the risk of being plunged into an anarchy worse than that of the civil wars. ”By English law,” wrote Falier, the Venetian amba.s.sador, in 1531, ”females are excluded from the throne;”[511] that was not true, but it was undoubtedly a widespread impression, based upon the past history of England. No Queen-Regnant had a.s.serted a right to the English throne but one, and that one precedent provided the most effective argument for avoiding a repet.i.tion of the experiment. Matilda was never crowned, though she had the same claim to the throne as Mary, and her attempt to (p. 180) enforce her t.i.tle involved England in nineteen years of anarchy and civil war. Stephen stood to Matilda in precisely the same relation as James V. of Scotland stood to the Princess Mary; and in 1532, as soon as he came of age, James was urged to style himself ”Prince of England”
and Duke of York, in manifest derogation of Mary's t.i.tle.[512] At that time Charles V. was discussing alternative plans for deposing Henry VIII. One was to set up James V., the other to marry Mary to some great English n.o.ble and proclaim them King and Queen;[513] Mary by herself was thought to have no chance of success. John of Gaunt had maintained in Parliament that the succession descended only through males;[514] the Lancastrian case was that Henry IV., the son of Edward III.'s fourth son, had a better t.i.tle to the throne than Philippa, the daughter of the third; an Act limiting the succession to the male line was pa.s.sed in 1406;[515] and Henry VII. himself only reigned through a tacit denial of the right of women to sit on the English throne.
[Footnote 511: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 300.]
[Footnote 512: _L. and P._, v., 609, 817.]
[Footnote 513: _Ibid._, vi., 446.]
[Footnote 514: _Chronicon Angliae_, Rolls Ser., p.
92, _s.a._, 1376; _D.N.B._, xxix., 421. This became the orthodox Lancastrian theory (_cf._ Fortescue, _Governance of England_, ed. Plummer, pp. 352-55).]
[Footnote 515: Stubbs, _Const. Hist._, iii., 58.
This Act was, however, repealed before the end of the same year.]
The objection to female sovereigns was grounded not so much on male disbelief in their personal qualifications, as upon the inevitable consequence of matrimonial and dynastic problems.[516] If the Princess Mary succeeded, was she to marry? If not, her death would leave (p. 181) the kingdom no better provided with heirs than before; and in her weak state of health, her death seemed no distant prospect. If, on the other hand, she married, her husband must be either a subject or a foreign prince. To marry a subject would at once create discords like those from which the Wars of the Roses had sprung; to marry a foreign prince was to threaten Englishmen, then more jealous than ever of foreign influence, with the fear of alien domination. They had before their eyes numerous instances in which matrimonial alliances had involved the union of states so heterogeneous as Spain and the Netherlands; and they had no mind to see England absorbed in some continental empire. In the matrimonial schemes arranged for the princess, it was generally stipulated that she should, in default of male heirs, succeed to the throne of England; her succession was obviously a matter of doubt, and it is quite certain that her marriage in France or in Spain would have proved a bar in the way of her succession to the English throne, or at least have given rise to conflicting claims.
[Footnote 516: Professor Maitland has spoken of the ”Byzantinism” of Henry's reign, and possibly the objection to female sovereigns was strengthened by the prevalent respect for Roman imperial and Byzantine custom (_cf._ Hodgkin, _Charles the Great_, p. 180).]
These rival pretensions began to be heard as soon as it became evident that Henry VIII. would have no male heirs by Catherine of Aragon. In 1519, a year after the birth of the Queen's last child, Giustinian reported to the Venetian signiory on the various n.o.bles who had hopes of the crown. The Duke of Norfolk had expectations in right of his wife, a daughter of Edward IV., and the Duke of Suffolk in right of his d.u.c.h.ess, the sister of Henry VIII. But the Duke of Buckingham was the most formidable: ”It was thought that, were the King to die without male heirs, that Duke might easily obtain the crown”.[517] (p. 182) His claims had been canva.s.sed in 1503, when the issue of Henry VII.
seemed likely to fail,[518] and now that the issue of Henry VIII. was in even worse plight, Buckingham's claims to the crown became again a matter of comment. His hopes of the crown cost him his head; he had always been discontented with Tudor rule, especially under Wolsey; he allowed himself to be encouraged with hopes of succeeding the King, and possibly spoke of a.s.serting his claim in case of Henry's death.
This was to touch Henry on his tenderest spot, and, in 1521, the Duke was tried by his peers, found guilty of high treason, and sent to the block.[519] In this, as in all the great trials of Henry's reign, and indeed in most state trials of all ages, considerations of justice were subordinated to the real or supposed dictates of political expediency. Buckingham was executed, not because he was a criminal, but because he was, or might become, dangerous; his crime was not treason, but descent from Edward III. Henry VIII., like Henry VII., showed his grasp of the truth that nothing makes a government so secure as the absence of all alternatives.
[Footnote 517: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1287. Buckingham's end was undoubtedly hastened by Wolsey's jealousy; before the end of 1518 the Cardinal had been instilling into Henry's ear suspicions of Buckingham (_L. and P._, iii., 1; _cf. ibid._, ii., 3973, 4057). Brewer regards the hostility of Wolsey to Buckingham as one of Polydore Vergil's ”calumnies” (_ibid._, vol. iii., Introd., p.
lxvi.).]
[Footnote 518: _L. and P. of Richard III. and Henry VII._, i., 233.]
[Footnote 519: See detailed accounts in _L. and P._, iii., 1284, 1356. Shakespeare's account in ”Henry VIII.” is remarkably accurate, except in matters of date.]