Part 22 (1/2)
THE KING AND HIS PARLIAMENT.
In the closing days of July, 1529, a courier came posting from Rome with despatches announcing the alliance of Clement and Charles, and the revocation to the Papal Court of the suit between Henry VIII. and the Emperor's aunt. Henry replied with no idle threats or empty reproaches, but his retort was none the less effective. On the 9th of August[703] writs were issued from Chancery summoning that Parliament which met on the 3rd of November and did not separate till the last link in the chain which bound England to Rome was sundered, and the country was fairly launched on that sixty years' struggle which the defeat of the Spanish Armada concluded.[704] The step might well seem a desperate hazard. The last Parliament had broken up in (p. 250) discontent; it had been followed by open revolt in various s.h.i.+res; while from others there had since then come demands for the repayment of the loan, which Henry was in no position to grant. Francis and Charles, on whose mutual enmity England's safety largely depended, had made their peace at Cambrai; and the Emperor was free to foment disaffection in Ireland and to instigate Scotland to war. His chancellor was boasting that the imperialists could, if they would, drive Henry from his kingdom within three months,[705] and he based his hopes on revolt among Henry's own subjects. The divorce had been from the beginning, and remained to the end, a stumbling-block to the people.
Catherine received ovations wherever she went, while the utmost efforts of the King could scarcely protect Anne Boleyn from popular insult. The people were moved, not only by a creditable feeling that Henry's first wife was an injured woman, but by the fear lest a breach with Charles should destroy their trade in wool, on which, said the imperial amba.s.sador, half the realm depended for sustenance.[706]
[Footnote 703: Rymer, _Foedera_, xiv., 302.]
[Footnote 704: It has been alleged that the immediate object of this Parliament was to relieve the King from the necessity of repaying the loan (_D.N.B._, xxvi., 83); and much scorn has been poured on the notion that it had any important purpose (_L. and P._, iv., Introd., p. dcxlvii.).
Brewer even denies its hostility to the Church on the ground that it was composed largely of lawyers, and ”lawyers are not in general enemies to things established; they are not inimical to the clergy”.
Yet the law element was certainly stronger in the Parliaments of Charles I. than in that of 1529; were they not hostile to ”things established” and ”inimical to the clergy”? Contemporaries had a different opinion of the purpose of the Parliament of 1529. ”It is intended,” wrote Du Bellay on the 23rd of August, three months before Parliament met, ”to hold a Parliament here this winter and act by their own absolute power, in default of justice being administered by the Pope in this divorce”
(_ibid._, iv., 5862; _cf._ iv., 6011, 6019, 6307); ”nothing else,” wrote a Florentine in December, 1530, ”is thought of in that island every day except of arranging affairs in such a way that they do no longer be in want of the Pope, neither for filling vacancies in the Church, nor for any other purpose” (_ibid._, iv., 6774).]
[Footnote 705: _L. and P._, iv., 4909, 4911; _cf._ 5177, 5501.]
[Footnote 706: _Ibid._, vi., 1528.]
To summon a Parliament at such a conjuncture seemed to be courting certain ruin. In reality, it was the first and most striking instance of the audacity and insight which were to enable Henry to guide the whirlwind and direct the storm of the last eighteen years of his (p. 251) reign. Clement had put in his hands the weapon with which he secured his divorce and broke the bonds of Rome. ”If,” wrote Wolsey a day or two before the news of the revocation arrived, ”the King be cited to appear at Rome in person or by proxy, and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will tolerate it. If he appears in Italy, it will be at the head of a formidable army.”[707] A sympathiser with Catherine expressed his resentment at his King being summoned to plead as a party in his own realm before the legatine Court;[708] and it has even been suggested that those proceedings were designed to irritate popular feeling against the Roman jurisdiction. Far more offensive was it to national prejudice, that England's king should be cited to appear before a court in a distant land, dominated by the arms of a foreign prince. Nothing did more to alienate men's minds from the Papacy. Henry would never have been able to obtain his divorce on its merits as they appeared to his people. But now the divorce became closely interwoven with another and a wider question, the papal jurisdiction in England; and on that question Henry carried with him the good wishes of the vast bulk of the laity. There were few Englishmen who would not resent the pet.i.tion presented to the Pope in 1529 by Charles V. and Ferdinand that the English Parliament should be forbidden to discuss the question of divorce.[709] By summoning Parliament, Henry opened the floodgates of anti-papal and anti-sacerdotal feelings which Wolsey had long kept shut; and the unpopular divorce became (p. 252) merely a cross-current in the main stream which flowed in Henry's favour.
[Footnote 707: _L. and P._, iv., 5797.]
[Footnote 708: Cavendish, p. 210; _L. and P._, iv., Introd., p. dv.]
[Footnote 709: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 979.]
It was thus with some confidence that Henry appealed from the Pope to his people. He could do so all the more surely, if, as is alleged, there was no freedom of election, and if the House of Commons was packed with royal nominees.[710] But these a.s.sertions may be dismissed as gross exaggerations. The election of county members was marked by unmistakable signs of genuine popular liberty. There was often a riot, and sometimes a secret canva.s.s among freeholders to promote or defeat a particular candidate.[711] In 1547 the council ventured to recommend a minister to the freeholders of Kent. The electors objected; the council reprimanded the sheriff for representing its recommendation as a command; it protested that it never dreamt of depriving the s.h.i.+re of its ”liberty of election,” but ”would take it thankfully” if the electors would give their voices to the ministerial candidate. The electors were not to be soothed by soft words, and that Government candidate had to find another seat.[712] In the boroughs there was every variety of franchise. In some it was almost democratic; in others elections were in the hands of one or two voters. In the city of London the election for the Parliament of 1529 was held on (p. 253) 5th October, _immensa communitate tunc presente_, in the Guildhall; there is no hint of royal interference, the election being conducted in the customary way, namely, two candidates were nominated by the mayor and aldermen, and two by the citizens.[713] The general tendency had for more than a century, however, been towards close corporations in whose hands the parliamentary franchise was generally vested, and consequently towards restricting the basis of popular representation.
The narrower that basis became, the greater the facilities it afforded for external influence. In many boroughs elections were largely determined by recommendations from neighbouring magnates, territorial or official.[714] At Gatton the lords of the manor nominated the members for Parliament, and the formal election was merely a matter of drawing up an indenture between Sir Roger Copley and the sheriff,[715]
and the Bishop of Winchester was wont to select representatives for more than one borough within the bounds of his diocese.[716] The Duke of Norfolk claimed to be able to return ten members in Suss.e.x and Surrey alone.[717]
[Footnote 710: ”The choice of the electors,” says Brewer (_L. and P._, iv., Introd., p. dcxlv.), ”was still determined by the King or his powerful ministers with as much certainty and a.s.surance as that of the sheriffs.”]
[Footnote 711: _L. and P._, i., 792, vii., 1178, where mention is made of ”secret labour” among the freeholders of Warwicks.h.i.+re for the bye-election on Sir E. Ferrers' death in 1534; and x., 1063, where there is described a hotly contested election between the candidate of the gentry of Shrops.h.i.+re and the candidate of the townsfolk of Shrewsbury.]
[Footnote 712: _Acts of the Privy Council_, 1547-50, pp. 516, 518, 519; _England under Protector Somerset_, pp. 71, 72.]
[Footnote 713: _Narratives of the Reformation_, Camden Soc., pp. 295, 296.]
[Footnote 714: _Cf._ d.u.c.h.ess of Norfolk's letter to John Paston, 8th June, 1455 (_Paston Letters_, ed.
1900, i., 337), and in 1586 Sir Henry Bagnal asked the Earl of Rutland if he had a seat to spare in Parliament as Bagnal was anxious ”for his learning's sake to be made a Parliament man”
(_D.N.B._, Suppl., i., 96).]
[Footnote 715: _L. and P._, xiv., 645; _cf._ Hallam, 1884, iii., 44-45.]
[Footnote 716: Foxe, ed. Townsend, vi., 54. There are some ill.u.s.trations and general remarks on Henry's relations with Parliament in Porritt's _Unreformed House of Commons_, 2 vols., 1903.]
[Footnote 717: At Reigate, says the Duke, ”I doubt whether any burgesses be there or not” (_L. and P._, x., 816); and apparently there were none at Gatton.]
But these nominations were not royal, and there is no reason (p. 254) to suppose that the nominees were any more likely to be subservient to the Crown than freely elected members unless the local magnate happened to be a royal minister. Their views depended on those of their patrons, who might be opposed to the Court; and, in 1539, Cromwell's agents were considering the advisability of setting up Crown candidates against those of Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester.[718] The curious letter to Cromwell in 1529,[719] upon which is based the theory that the House of Commons consisted of royal nominees, is singularly inconclusive. Cromwell sought Henry's permission to serve in Parliament for two reasons; firstly, he was still a servant of the obnoxious and fallen Cardinal; secondly, he was seeking to transfer himself to Henry's service, and thought he might be useful to the King in the House of Commons. If Henry accepted his offer, Cromwell was to be nominated for Oxford; if he were not elected there, he was to be put up for one of the boroughs in the diocese of Winchester, then vacant through Wolsey's resignation. Even with the King's a.s.sent, his election at Oxford was not regarded as certain; and, as a matter of fact, Cromwell sat neither for Oxford, nor for any const.i.tuency (p. 255) in the diocese of Winchester, but for the borough of Taunton.[720]
Crown influence could only make itself effectively felt in the limited number of royal boroughs; and the attempts to increase that influence by the creation of const.i.tuencies susceptible to royal influence were all subsequent in date to 1529. The returns of members of Parliament are not extant from 1477 to 1529, but a comparison of the respective number of const.i.tuencies in those two years reveals only six in 1529 which had not sent members to a previous Parliament; and almost if not all of these six owed their representation to their increasing population and importance, and not to any desire to pack the House of Commons. Indeed, as a method of enforcing the royal will upon Parliament, the creation of half a dozen boroughs was both futile and unnecessary. So small a number of votes was useless, except in the case of a close division of well-drilled parties, of which there is no trace in the Parliaments of Henry VIII.[721] The House of Commons acted as a whole, and not in two sections. ”The sense of the House”
was more apparent in its decisions then than it is to-day. Actual divisions were rare; either a proposal commended itself to the House, or it did not; and in both cases the question was usually determined without a vote.