Part 29 (1/2)
[Footnote 933: _L. and P._, viii., 52; Rymer, xiv., 549.]
[Footnote 934: The general idea that Fisher and More were executed for refusing to take an oath prescribed in the Act of Supremacy is technically inaccurate. No oath is there prescribed, and not till 1536 was it made high treason to refuse to take the oath of supremacy; even then the oath was to be administered only to civil and ecclesiastical officers. The Act under which they were executed was 26 Henry VIII., c. 13, and the common mistake arises from a confusion between the oath to the succession and the oath of supremacy.]
[Footnote 935: _L. and P._, viii., 876.]
[Footnote 936: _L. and P._, iv., 6199; vi., 1164, 1249. He told Chapuys that if Charles invaded England he would be doing ”a work as agreeable to G.o.d as going against the Turk,” and suggested that the Emperor should make use of Reginald Pole ”to whom, according to many, the kingdom would belong”
(Chapuys to Charles, 27th September, 1533). Again, says Chapuys, ”the holy Bishop of Rochester would like you to take active measures immediately, as I wrote in my last; which advice he has sent to me again lately to repeat” (10th October, 1533). Canon Whitney, in criticising Froude (_Engl. Hist. Rev._, xii., 353), a.s.serts that ”nothing Chapuys says justifies the charge against Fisher!”]
[Footnote 937: This statement has been denounced as ”astounding” in a Roman Catholic periodical; yet if More believed individual conscience (_i.e._, private judgment) to be superior to the voice of the Church, how did he differ from a Protestant?
The statement in the text is merely a paraphrase of More's own, where he says that men are ”not bound on pain of G.o.d's displeasure to change their conscience for any particular law made anywhere _except by a general council or a general faith growing by the working of G.o.d universally through all Christian nations_” (More's _English Works_, p.
1434; _L. and P._, vii., 432).]
[Footnote 938: [Greek: Ou gar ti moi Zeus en ho keruxas tade oud he xunoikos ton kato theon Dike.]
Sophocles, _Antigone_, 450.]
It was the personal eminence of the victims rather than the merits of their case that made Europe thrill with horror at the news of their death; for thousands of others were sacrificing their lives in a similar cause in most of the countries of Christendom. For the first and last time in English history a cardinal's head had rolled from an English scaffold; and Paul III. made an effort to bring into play the artillery of his temporal powers. As supreme lord over all the princes of the earth, he arrogated to himself the right to deprive Henry VIII.
of his kingdom; and he sent couriers to the various courts to seek their co-operation in executing his judgment. But the weapons of Innocent III. were rusty with age. Francis denounced the Pope's claim as a most impudent attack on monarchical dignity; and Charles was engaged in the conquest of Tunis. Thus Henry was able to take a high tone in reply to the remonstrances addressed to him, and to proceed undisturbed with the work of enforcing his royal supremacy. The autumn was occupied mainly by a visitation of the monasteries and of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others were deposed from the seat of authority they had held for so many centuries, and efforts were made to subst.i.tute studies like that of the civil law, more in harmony with the King's doctrine and with his views of royal authority.
The more boldly Henry defied the Fates, the more he was favoured by Fortune. ”Besides his trust in his subjects,” wrote Chapuys in (p. 335) 1534, ”he has great hope in the Queen's death;”[939] and the year 1536 was but eight days old when the unhappy Catherine was released from her trials, resolutely refusing to the last to acknowledge in any way the invalidity of her marriage with Henry. She had derived some comfort from the papal sentence in her favour, but that was not calculated to soften the harshness with which she was treated. Her pious soul, too, was troubled with the thought that she had been the occasion, innocent though she was, of the heresies that had arisen in England, and of the enormities which had been practised against the Church. Her last days were cheered by a visit from Chapuys,[940] who went down to Kimbolton on New Year's Day and stayed until the 5th of January, when the Queen seemed well on the road to recovery. Three days later she pa.s.sed away, and on the 29th she was buried with the state of a princess dowager in the church of the Benedictine abbey at Peterborough. Her physician told Chapuys that he suspected poison, but the symptoms are now declared, on high medical authority, to have been those of cancer of the heart.[941] The suspicion was the natural result of the circ.u.mstance that her death relieved the King of a pressing anxiety. ”G.o.d be praised!” he exclaimed, ”we are free from all suspicion of war;”[942] and on the following day he proclaimed his joy by appearing at a ball, clad in yellow from head to foot.[943] Every inch a King, Henry VIII. never attained to the stature of a gentleman, but even Bishop Gardiner wrote that by Queen Catherine's death (p. 336) ”G.o.d had given sentence” in the divorce suit between her and the King.[944]
[Footnote 939: _L. and P._, vii., 83.]
[Footnote 940: _Ibid._, x., 28, 59, 60, 141.]
[Footnote 941: Dr. Norman Moore in _Athenaeum_, 1885, i., 152, 215, 281.]
[Footnote 942: _L. and P._, x., 51.]
[Footnote 943: _Ibid._ Hall only tells his readers that Anne Boleyn wore yellow for the mourning (_Chronicle_, p. 818).]
[Footnote 944: _L. and P._, x., 256.]
A week later, the Reformation Parliament met for its seventh and last session. It sat from 4th February to 14th April, and in those ten weeks succeeded in pa.s.sing no fewer than sixty-two Acts. Some were local and some were private, but the residue contained not a few of public importance. The fact that the King obtained at last his Statute of Uses[945] may indicate that Henry's skill and success had so impressed Parliament, that it was more willing to acquiesce in his demands than it had been in its earlier sessions. But, if the drafts in the Record Office are to be taken as indicating the proposals of Government, and the Acts themselves are those proposals as modified in one or other House, Parliament must have been able to enforce views of its own to a certain extent; for those drafts differ materially from the Acts as finally pa.s.sed.[946] Not a few of the bills were welcome, if unusual, concessions to the clergy. They were relieved from paying tenths in the year they paid their first-fruits. The payment of t.i.thes, possibly rendered doubtful in the wreck of canon law, was enjoined by Act of Parliament. An attempt was made to deal with the poor, and another, if not to check enclosures, at least to extract some profit for the King from the process. It was made high treason to counterfeit the King's sign-manual, privy signet, or privy seal; and Henry was empowered by Parliament, as he had before been by (p. 337) Convocation, to appoint a commission to reform the canon law. But the chief acts of the session were for the dissolution of the lesser monasteries and for the erection of a Court of Augmentations in order to deal with the revenues which were thus to accrue to the King.
[Footnote 945: This Act has generally been considered a failure, but recent research does not confirm this view (see Joshua Williams, _Principles of the Law of Real Property_, 18th ed., 1896).]
[Footnote 946: _L. and P._, x., 246.]
The way for this great revolution had been carefully prepared during the previous autumn and winter. In virtue of his new and effective supremacy, Henry had ordered a general visitation of the monasteries throughout the greater part of the kingdom; and the reports of these visitors were made the basis of parliamentary action. On the face of them they represent a condition of human depravity which has rarely been equalled;[947] and the extent to which those reports are worthy of credit will always remain a point of contention. The visitors themselves were men of doubtful character; indeed, respectable men could hardly have been persuaded to do the work. Their methods were certainly harsh; the object of their mission was to get up a case for the Crown, and they probably used every means in their power to induce the monks and the nuns to incriminate themselves. Perhaps, too, an entirely false impression may be created by the fact that in most cases only the guilty are mentioned; the innocent are often pa.s.sed over in silence, and the proportion between the two is not recorded.
Some of the terms employed in the reports are also open to dispute; it is possible that in many instances the stigma of unchast.i.ty (p. 338) attached to a nun merely meant that she had been unchaste before entering religion,[948] and it is known that nunneries were considered the proper resort for ladies who had not been careful enough of their honour.
[Footnote 947: See the doc.u.ments in _L. and P._, vols. ix., x. The most elaborate criticism of the Dissolution is contained in Gasquet's _Henry VIII.
and the Monasteries_, 2 vols., 4th ed. 1893; some additional details and an excellent monastic map will be found in Gairdner's _Church History_, 1902.]
[Footnote 948: ”Religion” of course in the middle ages and sixteenth century was a term almost exclusively applied to the monastic system, and the most ludicrous mistakes are often made from ignorance of this fact; ”religiosi” are sharply distinguished from ”clerici”.]
On the other hand, the lax state of monastic morality does not depend only upon the visitors' reports; apart from satires like those of Skelton, from ballads and from other mirrors of popular opinion or prejudice, the correspondence of Henry VIII.'s reign is, from its commencement, full of references, by bishops and other unimpeachable witnesses, to the necessity of drastic reform. In 1516, for instance, Bishop West of Ely visited that house, and found such disorder that he declared its continuance would have been impossible but for his visitation.[949] In 1518 the Italian Bishop of Worcester writes from Rome that he had often been struck by the necessity of reforming the monasteries.[950] In 1521 Henry VIII., then at the height of his zeal for the Church, thanks the Bishop of Salisbury for dissolving the nunnery of Bromehall because of the ”enormities” practised there.[951]
Wolsey felt that the time for reform had pa.s.sed, and began the process of suppression, with a view to increasing the number of cathedrals and devoting other proceeds to educational endowments. Friar Peto, afterwards a cardinal, who had fled abroad to escape Henry's anger for his bold denunciation of the divorce, and who had no possible (p. 339) motive for cloaking his conscientious opinion, admitted that there were grave abuses, and approved of the dissolution of monasteries, if their endowments were used for proper ends.[952] There is no need to multiply instances, because a commission of cardinals, appointed by Paul III. himself, reported in 1537 that scandals were frequent in religious houses.[953] The reports of the visitors, too, can hardly be entirely false, though they may not be entirely true. The charges they make are not vague, but very precise. They specify names of the offenders, and the nature of their offences; and an air of verisimilitude, if nothing more, is imparted to the condemnations they p.r.o.nounce against the many, by the commendations they bestow on the few.[954]