Part 30 (1/2)
The grounds of the sentence are not stated, but there may have been two--the alleged precontract with the Earl of Northumberland, which the Earl denied on oath and on the sacrament, and the previous affinity between Anne and Henry arising from the King's relations with Mary Boleyn. The latter seems the more probable. Henry had obtained of Clement VII. a dispensation from this disability; but the Pope's power to dispense had since been repudiated, while the canonical (p. 345) objection remained and was given statutory authority in this very year.[965] The effects of this piece of wanton injustice were among the troubles which Henry bequeathed to Queen Elizabeth; the sole advantage to Henry was that his infidelities to Anne ceased to be breaches of the seventh commandment. The justice of her sentence to death is also open to doubt. Anne herself went to the block boldly proclaiming her innocence.[966] Death she regarded as a relief from an intolerable situation, and she ”laughed heartily,” writes the Lieutenant of the Tower as she put her hands round her ”little neck,” and thought how easy the executioner's task would be.[967] She complained when the day of her release from this world was deferred, and regretted that so many innocent persons should suffer through her. Of her accomplices, none confessed but Smeaton, though Henry is said, before Anne's arrest, to have offered Norris a pardon if he would admit his crime.
On the other hand, her conduct must have made the charges plausible.
Even in those days, when justice to individuals was regarded as dust if weighed in the balance against the real or supposed interests of the State, it is not credible that the juries should have found her accomplices guilty, that twenty-six peers, including her uncle, (p. 346) should have condemned Anne herself, without some colourable justification.
If the charges were merely invented to ruin the Queen, one culprit besides herself would have been enough. To a.s.sume that Henry sent four needless victims to the block is to accuse him of a l.u.s.t for superfluous butchery, of which even he, in his most bloodthirsty moments, was not capable.[968]
[Footnote 965: This Act indirectly made Elizabeth a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and Henry's marriage with Anne invalid, (_cf._ Chapuys to Granvelle _L. and P._, x., 909).
The Antinomian theory of marital relations, which Chapuys ascribes to Anne, was an Anabaptist doctrine of the time. Chapuys calls Anne a Messalina, but he of course was not an impartial witness.]
[Footnote 966: According to some accounts, but a Spaniard who writes as an eye-witness says she cried ”mercy to G.o.d and the King for the offence she had done” (_L. and P._, x., 911).]
[Footnote 967: _Ibid._, x., 910.]
[Footnote 968: The execution of Anne was welcomed by the Imperialists and Catholics, and it is possible that it was hastened on by rumours of disquiet in the North. A few days later the n.o.bles and gentry who were in London were ordered to return home to put the country in a state of defence (_L. and P._, x., 1016).]
On the day that his second queen was beheaded, Henry obtained from Cranmer a special licence to marry a third.[969] He was betrothed on the morrow and privately married ”in the Queen's closet at York Place”
on the 30th of May. The lady of his choice was Jane, daughter of Sir John Seymour of Wolf Hall in Wilts.h.i.+re.[970] She was descended on her mother's side from Edward III., and Cranmer had to dispense with a canonical bar to the marriage arising from her consanguinity to the King in the third and fourth degrees. She had been lady-in-waiting to the two previous queens, and her brother, Sir Edward Seymour, the future Protector, had for years been steadily rising in Henry's favour. In October, 1535, the King had paid a visit to Wolf Hall, and from that time his attentions to Jane became marked. She seems to have received them with real reluctance; she refused a purse of gold and returned the King's letters unopened.[971] She even obtained a (p. 347) promise from Henry that he would not speak with her except in the presence of others, and the King ejected Cromwell from his rooms in the Palace in order to bestow them on Sir Edward Seymour, and thus to provide a place where he and Jane could converse without scandal. All this modesty has, of course, been attributed to prudential and ambitious motives, which were as wise as they were successful. But Jane seems to have had no enemies, except Alexander Aless, who denounced her to Luther as an enemy to the Gospel, probably because she extinguished the s.h.i.+ning light of Anne Boleyn.[972] Cardinal Pole described her as ”full of goodness,”[973] and she certainly did her best to reconcile Henry with his daughter the Princess Mary, whose treatment began to improve from the fall of Anne Boleyn. ”She is,”
writes Chapuys, ”of middle stature, and no great beauty; so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise.”[974] But all agreed in praising her intelligence. She had neither Catherine's force of character nor the temper of Anne Boleyn; she was a woman of gentle spirit, striving always to mitigate the rigour of others; her brief married life was probably happier than that of any other of Henry's Queens; and her importance is mainly due to the fact that she bore to Henry his only legitimate son.
[Footnote 969: _Ibid._ x., 915, 926, 993, 1000.
There is a persistent fable that they were married on the day or the day after Anne's execution; Dr.
Gairdner says it is repeated ”in all histories”.]
[Footnote 970: See _Wilts Archaeol. Mag._, vols xv., xvi., doc.u.ments printed from the _Longleat MSS._]
[Footnote 971: _L. and P._, x., 245.]
[Footnote 972: Luther, _Briefe_, v., 22; _L. and P._, xi., 475.]
[Footnote 973: Strype, _Eccl. Memorials_, I., ii., 304.]
[Footnote 974: _L. and P._, x., 901.]
The disgrace of Anne Boleyn necessitated the summons of a fresh Parliament to put the succession to the crown on yet another basis.
The Long Parliament had been dissolved on 14th April; another was called to meet on the 8th of June. The eighteen acts pa.s.sed during its six weeks' session ill.u.s.trate the parallel development of the (p. 348) Reformation and of the royal autocracy. The Act of Succession made Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, without declaring Catherine's daughter, Mary, legitimate, and settled the crown on Henry's prospective issue by Jane. A unique clause empowered the King to dispose of the crown at will, should he have no issue by his present Queen.[975] Probably he intended it, in that case, for the Duke of Richmond; but the Duke's days were numbered, and four days after the dissolution of Parliament he breathed his last. The royal prerogative was extended by a statute enabling a king, when he reached the age of twenty-four, to repeal by proclamation any act pa.s.sed during his minority; and the royal caste was further exalted by a statute making it high treason for any one to marry a king's daughter, legitimate or not, his sister, his niece, or his aunt on the father's side, without royal licence. The reform of clerical abuses was advanced by an act to prevent non-residence, and by another to obviate the delay in inst.i.tuting to benefices practised by bishops with a view to (p. 349) keeping the t.i.thes of the vacant benefice in their own hands. The breach with Rome was widened still further by a statute, declaring all who extolled the Pope's authority to be guilty of _praemunire_, imposing an oath of renunciation on all lay and clerical officers, and making the refusal of that oath high treason. Thus the hopes of a reaction built on the fall of those ”apostles of the new sect,” Anne Boleyn and her relatives, were promptly and roughly destroyed.
[Footnote 975: Parliament prefered to risk the results of Henry's nomination to the risk of civil war, which would inevitably have broken out had Henry died in 1536. Hobbes, it may be noted, made this power of nomination an indispensable attribute of the sovereign, and if the sovereign be interpreted as the ”King in Parliament” the theory is sound const.i.tutionalism and was put in practice in 1701 as well as in 1536. But the limitations on Henry's power of bequeathing the crown have generally been forgotten; he never had power to leave the crown away from Edward VI., that is, away from the only heir whose legitimacy was undisputed.
The later acts went further, and entailed the succession upon Mary and Elizabeth unless Henry wished otherwise--which he did not. The preference of the Suffolk to the Stuart line may have been due to (1) the common law forbidding aliens to inherit English land (_cf. L. and P._, vii., 337); (2) the national dislike of the Scots; (3) a desire to intimate to the Scots that if they would not unite the two realms by the marriage of Edward and Mary, they should not obtain the English crown by inheritance.]
Henry's position had been immensely strengthened alike by the death of Catherine of Aragon and by the fall of Anne Boleyn; and on both occasions he had expressed his appreciation of the fact in the most indecent and heartless manner. He was now free to marry whom he liked, and no objection based on canon or on any other law could be raised to the legitimacy of his future issue; whether the Pope could dispense or not, it made no difference to Edward VI.'s claim to the throne. The fall of Anne Boleyn, in spite of some few rumours that she might have been condemned on insufficient evidence, was generally popular; for her arrogance and that of her family made them hated, and they were regarded as the cause of the King's persecution of Catherine, of Mary, and of those who maintained their cause. Abroad the effect was still more striking. The moment Henry heard of Catherine's death, he added a postscript to Cromwell's despatch to the English amba.s.sadors in France, bidding them to take a higher tone with Francis, for all cause of difference had been removed between him and Charles V.[976] The Emperor secretly believed that his aunt had been poisoned,[977] but that private grief was not to affect his public policy; and Charles, Francis, and even the Pope, became more or less eager compet.i.tors (p. 350) for Henry's favour. The bull of deprivation, which had been drawn up and signed, became a dead letter, and every one was anxious to disavow his share in its promotion. Charles obtained the suspension of its publication, made a merit of that service to Henry, and tried to represent that it was Francis who, with his eyes on the English crown, had extorted the bull from the Pope.[978] Paul III. himself used words to the English envoy at Rome, which might be interpreted as an apology for having made Fisher a cardinal and having denounced his and More's execution.[979]
[Footnote 976: _L. and P._, x., 54.]
[Footnote 977: _Ibid._, x., 230.]
[Footnote 978: _L. and P._, x., 887.]
[Footnote 979: _Ibid._, x., 977.]