Volume Iv Part 1 (2/2)

The fearlessness and completeness of such a policy as this brings home to us more than any other of his plans the genius of Cromwell. But its success depended wholly on the absolute servility of Parliament to the will of the Crown, and Cromwell's own action made the continuance of such a servility impossible. The part which the Houses were to play in after years shows the importance of clinging to the forms of const.i.tutional freedom, even when their life is all but lost. In the inevitable reaction against tyranny they furnish centres for the reviving energies of the people, while the returning tide of liberty is enabled through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally along its traditional channels. And even before Cromwell pa.s.sed to his doom the tide of liberty was returning. On one occasion during his rule a ”great debate” on the suppression of the lesser monasteries showed that elements of resistance still survived; and these elements developed rapidly as the power of the Crown declined under the minority of Edward and the unpopularity of Mary. To this revival of a spirit of independence the spoliation of the Church largely contributed. Partly from necessity, partly from a desire to build up a faction interested in the maintenance of their ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and the king squandered the vast ma.s.s of wealth which flowed into the Treasury from the dissolution of the monasteries with reckless prodigality. Three hundred and seventy-six smaller houses had been suppressed in 1536; six hundred and forty-five greater houses were surrendered or seized in 1539. Some of the spoil was devoted to the erection of six new bishop.r.i.c.ks; a larger part went to the fortification of the coast. But the bulk of these possessions was granted lavishly away to the n.o.bles and courtiers about the king, and to a host of adventurers who ”had become gospellers for the abbey lands.” Something like a fifth of the actual land in the kingdom was in this way transferred from the holding of the Church to that of n.o.bles and gentry. Not only were the older houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was erected from among the dependants of the Court. The Russells and the Cavendishes are familiar instances of families which rose from obscurity through the enormous grants of Church-land made to Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was thus hardly crushed before a new aristocracy took its place. ”Those families within or without the bounds of the peerage,” observes Mr.

Hallam, ”who are now deemed the most considerable, will be found, with no great number of exceptions, to have first become conspicuous under the Tudor line of kings and, if we could trace the t.i.tle of their estates, to have acquired no small portion of them mediately or immediately from monastic or other ecclesiastical foundations.” The leading part which these freshly-created peers took in the events which followed Henry's death gave strength and vigour to the whole order. But the smaller gentry shared in the general enrichment of the landed proprietors, and the new energy of the Lords was soon followed by a display of political independence among the Commons themselves.

[Sidenote: Results of the Religious Changes.]

While the prodigality of Cromwell's system thus brought into being a new check upon the Crown by enriching the n.o.bles and the lesser gentry, the religious changes it brought about gave fire and vigour to the elements of opposition which were slowly gathering. What did most to ruin the king-wors.h.i.+p that Cromwell set up was Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy.

In reducing the Church to mere slavery beneath the royal power he believed himself to be trampling down the last const.i.tutional force which could hold the Monarchy in check. What he really did was to give life and energy to new forces which were bound from their very nature to battle with the Monarchy for even more than the old English freedom.

When Cromwell seized on the Church he held himself to be seizing for the Crown the mastery which the Church had wielded till now over the consciences and reverence of men. But the very humiliation of the great religious body broke the spell beneath which Englishmen had bowed. In form nothing had been changed. The outer const.i.tution of the Church remained utterly unaltered. The English bishop, freed from the papal control, freed from the check of monastic independence, seemed greater and more imposing than ever. The priest still clung to rectory and church. If images were taken out of churches, if here and there a rood-loft was pulled down or a saint's shrine demolished, no change was made in form of ritual or mode of wors.h.i.+p. The ma.s.s was untouched. Every hymn, every prayer, was still in Latin; confession, penance, fastings and feastings, extreme unction, went on as before. There was little to show that any change had taken place; and yet every ploughman felt that all was changed. The bishop, gorgeous as he might be in mitre and cope, was a mere tool of the king. The priest was trembling before heretics he used to burn. Farmer or shopkeeper might enter their church any Sunday morning to find ma.s.s or service utterly transformed. The spell of tradition, of unbroken continuance, was over; and with it the power which the Church had wielded over the souls of men was in great part done away.

It was not that the new Protestantism was as yet formidable, for, violent and daring as they were, the adherents of Luther were few in number, and drawn mostly from the poorer cla.s.ses among whom Wyclifite heresy had lingered or from the cla.s.s of scholars whose theological studies drew their sympathy to the movement over sea. It was that the lump was now ready to be leavened by this petty leaven, that men's hold on the firm ground of custom was broken and their minds set drifting and questioning, that little as was the actual religious change, the thought of religious change had become familiar to the people as a whole. And with religious change was certain to come religious revolt. The human conscience was hardly likely to move everywhere in strict time to the slow advance of Henry's reforms. Men who had been roused from implicit obedience to the Papacy as a revelation of the Divine will by hearing the Pope denounced in royal proclamations as a usurper and an impostor were hardly inclined to take up submissively the new official doctrine which subst.i.tuted implicit belief in the King for implicit belief in the ”Bishop of Rome.” But bound as Church and King now were together, it was impossible to deny a tenet of the one without entering on a course of opposition to the other. Cromwell had raised against the Monarchy the most fatal of all enemies, the force of the individual conscience, the enthusiasm of religious belief, the fire of religious fanaticism. Slowly as the area of the new Protestantism extended, every man that it gained was a possible opponent of the Crown. And should the time come, as the time was soon to come, when the Crown moved to the side of Protestantism, then in turn every soul that the older faith retained was pledged to a lifelong combat with the Monarchy.

[Sidenote: The Imperial Alliance.]

How irresistible was the national drift was seen on Cromwell's fall. Its first result indeed promised to be a reversal of all that Cromwell had done. Norfolk returned to power, and his influence over Henry seemed secured by the king's repudiation of Anne of Cleves and his marriage in the summer of 1540 to a niece of the Duke, Catharine Howard. But Norfolk's temper had now become wholly hostile to the movement about him. ”I never read the Scripture nor never will!” the Duke replied hotly to a Protestant arguer. ”It was merry in England afore the new learning came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past.” In his preference of an Imperial alliance to an alliance with Francis and the Lutherans Henry went warmly with his minister. Parted as he had been from Charles by the question of the divorce, the King's sympathies had remained true to the Emperor; and at this moment he was embittered against France by the difficulties it threw in the way of his projects for gaining a hold upon Scotland. Above all the king still clung to the hope of a purification of the Church by a Council, as well as of a reconciliation of England with the general body of this purified Christendom, and it was only by the Emperor that such a Council could be convened or such a reconciliation brought about. An alliance with him was far from indicating any retreat from Henry's position of independence or any submission to the Papacy. To the men of his own day Charles seemed no Catholic bigot. On the contrary the stricter representatives of Catholicism such as Paul the Fourth denounced him as a patron of heretics, and attributed the upgrowth of Lutheranism to his steady protection and encouragement. Nor was the charge without seeming justification. The old jealousy between Pope and Emperor, the more recent hostility between them as rival Italian powers, had from the beginning proved Luther's security. At the first appearance of the reformer Maximilian had recommended the Elector of Saxony to suffer no harm to be done to him; ”there might come a time,” said the old Emperor, ”when he would be needed.” Charles had looked on the matter mainly in the same political way. In his earliest years he bought Leo's aid in his recovery of Milan from the French king by issuing the ban of the Empire against Luther in the Diet of Worms; but every Italian held that in suffering the reformer to withdraw unharmed Charles had shown not so much regard to his own safe-conduct as a purpose still ”to keep the Pope in check with that rein.” And as Charles dealt with Luther so he dealt with Lutheranism. The new faith profited by the Emperor's struggle with Clement the Seventh for the lords.h.i.+p over Italy. It was in the midst of this struggle that his brother and representative, Ferdinand, signed in the Diet of Spires an Imperial decree by which the German States were left free to arrange their religious affairs ”as each should best answer to G.o.d and the Emperor.” The decree gave a legal existence to the Protestant body in the Empire which it never afterwards lost.

[Sidenote: Charles and the Council.]

Such a step might well encourage the belief that Charles was himself inclining to Lutheranism; and the belief gathered strength as he sent Lutheran armies over the Alps to sack Rome and to hold the Pope a prisoner. The belief was a false one, for Charles remained utterly untouched by the religious movement about him; but even when his strife with the Papacy was to a great extent lulled by Clement's submission, he still turned a deaf ear to the Papal appeals for dealing with Lutheranism by fire and sword. His political interests and the conception which he held of his duty as Emperor alike swayed him to milder counsels. He purposed indeed to restore religious unity. His political aim was to bring Germany to his feet as he had brought Italy; and he saw that the religious schism was the great obstacle in the way of his realizing this design. As the temporal head of the Catholic world he was still more strongly bent to heal the breaches of Catholicism. But he had no wish to insist on an unconditional submission to the Papacy.

He believed that there were evils to be cured on the one side as on the other; and Charles saw the high position which awaited him if as Emperor he could bring about a reformation of the Church and a reunion of Christendom. Violent as Luther's words had been, the Lutheran princes and the bulk of Lutheran theologians had not yet come to look on Catholicism as an irreconcileable foe. Even on the papal side there was a learned and active party, a party headed by Contarini and Pole, whose theological sympathies went in many points with the Lutherans, and who looked to the winning back of the Lutherans as the needful prelude to any reform in the doctrine and practice of the Church; while Melancthon was as hopeful as Contarini that such a reform might be wrought and the Church again become universal. In his proposal of a Council to carry on the double work of purification and reunion therefore Charles stood out as the representative of the larger part both of the Catholic and the Protestant world. Against such a proposal however Rome struggled hard.

All her tradition was against Councils, where the a.s.sembled bishops had in earlier days a.s.serted their superiority to the Pope, and where the Emperor who convened the a.s.sembly and carried out its decrees rose into dangerous rivalry with the Papacy. Crushed as he was, Clement the Seventh throughout his lifetime held the proposal of a Council stubbornly at bay. But under his successor, Paul the Third, the influence of Contarini and the moderate Catholics secured a more favourable reception of plans of reconciliation. In April, 1541, conferences for this purpose were in fact opened at Augsburg in which Contarini, as Papal legate, accepted a definition of the moot question of justifications by faith which satisfied Bucer and Melancthon. On the other side, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Brandenburg publicly declared that they believed it possible to come to terms on the yet more vexed questions of the Ma.s.s and the Papal supremacy.

[Sidenote: Charles and Henry.]

Never had the reunion of the world seemed so near; and the hopes that were stirring found an echo in England as well as in Germany. We can hardly doubt indeed that it was the revival of these hopes which had brought about the fall of Cromwell and the recall of Norfolk to power.

Norfolk, like his master, looked to a purification of the Church by a Council as the prelude to a reconciliation of England with the general body of Catholicism; and both saw that it was by the influence of the Emperor alone that such a Council could be brought about. Charles on the other hand was ready to welcome Henry's advances. The quarrel over Catharine had ended with her death; and the wrong done her had been in part atoned for by the fall of Anne Boleyn. The aid of Henry too was needed to hold in check the opposition of France. The chief means which France still possessed of holding the Emperor at bay lay in the disunion of the Empire, and it was resolute to preserve this weapon against him at whatever cost to Christendom. While Francis remonstrated at Rome against the concessions made to the Lutherans by the Legates, he urged the Lutheran princes to make no terms with the Papacy. To the Protestants he held out hopes of his own conversion, while he promised Pope Paul that he would defend him with his life against Emperor and heretics. His intrigues were aided by the suspicions of both the religious parties. Luther refused to believe in the sincerity of the concessions made by the Legates; Paul the Third held aloof from them in sullen silence. Meanwhile Francis was preparing to raise more material obstacles to the Emperor's designs. Charles had bought his last reconciliation with the king by a promise of restoring the Milanese, but he had no serious purpose of ever fulfilling his pledge, and his retention of the Duchy gave the French king a fair pretext for threatening a renewal of the war.

[Sidenote: James the Fifth.]

England, as Francis hoped, he could hold in check through his alliance with the Scots. After the final expulsion of Albany in 1524 Scottish history became little more than a strife between Margaret Tudor and her husband, the Earl of Angus, for power; but the growth of James the Fifth to manhood at last secured rest for the land. James had all the varied ability of his race, and he carried out with vigour its traditional policy. The Highland chieftains, the great lords of the Lowlands, were brought more under the royal sway; the Church was strengthened to serve as a check on the feudal baronage; the alliance with France was strictly preserved, as the one security against English aggression. Nephew as he was indeed of the English king, James from the outset of his reign took up an att.i.tude hostile to England. He was jealous of the influence which the two Henries had established in his realm by the marriage of Margaret and by the building up of an English party under the Douglases; the great Churchmen who formed his most trusted advisers dreaded the influence of the religious changes across the border; while the people clung to their old hatred of England and their old dependence on France. It was only by two inroads of the border lords that Henry checked the hostile intrigues of James in 1532; his efforts to influence his nephew by an interview and alliance were met by the king's marriage with two French wives in succession, Magdalen of Valois, a daughter of Francis, and Mary, a daughter of the Duke of Guise. In 1539 when the projected coalition between France and the Empire threatened England, it had been needful to send Norfolk with an army to the Scotch frontier, and now that France was again hostile Norfolk had to move anew to the border in the autumn of 1541.

[Sidenote: Defeat at the Solway.]

While the Duke was fruitlessly endeavouring to bring James to fresh friends.h.i.+p a sudden blow at home weakened his power. At the close of the year Catharine Howard was arrested on a charge of adultery; a Parliament which a.s.sembled in January 1542 pa.s.sed a Bill of Attainder; and in February the Queen was sent to the block. She was replaced by the widow of Lord Latimer, Catharine Parr; and the influence of Norfolk in the king's counsels gradually gave way to that of Bishop Gardiner of Winchester. But Henry clung to the policy which the Duke favoured. At the end of 1541 two great calamities, the loss of Hungary after a victory of the Turks and a crus.h.i.+ng defeat at Algiers, so weakened Charles that in the summer of the following year Francis ventured to attack him. The attack served only to draw closer the negotiations between England and the Emperor; and Francis was forced, as he had threatened, to give Henry work to occupy him at home. The busiest counsellor of the Scotch king, Cardinal Beaton, crossed the seas to negotiate a joint attack, and the att.i.tude of Scotland became so menacing that in the autumn of 1542 Norfolk was again sent to the border with twenty thousand men. But terrible as were his ravages, he could not bring the Scotch army to an engagement, and want of supplies soon forced him to fall back over the border. It was in vain that James urged his n.o.bles to follow him in a counter-invasion. They were ready to defend their country; but the memory of Flodden was still fresh, and success in England would only give dangerous strength to a king in whom they saw an enemy. But James was as stubborn in his purpose as the lords. Anxious only to free himself from their presence, he waited till the two armies had alike withdrawn, and then suddenly summoned his subjects to meet him in arms on the western border. A disorderly host gathered at Lochmaben and pa.s.sed into c.u.mberland; but the English borderers followed on them fast, and were preparing to attack when at nightfall on the twenty-fifth of November a panic seized the whole Scotch force. Lost in the darkness and cut off from retreat by the Solway Firth, thousands of men with all the baggage and guns fell into the hands of the pursuers. The news of this rout fell on the young king like a sentence of death. For a while he wandered desperately from palace to palace till at the opening of December the tidings met him at Falkland that his queen, Mary of Guise, had given birth to a child. His two boys had both died in youth, and he was longing pa.s.sionately for an heir to the crown which was slipping from his grasp. But the child was a daughter, the Mary Stuart of later history. ”The deil go with it,” muttered the dying king, as his mind fell back to the close of the line of Bruce and the marriage with Robert's daughter which brought the Stuarts to the Scottish throne, ”The deil go with it! It will end as it began. It came with a la.s.s, and it will go with a la.s.s.” A few days later he died.

[Sidenote: The Marriage Treaty.]

The death of James did more than remove a formidable foe. It opened up for the first time a prospect of that union of the two kingdoms which was at last to close their long hostility. Scotland, torn by factions and with a babe for queen, seemed to lie at Henry's feet: and the king seized the opportunity of completing his father's work by a union of the realms. At the opening of 1543 he proposed to the Scotch regent, the Earl of Arran, the marriage of the infant Mary Stuart with his son Edward. To ensure this bridal he demanded that Mary should at once be sent to England, the four great fortresses of Scotland be placed in English hands, and a voice given to Henry himself in the administration of the Scotch Council of Regency. Arran and the Queen-mother, rivals as they were, vied with each other in apparent goodwill to the marriage; but there was a steady refusal to break the league with France, and the ”English lords,” as the Douglas faction were called, owned themselves helpless in the face of the national jealousy of English ambition. The temper of the nation itself was seen in the answer made by the Scotch Parliament which gathered in the spring. If they consented to the young Queen's betrothal, they not only rejected the demands which accompanied the proposal, but insisted that in case of such a union Scotland should have a perpetual regent of its own, and that this office should be hereditary in the House of Arran. Warned by his very partizans that the delivery of Mary was impossible, that if such a demand were pressed ”there was not so little a boy but he would hurl stones against it, the wives would handle their distaffs, and the commons would universally die in it,” Henry's proposals dropped in July to a treaty of alliance, offensive and defensive, he suffered France to be included among the allies of Scotland named in it, he consented that the young Queen should remain with her mother till the age of ten, and offered guarantees for the maintenance of Scotch independence.

[Sidenote: Scotland and France.]

But modify it as he might, Henry knew that such a project of union could only be carried out by a war with Francis. His negotiations for a treaty with Charles had long been delayed through Henry's wish to drag the Emperor into an open breach with the Papacy, but at the moment of the King's first proposals for the marriage of Mary Stuart with his son the need of finding a check upon France forced on a formal alliance with the Emperor in February 1543. The two allies agreed that the war should be continued till the Duchy of Burgundy had been restored to the Emperor and till England had recovered Normandy and Guienne; while the joint fleets of Henry and Charles held the Channel and sheltered England from any danger of French attack. The main end of this treaty was doubtless to give Francis work at home which might prevent the despatch of a French force into Scotland and the overthrow of Henry's hopes of a Scotch marriage. These hopes were strengthened as the summer went on by the acceptance of his later proposals in a Parliament which was packed by the Regent, and by the actual conclusion of a marriage-treaty. But if Francis could spare neither horse nor man for action in Scotland his influence in the northern kingdom was strong enough to foil Henry's plans. The Churchmen were as bitterly opposed to such a marriage as the partizans of France; and their head, Cardinal Beaton, who had held aloof from the Regent's Parliament, suddenly seized the Queen-mother and her babe, crowned the infant Mary, called a Parliament in December which annulled the marriage-treaty, and set Henry at defiance.

[Sidenote: War with France.]

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