Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/699

OF ENGLAND.] HENRY VIII 665 vinced of the futility of an invasion; and the thunderbolts of the pope fell harmless to the ground. In all this crisis, when a wrong step or the appearance of vacillation might have occasioned a religious war, in which the conservatism at home would have been seconded by the armies of Spain, the energy and the commanding sagacity of Henry did more than aught else to save the country. To him the praise is chiefly due that this great revolution was comparatively free from blood and havoc. Henry had defied the emperor and the pope, and he had suppressed the conservative Catholic discontent at home with a high hand ; but he was never disposed to be a Protestant. Instead of following the lead of the advanced Reformers he impressed upon the English Church his own moderate and substantially Catholic theology. At thirty he had defended the seven sacraments against Luther ; he was thirty-six when he took up the question of divorce, and he was forty ere his relations to the pope had hardened into alienation and hostility. All his life he was orthodox from conviction as well as from traditional assent. Such a man could not be a revolutionary in theology. He repressed with a firm hand all excess in innovation, showing equal aversion to the iconoclastic mob and to iconoclastic preachers. The bill of the Six Articles, passed in the same year that saw the final dissolution of the monastic system of England, was the most remarkable exemplification of this spirit of Henry. It also proves that innovation in theology was a new thing to the mass of the English nation, and its penalties too clearly illustrate the fact that religion was not considered an individual and private matter, but a national interest, the violation of which was a capital offence. It is to the honour of Henry that the victims of the Bloody Statute were so few. Five hundred arrests were made by the eager Catholic party in a single fortnight after the passing of the bill ; but the king interposed in time, and only twenty-eight suffered under the statute during the whole reigu. In the meantime Henry had been less fortunate in the matrimonial scheme which hid been the occasion of all the changes and dangers we have noted. A few months after tli3 deith of Catherine, Anne Boleyn was sent to the scaffold. Anie may have been guilty of the crimes laid to her charge, but Hinry himself had taught her to cast aside all feminine reserve and self-respsct, and his fickle heart had been capti vated by another, long before the disclosures which were tli3 ground of har death. Henry married his new love, Jane Ssymour, the day after the execution of Anne (1536). The birth of Edward in tha following year gratified the king s dssire for a mile heir; but the early death of Jane left him again without a queen. After an interval of more than two years Cromwell undertook to procure a suitable wife at the Protestant courts of Germany ; but his ruin was not less complete than that of his patron Wolsey on a similar occasion ten years before. Anne of Cleves found no favour in the king s eyes ; she was divorced and pensioned off, while the enemies of Cromwell succeeded in sending him to the scaffold. Anne s place was occupied by Catherine Howard, till she, really guilty, was also executed (15 i2). For his sixth and last queen Henry married (1543) Catherine Parr, who proved a patient wife and an excellent nurse. During the last few years of Henry s reign home affairs and the question of the religious revolution ceased to be the exclusive subject of interest. England and the neighbouring powers were constrained to acquiesce for the time being in Henry s arrangement of things. Even the emperor cultivated his alliance. His foreign politics ended very much as they began with a war against Scotland and France. The former arose out of certain border quarrels ; the Scots were beaten at Solway Moss, but defeated an English force at Ancrum Moor. After the death of James V. Henry s course was to arrange a marriage of the infant queen of Scots with his own son Edward. The plan failed through Henry s self-will, and Scotland was ravaged to no purpose. The war with France (1543-46) was equally fruitless. Its chief feature was a threatened invasion by a formidable French fleet, which for some time was master of the Channel. At home the most important point of interest was the struggle between the two factions, Protestant and Con servative, which had now for some years confronted each other Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner of Winchester being the leaders of the latter, while the queen, Cranmer, and the earl of Hertford, uncle of young Edward, were at the head of the former. Cromwell had already fallen under the machinations of the Conservative party. Cranmer and even the queen were not quite safe from its attacks. The heads of that party now suffered at the close of the reign. Surrey was executed, and Norfolk was saved only by the death of the king. The effect of such measures was to make the prospects of Edward secure by confirming the power of his uncle Hertford. Henry was anxious to arrange affairs for the accession of his son, as he felt his own life waning away. Though only in his fifty-sixth year he was unwieldy with disease and corpulency, and required to be wheeled from room to room ; an ulcer in the leg had troubled him for many years. In this as in so many other respects the contrast between the beginning and end of his career is striking : the young athlete is transformed into a helpless invalid ; the joviality, the enthusiasm, and the unanimity of his earlier reign gave place to a long period of gloom and contention, repressed only by the savage and imperious hand of the king. He died on the 28th of January 1547. The character of Henry has long been a stumbling-block to historians, and will always be a puzzle to such as classify mankind under the two heads of good and bad without recognizing the intermediate gradations to which the vast majority belong. To many it is all the more inexplicable, because the contrast between his youth and declining man hood is so apparently complete. Yet it was a perfectly consistent, though a mixed character, and the later phases of it are only a natural development of the earlier. He was always strong-willed to excess, capricious, and fickle, with the sensuous part of his nature predominating. In his youth his baser tendencies were controlled by his love of popularity, his regard for his excellent wife, his own sense of duty, and the vigorous animal spirits which found congenial play in physical exercise and in foreign war. In his maturer years he was more self-reliant and therefore less dependent on popularity ; after losing his regard for Catherine he fell into baser companionship ; as his health began to fail, his boisterous spirits declined. Worst of all, his constitutional fickleness took the form of disloyalty to his successive wives, and to his friends and ministers. In the time of Henry there was no acuter man than Sir Thomas More. His verdict may be accepted as final on this aspect of the king s character. In the height of his favour with the king, after walking an hour with him in the garden at Chelsea, the king holding his arm about his neck, More confessed that he had " no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in France it should not fail to go." Such may have been the repulsive side of Henry. Much more important, however, than the consider ation of his personal character is the question as to the nature and tendency of the historic work in which he took the initiative. Was that the outcome merely of misguided self-will concealing itself under the guise of duty, or was it the true and durable expression of the claims and aspirations of the time 1 The passions of Henry had certainly too much to do with it ; the work he did was, like his character, mixed with baser elements. But the best answer to such

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