Henry Viii 2 Essay, Research Paper
Henry VIII
King of England, born 28 June, 1491; died 28 January, 1547.
He was the second son and third child of his father, Henry VII. His elder
brother Arthur died in April, 1502, and consequently Henry became heir
to the throne when he was not yet quite eleven years old. It has been
asserted that Henry’s interest in theological questions was due to the bias
of his early education, since he had at first been destined by his father for
the Church. But a child of eleven can hardly have formed lifelong
intellectual tastes, and it is certain that secular titles, such as those of Earl
Marshal and Viceroy of Ireland, were heaped upon him when he was
five. On the other hand there can be no question as to the boy’s great
precocity and as to the liberal scope of the studies which he was made to
pursue from his earliest years.
After Arthur’s death a project was at once formed of marrying him to his
brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, who, being born in December,
1485, was more than five years his senior. The negotiations for a papal
dispensation took some little time, and the Spanish Queen Isabella, the
mother of Catherine, then nearing her end, grew very impatient. Hence a
hastily drafted Brief containing the required dispensation was privately
sent to Spain in 1504, to be followed some months later by a Bull to the
same effect which was of a more public character. The existence of these
two instruments afterwards caused complications. Owing, however, to
some political scheming of Henry VII who was trying to outwit his
rival Ferdinand Prince Henry, on attaining the age of fourteen, was
made to record a formal protest against the proposed marriage with
Catherine, as a matter arranged without his consent. Still, when his father
died in 1509, Henry carried out the marriage nine weeks after his
accession, he being then eighteen, and showing from the first a thorough
determination to be his own master. Great popularity was won for the
new reign by the attainder and execution of Empson and Dudley, the
instruments of the late king’s extortion. Besides this, it is unanimously
attested by contemporaries that the young sovereign possessed every gift
of mind and person which could arouse the enthusiasm of his people. His
skill in manly sports was almost equalled by his intelligence and his
devotion to letters. Of the complicated foreign policy which marked the
beginning of his reign no detail can be given here. Thanks partly to
Henry’s personality, but still more to the ability of Wolsey, who soon took
the first place in the council chamber, England for the first time became a
European power. In 1512 Henry joined Pope Julius II, Ferdinand of
Spain, and the Venetians in forming the “Holy League” against the King of
France. Julius was feverishly bent on chasing the “barbarians” (i.e. the
French and other foreigners) out of Italy, and Henry cooperated by
collecting ships and soldiers to attack the French king in his own
dominions. No very conspicuous success attended his arms, but there
was a victory at Guinegate outside Therouanne, and the Scotch, who, as
the allies of France, had threatened invasion, were disastrously defeated
at Flodden in 1513. During all this time Henry remained on excellent
terms with the Holy See. In April, 1510, Julius sent him the golden rose,
and in 1514 Leo X bestowed the honorific cap and sword, which were
presented with much solemnity at St. Paul’s.
The League having been broken up by the selfish policy of Ferdinand,
Henry VIII now made peace with France and for some years held the
balance of power on the Continent, though not without parting with a
good deal of money. Wolsey was made a cardinal in 1515 and exercised
more influence than ever, but it was somewhat against his advice that
Henry, in 1519, secretly became a candidate for the succession to the
empire, though pretending at the same time to support the candidature of
Francis, his ally. When, however, Charles V was successful, the French
king could not afford to quarrel with Henry, and a somewhat hollow and
insincere renewal of their friendship took place in June, 1520, at the
famous “Field of the Cloth of Gold”, when the most elaborate courtesies
were exchanged between the two monarchs. The prospect of this
rapprochement had so alarmed the Emperor Charles that, a month
before it took place, he visited Henry in England. In point of fact a
continuous game of intrigue was being played by all three monarchs,
which lasted until the period when Henry’s final breach with Rome led him
to turn his principal attention to domestic concerns. Meanwhile the
strength of Henry’s position at home had been much developed by
Wolsey’s judicious diplomacy, and, despite the costliness of some of
England’s demonstrations against France, before the French king became
the emperor’s prisoner at Pavia, the odium of the demand for money fell
upon the minister, while Henry retained all his popularity. Indeed,
whatever disaffection might be felt, the people had no leader to make
rebellion possible. The old nobility, partly as a result of the Wars of the
Roses, and partly owing to the repressive policy dictated by the dynastic
fears of Henry VII, had been reduced to impotence. In 1521 the most
prominent noble in England, the Duke of Buckingham, was condemned to
death for high treason by a subservient House of Peers, simply because
the king suspected him of aiming at the succession and had determined
that he must die. At the same period Henry’s prestige in the eyes of the
clergy, and not the clergy only, was strengthened by his famous book, the
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. This book was written against Luther
and in vindication of the Church’s dogmatic teaching regarding the
sacraments and the Sacrifice of the Mass, while the supremacy of the
papacy is also insisted upon in unequivocal terms. There is no reason to
doubt that the substance of the book was really Henry’s. Pope Leo X
was highly pleased with it and conferred upon the king the title of Fidei
Defensor (Defender of the Faith), which is maintained to this day as part
of the royal style of the English Crown. All this success and adulation
were calculated to develop the natural masterfulness of Henry’s character.
He had long shown to discerning eyes, like those of Sir Thomas More,
that he would contradiction in nothing. Without being guilty of notable
profligacy in comparison with the other monarchs of his time, it is doubtful
if Henry’s married life had ever been pure, even from the first, and we
know that in 1519 he had, by Elizabeth Blount, a son whom, at the age of
six, he made the Duke of Richmond. He had also carried on an intrigue
with Mary Boleyn which led to some complications at a later date.
Such was Henry when, probably about the beginning of the year 1527,
he formed a violent passion for Mary’s younger sister, Anne. It is possible
that the idea of the divorce had suggested itself to the king much earlier
than this (see Brown, “Venetian Calendars”, II, 479), and it is highly
probable that it was motivated by the desire of male issue, of which he
had been disappointed by the death in infancy of all Catherine’s children
save Mary. Anne Boleyn was restrained by no moral scruples, but she
saw her opportunity in Henry’s infatuation and determined that she would
only yield as his acknowledged queen. Anyway, it soon became the one
absorbing object of the king’s desires to secure a divorce from Catherine,
and in the pursuit of this he condescended to the most unworthy means.
He had it put about that the Bishop of Tarbes, when negotiating an
alliance in behalf of the French king, had raised a doubt as to the Princess
Mary’s legitimacy. He also prompted Wolsey, as legate, to hold with
Archbishop Warham a private and collusive inquiry, summoning Henry to
prove before them that his marriage was valid. The only result was to give
Catherine an inkling of what was in the king’s mind, and to elicit from her
a solemn declaration that the marriage had never been consummated.
From this it followed that there had never been any impediment of
“affinity” to bar her union with Henry, but only the much more easily
dispensed impediment known as publicae honestatis. The best canonists
of the time also held that a papal dispensation which formally removed the
impediment of affinity also involved by implication that of publicae
honestatis, or “public decency.” The collective suit was thereupon
dropped, and Henry now set his hopes upon a direct appeal to the Holy
See, acting in this independently of Wolsey, to whom he at first
communicated nothing of his design so far as it related to Anne. William
Knight, the king’s secretary, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the
declaration of nullity of his union with Catherine, on the ground that the
dispensing Bull of Julius II was obreptitious i.e. obtained by false
pretences. Henry also petitioned, in the event of his becoming free, a
dispensation to contract a new marriage with any woman even in the first
degree of affinity, whether the affinity was contracted by lawful or
unlawful connexion. This clearly had reference to Anne Boleyn, and the
fictitious nature of Henry’s conscientious scruples about his marriage is
betrayed by the fact that he himself was now applying for a dispensation
of precisely the same nature as that which he scrupled about, a
dispensation which he later on maintained the pope had no power to
grant.
As the pope was at that time the prisoner of Charles V, Knight had some
difficulty in obtaining access to him. In the end the king’s envoy had to
return without accomplishing much, though the (conditional) dispensation
for a new marriage was readily accorded. Henry had now no choice but
to put his great matter into the hands of Wolsey, and Wolsey, although
the whole divorce policy ran counter to his better judgment, strained
every nerve to secure a decision in his master’s favour. An account of the
mission of Gardiner and Foxe and of the failure of the divorce
proceedings before the papal commissioners, Wolsey and Campeggio,
mainly on account of the production of the Brief, has been given in some
detail in the article CLEMENT VII, to which the reader is referred. The
revocation of the cause to Rome in July, 1529, owing, no doubt, in part
to Queen Catherine’s most reasonable protests against her helplessness in
England and the compulsion to which she was subjected, had many
important results. First among these we must count the disgrace and fall
of Wolsey, hitherto the only real check upon Henry’s wilfulness. The
incredible meanness of the praemunire, and consequent confiscation,
which the cardinal was pronounced to have incurred for obtaining the
cardinalate and legateship from Rome though of course this had been
done with the king’s full knowledge and consent would alone suffice to
stamp Henry as one of the basest of mankind. But, secondly, we may
trace to this same crisis the rise of both Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell,
the two great architects of Henry’s new policy. It was Cranmer who, in
the autumn of 1529, made the momentous suggestion that the king should
consult the universities of Europe upon the question of the nullity of his
marriage, a suggestion which at once brought its author into favour.
The project was carried out as soon as possible with a lavish expenditure
of bribes, and the use of other means of pressure. The result was naturally
highly favourable to the king’s wishes, though the universities which lay
within the dominions of Charles V were not consulted. The answers were
submitted to Parliament, where the king still kept the pretense of having
no personal interest in the matter. He professed to be suffering from
scruples of conscience, now rendered more acute by such a weight of
learned opinion. With the same astuteness he persuaded the leading
nobility of the kingdom to write to the pope praying him to give sentence
in Henry’s favour for fear that worse might follow. All this drew the king
into closer relations with Cranmer, who was made ambassador to the
emperor, and who, a year or two afterwards, despite the fact that he had
just married Osiander’s niece (his second wife), was summoned home to
become Archbishop of Canterbury. The necessary Bulls and the pallium
were obtained from Rome under threat that the law (referred to again
below) for the abolition of annates and first-fruits would be made
permanent. The vacillating Clement who probably hoped that by
making every other kind of concession he might be able to maintain the
position he had assumed upon the more vital question of the divorce
conceded Bulls and pallium. But to benefit by them it was necessary that
Cranmer should take certain prescribed oaths of obedience to the Holy
See. He took the oaths, but committed to writing a solemn protest that he
considered the oaths in no way binding in conscience, a procedure which
even so prejudiced a historian as Mr. H.A. Fisher cannot refrain from
describing as a “signal dishonesty.” “If”, asks Dr. Lingard, “it be simony to
purchase spiritual office by money, what is it to purchase the same by
perjury?” The father of the new Church of England, and future compiler
of its liturgy, was not entering upon his functions under very propitious
auspices.
But the Church which was soon to be brought into being probably owes
even more to Thomas Cromwell than to its first archbishop. It is
Cromwell who seems to have suggested to Henry as a deliberate policy
that he should abolish the imperium in imperio, throw off the papal
supremacy, and make himself the supreme head of his own religion. This
was in fact the course which from the latter part of 1529 Henry
undeviatingly followed, though he did not at first go to lengths from which
there was no retreat. The first blow was struck at the clergy by involving
them in Wolsey’s praemunire. Some anti-clerical disaffection there had
always been, partly, no doubt, the remnants of Lollardy, as was instanced
in the case of Richard Hunne, 1515. This, of late years, had been a good
deal aggravated by the importation into England of Tyndale’s annotated
New Testament and other books of heretical tendency, which, though
prohibited and burnt by authority, still made their way among the people.
Henry and his ministers had, therefore, some popular support upon which
they could fall back, if necessary, in their campaign to reduce the clergy
to abject submission. At the beginning of 1531 the Convocation of
Canterbury were informed that they could purchase a pardon for the
praemunire they had incurred by presenting the king with the enormous
sum of 100,000 pounds. Further, they were bidden to recognize the king
as “Protector and Supreme Head of the Church of England.”
Convocation struggled desperately against the demand, and in the end
succeeded in inserting the qualification “so far as is allowed by the law of
Christ.” But this was only a brief respite. A year later Parliament under
pressure passed an edict forbidding the payment to the Holy See of
Annates or first-fruits, but the operation of it was for the present
suspended at the sovereign’s pleasure, and the king was meanwhile
solicited to come to an amicable understanding with “His Holiness” on the
subject of the divorce. The measure amounted to a decently veiled threat
to withdraw this source of income from the Holy See altogether if the
divorce was refused. Still the pope held out, and so did the queen. Only a
little time before, a deputation of lords and bishops of course by the
king’s order had visited Catherine and had rudely urged her to
withdraw the appeal in virtue of which the king, contrary to his dignity,
had been cited to appear personally at Rome; but though deprived of all
counsel, she stood firm. In the May of 1532 further pressure was brought
to bear upon Convocation, and resulted in the so-called “Submission of
the Clergy”, by which they practically renounced all right of legislation
except in dependence upon the king.
An honest man like Sir Thomas More could no longer pretend to work
with the Government, and he resigned the chancellorship, which he had
held since the fall of Wolsey. The situation was too strained to last, and
the end came through the death of Archbishop Warham in August, 1532.