murdered princes is named in the list of English kings as
Edward V.; but he cannot be said to have reigned. Richard III.
was overthrown and slain on Bosworth field in 1485.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1471-1485.
The New Monarchy.
The rise of Absolutism and the decline of Parliamentary
government.
"If we use the name of the New Monarchy to express the
character of the English sovereignty from the time of Edward
IV. to the time of Elizabeth, it is because the character of
the monarchy during this period was something wholly new in
our history. There is no kind of sibilantly between the
kingship of the Old English, of the Norman, the Angevin, or
the Plantagenet sovereigns, and the kingship of the Tudors.
... What the Great Rebellion in its final result actually did
was to wipe away every trace of the New Monarchy, and to take
up again the thread of our political development just where it
had been snapped by the Wars of the Roses. ... The founder of
the New Monarchy was Edward IV. ... While jesting with
aldermen, or dallying with his mistresses, or idling over the
new pages from the printing press [Caxton's] at Westminster,
Edward was silently laying the foundations of an absolute rule
which Henry VII. did little more than develop and consolidate.
The almost total discontinuance of Parliamentary life was in
itself a revolution. Up to this moment the two Houses had
played a part which became more and more prominent in the
government of the realm. ... Under Henry VI. an important step
in constitutional progress had been made by abandoning the old
form of presenting the requests of the Parliament in the form
of petitions which were subsequently moulded into statutes by
the Royal Councils; the statute itself, in its final form, was
now presented for the royal assent, and the Crown was deprived
of its former privilege of modifying it. Not only does this
progress cease, but the legislative activity of Parliament
itself comes abruptly to an end. ... The necessity for
summoning the two Houses had, in fact, been removed by the
enormous tide of wealth which the confiscation of the civil
war poured into the royal treasury. ... It was said that
nearly a fifth of the land had passed into the royal
possession at one period or another of the civil war. Edward
added to his resources by trading on a vast scale. ... The
enterprises he had planned against France ... enabled Edward
not only to increase his hoard, but to deal a deadly blow at
liberty. Setting aside the usage of loans sanctioned by the
authority of Parliament, Edward called before him the
merchants of the city and requested from each a present or
benevolence in proportion to the need. Their compliance with
his prayer was probably aided by his popularity with the
merchant class; but the system of benevolence was soon to be
developed into the forced loans of Wolsey and the ship-money
of Charles I."
J. R. Green,
Short History of the English People,
chapter 6, section 3.
ALSO IN:
W. Stubbs,
Constitutional History of England,
chapter 18, section 696.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1474.
Treaty with the Hanseatic League.
See HANSA TOWNS.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1476.
Introduction of Printing by Caxton.
See PRINTING, &c.: A. D. 1476-1491.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1483-1485.
Murder of the young king, Edward V.
Accession of Richard III.
The battle of Bosworth and the fall of the House of York.
On the death of Edward IV., in 1483, his crafty and
unscrupulous brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, gathered
quickly into his hands the reins of power, proceeding with
consummate audacity and ruthlessness to sweep every strong
rival out of his path. Contenting himself for a few weeks,
only, with the title of Protector, he soon disputed the
validity of his brother Edward's marriage, caused an
obsequious Parliament to set aside the young sons whom the
latter had left, declaring them to be illegitimate, and placed
the crown on his own head. The little princes (King Edward V.,
and Richard, Duke of York), immured in the Tower, were
murdered presently at their uncle's command, and Richard III.
appeared, for the time, to have triumphed in his ambitious
villainy. But, popular as he made himself in many cunning
ways, his deeds excited a horror which united Lancastrians
with the party of York in a common detestation. Friends of
Henry, Earl of Richmond, then in exile, were not slow to take
advantage of this feeling. Henry could claim descent from the
same John of Gaunt, son of Edward III., to whom the House of
Lancaster traced its lineage; but his family--the
Beauforts--sprang from the mistress, not the wife, of the
great Duke of Lancaster, and had only been legitimated by act
of Parliament. The Lancastrians, however, were satisfied with
the royalty of his blood, and the Yorkists were made content
by his promise to marry a daughter of Edward IV. On this
understanding being arranged, Henry came over from Brittany to
England, landing at Milford Haven on the 7th or 8th of August,
1485, and advancing through Wales, being joined by great
numbers as he moved. Richard, who had no lack of courage,
marched quickly to meet him, and the two forces joined battle
on Bosworth Field, in Leicestershire, on Sunday, August 21. At
the outset of the fighting Richard was deserted by a large
division of his army and saw that his fate was sealed. He
plunged, with despairing rage, into the thickest of the
struggle and was slain. His crowned helmet, which he had worn,
was found by Sir Reginald Bray, battered and broken, under a
hawthorn bush, and placed on the head of his rival, who soon
attained a more solemn coronation, as Henry VII.
C. M. Yonge,
Cameos from English History,
3d Series, chapters 19-20.
"I must record my impression that a minute study of the facts
of Richard's life has tended more and more to convince me of
the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been
made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More. I feel quite
ashamed, at this day, to think how I mused over this subject
long ago, wasting a great deal of time, ink and paper, in
fruitless efforts to satisfy even my own mind that traditional
black was real historical white, or at worst a kind of grey.
...
{823}
Both the character and personal appearance of Richard III.
have furnished matter of controversy. But with regard to the
former the day has now gone by when it was possible to doubt
the evidence at least of his principal crime; and that he was
regarded as a tyrant by his subjects seems almost equally
indisputable. At the same time he was not destitute of better
qualities. ... As king he seems really to have studied his
country's welfare, passed good laws, endeavoured to put an end
to extortion, declined the free gifts offered to him by
several towns, and declared he would rather have the hearts of
his subjects than their money. His munificence was especially
shown in religious foundations. ... His hypocrisy was not of
the vulgar kind which seeks to screen habitual baseness of
motive by habitual affectation of virtue. His best and his
worst deeds were alike too well known to be either concealed
or magnified; at least, soon after he became king, all doubt
upon the subject must have been removed. ... His ingratiating
manners, together with the liberality of his disposition, seem
really to have mitigated to a considerable extent the alarms
created by his fitful deeds of violence. The reader will not
require to be reminded of Shakespeare's portrait of a murderer
who could cajole the woman whom he had most exasperated and
made a widow into marrying himself. That Richard's ingenuity
was equal to this extraordinary feat we do not venture to
assert; but that he had a wonderful power of reassuring those
whom he had most intimidated and deceiving those who knew him
best there can be very little doubt. ... His taste in building
was magnificent and princely. ... There is scarcely any
evidence of Richard's [alleged] deformity to be derived from
original portraits. The number of portraits of Richard which
seem to be contemporary is greater than might have been
expected. ... The face in all the portraits is a remarkable
one, full of energy and decision, yet gentle and sad-looking,
suggesting the idea not so much of a tyrant as of a mind
accustomed to unpleasant thoughts. Nowhere do we find depicted
the warlike hard-favoured visage attributed to him by Sir
Thomas More. ... With such a one did the long reign of the
Plantagenets terminate. The fierce spirit and the valour of
the race never showed more strongly than at the close. The
Middle Ages, too, as far as England was concerned, may be said
to have passed away with Richard III."
J. Gairdner,
History of the Life, and Reign of Richard The Third,
introduction and chapter 6.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1485.
Accession of King Henry VII.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1528.
The Sweating Sickness.
See SWEATING SICKNESS.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1603.
The Tudors.
The Tudor family, which occupied the English throne from the
accession of Henry VII., 1485, until the death of Elizabeth,
1603, took its name, but not its royal lineage, from Sir Owen
Tudor, a handsome Welsh chieftain, who won the heart and the
hand of the young widow of Henry V., Catherine of France. The
eldest son of that marriage, made Earl of Richmond, married in
his turn Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter to John of
Gaunt, or Ghent, who was one of the sons of Edward III. From
this latter union came Henry of Richmond, as he was known, who
disputed the crown with Richard III. and made his claim good
on Bosworth Field, where the hated Richard was killed. Henry's
pretensions were based on the royal descent of his
mother--derived, however, through John of Gaunt's mistress--
and the dynasty which he founded was closely related in origin
to the Lancastrian line. Henry of Richmond strengthened his
hold upon the crown, though not his title to it, by marrying
Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., thus joining the white rose
to the red. He ascended the throne as Henry VII., A. D. 1485;
was succeeded by his son, Henry VIII., in 1509, and the latter
by his three children, in order as follows: Edward VI., 1547;
Mary, 1553; Elizabeth, 1558. The Tudor family became extinct
on the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603. "They [the Tudors]
reigned in England, without a successful rising against them,
for upwards of a hundred years; but not more by a studied
avoidance of what might so provoke the country, than by the
most resolute repression of every effort, on the part of what
remained of the peerage and great families, to make head
against the throne. They gave free indulgence to their tyranny
only within the circle of the court, while they unceasingly
watched and conciliated the temper of the people. The work
they had to do, and which by more scrupulous means was not
possible to be done, was one of paramount necessity; the
dynasty uninterruptedly endured for only so long as was
requisite to its thorough completion; and to each individual
sovereign the particular task might seem to have been
specially assigned. It was Henry's to spurn, renounce and
utterly cast off, the Pope's authority, without too suddenly
revolting the people's usages and habits; to arrive at blessed
results by ways that a better man might have held to be
accursed; during the momentous change in progress to keep in
necessary check both the parties it affected; to persecute
with an equal hand the Romanist and the Lutheran; to send the
Protestant to the stake for resisting Popery, and the Roman
Catholic to the scaffold for not admitting himself to be Pope;
while he meantime plundered the monasteries, hunted down and
rooted out the priests, alienated the abbey lands, and glutted
himself and his creatures with that enormous spoil. It was
Edward's to become the ready and undoubting instrument of
Cranmer's design, and, with all the inexperience and more than
the obstinacy of youth, so to force upon the people his
compromise of doctrine and observance, as to render possible,
even perhaps unavoidable, his elder sister's reign. It was
Mary's to undo the effect of that precipitate eagerness of the
Reformers, by lighting the fires of Smithfield; and
opportunely to arrest the waverers from Protestantism, by
exhibiting in their excess the very worst vices, the cruel
bigotry, the hateful intolerance, the spiritual slavery, of
Rome. It was Elizabeth's finally and forever to uproot that
slavery from amongst us, to champion all over the world a new
and nobler faith, and immovably to establish in England the
Protestant religion."
J. Forster,
Historical and Biographical Essays,
pages 221-222.
ALSO IN:
S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger,
Introduction to the Study of English History,
chapter 6.
C. E. Moberly,
The Early Tudors.
{824}
ENGLAND: A. D. 1487-1497.
The Rebellions of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.
Although Henry VII., soon after he attained the throne,
married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV., and thus
united the two rival houses, the Yorkists were discontented
with his rule. "With the help of Margaret of Burgundy, Edward
IV. 's sister, and James IV. of Scotland, they actually set up
two impostors, one after the other, to claim the throne. There
was a real heir of the House of York still alive--young
Edward, Earl of Warwick [son of the Duke of Clarence, brother
to Edward IV.], ... and Henry had taken the precaution to
keep him in the Tower. But in 1487 a sham Earl of Warwick
appeared in Ireland, and being supported by the Earl of
Kildare, was actually crowned in Dublin Cathedral. Henry soon
put down the imposture by showing the real earl to the people
of London, and defeating the army of the pretended earl at
Stoke, near Newark, June, 1487. He proved to be a lad named
Lambert Simnel, the son of a joiner at Oxford, and he became a
scullion in the king's kitchen." In 1492 another pretender of
like character was brought forward. "A young man, called
Perkin Warbeck, who proved afterwards to be a native of
Tournay, pretended that he was Richard, Duke of York, the
younger of the two little princes in the Tower, and that he
had escaped when his brother Edward V. was murdered. He
persuaded the king of France and Margaret of Burgundy to
acknowledge him, and was not only received at the foreign
courts, but, after failing in Ireland, he went to Scotland,
where James IV. married him to his own cousin Catharine
Gordon, and helped him to invade England in 1496. The invasion
was defeated however, by the Earl of Surrey, and then Perkin
went back to Ireland, where the people had revolted against
the heavy taxes. There he raised an army and marched to
Exeter, but meeting the king's troops at Taunton, he lost
courage, and fled to the Abbey of Beaulieu, where he was taken
prisoner, and sent to the Tower in 1497." In 1501 both Perkin
Warbeck and the young Earl of Warwick were executed.
A. B. Buckley,
History of England for Beginners,
chapter 13.
ALSO IN:
J. Gairdner, Story of Perkin Warbeck
(appendix to Life of Richard III.).
C. M, Yonge,
Cameos from English History,
3d series, chapters 21 and 24.
J. Gairdner,
Henry VII.,
chapters 4 and 7.
ENGLAND: 15th-16th Centuries.
The Renaissance.
Life in "Merry England."
Preludes to the Elizabethan Age of literature.
"Toward the close of the fifteenth century ... commerce and
the woollen trade made a sudden advance, and such an enormous
one that corn-fields were changed into pasture-lands, 'whereby
the inhabitants of the said town (Manchester) have gotten and
come into riches and wealthy livings,' so that in 1553, 40,000
pieces of cloth were exported in English ships. It was already
the England which we see to-day, a land of meadows, green,
intersected by hedgerows, crowded with cattle, abounding in
ships, a manufacturing, opulent land, with a people of
beef-eating toilers, who enrich it while they enrich
themselves. They improved agriculture to such an extent, that
in half a century the produce of an acre was doubled. They
grew so rich, that at the beginning of the reign of Charles I.
the Commons represented three times the wealth of the Upper
House. The ruin of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma sent to
England 'the third part of the merchants and manufacturers,
who made silk, damask, stockings, taffetas, and serges.' The
defeat of the Armada and the decadence of Spain opened the
seas to their merchants. The toiling hive, who would dare,
attempt, explore, act in unison, and always with profit, was
about to reap its advantages and set out on its voyages,
buzzing over the universe. At the base and on the summit of
society, in all ranks of life, in all grades of human
condition, this new welfare became visible. ... It is not when
all is good, but when all is better, that they see the bright
side of life, and are tempted to make a holiday of it. This is
why at this period they did make a holiday of it, a splendid
show, so like a picture that it fostered painting in Italy, so
like a representation, that it produced the drama in England.
Now that the battle-axe and sword of the civil wars had beaten
down the independent nobility, and the abolition of the law of
maintenance had destroyed the petty royalty of each great
feudal baron, the lords quitted their sombre castles,
battlemented fortresses, surrounded by stagnant water, pierced
with narrow windows, a sort of stone breast-plates of no use
but to preserve the life of their masters. They flock into new
palaces, with vaulted roofs and turrets, covered with
fantastic and manifold ornaments, adorned with terraces and
vast staircases, with gardens, fountains, statues, such as
were the palaces of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, half Gothic and
half Italian, whose convenience, grandeur, and beauty
announced already habits of society and the taste for
pleasure. They came to court and abandoned their old manners;
the four meals which scarcely sufficed their former voracity
were reduced to two; gentlemen soon became refined, placing
their glory in the elegance and singularity of their
amusements and their clothes. ... To vent the feelings, to
satisfy the heart and eyes, to set free boldly on all the
roads of existence the pack of appetites and instincts, this
was the craving which the manners of the time betrayed. It was
'merry England,' as they called it then. It was not yet stern
and constrained. It expanded widely, freely, and rejoiced to
find itself so expanded. No longer at court only was the drama
found but in the village. Strolling companies betook
themselves thither, and the country folk supplied any
deficiencies when necessary. Shakspeare saw, before he
depicted them, stupid fellows, carpenters, joiners,
bellow-menders, play Pyramus and Thisbe, represent the lion
roaring as gently as possible, and the wall, by stretching out
their hands. Every holiday was a pageant, in which
townspeople, workmen, and children bore their parts. ... A few
sectarians, chiefly in the towns and of the people, clung
gloomily to the Bible. But the court and the men of the world
sought their teachers and their heroes from pagan Greece and
Rome. About 1490 they began to read the classics; one after
the other they translated them; it was soon the fashion to
read them in the original. Elizabeth, Jane Grey, the Duchess
of Norfolk, the Countess of Arundel, many other ladies, were
conversant with Plato, Xenophon, and Cicero in the original,
and appreciated them. Gradually, by an insensible change, men
were raised to the level of the great and healthy minds who
had freely handled ideas of all kinds fifteen centuries ago.
They comprehended not only their language, but their thought;
they did not repeat lessons from, but held conversations with
them; they were their equals, and found in them intellects as
manly as their own. ...
{825}
Across the train of hooded school men and sordid cavillers the
two adult and thinking ages were united, and the moderns,
silencing the infantine or snuffling voices of the middle-age,
condescended only to converse with the noble ancients. They
accepted their gods, at least they understand them, and keep
them by their side. In poems, festivals, tapestries, almost
all ceremonies they appear, not restored by pedantry merely,
but kept alive by sympathy, and glorified by the arts of an
age as flourishing and almost as profound as that of their
earliest birth. After the terrible night of the middle-age,
and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a
delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its
heroic and beautiful deities once more ravishing the heart of
men, they raised and instructed this young world by speaking
to it the language of passion and genius; and the age of
strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only to
follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal
promoters of liberty and beauty. Nearer still was another
paganism, that of Italy; the more seductive because more
modern, and because it circulates fresh sap in an ancient
stock; the more attractive, because more sensuous and present,
with its worship of force and genius, of pleasure and
voluptuousness. ... At that time Italy clearly led in every
thing, and civilisation was to be drawn thence as from its
spring. What is this civilisation which is thus imposed on the
whole of Europe, whence every science and every elegance
comes, whose laws are obeyed in every court, in which Surrey,
Sidney, Spenser, Shakspeare sought their models and their
materials? It was pagan in its elements and its birth; in its
language, which is but slightly different from Latin; in its
Latin traditions and recollections, which no gap has come to
interrupt; in its constitution, whose old municipal life first
led and absorbed the feudal life; in the genius of its race,
in which energy and enjoyment always abounded."
H. A. Taine,
History of English Literature,
book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1).
"The intellectual movement, to which we give the name of
Renaissance, expressed itself in England mainly through the
Drama. Other races in that era of quickened activity, when
modern man regained the consciousness of his own strength and
goodliness after centuries of mental stagnation and social
depression, threw their energies into the plastic arts and
scholarship. The English found a similar outlet for their
pent-up forces in the Drama. The arts and literature of Greece
and Rome had been revealed by Italy to Europe. Humanism had
placed the present once more in a vital relation to the past.
The navies of Portugal and Spain had discovered new continents
beyond the ocean; the merchants of Venice and Genoa had
explored the farthest East. Copernicus had revolutionised
astronomy, and the telescope was revealing fresh worlds beyond
the sun. The Bible had been rescued from the mortmain of the
Church; scholars studied it in the language of its authors,
and the people read it in their own tongue. In this rapid
development of art, literature, science, and discovery, the
English had hitherto taken but little part. But they were
ready to reap what other men had sown. Unfatigued by the
labours of the pioneer, unsophisticated by the pedantries and
sophistries of the schools, in the freshness of their youth
and vigour, they surveyed the world unfolded to them. For more
than half a century they freely enjoyed the splendour of this
spectacle, until the struggle for political and religious
liberty replunged them in the hard realities of life. During
that eventful period of spiritual disengagement from absorbing
cares, the race was fully conscious of its national
importance. It had shaken off the shackles of oppressive
feudalism, the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. It had not
yet passed under the Puritan yoke, or felt the encroachments
of despotic monarchy. It was justly proud of the Virgin Queen,
with whose idealised personality the people identified their
newly acquired sense of greatness. ... What in those fifty
years they saw with the clairvoyant eyes of artists, the poets
wrote. And what they wrote, remains imperishable. It is the
portrait of their age, the portrait of an age in which
humanity stood self-revealed, a miracle and marvel to its own
admiring curiosity. England was in a state of transition when
the Drama came to perfection. That was one of those rare
periods when the past and the future are both coloured by
imagination, and both shed a glory on the present. The
medieval order was in dissolution; the modern order was in
process of formation. Yet the old state of things had not
faded from memory and usage; the new had not assumed despotic
sway. Men stood then, as it were, between two dreams--a dream
of the past, thronged with sinister and splendid
reminiscences; a dream of the future, bright with unlimited
aspirations and indefinite hopes. Neither the retreating
forces of the Middle Ages nor the advancing forces of the
modern era pressed upon them with the iron weight of
actuality. The brutalities of feudalism had been softened; but
the chivalrous sentiment remained to inspire the Surreys and
the Sidneys of a milder epoch. ... What distinguished the
English at this epoch from the nations of the South was not
refinement of manners, sobriety, or self-control. On the
contrary they retained an unenviable character for more than
common savagery. ... Erasmus describes the filth of their
houses, and the sicknesses engendered in their cities by bad
ventilation. What rendered the people superior to Italians and
Spaniards was the firmness of their moral fibre, the sweetness
of their humanity, a more masculine temper, less vitiated
instincts and sophisticated intellects, a law-abiding and
religious conscience, contempt for treachery and baseness,
intolerance of political or ecclesiastical despotism combined
with fervent love of home and country. They were coarse, but
not vicious; pleasure-loving, but not licentious; violent, but
not cruel; luxurious but not effeminate. Machiavelli was a
name of loathing to them. Sidney, Essex, Raleigh, More, and
Drake were popular heroes; and whatever may be thought of
these men, they certainly counted no Marquis of Pescara, no
Duke of Valentino, no Malatesta Baglioni, no Cosimo de' Medici
among them. The Southern European type betrayed itself but
faintly in politicians like Richard Cromwell and Robert
Dudley. . . . Affectations of foreign vices were only a
varnish on the surface of society. The core of the nation
remained sound and wholesome. Nor was the culture which the
English borrowed from less unsophisticated nations, more than
superficial. The incidents of Court gossip show how savage was
the life beneath.
{826}
Queen Elizabeth spat, in the presence of her nobles, at a
gentleman who had displeased her; struck Essex on the cheek;
drove Burleigh blubbering from her apartment. Laws in merry
England were executed with uncompromising severity. Every
township had its gallows; every village its stocks,
whipping-post and pillory. Here and there, heretics were
burned upon the market-place; and the block upon Tower Hill
was seldom dry. ... Men and women who read Plato, or discussed
the elegancies of Petrarch, suffered brutal practical jokes,
relished the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest
language of the people. Carrying farms and acres on their
backs in the shape of costly silks and laces, they lay upon
rushes filthy with the vomit of old banquets. Glittering in
suits of gilt and jewelled mail, they jostled with
town-porters in the stench of the bear-gardens, or the bloody
bull-pit. The church itself was not respected. The nave of old
S. Paul's became a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes. ...
It is difficult, even by noting an infinity of such
characteristics, to paint the many-coloured incongruities of
England at that epoch. Yet in the midst of this confusion rose
cavaliers like Sidney, philosophers like Bacon, poets like
Spenser; men in whom all that is pure, elevated, subtle,
tender, strong, wise, delicate and learned in our modern
civilisation displayed itself. And the masses of the people
were still in harmony with these high strains. They formed the
audience of Shakspere. They wept for Desdemona, adored Imogen,
listened with Jessica to music in the moon-light at Belmont,
wandered with Rosalind through woodland glades of Arden. Such
was the society of which our theatre became the mirror."
J. A. Symonds,
Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama,
chapter 2, section 1, 2, and 5.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1497.
Cabot's discovery of the North American Continent.
See AMERICA: A. D. 1497.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1498.
Voyage and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot.
Ground of English claims in the New World.
See AMERICA: A. D. 1498.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1502.
The marriage which brought the Stuarts to the English throne.
See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1502.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1509.
The character and reign of Henry VII.
"As a king, Bacon tells us that he was 'a wonder for wise
men.' Few indeed were the councillors that shared his
confidence, but the wise men, competent to form an estimate of
his statesmanship, had but one opinion of his consummate
wisdom. Foreigners were greatly struck with the success that
attended his policy. Ambassadors were astonished at the
intimate knowledge he displayed of the affairs of their own
countries. From the most unpropitious beginnings, a proscribed
man and an exile, he had won his way in evil times to a throne
beset with dangers; he had pacified his own country, cherished
commerce, formed strong alliances over Europe, and made his
personal influence felt by the rulers of France, Spain, Italy,
and the Netherlands as that of a man who could turn the scale
in matters of the highest importance to their own domestic
welfare. ... From first to last his policy was essentially his
own; for though he knew well how to choose the ablest
councillors, he asked or took their advice only to such an
extent as he himself deemed expedient. ... No one can
understand his reign, or that of his son, or, we might add, of
his granddaughter Queen Elizabeth, without appreciating the
fact that, however well served with councillors, the sovereign
was in those days always his own Prime Minister. ... Even the
legislation of the reign must be regarded as in large measure
due to Henry himself. We have no means, it is true, of knowing
how much of it originated in his own mind; but that it was all
discussed with him in Council and approved before it was
passed we have every reason to believe. For he never appears
to have put the royal veto upon any Bill, as constitutional
usage both before and after his days allowed. He gave his
assent to all the enactments sent up to him for approval,
though he sometimes added to them provisos of his own. And
Bacon, who knew the traditions of those times, distinctly
attributes the good legislation of his days to the king
himself. 'In that part, both of justice and policy, which is
the most durable part, and cut, as it were, in brass or
marble, the making of good laws, he did excel.' This
statement, with but slight variations in the wording, appears
again and again throughout the History; and elsewhere it is
said that he was the best lawgiver to this nation after Edward
I. ... The parliaments, indeed, that Henry summoned were only
seven in number, and seldom did anyone of them last over a
year, so that during a reign of nearly twenty-four years many
years passed away without a Parliament at all. But even in
those scanty sittings many Acts were passed to meet evils that
were general subjects of complaint. ... He could scarcely be
called a learned man, yet he was a lover of learning, and gave
his children an excellent education. His Court was open to
scholars. ... He was certainly religious after the fashion of
his day. ... His religious foundations and bequests perhaps do
not necessarily imply anything more than conventional feeling.
But we must not overlook the curious circumstance that he once
argued with a heretic at the stake at Canterbury and got him
to renounce his heresy. It is melancholy to add that he did
not thereupon release him from the punishment to which he had
been sentenced; but the fact seems to show that he was afraid
of encouraging insincere conversions by such leniency. During
the last two or three years of the 15th century there was a
good deal of procedure against heretics, but on the whole, we
are told, rather by penances than by fire. Henry had no desire
to see the old foundations of the faith disturbed. His zeal
for the Church was recognised by no less than three Popes in
his time, who each sent him a sword and a cap of maintenance.
... To commerce and adventure he was always a good friend. By
his encouragement Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol and
discovered Newfoundland--The New Isle, as it at first was
called. Four years earlier Columbus had first set foot on the
great western continent, and had not his brother been taken by
pirates at sea, it is supposed that he too might have made his
great discovery under Henry's patronage."
James Gairdner,
Henry the Seventh,
chapter 13.
ALSO IN:
Lord Bacon,
History of the Reign of King Henry VII.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1509,
Accession of King Henry VIII.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1151-1513.
Enlisted In the Holy League of Pope Julius II. against France.
See ITALY: A. D. 1510-1513.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1513.
Henry's invasion of France.
The victory of the Battle of the Spurs.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.
{827}
ENGLAND: A. D. 1513-1529.
The ministry of Cardinal Wolsey.
From 1513 to 1529, Thomas Wolsey, who became Archbishop of
York in 1514, and Cardinal in 1515, was the minister who
guided the policy of Henry VIII., so far as that head-strong
and absolute monarch could be guided at all. "England was
going through a crisis, politically, socially, and
intellectually, when Wolsey undertook the management of
affairs. ... We must regret that he put foreign policy in the
first place, and reserved his constructive measures for
domestic affairs. ... Yet even here we may doubt if the
measures of the English Reformation would have been possible
if Wolsey's mind had not inspired the king and the nation with
a heightened consciousness of England's power and dignity.
Wolsey's diplomacy at least tore away all illusions about Pope
and Emperor, and the opinion of Europe, and taught Henry VIII.
the measure of his own strength. It was impossible that
Wolsey's powerful hand should not leave its impression upon
everything which it touched. If Henry VIII. inherited a strong
monarchy, Wolsey made the basis of monarchical power still
stronger. ... Wolsey saw in the royal power the only possible
means of holding England together and guiding it through the
dangers of impending change. ... Wolsey was in no sense a
constitutional minister, nor did he pay much heed to
constitutional forms. Parliament was only summoned once during
the time that he was in office, and then he tried to browbeat
Parliament and set aside its privileges. In his view the only
function of Parliament was to grant money for the king's
needs. The king should say how much he needed, and Parliament
ought only to advise how this sum might be most conveniently
raised. ... He was unwise in his attempt to force the king's
will upon Parliament as an unchangeable law of its action.
Henry VIII. looked and learned from Wolsey's failure, and when
he took the management of Parliament into his own hands he
showed himself a consummate master of that craft. ... He was
so skilful that Parliament at last gave him even the power
over the purse, and Henry, without raising a murmur, imposed
taxes which Wolsey would not have dared to suggest. ... Where
Wolsey would have made the Crown independent of Parliament,
Henry VIII. reduced Parliament to be a willing instrument of
the royal will. ... Henry ... clothed his despotism with the
appearance of paternal solicitude. He made the people think
that he lived for them, and that their interests were his,
whereas Wolsey endeavoured to convince the people that the
king alone could guard their interests, and that their only
course was to put entire confidence in him. Henry saw that men
were easier to cajole than to convince. ... In spite of the
disadvantage of a royal education, Henry was a more thorough
Englishman than Wolsey, though Wolsey sprang from the people.
It was Wolsey's teaching, however, that prepared Henry for his
task. The king who could use a minister like Wolsey and then
throw him away when he was no longer useful, felt that there
was no limitation to his self-sufficiency. ... For politics in
the largest sense, comprising all the relations of the nation
at home and abroad, Wolsey had a capacity which amounted to
genius, and it is doubtful if this can be said of any other
Englishman. ... Taking England as he found her, he aimed at
developing all her latent possibilities, and leading Europe to
follow in her train. ... He made England for a time the centre
of European politics, and gave her an influence far higher
than she could claim on material grounds. ... He was indeed a
political artist, who worked with a free hand and a certain
touch.. ... He was, though he knew it not, fitted to serve
England, but not to serve the English king. He had the aims of
a national statesman, not of a royal servant. Wolsey's
misfortune was that his lot was cast on days when the career
of a statesman was not distinct from that of a royal servant."
M. Creighton,
Cardinal Wolsey,
chapters 8 and 11.
ALSO IN:
J. S. Brewer,
The Reign of Henry VIII.
J. A. Froude,
History of England from the Fall of Wolsey,
chapters 1-2.
G. Cavendish,
Life of Wolsey.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1514.
Marriage of the king's sister with Louis XII. of France.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1513-1515.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1516-1517.
Intrigues against France.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1516-1517.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1519.
Candidacy of Henry VIII. for the imperial crown.
See GERMANY: A. D. 1519.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1520-1521.
Rivalry of the Emperor and the French King
for the English alliance.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1520-1523.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1525.
The king changes sides in European politics and breaks his
alliance with the Emperor.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1525-1526.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1527.
New alliance with France and Venice against Charles V.
Formal renunciation of the claim of the English kings to the
crown of France.
See ITALY: A. D. 1527-1529.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1527-1534.
Henry VIII. and the Divorce question.
The rupture with Rome.
Henry VIII. owed his crown to the early death of his brother
Arthur, whose widow, Catharine of Aragon, the daughter of
Ferdinand, and consequently the aunt of Charles V. [emperor],
Henry was enabled to marry through a dispensation obtained by
Henry VII. from Pope Julius II.,--marriage with the wife of a
deceased brother being forbidden by the laws of the Church.
Henry was in his twelfth year when the marriage was concluded,
but it was not consummated until the death of his father. ...
The question of Henry's divorce from Catharine soon became a
subject of discussion, and the effort to procure the annulling
of the marriage from the pope was prosecuted for a number of
years. Henry professed, and perhaps with sincerity, that he
had long been troubled with doubts of the validity of the
marriage, as being contrary to the divine law, and therefore
not within the limit of the pope's dispensing power. The death
of a number of his children, leaving only a single daughter,
Mary, had been interpreted by some as a mark of the
displeasure of God. At the same time the English people, in
the fresh recollection of the long dynastic struggle, were
anxious on account of the lack of a male heir to the throne.
On the queen's side it was asserted that it was competent for
the pope to authorize a marriage with a brother's widow, and
that no doubt could possibly exist in the present case, since,
according to her testimony, her marriage with Arthur had never
been completed. The eagerness of Henry to procure the divorce
increased with his growing passion for Anne Boleyn. The
negotiations with Rome dragged slowly on. Catharine was six
years older than himself, and had lost her charms.
{828}
He was enamored of this young English girl, fresh from the
court of France. He resolved to break the marriage bond with
the Spanish princess who had been his faithful wife for nearly
twenty years. It was not without reason that the king became
more and more incensed at the dilatory and vacillating course
of the pope. ... Henry determined to lay the question of the
validity of his marriage before the universities of Europe,
and this he did, making a free use of bribery abroad and of
menaces at home. Meantime, he took measures to cripple the
authority of the pope and of the clergy in England. In these
proceedings he was sustained by a popular feeling, the growth
of centuries, against foreign ecclesiastical interference and
clerical control in civil affairs. The fall of Wolsey was the
effect of his failure to procure the divorce, and of the
enmity of Anne Boleyn and her family. ... In order to convict
of treason this minister, whom he had raised to the highest
pinnacle of power, the king did not scruple to avail himself
of the ancient statute of præmunire, which Wolsey was accused
of having transgressed by acting as the pope's legate in
England--it was dishonestly alleged, without the royal
license. Early in 1531 the king charged the whole body of the
clergy with having incurred the penalties of the same law by
submitting to Wolsey in his legatine character. Assembled in
convocation, they were obliged to implore his pardon, and
obtained it only in return for a large sum of money. In their
petition he was styled, in obedience to his dictation, 'The
Protector and Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of
England,' to which was added, after long debate, at the
suggestion of Archbishop Warham--'as far as is permitted by
the law of Christ.' The Church, prostrate though it was at the
feet of the despotic king, showed some degree of self-respect
in inserting this amendment. Parliament forbade the
introduction of papal bulls into England. The king was
authorized if he saw fit, to withdraw the annats--first-fruits
of benefices--from the pope. Appeals to Rome were forbidden.
The retaliatory measures of Henry did not move the pope to
recede from his position. On or about January 25, 1533, the
king was privately married to Anne Boleyn. ... In 1534 Henry
was conditionally excommunicated by Clement VII. The papal
decree deposing him from the throne, and absolving his
subjects from their allegiance, did not follow until 1538, and
was issued by Paul III. Clement's bull was sent forth on the
23 of March. On the 23 of November Parliament passed the Act
of Supremacy, without the qualifying clause which the clergy
had attached to their vote. The king was, moreover, clothed
with full power and authority to repress and amend all such
errors, heresies, and abuses as 'by any manner of spiritual
authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed.'
Thus a visitatorial function of vast extent was recognized as
belonging to him. In 1532 convocation was driven to engage not
'to enact or promulge or put in execution' any measures
without the royal license, and to promise to change or to
abrogate any of the 'provincial constitutions' which he should
judge inconsistent with his prerogative. The clergy were thus
stripped of all power to make laws. A mixed commission, which
Parliament ordained for the revision of the whole canon law,
was not appointed in this reign. The dissolution of the king's
marriage thus dissolved the union of England with the papacy."
G. P. Fisher,
History of the Christian Church,
period 8, chapter 6.
ALSO IN:
J. S. Brewer,
The Reign of Henry VIII.,
volume 2, chapters 27-35.
J. A. Froude,
History of England,
volume 1, chapter 2.
S. H. Burke,
Historical Portraits of the Tudor Dynasty,
volume 1, chapters 8-25.
J. Lingard,
History of England,
volume 6, chapter 3.
T. E. Bridgett,
Life and Writings of Sir T. More.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1529-1535.
The execution of Sir Thomas More.
On the 25th of October, 1529, the king, by delivering the
great seal to Sir Thomas More, constituted him Lord
Chancellor. In making this appointment, Henry "hoped to
dispose his chancellor to lend his authority to the projects
of divorce and second marriage, which now agitated the king's
mind, and were the main objects of his policy. ... To pursue
this subject through the long negotiations and discussions
which it occasioned during six years, would be to lead us far
from the life of Sir Thomas More. ... All these proceedings
terminated in the sentence of nullity in the case of Henry's
marriage with Catherine, pronounced by Cranmer, the espousal
of Anne Boleyn by the king, and the rejection of the papal
jurisdiction by the kingdom, which still, however, adhered to
the doctrines of the Roman catholic church. The situation of
More during a great part of these memorable events was
embarrassing. The great offices to which he was raised by the
king, the personal favour hitherto constantly shown to him,
and the natural tendency of his gentle and quiet disposition,
combined to disincline him to resistance against the wishes of
his friendly master. On the other hand, his growing dread and
horror of heresy, with its train of disorders; his belief that
universal anarchy would be the inevitable result of religious
dissension, and the operation of seven years' controversy for
the Catholic church, in heating his mind on all subjects
involving the extent of her authority, made him recoil from
designs which were visibly tending towards disunion with the
Roman pontiff. ... Henry used every means of procuring an
opinion favourable to his wishes from his chancellor, who
excused himself as unmeet for such matters, having never
professed the study of divinity. ... But when the progress
towards the marriage was so far advanced that he saw how soon
the active co-operation of a chancellor must be required, he
made suit to 'his singular dear friend,' the duke of Norfolk,
to procure his discharge from this office. The duke, often
solicited by More, then obtained, by importunate suit, a clear
discharge for the chancellor. ... The king directed Norfolk,
when he installed his successor, to declare publicly, that his
majesty had with pain yielded to the prayers of sir Thomas
More, by the removal of such a magistrate. .... It must be
owned that Henry felt the weight of this great man's opinion,
and tried every possible means to obtain at least the
appearance of his spontaneous approbation. ... The king ...
sent the archbishop of Canterbury, the chancellor, the duke of
Norfolk, and Cromwell, to attempt the conversion of More.
Audley reminded More of the king's special favour and many
benefits. More admitted them; but modestly added, that his
highness had most graciously declared that on this matter More
should be molested no more.
{829}
When in the end they saw that no persuasion could move him,
they then said, 'that the king's highness had given them in
commandment, if they could by no gentleness win him, in the
king's name with ingratitude to charge him, that never was
servant to his master so villainous, nor subject to his prince
so traitorous as he.'. . . By a tyrannical edict, mis-called a
law, in the same session of 1533-4, it was made high treason,
after the 1st of May, 1534, by writing, print, deed, or act,
to do or to procure, or cause to be done or procured, anything
to the prejudice, slander, disturbance, or derogation of the
king's lawful matrimony with queen Anne. If the same offences
were committed by words, they were only misprision. The same
act enjoined all persons to take an oath to maintain the whole
contents of the statute, and an obstinate refusal to make such
oath was subjected to the penalties of misprision. ... Sir T.
More was summoned to appear before these commissioners at
Lambeth, on Monday the 13th of April, 1534. ... After having
read the statute and the form of the oath, he declared his
readiness to swear that he would maintain and defend the order
of succession to the crown as established by parliament. He
disclaimed all censure of those who had imposed, or on those
who had taken, the oath, but declared it to be impossible that
he should swear to the whole contents of it, without offending
against his own conscience. ... He never more returned to his
house, being committed to the custody of the abbot of
Westminster, in which he continued four days; and at the end
of that time he was conveyed to the Tower on Friday the 17th
of April, 1534. ... On the 6th of May, 1535, almost
immediately after the defeat of every attempt to practise on
his firmness, More was brought to trial at Westminster, and it
will scarcely be doubted, that no such culprit stood at any
European bar for a thousand years. ... It is lamentable that
the records of the proceedings against such a man should be
scanty. We do not certainly know the specific offence of which
he was convicted. ... On Tuesday, the 6th of July (St.
Thomas's eve), 1535, sir Thomas Pope, 'his singular good
friend,' came to him early with a message from the king and
council, to say that he should die before nine o'clock of the
same morning. ... The lieutenant brought him to the scaffold,
which was so weak that it was ready to fall, on which he said,
merrily, 'Master Lieutenant, I pray you see me safe up, and
for my coming down let me shift for myself.' When he laid his
head on the block he desired the executioner to wait till he
had removed his beard, for that had never offended his
highness."
Sir J. Mackintosh,
Sir Thomas More
(Cabinet Cyclopedia:
Eminent British Statesmen, volume 1).
ALSO IN:
S. R. Gardiner,
Historical Biographies,
chapter 3.
T. E. Bridgett,
Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More,
chapters 12-24.
S. H. Burke,
Historical Portraits of the Tudor Dynasty,
volume 1, chapter 29.
ENGLAND: A. D. 1531-1563,
The genesis of the Church of England.
"Henry VIII. attempted to constitute an Anglican Church
differing from the Roman Catholic Church on the point of the
supremacy, and on that point alone. His success in this
attempt was extraordinary. The force of his character, the
singularly favorable situation in which he stood with respect
to foreign powers, the immense wealth which the spoliation of
the ah beys placed at his disposal, and the support of that
class which still halted between two opinions, enabled him to
bid defiance to both the extreme parties, to burn as heretics
those who avowed the tenets of the Reformers, and to hang as
traitors those who owned the authority of the Pope. But
Henry's system died with him. Had his life been prolonged, he
would have found it difficult to maintain a position assailed
with equal fury by all who were zealous either for the new or
for the old opinions. The ministers who held the royal
prerogatives in trust for his infant son could not venture to
persist in so hazardous a policy; nor could Elizabeth venture
to return to it. It was necessary to make a choice. The
government must either submit to Rome, or must obtain the aid
of the Protestants. The government and the Protestants had
only one thing in common, hatred of the Papal power. The
English reformers were eager to go as far as their brethren on
the Continent. They unanimously condemned as Antichristian
numerous dogmas and practices to which Henry had stubbornly
adhered, and which Elizabeth reluctantly abandoned. Many felt
a strong repugnance even to things indifferent which had
formed part of the polity or ritual of the mystical Babylon.
Thus Bishop Hooper, who died manfully at Gloucester for his
religion, long refused to wear the episcopal vestments. Bishop
Ridley, a martyr of still greater renown, pulled down the
ancient altars of his diocese, and ordered the Eucharist to be
administered in the middle of churches, at tables which the
Papists irreverently termed oyster boards. Bishop Jewel
pronounced the clerical garb to be a stage dress, a fool's
coat, a relique of the Amorites, and promised that he would
spare no labour to extirpate such degrading absurdities.
Archbishop Grindal long hesitated about accepting a mitre from
dislike of what he regarded as the mummery of consecration.
Bishop Parkhurst uttered a fervent prayer that the Church of
England would propose to herself the Church of Zurich as the
absolute pattern of a Christian community. Bishop Ponet was of
opinion that the word Bishop should be abandoned to the
Papist, and that the chief officers of the purified church
should be called Superintendents. When it is considered that
none of these prelates belonged to the extreme section of the
Protestant party, it cannot be doubted that, if the general
sense of that party had been followed, the work of reform
would have been carried on as unsparingly in England as in
Scotland. But, as the government needed the support of the
Protestants, so the Protestants needed the protection of the
government. Much was therefore given up on both sides: an
union was effected; and the fruit of that union was the Church
of England."
Lord Macaulay,
History of England,
chapter 1.
"The Reformation in England was, singular amongst the great
religious movements of the sixteenth century. It was the least
heroic of them all--the least swayed by religious passion, or
moulded and governed by spiritual and theological necessities.
From a general point of view, it looks at first little more